I was talking with a guy the other day and we were making rough guesses at what the actual population of a given Morgan date and MM, (standard business strikes), would still be in existence today. Basically rough guesses at the percentages left anywhere in existence. What's left that hasn't been buried, melted or lost forever. I remembered reading something in the Red Book about some act that made them melt down a bunch of Morgans at some point in time. So I read it and it says the Pittman Act of 1918 caused 270,232,722 Morgans to be melted down. I added up all the mintage figures and came up with a little over 570 million total minted, up to 1904. Which is key because the 1921s wouldn't have been in existence when the melt down went into effect. So you take into account the 270+ million melted down in 1918 and we can note that, at maximum only about 300 million pre-1921 Morgans could possibly exist today. They melted 47% of them! BTW, if anyone's curious, that would be 15,916,707 pounds of Morgans! Or, 7,958 tons. About 318 modern day truck loads. That's 208,889,894 troy ounces of pure silver. About 2.3 billion dollars worth of silver by todays price. All melted for bullion. (We'll never know the cost of manufacturing, transporting and melting it all again.) Anyway....... I was wondering if anybody had any info on what were the bulk of the coins that hit the melting pots and where was all this done? Were they melting at all the mints? Was it even done at the mints? It's probably safe to assume that some years took a huge hit and bore the brunt of the melting while other years may have (for the most part) escaped unscathed. Does anybody even have a remote idea? Were worn coins targeted or did it even matter? I ask strictly out of curiosity because it sure makes things interesting. An 1893-O for example had a mintage of 300,000. From there, we don't really know if 5% or 62% of those could have been melted. Just from this act. Not even taking into account how many of them have been lost or destroyed around the world.
I think one way people try to the estimate the number of remaining Morgan Dollar specimens for a given Date/MM is through the population reports for submissions for that given date/mm to PCGS and NGC. However, I think even this is flawed, because it does not account for crackouts that have been re-submitted. Nor can this method account for all the coins that have not yet been submitted. Somehow, I'm sure they use a formula that extrapolates the numbers based on coins that have been submitted, but it's certainly an inexact estimation method.
In 1918, most of the world was still on the gold standard, at least nominally. An exception was the British Raj, which was on the silver standard. When America joined World War I, it took a number of actions to help its new allies. One of these was the Pittman Act, which called for the Treasury to melt silver dollars and deliver the bullion to the British in India, where it was coined into silver rupees. The Pittman Act called for the melted silver dollars to be replaced after the war, hence the large mintages of these coins in 1921, 22 and 23. As circulating coins, silver dollars were never popular outside of the American west; those issued between 1878 and 1904 were the unloved result of a political deal between hard and soft money advocates, with the main beneficiaries being Western mining interests. The government dealt with the lack of demand by virtually circulating the coins via the issue of silver certificates backed specifically by silver dollars, while the actual coins piled up in the sub-basement vaults of the Treasury building in DC. Various factors determined which coins wound up there, and which ones got melted in 1918. Coins issued in San Francisco had a more enthusiastic native clientele than those issued in Philadelphia, while the area around Carson City had a relatively small population, so most of the CC issues got shipped straight to the Treasury. When the order to melt silver dollars came through, the Treasury workers grabbed the bags that were easiest to access, and some of the older issues tended to be way in the back, so to speak. This probably accounts for the relative scarcity of 1890's Morgans compared to some earlier issues with similar mintages.
