The History of United States Coinage As Illustrated by the Garrett Collection

Numismatic Americana

Hard Times Tokens 1833-1844

The series known as Hard Times tokens comprises tokens issued privately in the United States from to 1844. The pieces, mostly made of copper and he size of a United States cent of the period, can be divided into several categories:
1. Pieces referring to the United States Bank and the controversy surrounding it.
2. Those with inscriptions relating to political and satirical situations of the era.
3. Tokens with inscriptions and designs closely resembling the regular cent coinage but with some differences in order to evade the counterfeiting laws.
4. Examples bearing the advertisements of private merchants; "store cards".
5. Die mulings, combinations with the obverses or reverses of any of the preceding.
Hard times tokens were first described in 1858 by Charles I. Bushnell in An Arrangement of the Tradesmen's Cards, Political Tokens, Election Medals, etc. Bushnell, who died in 1880, began collecting around l850. During the first decade of his collecting activity ie engaged in considerable research concerning colonial coins, Hard Times tokens, and related items. Tokens, medals, and numismatic pieces with a story behind them specially intrigued Bushnell. While he collected regular United States Mint issues, these were secondary in importance, as evidenced by the preface to the June W-24, 1882, auction catalogue of the Bushnell Collection prepared by S. H. and Henry Chapman:

Mr. Bushnell told me he never spared expense in improving their condition, that no matter how fine a specimen was, if he could improve it he did so; he also told us that he cared but little for the dates of the United States Mint silver issues, and the series of which he never completed, his attention being devoted to the coins and medals relating to the history of this country.

Bushnell visited several original issuers and manufacturers of Hard Times tokens and was able to obtain undistributed pieces as well as have some special strikings made to his order.

In the April 1870 issue of The American Journal of Numismatics J. N. T. Levick enumerated and described 56 different issues. In 1886 Lyman H. Low produced a 16-page pamphlet describing additional pieces. Low became extremely interested in the field. He wrote extensively and traveled widely to interview those once associated with the issuance of the tokens. He sought relatives of merchants who once advertised on the pieces. From early newspapers, commercial journals, and other sources additional information was obtained. The result was his definitive work, Hard Times Tokens, of which the 1900 revised second edition remains today the standard work on the series. William F. Dunham, a Chicago numismatist whose magnificent collection was sold at auction by B. Max Mehl in 1941, issued an easy finding list, or cross-index of the series. In the 1950s

Charles V. Kappen, a California devotee of tokens and medals, reissued Low's earlier work and combined it with Dunham's information, plates made from photographs (Low's illustrations were line drawings), and furnished a table of prices and rarity information.

The Hard Times tokens with political motifs center on issues of the Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations.

Andrew Jackson, military hero of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, defeated John Quincy Adams' reelection bid to gain the presidency in 1828. Jackson, not an educated man, was the subject of much ridicule. His "Roman firmness" was mentioned on tokens as was his statement made at a Democratic banquet in April 1830, "our federal union must be preserved," or, as some have remembered it, "our federal union, it must and shall be preserved." In 1832 Harvard College conferred upon Jackson an honorary Doctorate of Laws. This LLD degree caused much amusement. As Lyman H. Low has stated, "the judicious grieved, and his enemies rejoiced at the absurdity of the title; and it was not long before the honorary degree appeared upon a token which ridiculed him."