United States · Numismatics

The circulation dollar followed the standard of the act of 18 January 1837: 26.73 g (412.5 grains), 38.10 mm in diameter, and about 2.40 mm thick. The alloy is 90% silver and 10% copper, 0.900 fine. The copper hardens the planchet against commercial wear. That alloy leaves 24.057 g of pure silver, 0.77344 troy ounces, the type’s actual silver weight. The edge is reeded; the sources give an average of about 189 reeds, varying with the collar used at each mint.

The revival after 2021 does not use that 90/10 alloy. Mint pages describe 0.999 fine silver planchets, with the same 38.10 mm diameter and a gross weight of 26.73 g that, at that fineness, is nearly all pure silver (0.859 troy ounces). The profile resembles the historical coin. The metal is not that of 1878.

The mint mark, when there is one, sits on the reverse, under the olive and laurel wreath, above the letters D and O of DOLLAR. Philadelphia struck the whole series with no mark. San Francisco, with an S, kept up annual production, and the accounts credit it with a sharper strike and a livelier cartwheel. New Orleans, with an O, reopened in 1879 after its Civil War closure and struck dollars through 1904; many of those coins show a soft center — Liberty’s hair and the eagle’s breast — from die spacing and lower pressure. Carson City, with CC, struck from 1878 to 1885 and from 1889 to 1893, on silver from the Comstock Lode. Denver, with a D, is outside the original run: it struck Morgans only in 1921, more than 20 million, before it moved to the Peace dollar.

The dollar was not born of counter demand. It was born of a fight over silver. The Coinage Act of 1873 dropped the standard silver dollar. Agrarians and miners called it the “Crime of ’73.” The Comstock Lode drove the metal’s price down, and the Western bloc asked for free and unlimited coinage. On 28 February 1878 Congress overrode Rutherford B. Hayes’s veto and passed the Bland-Allison Act: each month the Treasury had to buy between two and four million dollars of domestic silver, at the market price, and coin it into these dollars. The public preferred paper to the weight of the coin. Most of what was struck went into vaults.

In July 1890 the Sherman Silver Purchase Act raised the mandate: 4.5 million ounces of silver a month. Treasury Notes of 1890 were redeemed in gold, and the gold reserve fell through the legal floor of 100 million dollars. That run fed the Panic of 1893. Grover Cleveland called a special session and, late that year, Congress repealed the purchase clause. Without new silver, the mintages of 1893 to 1895 went short. Several of the dates the series treats as keys sit in that gap.

The original run stops in 1904. What followed explains why so many high mintages are scarce today. In the First World War, British India suffered a run on the silver rupee. On 23 April 1918 the Pittman Act, sponsored by Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, authorized melting up to 350 million standard silver dollars stored in the Treasury and selling the bullion to Great Britain at one dollar a fine ounce. The cited accounts give the exact melt: 270,232,722 dollars, about 47% of the Morgan coinage of 1878 to 1904. The same act required every melted dollar to be replaced with new coin, from domestic silver bought at one dollar an ounce. That replacement is the more than 86 million Morgans of 1921 at Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco, and, in December of that year, Anthony de Francisci’s Peace dollar.

The 1893-S is the key date of the circulation issue: a published mintage of 100,000, paid out at once into California and Western trade. The 1889-CC, at 350,000, circulated in the camps and, besides, was missing from the twentieth-century vault finds. The 1894 Philadelphia coin, 110,000, falls just after the Sherman purchase was repealed. The 1895-O, 450,000, was also absent from those Treasury payouts.

A condition rarity is different: a date that is ordinary when worn and scarce when uncirculated. The 1884-S has a mintage of 3,200,000 and, even so, nearly all of it entered trade or was melted under Pittman. This case holds one example of that date, with the S, raw. The 1886-O, at 10,710,000, is affordable when worn; the soft center and bag friction leave high-grade pieces very few. The 1892-S and the 1895-O are cited in the same group. None of that is a grade of the three pieces in this collection.

Mint records list 12,000 business strikes in June 1895 and 880 proofs for collectors. In more than a century no business strike the sources accept as genuine has turned up. The usual reading is that those 12,000 never left the Mint and were melted before disbursement, at an assay close or a bullion reconciliation. What passes as an 1895 Philadelphia dollar is a proof. The cited estimates put the net population near 400 to 500 pieces. This page has not counted that population.

In March 1878, at Philadelphia, Morgan’s eagle came out with eight tail feathers. Mint Director Henry R. Linderman stopped production and asked for seven. Popular telling says ornithologists objected to an even count. The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) has twelve rectrices. The change was about relief and heraldry, not biology.

Three reverses remain from that year. Eight tail feathers (8TF): about 749,500 circulation pieces and about 500 proofs, before the dies were changed. Seven tail feathers (7TF), which became the reverse for the rest of the series. And seven over eight (7/8TF): new seven-feather dies hubbed over unhardened eight-feather dies, to save the steel. On those coins the tips of the eight feathers show under the seven.

