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Philadelphia Important to Morgan Dollar Story

By Paul M. Green
NUMISMATIC NEWS

Morgan dollars tend to have reputations. News last week that the Goldbergs are selling a small hoard of 1894-P silver dollars couldn't be more timely from my point of view as we work our way through the Morgan series by mint.
The most historic Morgans in the minds of many are Carson City dollars because of their association with the Carson City Mint, which was located less than 20 miles from Virginia City and the heart of the mining activity in the Comstock Lode. The San Francisco Morgans, which also used Comstock Lode silver in many cases, are better known as the group where some truly extraordinary coins are found as for whatever reason San Francisco produced not only extremely nice Morgan dollars but sometimes a lot of them. In the case of New Orleans it can be the other extreme as care seemed to be lacking. It is also the New Orleans dates where some of the biggest surprises in terms of dollars appearing in $1,000 bags from the Treasury vaults were found.
The other major facility that produced silver dollars was the Philadelphia Mint and as so often happens in the case of coins from the later part of the 1800s and much of the 1900s, the coins from Philadelphia have a way of getting overlooked.
It is perhaps just a case where normally speaking Philadelphia as the main facility would have higher mintages of decent quality coins. There were not likely to be extremes and there were usually no significantly low mintages. In Morgan dollars, however, the Morgans that emerged from Philadelphia are not as easily placed in a simple category. The Philadelphia Morgans were a diverse and interesting group which deserve more attention than they usually receive.
From the start the Philadelphia Morgan dollars showed their diversity In 1878 there would be four different reverses on the first Philadelphia Morgan dollars and that fact alone tells a story. One of the four reverse(s), the one with eight tail feathers is especially historic as it is without question the first Morgan dollar.
In fact, the first Morgan dollar with a reverse featuring eight tailfeathers did not last long. It was an interesting situation as the Morgan dollar was not greeted with hysterical trumpeting of joy. In fact, with Trade dollars still in circulation that were not being honored as dollars because their legal tender status had been revoked in 1876, many people were not happy to see any kind of silver dollar.
The initial Morgan dollar took a lot of criticism based on the problems with the Trade dollar, but it had problems with the art critics as well. The editor of American Journal of Numismatics probably took the prize claiming, "The long line of monstrosities issued from the United States Mint certainly receives it crown in the new dollar.The ugliness of the piece adds another wrong to the original one of dishonesty."
The art critics were not the only ones examining the new dollars. Mint Director Henry Linderman was also not happy. He had apparently been spending his time in a useful manner examining the tailfeathers and coming to the conclusion that historically all the eagles depicted on U.S. coins had one large tail feather, suggesting an odd number of them. The new Morgans did not, so he held a meeting that resulted in a couple minor changes but most important was the order to reduce the number of feathers.
The Morgan dollar had only been in production a couple week and dies were available with eight tailfeathers, so the response was to impress the eight tailfeather dies with new ones of seven feathers. This left the tips of the eight feathers still visible and created what is called the doubled or seven over eight tailfeathers variety.
That solution was not the end of it. When the new dies were produced, some had the top arrow feather parallel to the shaft, which is known as the reverse of 1878, while others would have the top arrow feather slanting, called the reverse of 1879.
The situation produced four different 1879 Philadelphia reverses and many questions as to how many of each were made. In his book The Official Red Book of Morgan Silver Dollars, Q. David Bowers suggests a mintage of perhaps 750,000 of the original eight tailfeathers, perhaps 500,000 of the doubled tailfeathers, an estimated 7,850,000 of the reverse of 1878 and another 1,500,000 of the reverse of 1879.

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