Why Does A Morgan Dollar Have More Silver Than 2 Barber Half Dollars (Etc)?

When the weight of the silver coinage was reduced in 1873 (4?), they left the dollar alone, thus creating the observed imbalance. Part of the trade-offs required to pass Congress in the era of bi-mentalism.

Gold finds in California 1849, and the Comstock Lode silver find in 1859 caused problems in the U.S. fixed gold/silver exchange ratio that was the law.

One way in which large denomination gold and silver served as money is that silver dollars and gold double eagles remained largely in US Treasury vaults.

For purposes large domestic commerce, the Treasury kept the metals and issued gold and silver treasury certificates that were widely used for large payments.

As a result of this arrangement, there are today, millions of uncirculated silver dollars and double eagles that sat mostly in vaults.

One exception was in international trade where hard metal was often required for payment as foreign traders did not have access to the US Treasury or domestic US banks.

To answer the original question, the fixed gold/silver was 15/1 in 1792, 16/1 in 1934 before the '49 gold rush. This caused problems as the relative value of gold and silver in dollars was not constant, especially in light of large supply and demand shocks, but the metal content of coinage could not be adjusted on the fly to reflect market conditions.

If a speculator was able to trade 2 half dollars (dated 1853-1873) for 1 Seated dollar he would instantly gain about 4% profit in silver content. I don't know how widespread this practice might have been but it likely contributed to the low survival rate for the dollar coins.

That difference in silver content persisted with the Morgan and Peace dollars and that did not reduce the survival rate of those coins significantly although a large number of them were melted. It did take silver dollars out of circulation.

Seated dollars are scarce mostly because very few were minted. Seated dollars mintages only exceeded 1 million in 2 years and then just barely.

About 6.5 million Seated dollars were minted. Contrast that with about 657 million Morgan dollars produced by the US Mint.

Informative indeed! Great to see all of these perspectives, I'm learning a lot.

But by the time the Morgan dollar came out, silver had dropped well past the point where the metal was worth more than the face value. (A silver dollar has $1 worth of silver in it when silver is $1.29 an oz. In 1878 it was $1.10 an oz.) By the time of the Sherman Silver purchase act in 1890 silver was down to $1.06 and dropping. Sure it still had more silver than two half dollars but who cared? Two half dollars had 76 cents worth of silver in them and the silver dollar had 82 cents, but they could be SPENT for $1. By the time the Peace dollar came out silver was down to $0.66 an oz. A silver dollar had 51 cents worth of silver in it and two half dollars had 49 cents worth. (Silver finally reached bottom in 1932 at $0.25 an ounce.)

So it didn't make sense to swap two halves for Morgans or Peace dollars and hoard them or melt them down.

Was it the culture that drove people to hoard the silver dollars? I'd have to do some digging, but I recall reading that the Mint boasted in 1921/22 that they were going to make so many Peace dollars that they would circulate over the whole nation and nobody would ever hoard them or charge more than face for one.

Very interesting topic.