The number stamped on a coin and what the coin is worth parted ways long ago. Here is the story of the gap.
A Morgan dollar is legal tender for exactly one dollar, and nobody on earth would spend one. The gap between the number on a coin and what the coin is worth is one of the great stories in American money.
Every coin carries a face value (the denomination stamped on it), an intrinsic value (its metal content at market prices), and, if collectible, a numismatic value above both. For a Morgan dollar the first is $1 forever, the second moves daily with silver, and the third depends on date, mint, and grade, the full anatomy laid out in Numismatic Value vs Melt Value.
For most of American history the alignment was deliberate: a silver dollar contained roughly a dollar’s worth of silver, by design and by law. The system needed constant tending, in 1853 the Mint already had to trim the silver in small coins to keep them from being melted, but the principle held: the money was worth its metal.
Rising silver prices broke the marriage. When the metal in a quarter exceeded twenty-five cents, the Coinage Act of 1965 removed silver from dimes and quarters, and the public executed the oldest law in economics, Gresham’s law, in real time: overvalued clad coins circulated while undervalued silver ones vanished into drawers and safes within a few years. The silver in your change was not spent away; it was rescued.
Face value survives as legal fiction and occasional footnote: a Morgan remains lawful money for one dollar, a one-ounce Silver Eagle for the same, and modern bullion programs keep symbolic denominations mostly as a mark of sovereignty. Mexico’s Libertad drops the pretense entirely and carries no face value at all. Meanwhile even humble cents and nickels have flirted with metal values above face in recent decades, proof the old tension never fully retires.