New York Postmaster's Provisional

New York Postmaster’s Provisional
New York Postmaster’s Provisional
Country of production	United States of America
Location of production	New York, NY
Date of production	1845-47
Printer	Rawdon, Wright and Hatch
Depicts	George Washington
Notability	Most elegantly executed of the U. S. provisionals
No. in existence	thousands are known
Face value	5¢
Estimated value	$500-$11,000

The New York Postmaster's Provisional is, as its designation implies, a postage stamp provided by the New York Post Office to facilitate the prepayment of mail at a time when the United States had not yet issued postage stamps for national use. Placed on sale on July 14, 1845, this was the nation’s first provisional stamp to be issued by a local post office in response to the congressional postal reform act that had taken effect two weeks earlier. That law, passed on March 3, 1845, standardized nationwide mail rates, with the result that the use of stamps became a practical and reliable method of postal prepayment. (Before standardization, the many different postal rates in different jurisdictions had made fees too unpredictable to prepay all letters with stamps as a matter of course, with the result that recipients of letters--rather than senders--generally paid the postage on them.) Baltimore announced the issue of a provisional stamp one day after New York, on July 15, and New Haven soon followed. The New York issue has been cited as "the most elegantly executed and widely used of the group of provisionals issued by eleven different [U. S. post] offices between 1845 and 1847."

Preparations for issuing the New York provisional were among the first acts of the city’s Postmaster, Robert H. Morris, who took office on May 21, 1845 (the previous year he had completed a term as the 64th Mayor of New York). For the production, Morris contracted a leading security printer specializing in banknotes, Rawdon, Wright and Hatch. Creating a design around a stock banknote image of George Washington, the firm produced an engraving plate that printed forty stamp images. Morris received the first batch of stamps on June 12, and that day he sent copies of the letter excerpted below to postmasters in Boston, Philadelphia, Albany and Washington, enclosing a sample stamp in each:

I have adopted a stamp which I sell at 5 cents each. The accompanying is one….Your office of course will not officially recognize my stamp, but will be governed only by the post office stamp of prepayment. Should there by any accident be deposited in your office a letter directed to the City of New York with one of my stamps upon it, you will mark the letter unpaid, as though no stamp was on it, though when it reaches my office, I shall deliver it as a paid letter. In this manner, the accounts of the offices will be kept as now….

While other cities would see fit to offer more than one provisional denomination--Providence printed 5¢ and 10¢ stamps, while the St. Louis Bears appeared in 5¢, 10¢ and 20¢ values--Morris deemed a single stamp sufficient for New York. This decision reflected New York’s central location in the cluster of major coastal cities: the 5¢ postal rate covered the cost of transporting mail any distance up to three hundred miles, and little of New York’s correspondence went further (the situation was otherwise in Providence and far-off St. Louis).