This 1852-O $20 double eagle minted in New Orleans is scarce overall, and most are sharply struck with others showing a lighter strike at the obverse center and at the stars. High grade coins are often prooflike from polishing of the dies at the Philadelphia Mint (where all dies were made). Though moderately scarce overall, examples in grades up through Extremely Fine can be found with little effort. The issue becomes very scarce in About Uncirculated condition, and properly graded Mint State pieces remain very rare. Fewer than two dozen individual Uncirculated coins are thought to exist, with a single MS-65 (NCG) ranking as finest known.

Even though the New Orleans Mint had produced double eagles in quantity in both 1850 and 1851, the coiners were still working out many of the difficulties found in producing such a large gold coin with precision. Emphasis seemed to have been placed more on quantity over quality, leaving many examples with uneven or weak strikes. In the end, a total of 190,000 specimens came off the Mint's presses, a decent quantity to be sure, helping to make this one of the more readily available of all New Orleans double eagles. As with most gold coins produced in the Antebellum South, the coins entered circulation where they would remain, seeing use primarily in the region. Numismatics in America was still in its very infancy in the early 1850s and there was essentially no interest in mintmarks at all, which when combined with the denomination's high face value meant that precious few examples of the issue were intentionally saved at the time. The Civil War disrupted monetary circulation patterns drastically, causing many to be used for overseas commerce or otherwise disappeared from use. When double eagle holdings from overseas started to be repatriated back to these shores in the twentieth century, most surviving specimens bore the evidence of not only their extended storage in large sacks, but also the years of general commercial use in the mid- to late nineteenth century. As a result, it is estimated that about 400 to 600 examples of the date can be accounted for today, most of those in the VF and EF range, with only a very small number of coins at the AU level or above. This comparative availability at the middle circulated grade levels has made the 1852-O double eagle especially popular for type collectors seeking just a single example of a New Orleans-produced double eagle. The issue's popularity has placed quite a bit of competitive pressure for the few examples known at the AU level and above. This situation is even more pronounced at the Mint State levels of preservation, where at best only about a dozen uncirculated examples of the issue may still be extant for the modern numismatist to appreciate.

The example to the left was sold by Stack's Bowers Galleries in August 2018, where it realized $84,000. It is pedigreed to the Harry W. Bass, Jr. Collection, Part III.