The early years of the Seated Liberty dime, from 1837 to 1853, were not a smooth road of coinage, but a continual series of feast and famine. The mintage of dimes beginning in 1853 was to be even more rocky, with many of the great rarities and enormously common pieces side-by-side as the years rolled past. In the late 1840s, the discovery of gold in California had caused silver to become undervalued with respect to gold, and great quantities of coin were bought up by bullion dealers and shipped overseas for melting. By the middle of 1850, little was to be seen in the marketplaces. It was not until February 1853 that Congress finally solved the problem by reducing the amount of silver in the coinage.
The 1853 law kept the dollar intact at its old weight and fineness, but the minor silver coins saw their weight reduced by nearly 7 percent. The reduction was enough that bullion dealers would no longer buy up the silver coins.
The dollar was left alone to maintain the polite fiction that we still had a bimetallic system of coinage, where gold and silver were of equal importance. In real terms, however, the 1853 law created a de facto gold standard; the silver dollar did not circulate in America again until the creation of the Morgan dollar in 1878. Beginning in the spring of 1853, massive silver coinages were the order of the day.
