James B. Longacre — the engraver they spent years trying to fire

James Barton Longacre was born on a Pennsylvania farm in 1794 and walked away from it at twelve. His mother had died young, and he could not get on with his stepmother, so he left for Philadelphia and apprenticed himself to a bookseller named John E. Watson. That should have been the whole story — a farm boy shelving books in a city shop.

But he could draw. By 1819 he had switched trades entirely, training in engraving under George Murray at the firm of Murray, Draper, Fairman & Co. Banknote engraving is exacting work: every line is cut by hand into metal, in reverse, with no room for a slipped graver. It gave him a portraitist's eye and a craftsman's patience — and a livelihood.

For the next twenty-five years he made his name not on coins but on paper. He engraved portraits of the Founders for John Binns' famous facsimile of the Declaration of Independence. He illustrated the Sandersons' multi-volume Biographies of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. In the 1830s he and the New York artist James Herring published the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, page after page of engraved portraits of the men who had built the republic. By 1844 Longacre was one of the most respected portrait engravers in the country — and, through that work, personally known to powerful people.

Then the Mint's chief engraver, Christian Gobrecht, died. Longacre wanted the post, and a friend from those portrait years — Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina — pressed his case. President John Tyler appointed him the fourth Chief Engraver of the United States Mint on September 16, 1844; the Senate confirmed him that January. He had almost no experience cutting coin dies. That gap, and the political muscle behind his hiring, would shadow him for the rest of his life.

Longacre walked into a Mint that did not want him. Two men ran the place day to day: Director Robert Maskell Patterson and Chief Coiner Franklin Peale. Both resented the favor that had won Longacre his post — and Peale had a private motive. He ran a profitable medal business on the side, using Mint machinery and Mint workers on the government's clock. An active chief engraver with his own ideas threatened that arrangement. Peale's preferred outcome was simple: have Longacre's design work farmed out to engravers beyond the Mint, and his own side business could carry on undisturbed.

So they tried to push him out. They questioned his competence and pressed to hand his work to outside hands. On Christmas Day 1849, Patterson formally asked Treasury Secretary William Meredith to remove him. Longacre fought the only way he could — he traveled to Washington, met Meredith face to face in February 1850, and made his own case. He kept his job. Patterson retired in 1851; Peale's reckoning came in 1854, when Mint Director James Ross Snowden dismissed him after the scale of his private dealing became public knowledge.

The crucible of all this was the gold double eagle — the new twenty-dollar coin authorized in 1849 to convert California gold-rush bullion into money. The work nearly broke him. A model for the design was destroyed during the galvanic process used to make the dies, forcing Longacre to rebuild it from a backup plaster cast by his own hand; a finished die then cracked while being hardened. The Library Company of Philadelphia, which holds his papers, records that he completed the double eagle "alone and to the detriment of his health" — laboring solo, in part, as Peale's faction worked to outsource the engraving out from under him.

That ordeal hardened his way of working. Longacre worked by hand and in high relief — the design standing up boldly from the coin's surface. It is what gives his portraits their richness. It is also what got him in trouble again and again, because beautiful relief is punishing to strike: the press can't always push metal into the deepest parts of the die, and dies crack under the strain. His gold dollar and his Shield nickel both had to be redesigned for exactly this reason. The art kept colliding with the machine.

His other signature was American symbolism. He built a "cereal wreath" — wheat, corn, cotton, and tobacco, the crops of North and South — and used it on coin after coin, starting with the Flying Eagle cent reverse and persisting on the dime into the next century. When he finally got to choose a whole design himself, on the three-dollar gold piece, he noted in his papers that it was "the first time he had been allowed to choose a design." After a career of executing other people's instructions over their objections, that single line says a great deal.