“CAHAWBA, Alab[ama]. Sept. 23. We observe that a meeting has lately been held in the city of Mobile, for taking into consideration the propriety of discontinuing the currency of ten cent pieces, as twelve and a half cents.” — The Evening Post, New York City, October 16, 1824 This example presents a very different look from the previous coin from the same dies, with thoroughly frosty surfaces offering exceptionally choice visual appeal. Both sides show beautiful opalescent gray toning with subtle highlights of pale sea-green and dusky rose. The strike is excellent, with modest softness only at the extreme centers, and the surfaces are fresh and defect free. A tiny nick is noted on Liberty’s cap, and a couple of individual and truly forgettable hairlines are present in the left obverse field. The die state is later than the previous specimen, with the tiny linear die defect now visible above the space between stars 5 and 6. The fields no longer retain any reflectivity, and the reverse die cracks are each more noticeable. The tiny crack connecting the bases of TED now extends to I on the left and the first S of STATES on the right, while the crack atop UNIT to the leaf below and the two above the denomination are identical in extent but more severe than in the previous state. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, the once-uncommon dime denomination continued its march away from Philadelphia, penetrating the American hinterlands to find its manifest destiny in pockets and tills far from the Mint. In 1820, Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford, who grew up far from big cities on the Georgia/South Carolina state line, took a special interest in seeing the smaller silver coins struck at the United States Mint distributed far and wide. Crawford must have been satisfied with the progress he saw. Within just a few years, larger mintages and better distribution made dimes a regular portion of American pocket change from the Northeast to the Gulf Coast, from the Atlantic to the Appalachians. Long a curiosity that was forced to circulate as part of the predominant fractional system based on the Spanish-American 8 reales, the dime was the leading edge of the movement to make the United States a decimal society. Mobile, Alabama fell to the decimal wave in 1824. Natchez, a commercial hub on the Mississippi River that was built by traders spending 8 reales, was under siege by dimes in 1828, when the nationally distributed Niles’ Weekly Register reported that “a correspondent of the Natchez Galaxy complains of the circulation of ten cent pieces in Mississippi as eighths of a dollar. The citizens of that state are said, at their annual visits to the North, to invest considerable sums in these pieces.” News items like this make the treasure hunter in all of us wonder how many caches of bright new Capped Bust dimes must have been lost as they traveled downriver. Though perhaps less evocative, the truth is that most were merely spent. This piece clearly avoided such a fate. Boldly original and exceptionally attractive, this gem stands as one of the very finest known examples of the date, despite being a putative duplicate in this collection. The two Pogue specimens are the only examples graded MS-66 by PCGS, tied for the finest examples seen of this fascinating date. As each has its own distinctive look and sources of appeal, some collectors will prefer one over the other. The enticing originality of this example, however, would be very difficult to surpass. PCGS# 38805. NGC ID: 2373.
