In 1796 the Mint replaced Robert Scot's Flowing Hair with a new Liberty on every silver and copper coin. Mint Director Henry W. DeSaussure had set out to improve the designs, and the new portrait is traditionally said to follow a sketch by the painter Gilbert Stuart, with Philadelphia's Ann Willing Bingham as the model. No such sketch has been found, and CoinWeek notes that recent research doubts Stuart had a hand in it; Scot cut the dies, assisted by John Eckstein. The eagle on the reverse became smaller and sturdier and now stood inside a wreath of two kinds of branches.
The two years of the Small Eagle type show the Mint working out how many stars to use. The 1796 coins have 15, one for each state. Dies for 1797 were made with 15 stars, then 16 after Tennessee joined the Union, and finally 13, after Director Elias Boudinot decided to honor only the original states. Of the two die pairs used for 1796, one obverse had first been dated 1795.
No half dimes were struck in 1798 or 1799. When the coin came back in 1800 it carried Scot's Heraldic Eagle, modeled on the Great Seal, which was already in use on the quarter eagle (from 1796), the eagle (from 1797) and, from 1798, the dime, the dollar and the half eagle. Output stayed small: no year's reported figure passed 40,000, none were dated 1804, and after 1805 the Mint made no more half dimes until 1829. CoinWeek reports that specialists blame weak demand from bullion depositors, limited Mint capacity, or both.
