US Confederate Stamps and Covers

The first piece of CSA postage, issued on October 16, 1861, was a green, five-cent stamp bearing the bust of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. More than nine million of these stamps were printed by Hoyer & Ludwig of Richmond, Virginia. Less than a month later, the same printer produced 1.4-million ten-cent stamps featuring Thomas Jefferson—though dead since 1826, Jefferson was a Virginian and a slave owner, so the CSA claimed him as a son of the south.

By the spring of 1862, Hoyer & Ludwig had printed two-cent CSA stamps with Andrew Jackson on them, a five-cent blue Jefferson Davis, and a rose-colored version of the 10-cent Thomas Jefferson. In July of 1862, a new printer, J.T. Paterson and Co. of Augusta, Georgia, issued 4.6-million additional Thomas Jefferson stamps, which can be difficult to distinguish from the ones lithographed by Hoyer & Ludwig.

That same spring, the Confederacy went abroad to get some of its printing done, hiring De La Rue & Co. of London to print 12 million five-cent Jefferson Davis stamps by means of typography. Engraved stamps were finally issued in April of 1863 by Archer & Daly, another Richmond printer. Andrew Jackson got a two-cent stamp but Jefferson Davis was placed on the three different types of 10-cent stamps, while George Washington was placed on a 20-cent stamp.

As for that 14th stamp, only 400,000 were printed by De La Rue & Co., but these one-cent John C. Calhouns were never issued—by the time they were delivered from England, the two-cent stamp had been declared the Confederacy’s smallest denomination.

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