“He took him in his arms and kissed him, then putting his hand on his head, said ‘God bless you, my dear little fellow: be a good boy; learn your book; and be always ready to fight the enemies of your country.’ Then, taking out of his purse a fifty cent coin, and presenting it to him, he continued: ‘Here is the Eagle of your country – never desert it! Wear this next your heart, and remember me.’” — Niles’ Weekly Register, January 3, 1824, describing General Andrew Jackson meeting a young boy in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Superb pale silver gray surfaces have mellowed from full brilliance while never losing an iota of their dramatic cartwheel luster. Careful examination yields golden and olive highlights, particularly around peripheral design elements. The strike is strong, leaving fine details and a doubled profile of Liberty in its wake. No bad marks or hairlines are seen, just a little spot under the bust truncation and a dark natural planchet inclusion above the bust line. Some evidence of a die clash is seen under each of the eagle’s wings, and magnification reveals some pitting of the die surface in that area, perhaps spalling or perhaps a vestige of the process of removing the clash marks. The “distinct ridge” above the talon at right referred to in Overton is a portion of that clash mark. The repunching on the 4 of the date is readily visible, a short raised line parallel to the diagonal downstroke on the left of that numeral. Struck the year Andrew Jackson first erupted onto the national political scene, this coin shares its designs with the half dollar the famous general offered to a Virginia boy “who was named after him, soon after the glorious eighth of January 1815,” the date of Jackson’s victory over British forces at the Battle of New Orleans. The boy would have been approaching his ninth birthday when Jackson reached out to him and gave him a half dollar he would cherish always. This coin is most certainly not the one Jackson gave the boy named Andrew, however, as the news story reported that the boy “wears it round his neck, and it is the envy of all of his schoolfellows.” Little more needs to be said to a Capped Bust half specialist about the quality of this coin than to read its provenance like a litany: Eliasberg, Kaufman, Thomas, Pogue. United by their ownership of some of the finest examples of this design type to have survived into the 21st century, these four collectors names tend to be found together. Louis Eliasberg assembled one of the greatest collections of American coins ever formed, transformed from important to perhaps the finest ever with the acquisition of the Clapp Collection in 1942. The Clapps’ multigenerational stewardship yielded to that of the Eliasbergs, spanning the decades of Louis E. Eliasberg, Sr.’s careful construction of the cabinet as well as, in the instance of the offered coin, his son Richard’s equally careful protection of what his father had built. When Phil Kaufman built a superb cabinet of Capped Bust half dollars, he formed it around a nucleus acquired from the Eliasberg sale. The entire collection passed thereafter to the collector known as Joseph C. Thomas, and when his collection was sold in 2009, D. Brent Pogue acquired many of the highlights, including this coin. Among all the auction offerings of this variety, in both recent and distant memory, not one has ever featured a specimen graded finer than MS-64 by PCGS. Just three examples of this variety have been graded above that threshold, of which this coin ranks first, alone at the MS-66 level. PCGS# 39643. NGC ID: 24FK.
