The 1881-S Morgan Dollar is the Most Certified Coin in the Series

By Charles Morgan for CoinWeek. The Morgan Dollar was struck from 1878 to 1904, and then again in 1921. Despite no widespread demand for a circulating silver dollar coin.

The Morgan Dollar was struck from 1878 to 1904, and then again in 1921. Despite no widespread demand for a circulating silver dollar coin, the United States Congress pressed for reintroducing the denomination as a sop to mining interests in the western part of the country. Overturning President Rutherford B. Hayes’s veto, in which he called the Act “unwise and inopportune,” the passing of the Bland-Allison Act of February 28, 1878 led to one of the great monetary boondoggles in American history.

When the silver dollar was reintroduced, $1 represented just under a day’s wages for unskilled laborers. Its weight and size were largely based on the coin’s inherent precious metal value, but during its service life as a circulating coin, the Morgan Dollar never contained a dollar’s worth of silver. Outside of America’s less-populated Western states, smaller-denomination coins and paper dollars proved more practical any way – though the silver dollar was often used to back paper currency issued by banks. Therefore, demand for the coin never met the levels at which Congress mandated it to be struck, and so, for over 80 years, millions of uncirculated examples sat in government storage in 1,000-coin canvas bags.

“Common Rare Coins”

Morgan Dollars weren’t just held in Treasury Department subvaults. Millions of examples were held by private banks well into the mid-20th century, even though hundreds of millions of coins were melted in 1918 and converted into bullion under the auspices of the Pittman Act. While it may be hard to believe that 80-year-old coins containing .7734 ounces of silver would be available at banks at their $1 face value, this was the case until the early 1960s as demand for silver pushed prices up. At the same time, a major development in the numismatic market was taking place. When Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1965 and removed silver coins from circulation, a groundswell of interest for coins started to take root.

There’s nothing quite like taking something away from people to evoke nostalgia, and the sales pitch that coin dealers and the United States General Services Administration (GSA) made regarding silver dollars was persuasive. The GSA called its stockpile of a few million Carson City Morgan Dollars “the coins Jesse James didn’t get” and produced circulars styled after 19th-century handbills. Cartwheel mania provided dealers a profitable opportunity to pull scarce dates out of unopened $1,000 mint-sewn bags and sell them at a great profit.

Uncirculated Morgan Dollars were plentiful in these heady days, and collectors sought them by date, condition, and variety. Many preferred blast white coins, so slightly tarnished coins were dipped in quantity. Others sought coins with colorful bag toning. Many of these coins survived au natural, but others were treated with chemicals to speed up the toning process. One had to know what they were doing to avoid being taken advantage of.

It was the Wild West of the coin-collecting market as it transitioned from a hobby to an investment-oriented business. When third-party grading businesses emerged in the mid-1980s, they introduced a clever marketing tactic by publishing a population report. These population reports have always been imperfect and over-relied upon, but the data sets in the first 20 years or so were woefully inadequate to communicate anything of real value in regards to the extant population of coins in different grades. Nevertheless, narratives about certain series of consequence to the market began to emerge. One notable series impacted by the pop reports was the classic commemorative coin series, which had been marketed as highly collectible with many low-mintage coins. The pop reports revealed that most of them survived and weren’t all that rare.

No such revelation faced the Morgan Dollar.

By the mid-1960s, it was obvious that most circulation-strike issues survived in volume. This helped the series draw a steady and growing collector base. One could reasonably expect to assemble a near-complete collection of Morgan Dollars, minus a few of the series’s stoppers. Because of this, even common issues like the 1879-S, the 1886, and the 1921 were submitted for grading in quantity and sold through various channels. Some experts, such as nationally-known coin dealer Jeff Garrett, referred to these as “common rare coins.” They are common in an absolute sense but rare because you will never find them in circulation. The most common of these “common rare coins” has to be the 1881-S Morgan Dollar.

The 1881-S Morgan Dollar is the Most Certified Coin in the Series

Third-party graders NGC and PCGS have combined to certify over