1881 Morgan Dollars 1878-1921 MS65

History

Silver dollar coinage resumed under the Bland-Allison Act, enacted February 28, 1878, which required the Treasury to buy silver for coinage into standard dollars and restored the silver dollar's legal-tender character. President Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed the bill, and both chambers overrode him the same day, the House by 196 to 73 and the Senate by 46 to 19. The pressure behind the law came from western silver interests reacting to falling prices after the Civil War and to the flood of metal from new deposits such as Nevada's Comstock Lode, discovered in 1859, along with the Coinage Act of 1873 that had ended silver dollar production and put the country on the gold standard. The 1881-S falls in the middle of the Bland-Allison run at San Francisco.

Details

George T. Morgan designed both faces. Each piece contains 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper, weighs 26.73 grams, measures 38.10 mm across and carries a reeded edge. The San Francisco Mint struck 12,760,000 for circulation in 1881, a figure on the high side of average for the series.

Features

Morgan's obverse carries his Liberty head, with cotton and wheat worked into the headdress wreath, and the reverse shows the heraldic eagle. San Francisco dies of this period generally filled well, so hair, cotton and wheat, and eagle feather detail on 1881-S dollars tend to come sharper than on most other mintmarked dates of the era. Numerous VAM die varieties are recognized for the date, beginning with VAM 1, VAM 1A, VAM 2 and VAM 3, many of them further classified as prooflike or deep mirror prooflike. Examples distributed through the Treasury's GSA sales are tracked as separate categories, including GSA Hoard prooflike and deep mirror prooflike listings.

Notable facts

• PCGS has encapsulated 315,686 examples of the 1881-S, of which 303,894 graded Mint State.
• The date accounts for roughly 7.7 percent of the 4,092,272 Morgan dollars PCGS has graded, making it the most frequently submitted issue in the series, ahead of even the higher-mintage 1921.
• An MS69 example sold for $51,600 through Heritage Auctions on April 6, 2025.
• PCGS notes that survivorship rather than mintage governs the date's availability, and that several Morgan issues with larger mintages are scarcer today.
• Morgan was serving as an assistant engraver at the Mint when the series began and later became chief engraver; he lived from 1845 to 1925.