1839 $10 Liberty Head Eagle, Head of '38 NGC AU55 Ex.S.S. Republic

The Story of the SS Republic Treasure

In October of 1865, six months after the end of the U.S. Civil War, the side-wheel steamer SS Republic was bound from New York to New Orleans. Aboard the former Civil War blockade ship was precious cargo to aid in the rebuilding of the war-ravaged city of New Orleans to its prewar glory. Unfortunately, the ship never made port, sinking in a massive hurricane off the coast of Georgia. The ship and its cargo, including a reported $400,000 in gold and silver coins, came to rest 1,700 feet deep in the Atlantic Ocean. Nearly 140 years later a team of salvage experts, aided by state-of-the-art electronics and recovery equipment, found and brought to the surface a stunning treasure trove of numismatic classics.

The quality of the coins recovered cannot be overstated. You see, during and just after the Civil War, in both the North and especially the South, gold and silver coins were a valued but extremely scarce commodity. Rampant inflation, caused by both sides financing their huge war costs through the near-nonstop printing of paper currency, resulted in the widespread hoarding of “hard money.” At the end of the war, the South, for all practical purposes, was broke…its paper money was worthless, its hard money virtually gone. The years following the Civil War saw wild fluctuations in the value of gold and silver. As a result of these fluctuations, many of the coins of this era were melted or saw heavy circulation.

The wonderful and rare gold treasures offered in this final release are available today only because of the tragic loss of the SS Republic. The coins were literally preserved in their pristine condition due to the fact that they were locked in a time capsule at the bottom of the deep blue sea.

The excavation of the Republic has yielded the largest collection of American coins, numbering 51,404, ever discovered on a shipwreck. The assemblage consists of 2,675 gold $20 double eagles, 1,460 $10 eagles and 47,263 silver issues.

En route from New York to New Orleans within four months of the end of the Civil War, the Republic was shipping an eclectic utilitarian cargo of glass and stoneware bottles (containing medicines, ink, foodstuffs and alcoholic beverages), writing slates, pottery wares, hardware and religious artifacts all intended to re-stock the city’s depleted shelves and possibly to be trans-shipped to other ports up the Mississippi River.

The coins were destined to help stimulate trade in New Orleans’ re-emerging monetary economy. Prior to the war, nowhere in the nation was the banking system stronger than in the Deep South, home to the country’s five cotton states: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. New Orleans, in particular, dubbed ‘King Cotton’, was America’s wealthiest city by 1861 and had become a thriving banking and financial center providing credit for the city’s business community and for the planters of the lower Mississippi Valley. Yet by the summer of 1865 commercial banking had almost ceased to exist, the Bank of New Orleans alone representing one of the few financial institutions in the city that had managed to stave off complete collapse.

Without a cargo manifest or related historical evidence, the intended recipients of the Republic’s coin cargo are unlikely ever to be known. It can only be assumed that its loss 150km off the coast of Georgia, one in a series of tragedies that beset the South in the brutal war years, was a major set-back for a city plagued by a scarcity of much needed capital.