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P
olitical pressure, not public demand, brought the Morgan dollar into being. There was no real need for a new silver dollar in the late 1870s; the last previous “cartwheel,” the Liberty Seated dollar, had been legislated out of existence in 1873, and hardly anyone missed it.
Silver-mining interests did miss the dollar, though, and lobbied Congress forcefully for its return. The Comstock Lode in Nevada was yielding huge quantities of silver, with ore worth $36 million being extracted annually. After several futile attempts, the silver forces in Congress—led by Representative Richard (“Silver Dick”) Bland of Missouri—finally succeeded in winning authorization for a new silver dollar when Congress passed the Bland-Allison Act on February 28, 1878. This Act required the Treasury to purchase at market levels between two million and four million troy ounces of silver bullion every month to be coined into dollars. This amounted to a massive subsidy, coming at a time when the dollar’s face value exceeded its intrinsic worth by nearly 10%.
In November 1877, nearly four months before passage of the Bland-Allison Act, the Treasury saw the handwriting on the wall and began making preparations for a new dollar coin. Mint Director Henry P. Linderman ordered Chief Engraver William Barber and one of his assistants, George T. Morgan, to prepare pattern dollars, with the best design to be used on the new coin. Actually, Linderman fixed this “contest” in Morgan's favor; he had been dissatisfied with the work of the two Barbers—William and his son, Charles—and in 1876 had hired Morgan, a talented British engraver, with plans to entrust him with new coin designs. At that time, resumption of silver dollar coinage was not yet planned, and Morgan began work on designs intended for the half dollar. Following Linderman’s orders that a head of Liberty should replace the full-figure depiction then in use, Morgan recruited Philadelphia school teacher Anna Willess Williams to pose for the new design.
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