OCTOBER 3
2022•Franklin Pierce Presidential Medal
2025•Navy 250th Anniversary Silver Eagle Announced
The U.S. Mint Releases the Franklin Pierce Presidential Silver Medal
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At noon Eastern Time on October 3, 2022, the United States Mint opened sales of its Franklin Pierce Presidential Silver Medal, a one-ounce, 99.9 percent fine silver recreation of a historic nineteenth-century presidential medal.
The release honored Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States, but it also preserved a much older chapter of American medallic art. The obverse portrait was created by sculptor Salathiel Ellis. The reverse, by artist Joseph Willson, shows a farmer leaning on a plow while speaking with a Native American chief, with an American flag behind them and the words LABOR, VIRTUE, and HONOR above.
That combination makes the medal more than a presidential portrait. It is a modern silver reproduction of an artifact whose imagery reflects the political ideals—and the contradictions—of mid-nineteenth-century America.
October 3, 2022
The Mint’s official release announcement leaves little ambiguity about the date.
The Franklin Pierce Presidential Silver Medal became available for purchase directly from the United States Mint beginning October 3 at noon ET.
The product carried item number S814 and was originally priced at $65.
There was no mintage limit, no product limit, and no household order limit.
The Mint also made the medal available through its Presidential Silver Medal subscription program and at its physical sales locations, subject to operating conditions.
The distinction matters.
The Pierce piece has no denomination and is not circulating legal tender. It is a medal produced by the United States Mint under its authority to manufacture national medals.
Its value as an object comes from its silver content, historical design, government manufacture, and collector appeal rather than a face value such as one dollar or five dollars.
That gives the designers freedom from many of the inscriptions and functional requirements imposed on circulating coins.
One Troy Ounce of Fine Silver
The modern Pierce medal is struck in 99.9 percent fine silver.
It contains one troy ounce of silver and measures 1.598 inches in diameter.
The finish is matte and the edge is plain.
Unlike many modern U.S. coins, it carries no mint mark or privy mark.
Each medal is encapsulated and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
The Department of the Treasury has a long tradition of honoring American presidents with official medals struck by the Mint.
Historically, these medals were generally produced in bronze.
They became part of a broad federal medallic tradition that also included military awards, commemorative medals, Indian peace medals, exposition pieces, and medals honoring important national events and individuals.
The modern Presidential Silver Medal series adapts historic presidential designs into a standardized precious-metal collection.
Franklin Pierce served as president from March 4, 1853, through March 3, 1857.
Born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, in 1804, he entered politics at a relatively young age and served in both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.
He also served in the Mexican-American War and rose to the rank of brigadier general.
Democrats nominated Pierce for president in 1852 as a compromise candidate capable of appealing to different factions of the party.
Pierce defeated Whig candidate Winfield Scott decisively.
His victory came at a moment when the United States was expanding rapidly but becoming increasingly divided over slavery.
The Compromise of 1850 had temporarily reduced sectional tensions, yet the underlying conflict remained unresolved.
Pierce entered office hoping to preserve national unity.
Instead, his administration became deeply entangled in the political crisis that ultimately led toward the Civil War.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
The defining domestic controversy of Pierce’s presidency was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
The law organized the Kansas and Nebraska territories and allowed settlers to determine the status of slavery through popular sovereignty.
In practice, it overturned the Missouri Compromise restriction that had prohibited slavery in much of that territory.
The result was political upheaval and violence in “Bleeding Kansas.”
The controversy helped destroy the Whig Party, accelerate the rise of the Republican Party, and deepen sectional hostility.
Pierce supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was widely blamed in the North for its consequences.
By 1856, his political position had deteriorated so badly that the Democratic Party denied its sitting president renomination and selected James Buchanan instead.
Pierce left office in March 1857.
His presidency is therefore remembered less for administrative accomplishments than for the nation’s accelerating movement toward sectional rupture.
The design reproduced in silver in 2022 is historically valuable because it originated during the nineteenth century rather than being created as a modern retrospective portrait.
Its obverse is the work of Salathiel Ellis, an American sculptor and medalist active during Pierce’s lifetime.
Ellis also produced portraits associated with other presidential medals.
His Pierce portrait presents the president in profile, surrounded by inscriptions identifying him and the year 1853.
The Obverse Design
The obverse depicts a right-facing portrait of Franklin Pierce.
Around it are the inscriptions FRANKLIN PIERCE, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and 1853.
The design is formal and restrained.
It belongs to a tradition of medallic presidential portraiture in which the sitter is presented almost like a classical statesman, with little visual clutter competing with the portrait.
For a modern collector, it is a direct encounter with the official artistic language of Pierce’s era.
The reverse is much more complex.
Created by Joseph Willson, it depicts a farmer leaning on a plow while conversing with a Native American chief.
An American flag appears in the background.
Above the scene are the words LABOR, VIRTUE, and HONOR.
At the base appears the name J. WILLSON.
The scene was used on presidential medals of the period and communicates a set of nineteenth-century ideas about agriculture, national expansion, diplomacy, and American identity.
Modern viewers should not treat the reverse as a neutral documentary scene.
