Design
Longacre's obverse of an eagle in flight is based on that of the Gobrecht dollar, struck in small quantities from 1836 to 1839. Although Gobrecht's model is not known with certainty, some sources state that the flying eagle was based on Peter the eagle, a tame bird which was fed by Mint workers in the early 1830s until it was caught up in machinery and killed. The bird was stuffed, and is still displayed at the Philadelphia Mint. The wreath on the reverse is composed of leaves of wheat, corn, cotton and tobacco. The cotton leaves are sometimes said to be maple leaves; the two types are not dissimilar and maple leaves are more widely known than cotton leaves. An ear of corn is also visible.
Despite its derivative nature, Longacre's eagle has been widely admired. According to art historian Cornelius Vermeule in his book on U.S. coins, the flying eagle motif, when used in the 1830s, was "the first numismatic bird that could be said to derive from nature rather than from colonial carving or heraldry". Vermeule described the Flying Eagle cent's replacement, the Indian Head cent, as "far less attractive to the eye than the Peale-Gobrecht flying eagle and its variants". Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, when commissioned in 1905 to provide new designs for American coinage, sought to return a flying eagle design to the cent, writing to President Theodore Roosevelt, "I am using a flying eagle, a modification of the device which was used on the cent of 1857. I had not seen that coin for many years, and was so impressed by it that I thought if carried out with some modifications, nothing better could be done. It is by all odds the best design on any American coin." Saint-Gaudens did return the flying eagle to American coinage, but his design was used for the reverse of the double eagle rather than the cent.
Read more about this topic: Flying Eagle Cent
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