Postal Service, says that in the 1830s one disgruntled individual harassed an enemy by sending him letters stuffed with blank pages.Įxcessive costs probably kept some Americans from communicating through the mails. 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. 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. Add a couple of enclosures to the missive and the cost jumped to 75 cents. 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. ![]() Given the cost involved, this was not as bizarre as it now seems. 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. A stamped or prepaid letter was sometimes seen as a way to insult the recipient. Early reluctance to use stamps actually hinged on something more subtle but no less important. Stamps promised to flip this tradition on its head by shifting responsibility for paying postage from the recipient to the letter writer. system, paying for goods only upon delivery, made sense in the uncertain early years of the Republic. To claim a letter, the addressee, rather than the addressor, paid its postage. ![]() Until then the federal postal system had operated without stamps. 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.īack in 1847, the idea of a stamp seemed radical enough to put some Americans' backs up. ![]() 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. During the first five years after federal stamps were introduced, less than 2 percent of America's mail made use of them.Ī smile might have flickered across Johnson's dour visage if anyone had told him that stamps would become a major source of revenue. Congress was impressed, all right, but the public proved a harder sell. 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. 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. ![]() Postmaster General Cave Johnson-mailing it without a stamp as was then the custom-to ask whether to honor these "apparently genuine" stamps. Woodbury didn't even know that the federal government had issued official stamps. Up north in Portland, Maine, postmaster N. Hardly anybody bothered to use the stamps, though they bore the images of Ben Franklin and George Washington. When the United States Post Office issued the first federal stamps 150 years ago, the public response was distinctly, well, lukewarm.
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