Confederate Postage
Within a month after his appointment as Postmaster General, Reagan ordered that ads be placed in both Southern and Northern newspapers seeking sealed proposals from printing companies for producing Confederate postage stamps. Bids arrived from companies in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, New Orleans and Richmond. After the war started, however, it became evident that the contract to print Confederate stamps should go to a Confederate firm. The Confederate Post Office Department therefore awarded the contract to lithographers Hoyer & Ludwig, a small firm in Richmond. The stamps they produced were inferior in image quality to the line engraved stamps printed by the U.S. Post Office, but with what resources they had, they produced some handsome images by many accounts. The first Confederate postage issues were placed in circulation in October 1861, five months after postal service between the North and South had ended. Jefferson Davis is depicted on the first issue of 1861. The appearance of a living person on a postage stamp marked a break from the tradition adhered to by the US Post Office, that a person may be depicted on U.S. postage or currency only after death.
Read more about this topic: Postage Stamps And Postal History Of The Confederate States
Famous quotes containing the words confederate and/or postage:
“Well, you Yankees and your holy principle about savin’ the Union. You’re plunderin’ pirates that’s what. Well, you think there’s no Confederate army where you’re goin’. You think our boys are asleep down here. Well, they’ll catch up to you and they’ll cut you to pieces you, you nameless, fatherless scum. I wish I could be there to see it.”
—John Lee Mahin (1902–1984)
“Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)