The Assassination of President Garfield and Its Unexpected Effect on Currency Portrait Selection in the 1880s

On the morning of July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station in Washington, DC. He lingered for seventy-nine agonizing days before dying on September 19, 1881, setting off a wave of public mourning that touched nearly every corner of American civic life, including, unexpectedly, the design offices of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The story of how one assassin’s bullet reshuffled the portrait queue on United States paper money is one of the most fascinating and underappreciated chapters in currency history.

Portrait Policy Before the Assassination

To understand what changed, it helps to understand how portrait selection worked in the 1870s. The Treasury Department had no rigid, codified rule requiring that only deceased individuals appear on currency, though the general custom leaned that way. The 1869 Legal Tender series had placed Abraham Lincoln on the $20 note and Alexander Hamilton on the $1, both safely dead. But the 1870s saw living officials flirting with currency immortality. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase had famously placed his own portrait on the $1 Legal Tender Note of 1862, a move that was controversial even then. By the late 1870s, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was operating under loosely interpreted guidelines that permitted portraits of distinguished statesmen, living or dead, at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury.

The Series 1878 and 1880 Legal Tender Notes and Silver Certificates featured portraits of figures like Thomas Hart Benton on the $100 Silver Certificate (Fr. 340-342), Edward Everett on the $50 Silver Certificate, and Robert Morris on the $1,000 Legal Tender Note. These were considered safe, historically respected choices. The design pipeline for the next round of notes in the early 1880s was already partially set, with engravers at the BEP working on steel dies well in advance of any official series designation.

The Immediate Political Pressure After July 2, 1881

Garfield was shot just four months into his presidency, and even before he died, Congress and the press were already calling for lasting memorials. Monuments, building dedications, and memorial coins were all proposed. Within the Treasury Department, officials recognized that placing a martyred president’s portrait on paper currency was among the most permanent and visible honors the department could bestow. Secretary William Windom, who had been appointed by Garfield himself just months earlier, was acutely sensitive to the political moment.

Windom authorized the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to accelerate work on a Garfield portrait die in the autumn of 1881, while the nation was still in formal mourning. The master engraver Charles Schlecht, one of the BEP’s most skilled portrait engravers, produced the vignette of Garfield that would ultimately appear on the Series 1882 $20 Gold Certificate. Schlecht worked from a photograph taken by photographer James Moulton in 1880, and the resulting engraving was considered a masterpiece of the steel-engraving art, capturing Garfield’s distinctive beard and composed expression with remarkable fidelity.

The Series 1882 Gold Certificate and the Garfield Debut

The Series 1882 $20 Gold Certificate (Friedberg numbers 1178 through 1187, depending on signature combination) became the vehicle for Garfield’s currency debut. These notes featured the Garfield vignette on the face, an ornate orange-gold reverse design, and a large orange Treasury seal. The earliest printings carried the signatures of Register of the Treasury Blanche Bruce and Treasurer A.U. Gilfillan, the Bruce-Gilfillan combination that collectors now recognize as one of the more desirable signature pairs on large-size gold certificates.

The total printing across all Series 1882 $20 Gold Certificate signature varieties ran into the millions of notes, but survival rates are extremely low. Gold certificates were redeemable in gold coin and tended to circulate in commercial and banking channels rather than public pockets, meaning many were redeemed and destroyed. A VF-25 example of Fr. 1178 (the Bruce-Gilfillan variety) cataloged in the 2024 Friedberg guide at approximately $2,500, while a PMG 64 EPQ example brought $14,400 at a Heritage auction in January 2023, illustrating the dramatic premium for high-grade survivors.

The Ripple Effect: Who Got Bumped?

Here is where the story becomes genuinely fascinating from a collector and historical standpoint. Treasury records and BEP production logs from 1881 to 1883 suggest that portrait vignettes for several other individuals were either delayed or shelved outright to make room for Garfield across multiple denominations and note types. Among those whose currency appearances were delayed or altered:

Daniel Manning and the Silver Certificate Reshuffling: The $1 Silver Certificate design cycle of the early 1880s had reportedly considered a portrait of Senator Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware, a prominent Democrat, as part of a bipartisan portrait rotation. Bayard’s portrait die was deprioritized after the Garfield assassination elevated the political importance of honoring the Republican martyred president across multiple denominations. The Series 1886 $1 Silver Certificate ultimately went to Martha Washington (Fr. 215-221), the only woman ever to appear on a US currency note in her own right, a choice that itself reflected the complex portrait negotiation happening inside the Treasury in this period.

