1880 Morgan Dollars 1878-1921 MS62

History

Congress ended the Liberty Seated dollar in 1873, and silver-mining interests spent the next several years pressing for a replacement. The Comstock Lode in Nevada was producing ore worth about $36 million annually, output that the Carson City Mint had been built to coin, and the campaign led by Representative Richard "Silver Dick" Bland of Missouri succeeded when the Bland-Allison Act passed on February 28, 1878, requiring monthly Treasury silver purchases for coinage into dollars. Mint Director Henry P. Linderman had anticipated the legislation, ordering Chief Engraver William Barber and his assistant George T. Morgan in November 1877 to prepare pattern dollars so the better design could be adopted; Morgan's work won that internal contest. The 1880-CC is the third year of Carson City Morgan production, part of a run that lasted from 1878 to 1885 and resumed from 1889 until the branch mint closed in 1893.

Details

George T. Morgan designed both obverse and reverse. The coin is struck in 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper, weighs 26.73 grams, measures 38.10 millimeters in diameter and has a reeded edge, with an actual silver weight of .7734 troy ounce. Carson City struck 591,000 pieces in 1880, a figure that still outpaced the 296,000 the same mint produced the following year.

Features

Liberty faces left on the obverse wearing a Phrygian cap, with LIBERTY on her hair band, E PLURIBUS UNUM above and the date below. The reverse shows a bald eagle holding an olive branch and a bundle of arrows, surrounded by UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN GOD WE TRUST and ONE DOLLAR, with the CC mint mark above and between the D and O of DOLLAR. The date is best known for its reverse and date-punch varieties: some pieces were struck from the Reverse of 1878, identified by a flat breast and a top arrow feather that runs straight and parallel to the others, while the Reverse of 1879 gives the eagle a rounder, more convex breast and a prominently slanted top feather. Die reuse also produced the 1880/79-CC and 1880 8/7-CC overdates, both on the Reverse of 1878 and showing clear remnants of the underlying 7, along with an 8/Low 7 and a separately catalogued 8/7 Dash; strike quality on the issue is generally good, with well-defined feathers and frosty surfaces.

Notable facts

• The Reverse of 1878 pairing is several times scarcer than the Reverse of 1879 for this date, though examples appear in the market with some regularity.
• PCGS maintains a separate listing for 1880-CC dollars sold in General Services Administration packaging, recognizing the date as one of the Carson City issues distributed from Treasury holdings.
• The top certified grade recorded for the regular-strike 1880-CC is MS68, an unusually high ceiling for an 1880s Carson City dollar.
• Eight tail feathers on the eagle occur only on 1878-dated Morgan dollars, Linderman having ordered the change to seven for all later years.
• Roughly 657 million Morgan dollars were struck between 1878 and 1921 across 96 date and mint combinations.
• The Bland-Allison Act was superseded in 1890 by the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which called for 4,500,000 troy ounces of silver monthly but mandated dollar coinage for only one year before its own repeal in 1893.