administration,
including a post office department. The Confederate Government later
moved to Richmond, Virginia, and throughout the long and bloody war
from 1861-1865 the Confederate States maintained a separate postal
service, with separate postage stamps. Judge John H. Reagan was
Postmaster-General.

The United States postage stamps current at the beginning of the war
were the beautiful series of 1851-60, and as large quantities remained
in stock at Southern post offices, these issues were demonetized and
replaced hurriedly by the now rare _premi[`e]re gravures_ of August,
1861, which were promptly superseded by the more finished designs of
September, 1861.

The Confederate States stamps lack the excellence of engraving
and printing of the United States stamps, a deficiency due to the
difficult conditions under which they were produced in the country or
imported from England. But what they lack in this respect is more than
amply compensated by their historic significance and associations. The
home produced stamps were prepared under the stress of invasion;
the foreign manufactured ones and much of the material for the local
productions had to be brought through the blockade. In the annals of
philately there are no more exciting records than those which tell
of the capture of a ship bearing three De La Rue plates and 400,000
dollars worth of Confederate States stamps, which the agent of Davis's
Government managed to throw overboard, or of the despatch (preparatory
to the evacuation of Richmond) of printing press, dies, plates, and
stamps to Columbia, in South Carolina, where they arrived only to be
destroyed in the holocaust following upon General Sherman's capture
of the city. The different designs of the successive issues of
Confederate stamps are shewn in _Figs._ 287-295; their history we have
dealt with at length in "Confederate States of America: Government
Postage Stamps."[7]

[Footnote 7: Melville Stamp Books, No. 19. Stanley Gibbons, Ltd.,
London, 1913.]

Some bogus stamps purporting to have been used in various temporary
services are illustrated (_Figs._ 296-299), including one showing a
fort at Charlestown, and another which purports to prepay "blockade
postage" to Europe.

The postmasters of a number of towns in the Confederate States found
it desirable pending the receipt of stamps from the Confederate
Government to prepare and issue provisional stamps of their own to
denote prepayment of postage.