Download “Union and Confederate Soldiers` Stationery: Their Designs and

1 “Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes By Steven R. Boyd From the outset of the war printers in both the North and South published what have become known as patriotic covers or envelopes. Often identified at the time as “Union,” “National” or “Pictorial” envelopes in the North and most often advertised as “Confederate Flag” envelopes in the South, individuals in both regions purchased, mailed and sometimes saved these items of popular culture. Postal historians owe a great deal to those 19th century individuals as well as to the cataloguers of the thousands of different designs which appeared in the North and substantially smaller numbers in the South. In the course of cataloguing those designs, however, the compiler of the first major collection used the label “Patriotic Covers,” a label which has come to define the genre, and implies that the primary purpose of the designs was to promote “patriotism” in the North and South respectively. My research, however, demonstrates that the “patriotic” label obscures an important aspect of these covers which served a number of different functions as is shown by an analysis of covers intended principally for use by Union and Confederate soldiers. In one sense it might be argued that a distinction between civilian and soldier designs is an artificial one as soldiers utilized throughout the war whatever paper available to them to write home to family and friends. Ample evidence nonetheless exists to support three ideas: 1) that printers created designs intended principally for soldiers’ use; Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
2 2) that those covers served to some degree a different purpose than did civilian ones and 3) that soldiers exercised a degree of agency in the creation and use of those envelopes. The very contents of four different types of covers offer substantial evidence for an interpretation that soldiers were their target audience rather than civilians. Design envelopes with an added logo, symbol or other identifier of a particular unit, corner cards (by which I mean covers with a military logo or design, usually in the area of the envelope that we would normally associate with the return address), corps and regiment covers, and some camp scene covers all suggest a military clientele. Marketing by publishers and wholesalers to sutlers as well as to individual soldiers or their unit commanders reinforces this notion of military intended designs. Fig. 1 Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
3 Fig. 1 constitutes an example of a widely available civilian intended design adapted for soldier use. A number of publishers used this image of an individual in uniform standing next to a flagpole with tents and the United States Capitol building in the background. William Weiss (The Catalog of Union Civil War Patriotic Covers) identifies thirteen different varieties of this cover (i.e. the same design with different slogans, mottos or other imprints). In this instance the printer added to the design on both the envelope and matching letter sheet the designation, 17th Massachusetts Regiment, Camp Andrew, a post just outside Baltimore. Philadelphia printer James Magee and the Cincinnati firm Murphy’s Sons imprints appear on some of these envelopes, although most varieties, including the design in Fig. 1, bear no publisher’s identification. These envelopes nonetheless clearly document the adaptation of specific pre‐existing designs for particular military units. Fig. 2 Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
4 Other envelopes, corner cards, which philatelists so label because the imprint is often in the upper left corner of the envelope, corps covers which include the specific symbol of a particular unit, and regimental envelopes with more detailed images of specific units, likewise appear created for particular military units. Fig. 2 illustrates one such design for “Battery D” of the 1st West Virginia Light Artillery,” commanded by Captain John Carlin, a Mexican American war veteran and post war commander of the West Virginia GAR. Also known as the Wheeling Battery because most of its members came from that area, the unit served from 1862 until June, 1865, principally in the Shenandoah Valley. Since similar designs exist for both Ohio and Illinois units, the unknown printer likely prepared these envelopes for various troops stationed in western Virginia. Fig. 3 Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
5 Starting in 1863, Union commanders devised a system of badges to be worn on a soldier’s cap to aid in recognition of troops in the heat of battle. Symbols of spheres, trefoils, crosses, diamonds and others in red, blue and green quickly appeared on Union envelopes used by soldiers. Fig. 3 is one such example of a Corps cover printed by James Magee of Philadelphia mailed from Washington D.C. to Cayuga County, New York. The blue cross symbol served to identify the 6th Army Corps, in this instance with a pencil notation, 3rd division, added. Logically members of the unit identified by the design on an envelope were the intended users of them, not their recipients. Fig. 4 Finally, “Camp Scene” covers like those marketed by Charles Magnus support the idea of soldier intended designs. Fig. 4 bears an image of a group of men standing in front of a “Refreshment” tent in an unspecified camp. One soldier stands to the side reading a letter. Issued Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
6 in both single and multi‐color formats, these covers implicitly assure the recipient of the wellbeing of the soldier in camp presumably pleased to be reading a letter from home. The designs all focus on small clusters of men, often in front of a tent, and are labeled “Camp Scene,” numbers 1 through 20. The envelopes bear Magnus’ imprint and New York City address, although they were likely sold in Washington D.C. to troops from across the nation as designs identify neither the individuals nor the specific camp illustrated. If the envelopes themselves support the idea of designs intended for soldiers’ use, two additional bodies of evidence reinforce the idea that soldiers constituted a specific market for these envelopes: stationery packets or kits assembled and sold to soldiers, and newspaper and other advertisements directed toward soldiers. Numerous printers and distributors offered stationery kits intended for both soldiers and civilians. Examples from at least printers in Syracuse, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Nashville and Covington, Kentucky are extant. Of the fifteen stationery kits I have identified, five market directly to soldiers. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
