To mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, we’re cataloging 25 objects that define the country’s history.
We often think of history as something written in a speech or fought for on a battlefield. But sometimes, it shows up in the corner of an old envelope.
In 1847, the U.S. government produced its first official stamps, and they weren’t just important for sending mail. They’re among the first mass-produced images in America.
Daniel Piazza, chief curator of philately at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, said the 5-cent Benjamin Franklin stamp and 10-cent George Washington stamp changed communication as we know it.
How were stamps born?
“The first postage stamps in the world had been issued about seven years earlier in the United Kingdom, and they pictured Queen Victoria. And there was a congressional committee — the committee on the post offices and post roads — that was keeping an eye on how the use of postage stamps was developing in the British Post Office.
“By 1847, they decided to adopt it in the U.S. Now, of course, having a monarch would not be appropriate for U.S. postage stamps. So, they went with two of the most popular and revered figures in the country’s history, and that’s Benjamin Franklin, who also happened to be the country’s first postmaster general, and George Washington, the first president.”
How did Americans send mail before these stamps?
“People were writing letters going all the way back to the first colonists in the 1620s and 1630s. But before the introduction of postage stamps, it was the recipient who paid for the letter rather than the sender.
“There were a number of reasons for that. Transportation was very slow. A lot of it was by ship, and a lot of ships sank. People did not want to pay the postage for letters that might never arrive at their destination. And so it was considered more convenient for the recipient to pay on the other end upon delivery.
“But that created a lot of problems for the post office. What if the person doesn’t want the letter or doesn’t pay for it? So, the idea of a postage stamp was that the sender could prepay the letter up front. That meant the post office always got paid to carry mail. That brings the costs way, way down and allows the volume of mail to increase.
“So, the introduction of stamps and the convenience of that stored value of postage that a stamp represents really made it easier than ever for people to write, and the volume of mail just exploded.”
Are there many of these original stamps still out there? And what would they be worth?
“They’re not as rare as you might think. They were printed in millions of copies, and they were the first. And the first of everything is innovation, right? And it gets saved. So these stamps survive in the millions. People kept them as souvenirs, but as with all collectibles, it’s all about condition and usage and the destination and all those sorts of things. So, a really beautiful copy of the stamp on a really scarce usage is very attractive to collectors and can cost quite a lot of money.”
Did people in 1847 have to lick the stamps to put them on the envelope?
“They did, and there are some reports in newspapers at the time that some people didn’t quite understand that. And so they tried to use them, I guess, almost like stickers, and press them on the envelope. And they wrote to the post office complaining that they kept falling off the envelope or that they didn’t wet it enough. They might attach the stamp, but by the time they drop it in a mailbox and it gets to the post office, maybe the stamp is gone.
“In the UK, when the first postage stamps came out in 1840 with Queen Victoria on them, a lot of people wrote amusing little poems in the newspaper about licking the queen’s head. So this was a whole new experience for people in the 1840s.”
Why do you think these stamps are so critical to telling the story of the United States?
“I think postage stamps, really, in a very small space, capture what a country thinks is important about itself at any point in time, whether those are important people or places or events.
“And what is important and what gets commemorated and how that changes over time is really important too. So these stamps, besides being works of art collectibles in and of themselves, they’re little snapshots of what a country thinks is important about itself at the time they were issued.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Will Walkey produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Walkey also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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