1880 Morgan Dollars 1878-1921 MS63

History

Silver politics, not commercial need, put the Morgan dollar into production. The Coinage Act of 1873, denounced by silver advocates as the "Crime of 1873," ended bimetallism and stopped silver dollar coinage, and Congress reversed course with the Bland-Allison Act of 1878, which required the Treasury to buy fixed quantities of silver and strike it into dollars. Mint Director Henry P. Linderman chose a design by George T. Morgan, the English-born assistant engraver who modeled his Liberty head on Philadelphia schoolteacher Anna Willess Williams. Carson City, sitting beside the Comstock Lode silver it coined, was a small operation that conserved its dies, and the 1880-CC dollars are correspondingly full of date varieties, including working dies originally dated 1879 that were repunched to 1880 and left traces of the 7 beneath the second 8.

Details

George T. Morgan designed both sides. The coin was struck in 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper, weighing 26.73 grams with an actual silver weight of 0.7734 troy ounce, at a diameter of 38.10 mm with a reeded edge. The CC mintmark sits on the reverse above the DO of DOLLAR. Carson City delivered 591,000 silver dollars dated 1880, a figure that covers every die variety of the date; the Mint kept no separate accounting for the 8/High 7, so any variety-specific quantity is an estimate rather than a record.

Features

The obverse carries Liberty facing left in a Phrygian cap and a wreath of cotton and wheat, seven stars to the left of the portrait and six to the right, E PLURIBUS UNUM above and the date below. On the reverse an eagle with outstretched wings holds arrows and an olive branch within a wreath, surrounded by UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and ONE DOLLAR, with IN GOD WE TRUST above the eagle. Attribution of the High 7 rests on the position of the remnant digit: the horizontal bar of the underlying 7 appears inside the top half of the upper loop of the second 8, with only a small notch showing beneath that loop's lower half, while on the Low 7 the base of the 7 sits much farther from the 8. The variety is catalogued as VAM-5 and listed among the Top 100 Morgan varieties, and it is normally paired with the Reverse of 1879, identified by its slanted top arrow feather and more rounded eagle's breast; PCGS treats the overdate style and the reverse hub as independent attributions, so the two should not be conflated.

Notable facts

• PCGS assigns number 7102 to the business strike 8/High 7 and a separate number, 7103, to prooflike examples.
• PCGS lists 33 related coins and varieties under the 1880-CC heading, including the 8/7 Dash, the Dash Under 8 (VAM-3) and its clashed VAM-3A.
• The companion 8/Low 7 is VAM-6, also a Top 100 variety, and PCGS describes it as one of the more common varieties of the 1880-CC, making the High 7 the scarcer of the pair.
• Reports place the number of 1880-CC dollars sold through the General Services Administration's Carson City dollar offerings at 131,500 to 131,529 pieces, distributed in both hard packs and soft packs, which is why the date is not especially rare in a GSA holder compared with the 1879-CC or 1890-CC.
• How many of the GSA coins are 8/High 7 was never tabulated, since the hoard was not broken out by variety.
• Prooflike and Deep Mirror Prooflike examples of the 1880-CC are rare in any packaging, though the 8/High 7 is obtainable in Gem, with certified examples known as high as MS67+.