United States · Numismatics

American numismatics meets monetary history and politics here. Hard Times tokens were struck mainly between 1832 and 1844, in copper, brass, and white metal, on the large-cent or half-cent module — about 28 mm. They did not come from a sovereign mint: they covered retail small change when legal-tender metal ran short.

They served at once as a medium of exchange and as party media. Douglas Mudd, director and curator of the American Numismatic Association’s Money Museum, places the series in 1832–1844 and notes that the shortage of small change predated the Panic of 1837: it had run since the colonial period despite the Mint. The tokens met that practical need and, at the same time, carried political mottos through everyday commerce. Today they are classed as exonumia — numismatic objects that are not federal legal-tender coin or paper. In the 1830s and 1840s they passed with federal copper and heavily worn foreign silver.

Private copper spread because of federal monetary policy and a crisis of confidence in paper. The origin is the Bank War: the fight over rechartering the Second Bank of the United States. In 1832 Andrew Jackson campaigned against that bank, which he saw as a monopoly on federal deposits that favored Northern finance over the agrarian South and West. Jackson distrusted paper: as a young man he had taken promissory notes for land, opened a store, and come close to bankruptcy when the notes proved worthless. He became a hard-money man: physical gold and silver.

Re-elected, he vetoed the charter’s extension, due to expire in 1836, and ordered federal deposits moved into favored state banks — the “pet banks.” Without the Second Bank’s oversight, those houses expanded credit and issued underbacked paper, the so-called shinplasters or wildcat currency. Speculation in public lands and inflation took off.

On 11 July 1836 Jackson and his Treasury secretary, Levi Woodbury, issued the Specie Circular. From 15 August, federal public lands had to be paid for in gold and silver; state-bank paper no longer served for those purchases. The shock devalued that paper, drained specie from the East to the frontier, and, with laws against small-denomination bank notes, contracted circulating small change.

The Circular met the Deposit and Distribution Act of 1836, crop failures, and a British downturn that cut investment and demand for American cotton. The result was the Panic of 1837. Martin Van Buren inherited the crash: in May the banks suspended specie payments. The public hoarded gold and silver and, soon after, copper cents and half cents. Without small change, retail trade stalled. Die sinkers, button makers, and merchants stepped in with Hard Times tokens.

Van Buren proposed keeping federal funds in government custody — Treasury vaults and sub-treasuries — rather than depositing them in a national bank or in the state pet banks. He put the plan before the special session of Congress in September 1837. Congress did not enact it until 1840 (Independent Treasury Act, 4 July); the Whigs repealed it the following year. HT-34 belongs to the controversy over a proposed financial arrangement, not to criticism of a system already long in force. Its target was the separation of the federal Treasury from the banking system.

That is why the reverse tortoise matters. Mudd reads the strongbox marked SUB TREASURY as a satire of the slowness and the alleged insecurity of moving specie — gold and silver coin — among geographically scattered sub-treasuries. It is more specific than a general joke about a slow government remedy. The token conveys that partisan criticism; this case does not adopt it as an objective verdict on the policy. Neither face of HT-34 carries an explicit denomination: calling it a “cent token” describes the large-cent module and its role as small change, not a value written on the piece.

Lyman Haynes Low set in 1899 the classification that still orders the series, later enlarged by Russell Rulau. He distinguished five groups: bank-controversy pieces (shinplasters, wildcat banks, Jackson’s fiscal policy); satire and politics (maxims, caricatures, causes such as abolition); federal imitations (Liberty, stars, and the motto Millions for Defence / Not One Cent); merchants’ store cards (name, trade, and address); and mules, mismatched obverse and reverse dies, sometimes to save on punches.

Without syndicated cartoons, copper carried the argument to the counter. Jackson is the usual target: one undated token shows him emerging from a chest with sword and money bag, a Whig charge that he had joined military power to control of the Treasury. The motto Executive Experiment mocks his handling of the banks; the reverse often carries a “stubborn” donkey. The pun on Jackson (jackass) was later popularized by Thomas Nast as the Democratic Party’s symbol. The HT-34 in this case reads I FOLLOW IN THE STEPS OF MY ILLUSTRIOUS PREDECESSOR — a parody, not a verbatim inaugural sentence — and loads a tortoise with the SUB TREASURY chest; HT-33 reads Executive Experiment instead of Executive Financiering.

Tokens for Daniel Webster and William Henry Harrison also circulated. Whig pieces use a ship — the ship of state — sometimes wrecked, a metaphor for the economy under Van Buren. A phoenix over flames promises that hard currency will rise from shinplasters. The Running Boar (HT-9 through HT-13) parodies Jacksonian policy. This case records an 1834 example attributed as HT-10A (Low-9B), silvered brass, distinct from John J. Adams’s advertising boar, and the 1841 HT-16 (Low-58): the ship CONSTITUTION with WEBSTER CREDIT CURRENT and the reverse MILLIONS FOR DEFENCE / NOT ONE CENT. That example’s edge is not photographed, so HT-16A is not assigned.

The 1838 anti-slavery token shows a kneeling, shackled Black woman with hands raised, and the legend Am I Not a Woman and a Sister 1838. The design takes Josiah Wedgwood’s British medallion, Am I Not a Man and a Brother. In copper it circulated in the North and put the abolitionist plea into small change.