7 Fig. 5 Fig. 5 provides an example. Manufactured by James Mumford of Cincinnati (after Union occupation of Nashville, he established a second office there), the “WESTERN ARMY PACKAGE OR VOLUNTEERS ARK” includes envelopes and notepaper as well as pens and a lead pencil, thread, a songbook, calendar for 1862 and other necessities of life for the soldier in the field. The package that held all of these items included images of generals Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Halleck, Don Carlos Buell and Rear Admiral Andrew Foote as well as a symbolic USA. Mumford assured potential purchasers that the items contained therein were “of the best quality, put up by regular Stationers to meet the real necessities of Soldiers and others.” Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
8 Fig. 6 A second “SOLDIERS UNION STATIONERY” kit by James Gates, also of Cincinnati, too contained envelopes and letter paper, pens and a pencil as well as “One Union pin or other piece of jewelry,” presumptively to be given to a loved one as a memento of the soldier before his departure for the field. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
9 Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
10 Fig. 7 Printers like Mumford, Gates and other creators of soldiers’ kits also advertised their products in flyers, magazines and on the envelopes themselves. An oversized circular from S.C. Rickards & Co’s of New York City provides an example of this marketing. Although largely unknown to historians (Grant [The Handbook of Civil War Patriotic Envelopes and Postal History, Vol. 1] incorrectly identifies the company as Richard’s), Rickard’s describes its business as “The Oldest and Largest Prize Package House in the United States.” An 1861 company circular identifies four different packages, two clearly intended for the soldier market. “The NEW UNION Prize Stationery and Recipe Package, FOR THE CAMP AND THE HOUSEHOLD, included “letter sheets expressly for soldiers use,” a 6+10 engraving of “our Chief, Maj. Gen. Geo. B. McClellan,” “Best QUALITY Army Envelopes,” a copy of “The Soldiers Camp Companion,” and a number of other supplies. A second package, “The Monitor” contained similar items as well as a copy of the “Soldiers Pocket Guide.” Rickards circular is directed toward retail sellers and other agents. A July 14th 1863 notice in Harper’s Weekly, however, describes the firm (now S.C. Rickards, Cately & Co. at the same address as earlier) as “an old established and reliable business house and persons in the army who may transact business with them will be honorably dealt with.” The implication of the advertisement is that the company marketed directly to members of the army, whether officers on behalf of their personnel or individual enlisted men. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
11 Fig. 8 The circular also describes the outside cover of the Union package which was “printed in different colors, (representing the red, white and blue), with a (sic) beautiful Union designs, also printed in various colors, presenting a handsome appearance.” No Rickards packet covers appear to be extant and the company logo appears on few individual envelopes. (ony five Rickards envelopes are listed in The Catalog of Union Patriotic Envelopes) They did, however, offer to add the “names and place of business of parties” ordering packets from them. Fig. 8 may represent one of those businesses. W.L. Winslow did not manufacture its own envelopes, serving instead only as a distributor of materials purchased from larger manufacturing interests. The contents of the packet they offer are similar to those available from Rickards &Co., and a Harper’s Weekly announcement in 1862 emphasizes the quality of Winslow’s packets when compared to those of Philadelphia manufacturers, implying a New York City printer (Winslow operated in Syracuse). Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
12 If I am correct in my argument that envelope publishers North and South intended some types of covers primarily for soldiers’ use, It also seems clear that these soldiers’ covers served, to a degree, different purposes than did their civilian counterparts. Granted, the primary function of any envelope was to carry letters between soldiers in the field and civilians at home or between civilians. Few intra‐solider mailings seem to exist. In addition envelopes, whether civilian or soldier, by definition served to promote the respective causes of Southern Independence and the preservation of a single American Union. For civilians design envelopes also became early in the war a fashionable collectible, purchased and saved, sometimes displayed in newly created “Union and Patriotic Album Illustrated Envelope” holders, and the focus of parlor conversation in middle class households. These niceties of middle class Victorian culture, however, eluded the soldiers of the North and South who relied on envelopes exclusively to mail letters home. Even the occasional cover of the enemy “found on the battlefield” served as its primary purpose the transmittal of a letter, perhaps with a cryptic remark about the enemy modifying the design. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
