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New York Postmaster's Provisional
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 (S. post ) offices〔 The other ten cities to issue provisionals were Alexandria (D. C.), Annapolis (MD), Baltimore (MD), Boscawen (NH), Brattleboro (VT), Lockport (NY), Millbury (MA), New Haven (CT), Providence (RI) and St. Louis (MO).〕 between 1845 and 1847." 〔''The Frelinghuysen Collection'', Sale 1020, Siegel Auction Galleries, March 28, 2012, "New York, New York" p. 70.〕
==Production==
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:
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).
Given that New York was then the base for most of the security printing firms that produced bank notes and other certificates for local financial institutions around the nation, it is not surprising that New York’s provisional stamp would exemplify the highest available standards of design and production. That smaller cities could not necessarily take state-of-the-art printing facilities for granted is shown by the accompanying illustration of the only other Provisional of this era that employed an image of George Washington, printed from a wood-cut die and issued by the Millbury, MA post office in 1846.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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