To circulate without inviting a federal charge, die sinkers matched the large cent’s diameter, weight, and color. Obverses often copy Matron Head or Classic Head Liberty, thirteen stars, and a date. Stamping ONE CENT on a private piece was counterfeiting. They therefore took the XYZ Affair motto (1797–1798): Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute. MILLIONS FOR DEFENCE on the rim and NOT ONE CENT at center — sometimes with NOT in tiny letters — made the token look, at a glance, like a federal cent, while legally stating it was not one.

Most tokens are copper or brass. The Feuchtwanger cent is the era’s metallurgical experiment. Lewis Feuchtwanger, a German chemist and pharmacist in New York, patented in 1829 a white alloy — “American Silver” or Feuchtwanger’s Composition, German silver — with no silver: copper, zinc, and nickel, harder than pure copper and resistant to verdigris. In 1837 he asked Congress to adopt it in place of the large cent. He hired Scovill of Waterbury, Connecticut, to strike patterns about 18.5 mm — dime size — with an eagle and snake on the obverse and ONE CENT / FEUCHTWANGER’S COMPOSITION on the reverse. Thomas Hart Benton backed him; Robert M. Patterson, director of the Philadelphia Mint, refused: nickel melts high, a three-metal alloy was hard to standardize, and domestic nickel was scarce.

Feuchtwanger put his tokens into circulation through his pharmacy, boldly marked ONE CENT and THREE CENTS: a legal gray area unlike the NOT ONE CENT tokens. There are at least fourteen die pairings of the 1837 cent (HT-268). In 1856 the Mint dropped the large copper cent and adopted the small Flying Eagle, 88% copper and 12% nickel: the case Feuchtwanger had made two decades earlier. Some 1864 three-cent pieces, struck in another wartime shortage, are not this Hard Times issue.

The most prolific maker was Scovill Manufacturing Company of Waterbury, Connecticut, born in brass buttons and equipped with rolling mills and coining presses. Other names: Wright & Bale in New York, Edward Hulseman, and Richard Trested (NY-922). Hulseman signed an 1837 token Half Cent Worth of Pure Copper, which traded on bullion rather than face value. Die sinkers sold the copper to merchants for less than a cent; the merchant paid it out as change at a full cent and took fractional seigniorage, with his advertisement in circulation. Store cards record apothecaries, hardware, dry goods, coaches, and even H.B. West’s Trained Dogs in New York. The store card photographed in this collection is John J. Adams’s, a brush manufacturer in Taunton with an office in Boston: HT-181 (Low-300), circa 1835.

The Treasury indicted William H. Scovill for making counterfeit copper with intent to deceive. The case dragged for years and was dismissed in 1842: the tokens carried advertising, political slogans, or NOT ONE CENT, and the government knew that prosecuting the makers would destroy the only small change still circulating. The legal fog lifted on 22 April 1864, in another flood of tokens — Civil War pieces. The Coinage Act of 1864 changed the federal cent, authorized the two-cent piece (the first to bear In God We Trust), and criminalized private striking of one- and two-cent coins for circulation. That ended private emergency small change in the United States.

Until the Coinage Act of 1857, foreign silver — especially the Spanish and Mexican 8 reales — was legal tender. Short of domestic quarters and half dollars, shops and banks chopped the 8 reales into wedges (a “two-bit” piece equaled a quarter dollar) and counterstamped them to guarantee weight and fineness. The Hard Times catalogue includes several of those cuts. One example is the Planters Bank counterstamp on cut quarters of 8 reales in New Orleans (HT-125), with the initials P B. Some marks predate 1832–1844 — Planters Bank belongs to the 1811–1815 shortage — but they are collected with the copper tokens because they share the same job: privately validated emergency small change.

Lyman Haynes Low’s second edition of Hard Times Tokens (1899) set the five typologies and 164 varieties, with Low numbers (the Feuchtwanger cent is Low-120). Edgar H. Adams added plates in 1913; William F. Dunham a list in 1910. For collectors such as Wayte Raymond and John J. Ford, Jr., those 164 pieces remain the “true” Hard Times tokens: the era’s political and necessity issues, not every peripheral scrip.

In 1981, and through the 2001 Standard Catalog of Hard Times Tokens, Russell Rulau absorbed Low’s list and added store cards, counterstamps, and varieties into the mid-500s, with the HT system. PCGS, NGC, and the auction houses now use HT as the primary attribution, with Low in parentheses. Q. David Bowers, in A Guide Book of Hard Times Tokens (2015), tightened the definition and dropped cardboard scrip and weakly dated counterstamps. Robert Schuman, in The True Hard Times Tokens, returns to Low and separates overt political pieces from local store cards.

Hard Times tokens show how private trade invented small change when federal metal ran short. Legally, the NOT ONE CENT tokens and Feuchtwanger’s cupronickel mark the line Congress closed in 1864. Politically, the copper is a document of Jacksonian rhetoric: from the abolitionist plea to the tortoise of the proposed Sub-Treasury. This case does not price the market or republish quotes; it records the photographed 1834 HT-10A, the 1841 HT-16, the 1837 HT-34, and the John J. Adams HT-181 store card.