13 Fig. 9 Still, Union and Confederate military designs served a second informational rather than patriotic function that does not characterize civilian mailed or collected covers. Envelopes and letter sheets published by numerous printers throughout the North appear to have as their primary purpose the identification of military commanders previously unknown to the public. Fig. 9, for example, bears an image of General Winfield Scott, Lincoln’s first commander of Union troops This, and similar designs with images of generals William Burnside, George McClellan (often paired with another officer or President Lincoln), Benjamin Butler, and a host of other commanders, imply a different message than do the celebratory envelopes bearing the image Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
14 of men like Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the first Union casualty of the war, or Colonel Robert Anderson, the Union commander who surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederate army. The former allowed recipients at home to attach a visual image to the name of the man commanding their husband or other loved one while some of the envelopes provided additional information via a map or other scene of the front. Enlisted men who utilized these envelopes could mail letters home inside an envelope that identified their commanders or provided other relevant data to the recipient. Two other types of military designs served comparable informational purposes. Some camp scene covers and letter sheets bear detailed drawings of military posts. Battle scene covers provide illustrations of specific engagements. In both instances the designs implicitly provide news about individual soldiers even as they assure loved ones at home of the mailer’s personal safety. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
15 Fig. 10 Linus and Max Rosenthal of Philadelphia for example, published sixty five different designs of Union camps. Each features a single regiment (e.g. Camp of 2nd Massachusetts) and consisted of both a 4 page letter sheet and matching envelope. For each of the Rosenthal designs, an artist from the firm visited the camp in order to provide accurate images. The contents of the letter accompanying one envelope with a 7th Massachusetts Infantry design explain that the artist had sketched Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
16 the image “last Sunday morning.” William Stowall, the author of that letter, assured its recipient, Lydia, that he was safe and that there were all kinds of activities around the camp and that soldiers too “can have fun,” even on a rainy evening in October 1861 far from home. Fig. 11 Battle scene covers too focus explicitly on specific engagements, often ones in which the writer participated. One series of twenty‐six black and white designs by an unknown printer provide significant detail and realism about individual battles. The series includes Cedar Mountain, Second Manassas, and Shiloh as well as less well known engagements. Dubbed the “Battle Series” by James Milgram, who thinks the printer may have been located in St. Louis, these designs exist as both letter sheets and envelopes. Fig. 11 illustrates the detail and realism of these covers and letter sheets. Titled the “Bombardment of Fort Henry,” the design offers in considerable detail an image of the damage inflicted on the Confederate position by the Union navy commanded by Captain Andrew Foote. The contents of the design – the billowing smoke of Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
17 cannon fire, the corpses of Confederate soldiers, and the densely packed scene – all hint at the chaotic nature of the conflict in a manner not matched by either the photographs of the era or the more pacific Union designs often utilized by civilians. Battle scene covers lack an explicit patriotic theme. Instead they serve an informational purpose, providing people back home with news and information about specific conflicts, sometimes including battles overlooked by east coast magazines like Harper’s Weekly. William G. Ray’s letters provide detailed descriptions of the Union capture of both forts Henry and Donaldson. They also communicate the ardor and pride of an individual soldier engaged in those very same battles even as they reassure friends and family of his own survival, albeit his overall health was, as he expressed it, “very poor.” Battle scene and some other designs served a “news” function conveying information to friends and family back home. Some soldiers also played a broader role in the development of these envelopes than has hitherto been recognized. Thus while civilians bore the responsibility for the preservation of both Union and Confederate designs (either as treasured letters from their soldiers at the front or in the North at least as mementos of the war), soldiers did more than merely purchase envelopes from among those available from printers or camp sutlers. They exercised a degree of agency in the content of the envelopes themselves. Ironically, we know more about this aspect of the envelopes of the South than the North in part because of files created after the war that document civilian contributions to the Confederate war effort. Titled Confederate Citizens File and housed in the National Archives, they contain receipts, vouchers and other records of civilian service to the Confederacy. They do not, therefore Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
18 contain records of printers who designed and published Confederate envelopes for the general public. They do, however, document specific cases when Southern printers provided envelopes for unit commanders or other military personnel at the latter’s initiative. Fig. 12 For example, Louis E. Pradat served as Confederate postmaster of Pass Christian, Mississippi and the proprietor of the Gothic Store. He printed both paper scrip and at least two Confederate patriotic envelopes. According to the records in the Confederate Civilian files Colonel Mayson, of the Seventh Mississippi Volunteers, purchased two boxes of envelopes from Pradat. In all likelihood they were the 7th Mississippi Regiment Volunteers cover with an eleven star Confederate flag flying and the name of the unit and its Captain positioned to the right of the flag in Fig. 12. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
