Two facts shape every decision in this series, and neither has an equivalent in a twentieth-century series. There is no hoard — no bag, no vault find, nothing waiting to be released — so the supply you can see is the supply. And there is no cheap end: this series has no common dates in absolute terms, only obtainable ones.
What makes this market different
A market with no reservoir
The Morgan dollar market was re-founded twice by government releases: the Treasury payouts of 1962–64 and the GSA sales of the 1970s. Prices collapsed, rarities became common coins, and the hobby learned that “rarity” could mean “not yet released”.
Nothing like that can happen here, and nothing like it ever has. The early dollars were not withdrawn or melted by the government — no recall, no redemption, no official melt. They were consumed by commerce, one profitable shipment to the West Indies at a time, over about thirty years. Attrition is high but uniform: no single event, no surviving bag. When a 1794 dollar appears, it appears alone.
The practical consequence: there is no downside scenario in which a hoard reprices your set, and no upside scenario in which one lets you buy in cheaply. Supply moves only when a collection is broken up — which is why the pedigree names in this series recur across two centuries.
The arithmetic behind “no cheap end”
- Delivered, 1794–1805
- 1,439,517
- Implied survival, 1798–1803
- 2–4%
- The series' most available date
- 1799 · R-3.4 · est. 8,000 known
Survival rates are OunceDesk arithmetic over the Mint's delivery figures and PCGS's survival estimates (DERIVED). Eight thousand survivors is what this series calls common; a Morgan date with 8,000 survivors would be its king.
The three-coin type set
MODERATE3 coinsThe design run in its simplest honest form: a Flowing Hair dollar, a Draped Bust with the small eagle, and a Draped Bust with the heraldic eagle. It is the set most collectors of eighteenth-century American silver actually build, and every coin in it is obtainable — the 1795 Flowing Hair 3 Leaves at R-3.8, the 1795 Draped Bust Centered at R-4.4, and any of the 1798–1803 heraldic eagles.
WATCH FOR The small-eagle coin is the bottleneck. The 1795 and 1796–97 small eagles are the scarcer half of the type, and the last-year 1798 small eagles are genuinely hard.
1795 Flowing Hair →1795 Draped Bust →1799 →
The date-and-type set
HIGH12 coinsEvery date from 1794 to 1803, with 1795 and 1798 counted twice because each carries two types. Twelve coins, and the checklist on this site is built for exactly this set. It is the completable version of the series — and its wall is the 1794.
WATCH FOR Decide about the 1794 before you start, not after ten coins. There are an estimated 150 across all grades, and the last three public sales were $10,016,875, $6,600,000 and $4,500,000. A circulated example is a serious commitment and there is no cheaper substitute anywhere in the date.
1794 →1796 →1797 →1798 Small Eagle →
The die-marriage specialist
SPECIALISTopen-endedThe real depth of this series. Bowers–Borckardt's BB sequence runs unbroken from BB-1 (the single 1794 marriage) through the 1804 dies; Bolender's B-numbers restart each date. A 1798 alone offered thirty obverses and seventeen reverses. This is a subject with its own literature, its own vocabulary and no end.
WATCH FOR Attribution is the skill and the cost. Buy the attribution on the holder for premium money, match every published marker in the right die state, and never accept a bare B-number without its date.
1798 Heraldic Eagle →1799 →1800 →
The restrike proofs
SPECIALIST3 issuesRoutinely omitted from series write-ups, which is why they belong on a list. PCGS recognises proof issues of 1801 (6 known), 1802 (10) and 1803 (10) — Mint products of the restrike era, made from the same institutional impulse and by the same hands as the Class III 1804 dollars, and sold out of the same building. The 1803 proof brought $1,110,000 in May 2025.
WATCH FOR These are seven-figure coins with fewer than thirty pieces between them. This is a pathway to understand, not a pathway to plan.
1801 →1802 →1803 →
The one great coin
TASTE1 coinPerfectly respectable, and in this series arguably the most rational approach. Buy one early dollar as well as you can afford it and stop. The 1795 Flowing Hair and the 1799 are the two dates that give the most coin for the money — R-3.8 and R-3.4 respectively, the closest thing this series has to availability.
WATCH FOR At every level, condition is the price. Because there was no hoard, mint-state examples of any date in this series are genuinely scarce rather than merely expensive.