Leroy Van Allen and A. George Mallis catalogued each die pair as a VAM variety. In the nineteenth century the date and the mint mark were punched by hand, and each die leaves a small difference. The sets specialists chase are called the Top 100 and the Hot 50. Among those cited: the 1879-CC “Capped Die” (VAM-3), with die-rust pitting above the CC; the 1882-O/S (VAM-3 through VAM-5), an O punched over an S on dies meant for San Francisco; the 1888-O “Scarface” (VAM-1B), a die break across Liberty’s left cheek; and the 1900-O/CC, surplus Carson City dies reused at New Orleans with an O over the CC. This case assigns no VAM to its three examples.

After 1921, hundreds of millions of uncirculated dollars stayed in 1,000-coin canvas bags, in vaults in Washington, New York, and San Francisco. By law, the public could redeem silver certificates for silver dollars. In October and November 1962 cashiers opened compartments that had been shut for decades. The sharpest shock was the 1903-O, long treated as rare: the accounts speak of about 200,000 to 500,000 uncirculated pieces paid out at face. Smaller releases brought 1898-O and 1904-O dollars as well. Lines formed at the Treasury Building for sealed bags.

Late in 1963 and early in 1964 the spot price of silver moved past 1.29 dollars an ounce. With 0.77344 troy ounces of pure silver, 1.2929 dollars an ounce is the point at which the metal equals a dollar of face value. Above that, redeeming paper and melting the coin was arbitrage. On 25 March 1964 Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon ended the redemption of certificates for silver dollars. From then on the paper was redeemed in granules and assay bars, until the silver backing expired on 24 June 1968.

The count after Dillon’s order left about 2.9 million dollars in the vaults. More than 80% carried CC and were still uncirculated, in the original bags. The government neither paid them out at face nor melted them: it transferred them to the General Services Administration to sell to collectors by mail bid. Between 1972 and 1980 there were seven sales. The coins went out in hard holders labeled “Carson City Uncirculated Silver Dollar,” in black cases, with a message from the president. The 1882-CC, 1883-CC, and 1884-CC remain accessible in Mint State because a large share of the mintage was never issued. Of the 1889-CC, the 1892-CC, and the 1893-CC the inventory cites a single example each. Original GSA holders are collected on their own, and the grading services sometimes grade them unopened, with a band around the case.

The floor of any Morgan is the silver in it: 0.77344 troy ounces times the spot price. Heavily worn common dates — the high-mintage 1921, or a well-worn Philadelphia coin of the 1880s — trade near that metal. Once there is a collector grade, a variety, or a short mintage, the numismatic premium pulls away from the bullion. This page does not publish that premium.

The Sheldon scale has 70 points. In worn grades the eye moves from the outline and the flat cotton bolls on the cap, at Good-4, to Fine-12 detail and, higher, to sharp feathers with only high-point friction, in Extremely Fine and About Uncirculated. MS-60 to MS-62 shows no circulation wear, but bag marks and dull luster. From MS-63 to MS-65 clean fields, luster, and strike matter more. From MS-66 to MS-68 populations are short. A freshly polished die leaves mirror fields and frosted devices: prooflike (PL) when the reflection reads at about two to four inches, and deep mirror prooflike (DMPL) when the mirror reaches about six inches on both sides, with cameo contrast. A Certified Acceptance Corporation sticker marks, for that grade, surface and strike above the typical piece. The three coins in this case are raw: they carry no numerical grade and none of those designations.

For the centennial of the change from Morgan to Peace, the Mint issued five collector Morgan dollars in 2021: Philadelphia with no mark, Denver with D, San Francisco with S, and two Philadelphia strikes with O and CC privy marks for the closed mints. In 2022 the program paused for lack of silver planchets. From 2023 there is an annual issue, in uncirculated, proof, and reverse proof. The cited pages give product caps — 275,000 for the 2024 uncirculated strikes and 150,000 for the 2025 issues. This page has not recounted those caps. Those pieces are not the original run of 1878–1904.

The rare dollar is altered and counterfeited. The protocol the grading services describe starts with measurement: 26.73 g, 38.10 mm, and about 2.40 mm thick. A copper, a zinc, or a modern white alloy fails the balance and the caliper. Core resistivity is measured without touching the surface, and hydrostatic specific gravity checks whether the volume matches the 90/10 alloy. This case neither weighed nor measured its three examples.

Dates are reworked — an 8 or a 5 turned into a 3 to imitate an 1893-S — and mint marks are added or removed. On a genuine 1893-S the sources place the 1 centered over the fourth denticle of the lower rim, and a die scratch through the upright of the T in LIBERTY. An added mark leaves a halo, solder, or a break in the reeding. A composite of two coins shows a seam on the edge, an odd weight, and a dull ring. Modern copies, even on 0.900 silver, repeat soft denticles, granular fields, and the same depressions from the transfer die. The genuine 1893-S is catalogued as two reverses (VAM-1 and VAM-2) with a single obverse: what does not match those dies is not that date. That is why high-value pieces trade almost only in a PCGS or NGC holder. The three in this collection are not in one.

The original run, from 1878 to 1904, is the stretch in which Bland-Allison and then Sherman forced the coinage of silver the public did not ask to carry. The Panic of 1893 shortened the mintages. Pittman, already outside that stretch, melted about half of what had been struck. The vaults of the 1960s and the GSA sales decided which dates are still common uncirculated. This case does not price the market. It records the photographed 1884-S, 1883-CC, and 1885-CC.