She May Get Wooly, Young Girls They Do Get Wooly

Cause of all the stress... yes.

Okay. I have been quite busy getting the coin auction up, so my intention of writing about another cool coin has been postponed until now.

I think it’s worth the wait, though.

1878 8 Feather Morgan Silver Dollar

Here, is the Morgan Silver Dollar (MSD). Designed by George T. Morgan, it was first struck at the Philadelphia Mint in March, 1878. In fact, we know that the first MSD was struck at 3:17 p.m., on the 11th of March, 1878. The first coin was given to President Rutherford B. Hayes, the next two coins were given to Secretary of the Treasury, John Sherman, and Mint Director, Henry Linderman.

George T. Morgan, wanted to use a real American woman as the model for the Goddess of Liberty, rather than creating a generic woman in the Greek style; his model was a lady named Anna Willess Williams. The MSD was minted every year from 1878 to 1904, when production of all silver dollars was halted (more on the reason why later), there was a short minting of Morgans in the last year of production in 1921. The total volume of MSD’s was something in the neighborhood of 650 million coins (perhaps a bit more).

The MSD is certainly one of the most beautiful coins the U.S. Mint ever produced. The coin’s beauty is, to me, the reason why other designs weren’t commissioned to replace it. Would you be surprised to know that e MSD was born out of, and sustained by, the rankest, bare-knuckle politics, in Washington D.C.? I thought not.

Before we get into the politics, let’s look at the reason why THIS specific coin is special.

While this coin looks much like any other MSD, a closer inspection of the eagle’s tail will reveal that it has a total of 8 tail feathers. This is significant because, virtually all of the rest of the minting of the MSD (650 Million) used a die that had only 7 tail feathers. Why was the change made? I wish that I could tell you. No one is absolutely sure why the change was made, but at some point after the Philadelphia Mint began striking coins with this, the original die.

The 8 feather coin was minted for only 14 days, in March, 1878. There was a total of nearly 150,000 8 feather coins made. When the 8 feather die was replaced with the 7 father die, some portion of the original minting was “re-struck” with the 7 feather die. This caused a very unique situation where the tips of the 8 feathers can be seen poking out from underneath the 7 feathers. Those re-struck coins are known as “7 Over 8” coins, and don’t you know that collectors love those fuck-ups!

Here is what the 8 feathers look like, close up.

When I look at this picture, and I see the 8 tail feathers, I expect to hear The Count, from Sesame Street, saying something like, “ I see 8 feathers, AH, AH, AH!”

As for the politics in the 19th Century, in the United States, it was fraught with currency manipulations. I won’t go into detail as to the why’s and how’s in this post, but I have another MSD that I want to show you, and I will do so in that post.

There were attempts to use silver production in the U.S. to cause inflation of prices so that influential constituencies (silver miners among them) could use the inflation to pay off crushing debts accumulated in the wake of the Civil War. For many years, the U. S. Treasury was required to purchase 4.5 Million ounces of silver PER MONTH and to turn that silver into coinage.

There were several different Congressional acts that were passed between 1873 and 1893 that required the U.S. Treasury to purchase huge amounts of silver, and for the U.S. Mint to turn that silver into coins. So much silver was purchased that the Mint could not produce enough coins to take care of all of the silver on hand. After those various coinage acts were repealed, the Mint coined MSD’s until they ran out of their surplus, in 1904.

There is so much more to mention, but I am done for now. Mostly, I wanted you to see the interesting feature of this coin. It was minted in the original run of MSD’s in Philadelphia, in March, 1878. A decision was made to change the design, but this coin survived, intact. There aren’t many of them, and its story should be told.