Share
Digg
StumbleUpon
RedditWhen the United States Post Office issued the first federal stamps 150 years ago, the public response was distinctly, well, lukewarm. No brass bands played. No first day covers were issued. Hardly anybody bothered to use the stamps, though they bore the images of Ben Franklin and George Washington. Up north in Portland, Maine, postmaster N. L. Woodbury didn't even know that the federal government had issued official stamps. He dashed off a note to U.S. Postmaster General Cave Johnson--mailing it without a stamp as was then the custom--to ask whether to honor these "apparently genuine" stamps.
Judging by a daguerreotype of Cave Johnson, who carries a prominent brow that protects bulging, intense eyes, the Postmaster General wouldn't have seen the humor in this missive. His department had been operating under a deficit, and Johnson had sold Congress on the idea that stamps would increase postal revenues by increasing the convenience and reliability of mailing private letters. Congress was impressed, all right, but the public proved a harder sell. During the first five years after federal stamps were introduced, less than 2 percent of America's mail made use of them.
A smile might have flickered across Johnson's dour visage if anyone had told him that stamps would become a major source of revenue. In 1993, some 517 million Elvis Presley stamps were sold; many popular single stamps bring the United States Postal Service revenues that over time rival the earnings of a Hollywood blockbuster. It was thus in celebration of a true Postal Service pot of gold that, on the 150th anniversary of America's first federal stamps, the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum assembled a small exhibit about them--and a pair of just-issued commemorative look-alikes.
Back in 1847, the idea of a stamp seemed radical enough to put some Americans' backs up. Until then the federal postal system had operated without stamps. Mail usually traveled postage due. To claim a letter, the addressee, rather than the addressor, paid its postage. This C.O.D. system, paying for goods only upon delivery, made sense in the uncertain early years of the Republic. Stamps promised to flip this tradition on its head by shifting responsibility for paying postage from the recipient to the letter writer. Early reluctance to use stamps actually hinged on something more subtle but no less important. A stamped or prepaid letter was sometimes seen as a way to insult the recipient. According to Joe Geraci, a specialist at the National Postal Museum, prepaying a letter suggested that the recipient was too poor to pay for it himself.
Given the cost involved, this was not as bizarre as it now seems. Says Michael Laurence, editor of Linn's Stamp News, "paying for a letter was like receiving a collect call from China." A single-sheet letter from New York City to Buffalo cost 25 cents, a prohibitive price in a time when a good day's wage for a laborer was rarely more than one dollar. Add a couple of enclosures to the missive and the cost jumped to 75 cents. In 1845 a congressman calculated that a letter sent from the East or South to the Northwest cost the equivalent of a bushel of wheat--or a day's labor. Historian Richard R. John points out that in 1831 the exasperated political theorist Francis Lieber implored letter writers to consider whether their epistle was "worth the postage." Meg Ausman, the historian of the U.S. Postal Service, says that in the 1830s one disgruntled individual harassed an enemy by sending him letters stuffed with blank pages.
Excessive costs probably kept some Americans from communicating through the mails. Many people who did receive mail simply refused to pay, rejecting the letter outright, which meant big headaches for the Post Office in mountains of dead letters. These had to be returned to the sender at government expense; the Post Office wound up paying for two deliveries with nothing in return.
Some historians credit one Rowland Hill, a British reformer and educator, with the idea of sticking a stamp on a letter before sending it. It seems to have struck him one day as he watched a housemaid receive a letter. She carefully scanned the envelope, deciphered a coded message from her lover, then refused to accept the mail. Postage was too expensive, Hill realized, and paid for by the wrong person. Prepaid stamps were the answer to both problems.
His pioneering efforts in England, aided by the winds of reform that blew across Europe in the 1840s, led to the overhaul of the British postal system, to a reduction of postal rates and to the introduction of its first national postage stamps, the Penny Black and the Two Pence Blue, in 1840. Brazil followed in 1843. Copying the British, the United States reformed its rate structure in 1845. Before that, distance and weight had determined the cost of a letter via a complex and byzantine price system under which each piece of mail was individually accounted for and marked with debits and credits.
Comments
I have stamps and I want to sell it (about 300and more) the stamps from various states and periods worth 700000 euros LAMA-Syria
Posted by LAMA on June 4,2008 | 09:49 AM