Designed by the Mint's chief engraver, James B. Longacre, it circulated well while other silver coinage was being hoarded and melted, but once that problem was addressed, became less used.

This, and the reduction of postage rates to three cents, prompted Congress in 1851 to authorize a coin of that denomination made of .750 fine silver, rather than the conventional .900.

The mint accepted them as payment at a slightly lower figure, but even so, lost money on the transactions as many of the pieces were lightweight through wear.

The House of Representatives instead considered legislation to reduce the valuation of the Spanish coins to ten cents per real, and to strike a twenty-cent piece, of .900 silver, to facilitate the exchange.

Neil Carothers, in his book on small-denomination American money, suggests that the House's plan would have resulted in the Spanish coins staying in circulation, and any twenty-cent pieces issued being hoarded or melted.

When the bill was debated in the House on January 13, 1851, New York Congressman William Duer indicated that he felt both coin and stamp should be denominated at 21⁄2 cents, and his fellow New Yorker, Orsamus Matteson, offered an amendment to that effect.

The amendment failed, as did every other attempt to change the legislation, including Dickinson's plea, in the Senate, to restore the requirement that the new coin be used to retire some of the Spanish silver.

Subsidiary coinage had been established, but in a trivial way, by an unworkable law, and at a time when the entire silver currency was flowing out of the country.

Peale produced a coin depicting a Liberty cap, based on a design prepared by Longacre's late predecessor, Christian Gobrecht, in 1836.

[4] On March 2, 1851, the day before the legislation was passed, Longacre, with the reluctant permission of Patterson (a Peale ally) sent Treasury Secretary Thomas Corwin samples of his proposed three-cent piece, along with a letter explaining the symbology.

Both types of pattern coin were sent by Patterson to Corwin on March 25, 1851, with the Mint director's recommendation that the chief engraver's design be selected.

[14] As Longacre wrote in his letter to Corwin of March 2, 1851, On so small a coin it is impossible that the device can be at once conspicuous and striking unless it is simple—complexity would defeat the object.

For the obverse I have therefore chosen a star (one of the heraldic elements of the National crest) bearing on its centre the shield of the Union, surrounded by the legal inscription and date.

Members of the public who wanted pieces were refused them by mint officials, who advised would-be purchasers to seek them at treasury depository branches.

One Philadelphia newspaper reported, derisively, that merchants were reduced to giving ladles full of three-cent pieces in change for a five-dollar banknote.

Carothers theorized, "Congress, probably realizing that the 3 cent piece was a misfit at best, preferred to leave it with a discordant legal tender value".

Despite the statutes, in 1853 and 1854, Snowden had the mint purchase large quantities of silver bullion at a fixed price, generally above the market rate, and struck it into coin.

[25] Although there is no archival evidence, Breen theorizes that in 1858 Snowden ordered Longacre to make changes to improve striking quality, as most type-2 pieces were weakly struck.

[23] The economic chaos of the civil war brought the introduction of legal tender notes, backed only by the credit of the government, and by mid-1862, gold and silver coins had vanished from circulation in much of the nation, their place taken by such makeshifts as fractional currency and postage stamps.

[29] In March 1863, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase wrote in a letter that the three-cent silver had entirely vanished from circulation, proposing that it be issued in aluminum to avoid hoarding.

Even in the draft bill, no provision was made for the three-cent silver, though some in Congress wished to retain the coin in anticipation of the resumption of specie payments.

[32] Breen deems the decision to eliminate the silver three-cent piece and the half dime, which might have directly competed with the two copper-nickel coins, a favor to industrialist Joseph Wharton, whose mines produced much of the nickel ore used in their coinage.

[25] Although the trime was confirmed as fully legal tender by the Coinage Act of 1965, which proclaimed all coin and currency of the United States good to any amount for payment of public and private debt, it had long since disappeared from circulation.

[34] The three-cent nickel also went the way of its silver counterpart, and, following years of low mintages and decreasing popularity, it was abolished by the Act of September 26, 1890 along with the gold dollar and three-dollar piece.

[35] According to Kevin Flynn and Winston Zack in their book on the three-cent silver, "Lower interest [in the trime] means that it is the type of coin [for] which you can find great deals on pricing, even on dates in which rarity is high.

[29] Much of the mintage of later dates was melted by the Mint after the termination of the series, having already been produced in low numbers in its latter years, thereby increasing scarcity of late trimes yet further.