I run a site built on one number per coin: the mintage. It is the only number in this hobby that never changes. But there is a reason the mintage is a birth certificate and not a census, and the reason has a name, a date, and a total: the Pittman Act, 1918, 270,232,722 silver dollars melted.

The short version. During the First World War, Germany ran a propaganda campaign in India claiming that British banknotes could not be redeemed for silver. It worked well enough to start a run on Britain's silver reserves. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, a silver state man to his boots, moved a bill that let the United States melt up to 350 million of the silver dollars sitting in its vaults and sell the metal to Britain at a dollar per troy ounce. It passed in April 1918, and the melting started immediately. In the end 270,232,722 dollars went into the furnace, and 259,121,554 ounces of them crossed the ocean.

Here is the part that matters to every collector who ever looks up a mintage: nobody recorded the dates. The Treasury melted by the bag, not by the year. A bag of 1878s and a bag of 1893s weighed the same and paid the same. So we know exactly how many silver dollars were born, and we will never know exactly how many of each date died. Roughly half the Morgan dollars ever struck ceased to exist, dateless, in a single act of Congress.

That is why survival, not mintage, is the real story of the silver dollar series, and why the two numbers can point in opposite directions. So let me pick a team. Eleven coins, in formation, that show what the Great Melt and its aftershocks did to the record. This is the Melt XI.

In goal

1895 Morgan Dollar. The last line of defense between the ledger and reality. The Mint's books record 12,000 circulation strikes for Philadelphia in 1895. Not one has ever been found. The prevailing theory is that they sat in their bags for twenty-three years and went into the Pittman furnace without ever touching a hand. If that is true, the melt did not just thin a mintage here, it deleted one. The 880 proofs struck for collectors are the entire known issue, and the reason the 1895 is called the King of the Morgans. A coin that exists as ink and nothing else is the perfect goalkeeper: you cannot get anything past it, because there is nothing there.

The back four

These are the defenders: coins the furnace should have taken and did not, because they were locked in Treasury vaults that the melt happened to miss. Their mintages say scarce. Their survival says otherwise.

1884-CC Morgan. Mintage of 1,136,000, and when the government finally opened the vaults, the majority of that mintage was still sitting there in mint bags. The GSA sales of the 1970s put hundreds of thousands of them into collectors' hands, uncirculated, a century old, never touched. The most common Carson City dollar in existence despite a mintage that looks scarce on paper.

1885-CC Morgan. The lowest mintage Carson City Morgan at 228,000, and the last coin the mint struck before closing in November 1885. It should be a monster rarity. Instead, well over half the mintage survived in the vaults and came out through the GSA sales. The result is a coin that is genuinely rare worn and readily available uncirculated, which is the melt era's logic running in reverse.

1903-O Morgan. For half a century this was one of the most famous rarities in American numismatics. Then, in 1962, the Treasury started paying out silver dollars from long-sealed vaults and bag after bag of uncirculated 1903-O dollars poured out. A five hundred dollar coin became a common one in a matter of weeks. Rarity built on locked doors is rarity on loan.

1898-O Morgan. The 1903-O's partner in the story. One of the missing New Orleans dates that nobody could find uncirculated, until the same 1962 releases made it one of the easiest. Its 4,440,000 mintage was honest all along; the coins were just behind a steel door.

The midfield three

The engine room: the coins that show the machinery of the melt itself, because the Pittman Act did not just destroy dollars, it required the Mint to strike a replacement for every single one melted.

1921 Morgan. The replacement program made flesh. The Mint had destroyed the old Morgan dies in 1910, so George Morgan, by then in his seventies, cut an entirely new master die, and the presses ran like they never had before: 44,690,000 from Philadelphia alone, more than 86 million across three mints. The biggest Morgan mintage in history exists because 270 million of its older siblings had been destroyed.

1922 Peace Dollar. The flood at full height. 51,737,000 struck at Philadelphia, the largest silver dollar mintage of any date and mint, ever. Nearly half of all the Peace dollars struck from 1922 to 1935 carry this one date. When people say Peace dollars are common, they mostly mean the 1922.

1928 Peace Dollar. The whistle at full time. The replacement quota was a fixed number, and in 1928 the Mint hit it. Philadelphia's output stopped at 360,649 coins and the presses went quiet, leaving the series key date behind as a souvenir of the arithmetic. The 1928 is scarce for the most honest reason a coin can be: the law said stop, so they stopped.

The front three

The finishers: the coins whose fame the melt era created, because no vault ever protected them.

1889-CC Morgan. 350,000 struck, and when the GSA catalogued its 2.9 million vault Carson City dollars, it found exactly one of them. One coin. The Treasury had paid the rest out into circulation, much of it during the 1930s, so the date has to be hunted the hard way, one worn coin at a time. The gap between 350,000 born and a single one saved is the whole melt era in a sentence.

1893-S Morgan. The lowest circulation mintage of the series at 100,000, struck as the silver program collapsed, released into Western commerce, and never hoarded by anyone. Whatever the furnace and the cash drawer left behind is mostly well worn, which is why a mint state example is one of the legendary rarities in American coins. An MS-67 sold for $2,086,875 in 2021. No vault ever did the 1893-S any favors.

1964-D Peace Dollar. Proof that the government never lost the habit. In 1965 the Denver Mint struck 316,076 silver dollars dated 1964, Congress changed its mind, and every coin was ordered back into the melting pot before a single one was issued. The official position is that none survived and that any that did remain government property. The Great Melt of 1918 destroyed the past without records. This one destroyed the future with them.

The manager's notes

Every population report, every survival estimate, every "how many are left" figure you will ever read about these series is an educated guess, because the one event that would settle the question kept no records. The mintage is the only hard number in the story. That is not a limitation of this site. It is the reason it exists.

So when a page here says 350,000 or 100,000 or 12,000, read it the way the melt era taught us to: that is how many were born. How many are left is a question the furnace answered in 1918, and it is not telling.