Confederate Postal Service

[NYCivilWar]

Hello All,

In preparation for a paper I am writing on Virginia soldiers' correspondence I am trying to find any sources on the Confederate Postal Service. I am mainly looking for some secondary sources on the topic, but primary sources are welcomed too. I am just trying to get a better understanding of the postal service of the Confederacy during the war.

I have only found one work thus far: The postal service of the Confederate States of America, by August Dietz published in 1929.

Any and all info would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Kyle M. Stetz

[JimConley]

Re: Confederate Postal Service

Kyle,
You need to check out the New Dietz Confederate States Catalog and Handbook, which contains everything the source you mentioned does plus decades of more research and collection materials.

Try contacting the Confederate Stamp Alliance, the book has been out of print for years, but they own copies that can be sold. They are currently working on combining even more research with Dietz's works to publish a new book due out in 2010.

[NYCivilWar]

Re: Confederate Postal Service

Jim,

Thanks for the info, will check it out.

-Kyle M. Stetz

[Hagooder02]

Re: Confederate Postal Service

Kyle,

If you go to Google Books, you will find several sources in pdf format. One that might be useful is the Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America 1861-1865. One piece of legislation for example, dealt with what to do with U.S. mail delivered to the Confederate States and vice versa.

We tend to think that mail delivery was painfully slow in that time. I have a series of letters from an ancestor at Camp Beaureguard (near Richmond). He regularly received letters from home in Society Hill, SC and it took about five days to reach him each trip. That's not too bad, even by today's standards.

Bruce Blackmon

[Horace]

Re: Confederate Postal Service

This is an excellent site:
http://www.arago.si.edu/flash/?tid=2027477|s1=1 It deals foremost with the mail itself: stamps, franks, envelopes-but, by way of explaining a particular letter that you're looking at, it goes into the story of how it got where it was going: point of truce mail, steamboat mail, a few different scenarios. It covers the US mail from the beginning to now, but goes into CS mail quite a bit, and it's an easy site to search.