The eagle, the $10 gold piece, had not been struck since 1804, when the Mint stopped making it because most of the coins were being exported. Laws of 1834 and 1837 cut the eagle's weight from 270 to 258 grains and set gold coins at nine-tenths fine, which left the new coins worth less as metal than as money. In July 1838 the Treasury told Mint Director Robert M. Patterson to resume the denomination.
Christian Gobrecht, then acting as the Mint's engraver, prepared the dies. According to Walter Breen, he took Liberty's head from the Venus in Omnia Vincit Amor, a painting by Benjamin West, and he based the eagle on John Reich's earlier design. Four specimen pieces went to the Treasury Secretary on December 6, 1838, followed by 7,200 coins for circulation. Partway through 1839 the head was reworked, with a new tilt, a new line to the bust and less hair over the ear, and the reverse lettering was made smaller. That second head stayed on the eagle for the rest of the series.
Philadelphia struck eagles every year from 1838 to 1907. New Orleans began in 1841 and struck its last pre-war eagles in 1860. The Civil War closed that mint in 1861, and it struck eagles again in some years from 1879 to 1906. San Francisco joined in 1854, Carson City in 1870, and Denver, which opened in 1906, in the last two years. An Act of March 3, 1865 required the motto IN GOD WE TRUST on every coin large enough to hold it, and from 1866 the eagle carried it on a scroll above the bird.
When the steamship Republic went down off Georgia in October 1865, her cargo of about $400,000 in coin was mostly $10 and $20 gold pieces, and salvors found the wreck in 2003. In 1907 the Liberty Head gave way to Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Indian Head eagle.
