US POSTAL HISTORY BLOG

“Fellow citizens, I presume you all know who I am…I am humble Abraham Lincoln,” said the future President in a bid for election to the State Legislature of New Salem, Illinois. “I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My policies are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a National Bank, I am in favor of the Internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; and if not, it will be all the same.” Continue reading

Nicknamed ‘the Prexies’ by collectors the Presidential Issue is a series of definitive postage stamps issued in the United States in 1938. The unique collection features all 29 U.S. presidents from George Washington through Calvin Coolidge. The Presidents are depicted as small busts printed on solid-color designs on stamps valued up to 50-cents. The designs are black on white with colored lettering for the $1, $2, and $5 values. Many irregular values were included simply to ensure so that each Commander-in-Chief had a stamp of his own. Additional stamps depicted Benjamin Franklin on a half-cent stamp, Martha Washington on a one-and-a-half-cent stamp, and the White House, on a stamp with a value of four-and-a-half cents.

And while George Washington may have been our nation’s first President, he was not the nation’s first famous face to be pictured on a stamp. Or, to be more accurate, he was not the ONLY first face to launch a thousand letters. The honor of being commemorated on those first stamps is shared by first President George Washington and first colonial Postmaster Ben Franklin.
 
U.S. Postmaster General Cave Johnson selected Franklin and Washington to be on the stamps and the firm of Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson to create them.
 
Best known for their work engraving banknotes, they proposed printing engraved stamps in their best style of line engraving in a two-color process. The cost: 25-cents per thousand stamps. Johnson learned that a one-color process would reduce the cost-per-thousand by a nickel, and the frugal Postmaster General authorized the cheaper printing.
 
Government spending stayed low when rather than creating brand new dies for the Franklin and Washington images, the engraving firm used stock dies that were already on the presses for banknotes and engraved frames. After the dies were completed, several trial colors were prepared and submitted to Postmaster General Johnson. He chose brown for the five-cent stamp and black for the ten-cent.
 
On June 26, 1847, the printers advised Postmaster General Johnson that 200,000 Washington ten-cent stamps and 600,000 Franklin five-cent stamps were ready for delivery. On July 1, 1847, the first federal United States postage stamps were issued in New York City.
 
No cover is known to have been posted at New York on July 1. The earliest known cover bearing one of these stamps was postmarked at New York City on July 2, 1847, although the stamps were probably purchased on the first day of issue.

Stamp design is a collaborative effort…even when the lead designer is the President of the United States. A case in point is FDR’s sketch for the 1933 Polar Stamp. As a favor to Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the President designed a commemorative-size stamp. It showed the eastern coast of the United States and South America, western areas of Europe and Africa, and the routes of Byrd’s trans-Atlantic, North Pole and South Pole flights.

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The “Day of Infamy” speech is one of the best-known American political speeches of the 20th Century. It was delivered by to Congress and a stunned nation on December 8, 1941 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often referred to as “The Stamp Collectors’ President.”
 
FDR was elected to the nation’s highest office in November 1932. His unprecedented four terms in the White House were marked with continuing political and economic crises. Yet despite the turmoil, the 32nd President of the United States, a lifelong stamp enthusiast, never lost touch with his hobby and found time to create original designs for several United States stamps issued while in office.

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Printer, inventor, and one of the best-loved figures of the Revolutionary War period, Dr. Benjamin Franklin was a founding father AND the future ‘father’ of the U.S. postal system.  Even before the states were united, Franklin was named postmaster of the American colonies, as much for his reputation for frugality as his interest in mail.

Franklin was known as a penny-pincher when it came to running the mail system, but he was not above using his status to send his own mail for free.  Frugal Franklin treated himself to what was known at the time as a “franking privilege.” 

Franking privileges—the ability to send mail with a signature rather than with postage—date back to the seventeenth-century English House of Commons. America’s Continental Congress adopted the practice in 1775 and voted it into law in 1789.  It was intended to improve the flow of information across a vast nation.

To send his missives on their way, all Franklin had to do was sign his name on an envelope and write the word “free.”  No fuss…no muss…and no pesky stamp either!  And so the term ‘Franklin Privilege’ was coined.

Even after the introduction of postage stamps in the U.S., their use was not mandatory for eight more years. One famous consequence of this was that in 1848, Zachary Taylor did not know he had been nominated for President for several weeks after the nomination took place, until someone arrived to tell him in person - he had refused several letters conveying the news, because he did not care to pay the postage due!

This seems incredible in these days of instant world- wide communication, but demonstrates not only the disadvantage of the postage rules in effect at the time, but the different attitude of those times - people valued their privacy. It must be said as well in the famous man’s defense that he had been forced to instruct his postmaster to reject all unpaid mail. Taylor was receiving so much from admirers that the cost of the postage due was more than he could afford to pay! Moreover, he had not sought the nomination, and was not expecting it.