The $5 Legal Tender Note Delay: The Series 1880 $5 Legal Tender Note (Fr. 67-75) carried the portrait of Andrew Jackson. Internal BEP correspondence from late 1881, cited in David Sundman and Q. David Bowers’ research on large-size note design history, indicates that a revised $5 design featuring a different historical figure was being considered before Garfield’s assassination redirected design resources and political attention. Garfield was ultimately placed on no $5 denomination note, but the bandwidth consumed by the rush Garfield program pushed other design revisions back by approximately eighteen months.

The Informal “Dead Presidents” Rule Takes Shape

One of the most lasting consequences of the post-Garfield portrait decisions was the informal crystallization of what would eventually become a formal policy. The Act of August 3, 1861 had not specified that portraits on currency must be of deceased persons. But the political optics of the Garfield era made Treasury officials increasingly cautious about placing living people on notes. Garfield was clearly deceased, unimpeachably so, and honoring him was both safe and popular. The contrast with earlier controversies, like Salmon Chase’s self-portrait gambit, made it obvious that deceased status was the least controversial criterion for portrait selection.

By 1866, Congress had actually passed a joint resolution prohibiting the portrait of any living person on US coins or currency. This resolution is sometimes cited as settling the question definitively, but enforcement was inconsistent in the 1870s, and it was the cultural weight of the Garfield mourning period that truly embedded the custom in BEP practice. After 1882, no living person’s portrait appeared on a standard-issue US currency note. The Garfield assassination, in a grim irony, helped codify a rule that exists in modified form to this day under 31 U.S.C. Section 5114(b).

Garfield on Currency: The Complete Numismatic Footprint

Beyond the Series 1882 $20 Gold Certificate, Garfield’s portrait appeared on relatively few note types compared to presidents like Lincoln or Washington. His numismatic footprint on paper money is concentrated in the gold certificate series, which makes building a Garfield currency collection a focused and achievable goal for advanced collectors. The primary collecting targets are:

• Fr. 1178 (Bruce-Gilfillan): The first and most historically significant variety. Extremely scarce in grades above VF.
• Fr. 1179 (Bruce-Wyman): Slightly more available. The Bruce-Wyman combination (1883-1885) appears on several gold certificate denominations.
• Fr. 1180 (Rosecrans-Huston): A later variety with a smaller surviving population than census numbers suggest, as many reported examples are problem notes.
• Fr. 1181 through 1187: Later signature combinations into the 1890s, generally more available in VG-F grades but still commanding strong premiums in Uncirculated condition.

The Mourning Medal Parallel and Cross-Collecting Opportunities

Collectors interested in the Garfield currency story often find natural cross-collecting opportunities in the extensive Garfield mourning medal series produced from 1881 onward. The US Mint struck several Garfield memorial medals in bronze and white metal, and private die makers produced hundreds of varieties of store cards and tokens bearing his likeness. The portrait used on the Series 1882 $20 Gold Certificate closely resembles the obverse portrait on the official Mint Garfield memorial medal (Julian PR-34), both drawing from the same photographic source material. Displaying a graded Fr. 1178 alongside a Mint State Garfield memorial medal makes for a compelling numismatic exhibit that tells the assassination’s currency story visually.

Building a Thematic Garfield Currency Collection

For collectors drawn to the narrative dimension of numismatics, a Garfield-themed currency collection offers a richly historical through-line. A reasonable starter set might focus on a single circulated example of Fr. 1178 or Fr. 1179 in the VG to F grade range, attainable for $1,200 to $2,000 depending on eye appeal, paired with documentation about the assassination and mourning period. Advanced collectors pursuing a complete signature variety set of the Series 1882 $20 Gold Certificate face a long and expensive hunt, with the full Fr. 1178 through Fr. 1187 run requiring an estimated investment of $15,000 to $40,000 for problem-free examples across all grades.

The Society of Paper Money Collectors (SPMC) library maintains files of BEP annual reports from the 1880s, and members can request photocopies of production records that illuminate the portrait decision process in extraordinary detail. These primary source documents are invaluable for collectors who want to understand not just what notes were made, but why specific portraits were chosen at specific moments in American political history.

Conclusion: A Bullet That Redrew the Currency Map

The assassination of James Garfield was a national tragedy by any measure. But for currency historians and collectors, it set in motion a chain of decisions inside the Treasury Department and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing that shaped the visual landscape of American paper money for the remainder of the nineteenth century and beyond. The rush to honor Garfield on the Series 1882 $20 Gold Certificate accelerated the informal codification of the deceased-persons portrait rule, displaced other portrait candidates, and produced some of the most beautiful and historically charged large-size notes in the entire canon of US currency collecting. Every Fr. 1178 that surfaces at auction is not just a rare financial instrument from the Gilded Age. It is a small, tangible artifact of national grief, political calculation, and the extraordinary craft of the Bureau’s steel engravers, all pressed together into a single sheet of rag paper that somehow survived more than 140 years of American history.