The Mint Act of 1792 made the eagle, worth ten dollars, the largest of the new gold coins. Gold coinage waited until 1795, when the first deposit of gold arrived and Congress had lowered the bonds required of the officers who handled it. Robert Scot cut the dies, probably with help from Adam Eckfeldt. His Liberty faces right in a tall soft cap that later collectors took for a turban, and the reverse shows a slender eagle standing on a palm branch with a wreath held up in its beak. The first 1,097 eagles were released on September 22, 1795, and 400 of them were paid to the Bank of Pennsylvania, the depositor of the gold.
The obverse stars followed the count of states: fifteen in 1795, sixteen once Tennessee joined in June 1796. Rather than add a star for every new state, Mint officials then settled on thirteen. In 1797 the small eagle, criticized as too thin for a national emblem, gave way to a heraldic eagle adapted from the Great Seal, a design the quarter eagle had already carried since 1796. Scot placed the arrows in the eagle's more honorable right claw and the olive branch in its left, a reversal of the Seal that Walter Breen called a blunder. The Mint reported 13,344 Small Eagle coins over 1795-1797; John Dannreuther's estimates run from 10,609 to 18,676.
Output depended on deposits and on the city's health. Yellow fever epidemics in 1796, 1797, 1801 and 1803 slowed the Mint's work, and it often favored smaller coins. Dies were used until they wore out and re-dated when needed, so every eagle dated 1798 is a 1797 die with an 8 cut over the 7, and old 1797 dies stayed in use after them. Demand rose in 1799, when 37,449 were reported. Yet by then gold was worth more against silver abroad than the United States' legal ratio of fifteen to one allowed, and eagles bought with silver at face were shipped to Europe and melted. President Thomas Jefferson then halted the coinage of eagles and silver dollars, by an order dated December 31, 1804. Eagles were not struck for circulation again until 1838, after Congress had lowered the gold content of the coinage.
One more group of 1804 eagles followed thirty years later. In 1834 the State Department ordered sets of the coins then current for gifts to rulers in Asia on Edmund Roberts' mission. Neither eagles nor dollars had been coined since 1804, and Mint Director Samuel Moore had both struck with that date. The new eagles have a plain 4 without the crosslet of the originals. Roberts delivered two of the sets, to the rulers of Muscat and Siam, before his death in Macao.