Federal imagery involving Native Americans was created within a much larger history of treaty-making, land cessions, removal, military conflict, assimilation policy, and western expansion.
The farmer and plow embody an idealized agricultural vision favored by federal policymakers.
The Native American figure and U.S. flag suggest peaceful coexistence and national unity, but the actual history of federal-Native relations was far more complicated and often violent.
The medal is therefore valuable partly because it preserves the worldview the federal government chose to project.
American presidential medal history intersects with the tradition of Indian peace medals.
For generations, federal officials distributed medals bearing presidential portraits in diplomatic relations with Native nations.
Earlier pieces often paired the president’s portrait with symbols such as clasped hands, a pipe, and a tomahawk beneath the phrase PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP.
Later imagery evolved, but the medals remained tangible symbols of federal authority and diplomacy.
Today they are studied both as numismatic objects and as artifacts of U.S.-Native relations.
The Pierce Era and Western Expansion
Pierce’s administration coincided with continued territorial expansion.
In 1853, the United States negotiated the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico, acquiring land that is now part of southern Arizona and New Mexico.
The administration was also interested in transcontinental transportation and the nation’s growing Pacific connections.
These developments intensified questions about slavery, Native lands, settlement, and the political future of western territories.
The medal’s agricultural imagery therefore appeared during an era when expansion was not an abstract idea but a major force reshaping the continent.
Pierce’s four years in office were also an interesting period at the United States Mint.
James Ross Snowden became Director of the Mint in 1853, shortly after Pierce took office.
James B. Longacre served as Chief Engraver.
The nation’s coinage system was adapting to the enormous influx of California gold and to changing relationships between gold and silver values.
Several important U.S. coin types and branch-mint developments belong to the Pierce era.
One of the most important numismatic events of Pierce’s presidency was the opening of the San Francisco Mint in 1854.
The California Gold Rush had created an urgent need for a federal coinage facility on the Pacific Coast.
Before the branch mint opened, gold dust and privately issued gold coins played a major role in western commerce.
The San Francisco facility allowed locally mined gold to be converted into federal coinage much closer to its source.
The first S-mint coins appeared during Pierce’s administration.
The Three-Dollar Gold Piece
The unusual $3 gold denomination also debuted in 1854.
Designed by James B. Longacre, the three-dollar gold piece featured an “Indian Princess” Liberty on the obverse and a wreath on the reverse.
The denomination never became widely useful in commerce, but it remains one of the distinctive products of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. coinage.
Its introduction during Pierce’s presidency illustrates how experimental the American monetary system could be during this period.
The large copper cent was still being produced while Pierce was president, but its days were numbered.
Rising copper costs and the inconvenience of the bulky large cent encouraged the Mint to search for alternatives.
Experiments during the 1850s eventually led to the small Flying Eagle cent in 1856 and its general issue in 1857, immediately after Pierce’s administration.
The transition helped establish the physical size still used for the American cent today.
The Pierce medal was the fourth presidential silver medal released by the Mint in 2022.
James K. Polk appeared on February 14, Zachary Taylor on May 2, and Millard Fillmore on August 15.
Pierce followed on October 3.
The sequence mirrors the presidential succession from Polk through Pierce, turning a group of historic medal designs into a chronological collector series.
That makes each individual release part of a much larger project to reproduce the Mint’s presidential medal archive in silver.
At release, the Franklin Pierce medal cost $65.
That historical issue price is worth preserving because Mint prices can change significantly over time with precious-metal markets and pricing policy.
The current catalog price should therefore not be substituted for the original 2022 price when describing the launch.
The Mint’s contemporary press release establishes the $65 figure and product code S814.
No Fixed Mintage
The absence of a mintage limit also distinguishes the Pierce medal from many modern collector coins.
Limited-edition products can generate intense release-day demand because collectors know that only a fixed number will exist.
The Pierce medal had no announced mintage, product, or household limit.
Its purpose was therefore less about engineered scarcity and more about maintaining a continuing historical medal series.
Presidential medals occupy a useful space between numismatics and American political history.
They preserve portraits by important artists, changing styles of federal symbolism, and the way presidents were officially represented in their own eras.
Unlike many commemorative coins, they do not need a congressional authorization for every individual subject.
The series can therefore proceed methodically through the presidency and reproduce designs that might otherwise remain unfamiliar outside specialized collections.
October 3, 2022 marks the release of the Franklin Pierce Presidential Silver Medal, a modern precious-metal reproduction of nineteenth-century federal medallic art.
The medal combines Salathiel Ellis’s portrait of the 14th president with Joseph Willson’s elaborate reverse of a farmer, plow, Native American chief, American flag, and the ideals LABOR, VIRTUE, and HONOR.
Its imagery opens a window onto the political culture of Pierce’s era—a period of western expansion, agricultural idealism, changing coinage, and rapidly worsening sectional conflict.
As a one-ounce silver collectible, the 2022 issue belongs to the modern Mint.
As a design, however, it belongs to the America of the 1850s.
That is what makes the Presidential Silver Medal series historically interesting: the Mint is not simply creating new portraits of old presidents. It is placing pieces of its own medallic past back into collectors’ hands.
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