Proposed by Nevada Senator John P. Jones, it proved a failure due to confusion with the quarter, to which it was close in both size and value.

In 1874, the newly elected Jones began pressing for a twenty-cent piece, which he stated would alleviate the shortage of small change in the Far West.

It was opposed by mint director Robert Patterson, though his opposition was more to the two-cent piece, which Tracy proposed be struck in billon, low-grade silver that would be difficult to recover when melting the coins.

Government payments in silver and gold had been suspended during the economic chaos caused by the Civil War—coins containing precious metal were hoarded except on the Pacific Coast, and did not pass at face value in trade.

Prices in the West were sometimes in bits (121⁄2 cents, based on the old Spanish colonial real, although those pieces no longer circulated), adding to the change problem.

Numismatist David Lange states that a shipment of nickels out West could have solved everything, but that they might not have been accepted due to the prejudice against money which did not contain precious metal.

Within a year, silver prices had dropped, and producers tried vainly to deposit bullion at the mints for conversion into legal tender.

[5][8] The third was American interest in aligning its currency with the Latin Monetary Union and to bring its weights for coinage into the metric system.

Part-owner of the Crown Point Mine, he had been elected to the Senate in 1873; on February 10, 1874, he introduced a bill to authorize a twenty-cent piece, one of his first legislative endeavors.

It was endorsed by mint director Linderman; according to numismatic historian Walter Breen, "other legislators went along with it, largely as a favor to Sen.

Pollock did not approve Bailly's proposal, deeming it too similar to the Seated Liberty design which was then on all domestic silver coinage, and so the new coin would too closely resemble the quarter.

Pollock deprecated a reverse design with a shield, but Linderman liked it and stated that it would have been adopted but for the law requiring an eagle to appear on silver pieces larger than the dime.

[15][16] That design, by the late chief engraver, Christian Gobrecht, following a concept by Thomas Sully and Titian Peale, was first used in 1836 and by 1840 was on all denominations of silver coins then being struck.

[18] Linderman had realized that the difference in size between the new coin and quarter was small, and thought a scaled-down version of the trade dollar suitable for the twenty-cent piece; he got his way on the reverse.

Vermeule admired the pattern designs made by Barber, especially the "Liberty by the Seashore" motif, which the historian believes owes a debt to the British copper coins of that period depicting Britannia—Barber was an Englishman by birth.

[18] Numismatist Yancey Rayburn, in his 1970 article, wrote that the twenty-cent piece is bare of much of the lettering common on US coins: neither "In God We Trust" nor "E Pluribus Unum" appears on it.

[24] Rayburn also admired that the full denomination, "twenty cents", was spelled out; at that time the quarter and fifty-cent piece had the word "dollar" abbreviated as "dol.

[6] In April 1876, when Congress began to allow the redemption of fractional currency with coin, the twenty-cent piece was listed as among the denominations that could be exchanged for the low-denomination paper.