 Nickel had been removed from the cent over the objection of Pennsylvania industrialist Joseph Wharton, who had large interests in the metal; his congressman, Thaddeus Stevens, had fought against the act. In 1864, Wharton published a pamphlet arguing for a coinage in which all coins less than ten cents would be made of a copper-nickel alloy with 25 % nickel, just over twice the percentage which the cent had contained. In March 1865, Congress passed legislation for a three-cent coin of that alloy, intended to retire fractional currency of that denomination. Longacre furnished a head of Liberty for the coin resembling his other depictions of the goddess which he had made in the past 16 years; for the reverse he used the "laurel" wreath from the 1859 cent surrounding the Roman numeral III borrowed from the silver three-cent piece.