19 Fig. 13 Other Southern printers likewise printed envelopes for specific units that reflected the fervor of the individual soldiers and their pride in both the incipient Confederate nation and their specific unit and its commanders. An example of the latter is an eleven star Confederate flag cover that cited the statement of Colonel Francis Bartow (I go to illustrate[i.e. defend] Georgia) who died in the first Battle of Manassas. Savannah bookstore owner and printer J.W. Burke sold that envelope to members of the Oglethorpe Light Infantry which Bartow had commanded. Burke’s experience also provides a partial explanation of the relative paucity of Confederate unit designs. In an article titled “Bartow Envelopes” published In the Savannah Daily Morning News in July 1861 Burke replied to a no longer extant criticism of his activities signed “Oglethorpe” published earlier in the Savannah Republican. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
20 “Oglethorpe” had chastised Burke for introducing “Yankeeisms” into Georgia, i.e., the sale of printed envelopes to troops for personal profit. Burke, in his rebuttal, denied the allegation, insisting that he sold the envelopes “for accommodation, and at a price that will scarcely return me the money I paid out.” Scarce resources of course curtailed the number of Confederate envelopes available, but cultural differences between the North and South clearly also played a role. Because these envelopes constituted a commercial enterprise in which printers usually acted on their own initiative to produce a product for the public’s consumption, little evidence is extant regarding the limited number of cases in which printer’s did in essence contract with individuals to provide specific designs to a civilian or military purchaser. Hints to that effect nonetheless exist with respect to several Northern as well as Southern covers. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
21 Fig. 14 For example, J.A. Howells, a printer in Jefferson, Ohio, published in 1863 and 1864 more than one hundred different poem envelopes, many clearly intended judging by their titles for soldiers to mail to loved ones at home. Fig. 14 is one illustration of these covers which were of uniform design. Titled “ARMY HYMN,” the mailer of this envelope was William J. Dean, postmaster for the 21st Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. In his diary for July 13, 1864 he noted that he had “Received a lot of paper and envelopes from J.A. Howells and Co.” The item in Fig. 14 may have been one of those envelopes, mailed months later to his mother, Lurana Rebecca Dean, in Oshkosh. Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
22 Howells aggressively marketed his covers. On most of his designs the notation “Twenty Envelopes of various sizes, colors and songs sent by mail free of postage for TEN CENTS” appears. The circumstances of how Dean acquired the lot of envelopes he did remains unclear. Perhaps he ordered them from Howells for personal or unit use. It seems unlikely he purchased them from a sutler in camp as he stipulates that he received the envelopes from Howells and Co., one of thousands who likely responded to Howells’ aggressive marketing. Fig. 15 Although we know relatively little about the publishers of most envelopes, North and South, we know even less about the men and women who designed them. There is a caricature Union design of a man hunched over a drafting board labeled “The Individual Who Designs the Comic Union Envelope…” A more informative exception is Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
23 pictured in Fig. 15. This Union design is unusual in that it includes the name of the designer, Frank Carr, likely the Frank Carr who enlisted in the Indiana 14th Volunteers , Company B, in June 1861. The 14th had organized at Camp Vigo, near Terra Haute, in May. Carr enlisted in June of that same year. Precisely how Carr’s artwork became the basis for this envelope by an unknown publisher (a single Terra Haute publisher, Devoe and Crampton, is known) remains uncertain. The design nonetheless suggests a soldier initiated image that reflects the pride and enthusiasm of a young man who early in the war shared with many Union designers (and soldiers) an enthusiasm to see Jefferson Davis executed. Soldiers played a greater role in the creation, distribution and utilization of some types of covers than has previously been recognized. An evaluation of these “soldiers’” envelopes also makes clear, not all “Patriotic” envelopes necessarily served the same purpose. Soldiers’ envelopes performed a more informational than celebratory function. Publishers at the time recognized these differences and marketed their products accordingly, “Union” and “flag” envelopes for civilians, “soldier’s” envelopes for military personnel. Soldiers also played a small role in the composition and design of those envelopes intended for their use. The implications of this analysis are twofold. There are currently at least two major projects working to post images of all Civil War era Union and Confederate design envelopes on the web. The organizers of these projects should, in my view, explicitly consider the purposes of the envelopes as well as their designs when organizing those websites. Similarly, in our scholarly thinking about Civil War design envelopes, we should recognize the varieties of types of covers including soldiers, as Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
24 well as campaign, advertising and other designs in order to better understand the various functions they performed for civilians and soldiers alike throughout the war. Images courtesy Patricia Kaufmann, James W. Milgram, Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, Inc., and Benjamin Wishnietsky, Confederate Patriotic Covers and Their Usages (N. Miami, Fl. 1991). Steven R. Boyd is a professor of history at the University of Texas At San Antonio and author of Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War. The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (Baton Rouge, La. 2010). Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012
25 Steven R. Boyd
Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Stationery: Their Designs and Purposes
Postal History Symposium, Nov. 2012