It would be much more valuable to the public to be supplied with abundance of dimes & half dimes which would stay among us, than with dollars & eagles which leave us immediately. -- Thomas Jefferson to Mint Director Robert Patterson, March 29, 1807.Endowed with every imaginable positive aspect, this highly lustrous, beautifully preserved, richly toned near gem is blessed with perhaps the most regal of the American collector pedigrees: Eliasberg. The surfaces betray an unbroken collector provenance many decades old, exhibiting the sort of majestic deep orange toning and freshness of surface that is the unmistakable hallmark of a coin flush with originality. Light hairlines are seen on the obverse, none too troubling in their aesthetic impression, but no heavy marks are noted, just a shallow abrasion midway between the chin and star 11. The reverse is free of any kind of remarkable distraction, though we note a light jogging nick above the arrowheads. The overall visual impact is utterly suburb. The profile shows some light granularity, inherent in the die. The date is recut on the first three digits, most noticeable on the 1 and 0, and some light strike doubling is visible on the letters of the reverse legend, widest on RICA of AMERICA.A thin die crack descends from the motto ribbon beneath B of PLURIBUS to the upper left shield tip, through the soft spot at the wingtip at left, to the arrowheads and on to the lower left serif of N in UNITED. The crack is barely visible above the motto ribbon, where it reaches stars 12 and 7, in order, before dead-ending nearly invisibly into the cloud above stars 1 and 2. The obverse is in its earliest state, still largely reflective, equivalent to Bass-Dannreuther state a. The reverse is in state b, the same state it was in through the BD-5 marriage.President Jeffersons hope that smaller silver and gold denominations would not be exported in quantity caused the United States Mint to cease production of dollars and eagles after 1804. Neither would be struck for over three decades. Half eagles, which Jefferson hoped would be less tempting to export in large quantities, were paid out to large-scale depositors who formerly would have requested eagles. Mintages of half eagles ballooned. As many as 33,000 coins with the Draped Bust design may have been struck before this type was replaced mid-year by John Reichs Capped Bust portrait of Liberty. While that number may sound large in the context of early United States gold coins, the population of modern-day Philadelphia in the next census (1810) exceeded 87,000 people. Most Americans, then around 7 million in number, never encountered even a single half eagle over the course of the year 1807. Those that did, despite Jeffersons best wishes, hoarded them in bank vaults before they were eventually sold to brokers and exported as so much bullion. Few survived, fewer survived in gem condition.This example may have the oldest intact provenance for any example of this date. Before spending four decades in the Eliasberg Collection, and nearly a half century before that in the Clapp Collection, this was in the collection of Nicholas Petry. Listed in the 1868 Philadelphia city directory as a restaurateur, Petry died four years later at the age of 49. By the time his collection sold in 1893, it was already an old-time holding. "Nicholas Petry was a gentleman well known to the Philadephian of a generation ago," wrote the Chapman brothers in their catalog of Petrys collection, "as a man having a fondness for collecting the rare and curious ... Since his death the collection has been deposited now for nearly twenty years in one of the safe deposit companies vaults, and only recently was it taken out of its obscurity and the coins brought to view once more." When Petry died, this coin was but 65 years old. He would undoubtedly still recognize this coin today.
