Robert Scot's Draped Bust portrait was already on the cent in 1796, but it did not reach the half cent until 1800. No half cent dies had been dated 1798 or 1799; NGC says dies dated 1797 were still in use as late as 1800. Scot's Liberty is based on a portrait by Gilbert Stuart, and some accounts name the Philadelphia socialite Ann Willing Bingham as the sitter.
Most Draped Bust half cents were struck on ready-made copper blanks from Matthew Boulton's works in England; NGC says all of them from 1803 on used Boulton planchets. A few 1800 half cents were struck instead on misstruck cents cut down to size.
There are no half cents dated 1801. In 1802 the Mint took a leftover 1800 obverse, punched a 2 over the final 0 and paired it with two reverses, one of them an old die of the 1795 to 1797 style. The 1802/0 is the first overdate in the half cent series. Another overdate closes the series: the 1808/7. The other 1808 die was first dated just "180", and according to NGC its last digit was formed from two zeros, one stacked on the other.
The mintage figures for these years count what the Mint delivered in each calendar year, and dies were used whatever date they carried, so the figures do not always match the coins. NGC notes that the 1807 half cents come from a single pair of dies, which it thinks could not have struck the 476,000 coins on record, and Walter Breen proposed lower net figures for 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1807. John Reich's Classic Head design replaced the Draped Bust in 1809.
