Lovely 1834 Classic Head Half Eagle
1834 Classic Head Half Eagle. HM-2. Rarity-4. Plain 4. MS-64 (PCGS). CMQ.
This premium 1834 Classic Head half eagle offers scarce and highly desirable Choice Mint State quality for this perennially popular first year type issue. Soft satin luster gives way to pronounced semi-reflectivity in the open fields around the central design elements. The strike is full apart from minor softness in the centers, the color visually stunning in vivid golden-olive. An area of roughness in the obverse field off Liberty's chin is in the planchet and, as such, is as made; there are singularly mentionable marks. A beautiful coin that is sure to please even the most discerning gold enthusiast. After the New Tenor half eagles went into production on August 1, 1834, they remained a consistent news item for much of the summer and fall. Editorials against the Bank of the United States in pro-Jackson newspapers railed against the bank's monopoly power and latched upon the new half eagle as a symbol of it, complaining that the bank stockpiled the gold rather than paid it out, though the political polemics of this era were not often an accurate reflection of reality. "The rapid circulation of the Jackson currency, the gold eagles and half eagles...is annoying the friends of monopoly and the Bank beyond all conception," the New York Evening Post published just two weeks after the new coins were introduced. The Bank of the United States, located nine blocks down Chestnut Street from the Philadelphia Mint, was the largest depositor of gold at the Mint in this era. The followers of President Jackson's populist anti-bank rhetoric didn't understand or care about banking reserves or the importance of gold in international banking, preferring to shake their fist at the clouds in anger for the control the bank wielded over the national economy. Jackson's veto of the bank's recharter is widely seen as causing the Panic of 1837, the first long national depression. Some scholars place greater importance upon other issues, including the bursting of the Western land bubble in 1836. The new "Jackson coinage" or "Jackson currency" also inspired a new invention that was widely advertised in the newspapers of major cities on the East Coast. Though "guinea rockers" were common in England from the Georgian period, small countertop coin balance scales were not often seen in the United States in the early 19th century. Pan scales, also known as equal arm balances, were standard equipment for many merchants and bankers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but they required an extensive set of properly calibrated weights for proper use. A coin rocker was a simple lever and fulcrum system that balanced a coin of proper weight against a pre-installed counterweight. Moore's Patent Eagle Balance advertisements began appearing in September 1834: "As 'Jackson Money' is getting plentifully into use, and will before many months constitute almost the sole circulating medium, every tradesman would do well to provide himself with one of these patent eagle balances." Many did, and the balances remain collectible today. More than 650,000 1834 Classic Head half eagles were coined between August 1 and the end of the year, the largest mintage of any issue of the Classic Head type. Most were the Plain 4 variety, as here. Though plenty of these survived, even in Mint State, Choice pieces such as this are rare relative to the demand they enjoy among advanced gold type collectors.
PCGS# 8171. NGC ID: 25RR.
PCGS Population: 39; 16 finer (MS-66 finest).