Were half cents used as cents?
topstuf
Posts: 14,803 ✭✭✭✭✭
Just curious. After the size reduction in 1857 did half cents pass as cents?
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1
topstuf
Posts: 14,803 ✭✭✭✭✭
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By size. weren't they closer to 2 cent pieces?
I think the answer is, "No, they were half cents, so they passed as half cents". You could just as well ask if copper cents pass for 3 cents (or whatever the current conversion rate) is today. No, they don't. They're cents.
I like the question though. I wouldn't be shocked if someone turned up citation that said that they did.
I'm guessing they stopped circulating soon after 1857 when they were no longer made. People either saved them as curiosities or they were melted for their copper value by both the treasury and private companies that used copper in manufacturing.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
From the net "Before the Act, foreign coins, such as the Spanish dollar, were widely used and allowed as legal tender by the Act of April 10, 1806. The Coinage Act of 1857 also discontinued the half cent. Furthermore, the penny was reduced in size. The large cent was discontinued and regular coinage of the Flying Eagle cent began".
Could they have? Perhaps, but probably not frequently.
Given by the average wear seen on the middle and late date coins, I don't think they
circulated much even when they were still being minted. I can't recall seeing any of these
below VF, and most seem to be XF-AU.
I doubt it. To begin the coins said "HALF CENT" on them so that would have discouraged the acceptance of them. Furthermore copper was not a precious metal. Even if the half cents melted for a bit more than their face value, it would have taken a lot of them to have turned a profit from melting them.
Finally, most of the made for circulation survivors we see today from the 1830s, the 1849 and the 1850s are in high grade. It’s unusual to see an 1830s half cent in less than VF, and the Braided Hair half cents are seldom seen below EF.
Therefore, my answer is no. Half cents did not circulate much when they were produced from the 1830s to the 1850s, and they circulated even less after the production of them ended
I would say no, they did not. The appearance was significantly different... In addition to the above, people were very careful with their money in those times... Cheers, RickO
Thinking upon this, I would suppose that they would not have been tendered as cents.
I would also suppose that they would have been....accepted... as cents by the more informed and astute people of those days.
If deposited in a bank, I'm sure the bank would credit it only as half a cent.
And I would also suppose that the lack of wear on them WOULD indicate that they were taken out of circulation very quickly and hoarded/ratholed.
Especially since I...assume.. that the people in those days would have been even more attuned to insidious government theft of intrinsic exchange media than the people of 1965 who at that time had already become accustomed to debasement since their parents would have been the victims of the government abuse of 1933.
I should have thought this through a bit deeper before posting, but was curious if any contemporary accounts might have dealt with this issue.
All of the answers seem logical, but it then begs the question, what happened to all the half cents? Were any recalled or hoarded by banks and then returned to the Mint?
I agree that based on the conditions of surviving coins from the later years that many did not circulate much, but back then a half cent had some value, so I am amazed that so many could be put away as mementos by the public. Is there any chance the banks ended up with stockpiles of them and that they slowly found their way back into the public's hands after they became obsolete in circulation, much like half dollar and Ike dollars today?
Absolutely not. For one, there were the size of a quarter.
"Seu cabra da peste,
"Sou Mangueira......."
No. Size didn't matter.
As I thought in the post previous to yours, I would bet that they were hoarded by folks who were savvy enough to realize that the intrinsic worth was greater than face value.
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Losing a dime could be devastating to some.
You would lose that bet.
With the introduction of the new small cent (FE) in 1857, the US Mint offered to redeem the old copper half and large cents for new cents at face value (how nice of them). The Mint records show that from 1857 until they stopped recording in 1953 (yes, 1953), a total of 38,386,687 cents were redeemed and melted for use as alloy in the then current coinage. That number included half cents which were accounted for as cents.
Taxay quotes a period newspaper article about the redemption on pages 238 - 239 of The U.S. Mint and Coinage, which noted the line for "cents for cents" and "cents for silver," ending with the comment, "It was, in effect, the funeral of the old coppers..."
So, the US Mint melted about a quarter of the total mintage of half and large cents and that was not the only mass melting. Private mass melts also occurred during the Napoleonic Wars, The War of 1812, and the Civil War. See my past article in the Nov. 1999 issue of Penny-wise, now on the Newman Numismatic Portal:
https://archive.org/stream/pennywise33n6#page/n3/mode/2up
Darn. They also credited your account for a full TWENTY DOLLARS when you turned in those awful gold $20 pieces in 1933.
That "melting" certainly was a success. No coppers escaped THAT baby, I bet.
You need to stop betting or you're gonna go broke
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There's a letter from the noted period coin dealer and collector J.N.T. Levick noting how he and others (Cogan, Mickley, Roper, et al) went into the Mint and combed through the redeemed coppers for rare varieties, buying them at face. Musta been nice, although they did have to pay in silver (darn). Levick goes on to say that after few trips, they weren't finding anything because the mint workers had figured out what to look for and were pulling the pieces before they could get to them. Levick winds up by saying that the large cent market was thus tolerably well supplied for quite some time.
It's very likely that many, maybe even most, of the nice early dates and rarities trace to Levick, et al and the mint workers saving them from the melting pot. So, if you're an early copper collector, put in a word of thanks to those gentlemen, else we would not have the pieces today.
Yes they were, but it took two of them.
"A penny hit by lightning is worth six cents". Opie Taylor