TODAY IN HISTORY: July 01 - Today's Stories: U.S. Post Office Issues First Stamps, The Battle of Gettysburg, The Rough Riders Storm San Juan Hill
U.S. Post Office Issues First Stamps
On July 1, 1847, the United States Post Office issued its first general issue postage stamp , a five-cent stamp honoring Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general under the Continental Congress, and a ten-cent stamp honoring George Washington. The first U.S. postal cards were issued in 1873, the first commemorative stamps in 1893, and the first airmail stamps in 1918.
Stamp collecting became a popular hobby, practiced by a wide variety of people from school children to Presidents. Franklin Roosevelt was famous for his stamp collecting, a hobby he began at age eight. He told people he liked stamps for their link with geography and history. In 1946, his collection contained more than a million stamps. As President, he often received stamps from White House visitors.
While many postage stamps commemorate people, they also feature places, and events. The image featured on the Homestead Act stamp was derived from a photograph of the John Bakken sod house in Milton, North Dakota. Bakken was born to Norwegian immigrants in 1871 in Benson, Minnesota.
Learn More
- To find additional images related to stamps and postal service, search across the collections of photos and prints on terms such as postage stamps, postal service, or letter.
- Search on the term post route in Collections with Maps for maps of postal routes that include rail routes, post offices, and more.
- A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875 contains many bills and resolutions on the U.S. postal service and post offices. Search across all titles on terms such as postal service, postage, post route, and postmaster for such items.
- Search Congress.gov for more recent legislation. Search there on terms such as postal service, postage stamp, postage, and postmaster for such items.
- A search on post office in Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey yields numerous drawings and photographs of post offices throughout the United States.
- Visit the Web site of the National Postal Museum , a Smithsonian Institution museum, to learn more about stamps and the history of the postal system in the United States.
- The United States Postal Service: An American History 1775-2002 provides a lengthy and informative history of the USPS.
- View an 1889 Postage Stamp Album , designed for collectors, available through Duke University’s online collection, Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920 .
The Battle of Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg began on July 1, 1863. Emboldened by his victory at Chancellorsville, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had decided to invade the North. In September of the previous year, he had ventured north into Maryland where, at Antietam, the bloodiest day of the war occurred. Although the battle was a draw, Lee’s invasion was turned back, but the next summer he made another foray northward.
…he can still remember the peaches on the trees across the field, and the corn being knee high, and how hot it was the day they fought.“William Munroe Graves.” Miss Effie Cowan, interviewer; Mart, Texas, ca. 1936-1939. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940. Manuscript Division
On June 30, General John Buford of the Union’s Army of the Potomac and his cavalry had taken possession of Seminary Ridge west of Gettysburg. Union General George Reynolds arrived with the First Corps on July 1 to assist Buford. Reynolds opened the battle but was struck by a bullet and killed before noon. His death set the tone for the day. Both armies suffered devastating losses on the first day of the battle, but Union losses proved much greater. While the first day of the battle was counted as a Confederate victory, the tide turned on July 2 and the battle came to be viewed as the turning point of the Civil War.
So it ends, this lesser battle of the first day,
Starkly disputed and piecemeal won and lost
By corps-commanders who carried no magic plans
Stowed in their sleeves, but fought and held as they could.
It is past. The board is staked for the greater game
Which is to follow…John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benet. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 294.
William Munroe Graves recalls the stories his fellow veterans told at the seventy-five-year reunion of the Battle of Gettysburg:
Maj.- Gen. O.R. Gillette who was in Davis Brigade, Heaths Division, the Army of Northern Virginia… told of how… the Army of Northern Virginia rolled northward… to strike at Harrisburg and Philadelphia to find shoes for the rebel soldiers bare feet, and food to fill the knapsacks which were almost empty of parched corn rations. He remembered how Lee’s war-tired men came out of the valley of the Shenandoah to meet Meade’s army of the Potomac as it reached out along the roads that centered like the spokes of a wheel at Gettysburg, and how they met and fought and forgot they ever needed shoes…“William Munroe Graves.” Miss Effie Cowan, interviewer; Mart, Texas, ca. 1936-1939. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940. Manuscript Division
Learn More
- See the Today in History features for the second and third days of the Battle of Gettysburg. Search this collection on the keyword Gettysburg or the names of other battles or key figures of the Civil War to find related pages.
