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Rebel Documents, Yankee
Stamps:
How the U.S. Collected Its Wartime
Stamp Taxes in the Confederacy
(PDF file revised 2020)
Michael Mahler
This exhibit
explains and illustrates, via stamped documents, the means by which the
U.S. government collected its wartime documentary stamp taxes from its
eleven “rebellious states,” otherwise known as the Confederate States of
America. This occurred in two stages:
I. Occupied Confederacy, 1863–5. This was first done directly, in
Union-occupied areas, primarily within U.S. Internal Revenue collection
districts established in 1862–3 in Virginia, Tennessee and Louisiana; but
also in Mississippi, Georgia and North Carolina.
II. Retroactively, 1865–7. The main thrust of this effort, though, came
after cessation of hostilities, when documents executed within the former
Confederacy were required to be stamped retroactively. In practice, this
applied only to long-lasting documents still in effect, such as promissory
notes, deeds, mortgages, bonds and the like.
Without stamps, both the instruments and any record of them were by law
“invalid and of no effect,” and thus fair game for legal challenge by any
party with an interest in having them invalidated.
These items are generally rare: only about 100 occupation usages and about
85 retroactively stamped have been recorded.
For a century and a half they have been virtually unrecognized by
philatelists.
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