1795 Flowing Hair →1799 →
The honest section
The set you cannot complete
Sixteen 1804 dollars exist across three classes, as of 2026. Three of the eight Class I coins are institutionally held — the Smithsonian, the ANA Money Museum and the Durham Museum in Omaha — and will never trade again. The unique Class II has no market and never will. Of the seven Class III coins, two are in public institutions and one is at the American Numismatic Society.
That leaves roughly nine coins in private hands, trading at intervals of years, at prices between $1.4 million and $7.7 million. This site carries the 1804 dollars in its roster because the series' identity requires them, and classifies them CROWN — a coin whose existence rather than whose scarcity is the subject.
A date-and-type set of early dollars is twelve coins. That is the set to plan. The 1804 is the chapter to read. The full census →
And the other set nobody completes
There is no 1804-dated coin to chase in the ordinary sense — but there is also no 1805 dollar. The Mint recorded 321 dollars delivered in 1805 and no dollar dated 1805 has ever been reported. Crosby put it on the same list as the 1802 eagles and the 1804 half dollars: a set of “coins” that exist only in the delivery column.
If a dealer offers you an 1805 dollar, you are being offered something that has never been recorded to exist. That is not a rarity opportunity.
Practical
Buying safely in a series with no cheap end
- Certification is not optional here. There is no price point in this series low enough to make a raw purchase a small mistake. Buy certified and verify the certification number against the grading service's own database.
- The characteristic fraud is an altered date, not a counterfeit die. 1795 obverses become 1794s; 1803 dollars become 1804s. Two centuries of named, dated rejections are on record and the diagnostics have not changed — the authentication guide carries the 1895 field test that still works.
- Learn adjustment marks and silver plugs before you buy anything. Both are Mint process, both are original to the coin, and one of them — the plug — can be the most valuable thing about it. Reading either as damage will cost you a coin you should have bought.
- Judge condition against the series, not against the century. These coins were struck on hand-adjusted planchets by a mint powered by horses. Weakness at the lower left of a 1794 is characteristic, not damage; a “soft” strike is often the die, not wear.
- Pedigree is worth real money here, and it is checkable. Populations are small enough that the great coins have documented chains running back into the nineteenth century. A pedigree claim in this series can be tested against the published catalogues — several of which are public domain and linked from our source ledger.
On values
OunceDesk publishes no price guide for this series and does not intend to. What appears on these pages is realized sales, sourced and dated: the auction records PCGS publishes, attributed to PCGS; the prices printed in nineteenth-century catalogues held in our Archive, attributed to the catalogue; and, on issue pages, catalogue-value estimates from Numista, labelled ESTIMATED and refreshed under that licence's terms. Where a figure is our own arithmetic it is labelled DERIVED and says so.
The melt value on these pages is real but it is historical context, not a floor. Every coin in this series trades orders of magnitude above its silver — see the overview for why that number is nevertheless worth knowing, and methodology for how everything here is classified.
Store this set
What actually fits an early dollar
39.5 mm · nominal 39–40, struck on an open collar — individual coins vary
Capsule
Air-Tite I, 40 mm ring
Rings come in whole millimetres; 39.5 mm sits between sizes and takes the next one up
find one →2x2 flip
Large Dollar (1.5")
Mylar window, never soft vinyl
find one →Tube
Not recommended
Never tube an early dollar
Measure before you buy. The Act of April 2, 1792 fixed the dollar's weight and fineness and said nothing about its diameter. These were struck on an open collar, and surviving coins run roughly 39–40 mm — so 39.5 mm is a nominal figure for the type, not a measurement of your coin. Caliper it before you order a direct-fit shell; a ring type tolerates the variation, a direct fit does not.
Derived from the coin's diameter against Air-Tite's published model chart — the full table, the materials grades and the six things that destroy coins are in the Supply Room. Ordered by fit and archival safety, never by commission. Product links are affiliate links; what they pay has no input into what appears here or in what order.
Continue: grading & authentication · die marriages · key dates & survival · start your checklist
Survival estimates and rarity ratings are PCGS CoinFacts' (S31), observed 2026-08-23. Delivery figures are the Mint's registry (S1, S3, S4). The absence of a government melt or recall for this series is established from Hepburn (S29), Eckfeldt & DuBois (S7) and the Mint's own FY1919 report (S42), which records the Pittman melt of Morgan dollars and is cited here only to exclude it. Implied survival rates are OunceDesk arithmetic (D1).