- Search on the keyword Gettysburg in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress to read items such as Simon Cameron’s June 29, 1863, telegram to Abraham Lincoln, which reported Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania.
- Search on Gettysburg in Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints to find images that relate to the battle. This collection also includes a Timeline of the Civil War.
- Mathew Brady’s and his colleagues photographs document the sites and the carnage of the battles of the war quite powerfully. However, due to the long exposure times necessary to make readable images, capturing action on film was difficult if not impossible. The public relied on images rendered by sketch artists, printed in the news publications of the day, to get a sense of the battles.
- The American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition contains examples of the work of sketch artist Alfred Waud. Waud ventured dangerously close to the fighting to eloquently capture on paper perhaps more information and emotion than would have been possible with photographs. Among the images in the collection is a sketch entitled Attack of the Louisiana Tigers on a Battery of the 11th Corps at Gettysburg that depicts an attack from the first day of the battle.
- To see photographs of the town and battlefield, search on Gettysburg in the following collections:
The Rough Riders Storm San Juan Hill
On July 1, 1898, Theodore Roosevelt and his volunteer cavalry, the Rough Riders, stormed Kettle Hill, then joined in the capture of the San Juan Hill complex. Thus they helped to secure a U.S. victory in the Battle of Santiago, the decisive battle of the short-lived Spanish-American War. Two days after the battle, the Spanish fleet fled the harbor at Santiago, effectively surrendering control of Cuba. The first U.S. Marines had landed on the island on June 10.
A flamboyant personality with a taste for adventure and an appetite for competition, Roosevelt argued vociferously for war against Spain while serving as President McKinley’s assistant secretary of the navy. When McKinley declared war in 1898, Roosevelt resigned his position, organized a volunteer cavalry unit, and took it to Cuba where he could be in the thick of action. The Rough Riders generated widespread publicity and made a national hero of the future president.
Most soldiers found their experiences in the Spanish-American War considerably less glamorous than the widely-depicted exploits of the Rough Riders. In American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940, a veteran recalls his very different experiences in the war:
We spent most of our time in Chickamauga Park [in Georgia]…and it was nothing but a…fever swamp. They lost more men there than they did in Cuba, a hell of a lot more. They died like flies at Chickamauga. Just because it was a battle site and a park they made it into a military camp and it killed off their own troops by the thousand. All the fighting we did was in rough-and-tumble street brawls with the southerners, still fighting the Civil War. We had some tough battles with them all along the line. They still hated Yankees, especially Yanks in uniform.“Five Years More.” Roaldus Richmond, interviewer; Barre, Vermont, September 14, 1940. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940. Manuscript Division
Learn More
- African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907, a collection of pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, contains a Chronology of the War with Spain, as well as A Sermon on the War, a pamphlet urging African Americans to join in the war effort, and “Eight Months in Camp,” a soldier’s firsthand account of the war first published in The National Baptist Magazinein 1899.
- Search on Spanish-American War in the collection American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940 to find more texts of veterans’ recollections.
- Consult Web Guide, Theodore Roosevelt: A Resource Guide to find more online resources relating to Theodore Roosevelt.
- Theodore Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to have his career and life chronicled on a large scale by motion picture companies (even though his predecessors, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, were the first to be filmed). Search on the term rough riders in Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film to see, for example, members of the Rough Riders escorting Roosevelt during the Inaugural Ceremony in 1905.
- The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures contains motion pictures of the war and the subsequent Philippine Revolution that were produced between 1898 and 1901. The Spanish-American War was the first U.S. war in which the motion picture camera played a role. The Edison Manufacturing Company and the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company made these films that consist of actualities filmed in the U.S., Cuba, and the Philippines.The films show troops, ships, notable figures, and parades, as well as reenactments of battles and other war-time events and include films of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. A special presentation, The Motion Picture Camera Goes to War, presents the motion pictures in chronological order together with brief essays that provide a historical context for their filming.
- The collection Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco, 1897 to 1916, contains a film of American soldiers departing for the war, Troops Embarking at San Francisco. Footage of the dedication of a monument to George Dewey, the naval hero who defeated the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in the Philippines in 1898, is included in the film Panorama, Union Square, San Francisco.
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