Hello everyone, Today I want to share 20 Morgan Dollars my stepson Arjenis purchased. The were sold as Gem. But when he received them he checked all of them out and found bag marks and scratches. He wrote to the seller and he agreed to refund him $2.50 per coin. He plans to sell them in the future. Most of his silver is set aside for investment.
IDK who the seller is, but I find with Morgans at coin shows, B and M coin shops, Morgans are always SUPER clean and bright and white. I am not saying they have been cleaned. But I suspect that dealers "dip" them and then sell them as BU or whatever, when perhaps they are AU.
To clarify, I find it odd that all of these 100+ year coins are always blast white. Which is why I suspect coin doctoring on this series to be very heavy. It was always a popular series and I think people who make a living from coins were maximizing their profits by doing this. Remember when the Morgan toners were selling for absurd money? I assume many of them were artificially toned to get those spectacular rainbow colors.
I don't doubt that many are dipped, but it is quite possible for 100-year-old silver coins to be naturally blast white. When the big rush came in 1963 and the treasury was emptying its vaults of silver dollars, I was working in a bank. We got in a bag with many blast white uncirculated from 1880 and 1881 (there were none in the bag younger than 1881, coins from 1878-79 and some from 1880 were mostly VF-AU). I'm pretty sure the treasury didn't bother to dip them. Properly stored, these would still be white today. I was only 13, but I bought as many as I could pay for. I sold them in the 1970s. Wish I hadn't, but I thought I needed the money.
The U.S. Mint System struck millions of these coins. They existed only because of the politics. They were the product of a political compromise. The government agreed to buy so silver each month and strike it into silver dollars. That supported the price of silver to a degree, but there was so much of it available at the time, that the prices remianed low. The alternative would have been the "free coinage" of silver which would have had the government converting silver depostied at the mints turned into silver dollars for free. That would have resulted in a significant increase in the money supply, massive inflation and the devaluation of the U.S. dollar. A realitively small number of people, mostly in the western states, wanted them. Therefore they piled up in government vaults, sealed in cloth bags away from air and light. A few of the coins toned, especially those that were in contact with the bags, but most of them didn't. Instead they remained as bright as they day they were minted. Most of the Mint State Morgan Dollars have not been dipped. They never had a chance to get a lot of toning.
