While doing research for the Georgia Archives Month exhibit, I found a Civil War envelope made out of wallpaper in our collections. Having a childhood full of Civil War museum trips and (mis)adventures, I assumed that the envelope was made out of wallpaper for an economical reason, but upon further researching these envelopes, I discovered that not only were wallpaper envelopes unique to the South but also that they were made of more materials than wallpaper, including even song sheets and maps.¹ The question soon arose: why didn’t they use traditional paper to make their envelopes? The answer unfolded in expected, though interesting, ways.
After the Southern states seceded from the North, the federal government suspended all postal services for any “rebelling” states in 1861. U.S. post offices wouldn’t accept Confederate postage, and all corresponding mail was sent to the Dead Letter Office.² The Union then blockaded Southern ports, making it increasingly difficult to not only send and receive letters but also to access paper on which to write letters and to make envelopes for those letters. For that reason, envelopes from the South were handmade after 1861 and made out of thrifty, but crafty, household materials.
With paper shortages and restricted postal services, families improvised by creating envelopes out of wallpaper, book pages/flyleaves, broadsides, religious tracts, accounting book pages, military forms, receipts, brown wrapping paper from dry goods stores, or they unglued an already used envelope and turned it inside out, so it could be reused. Any available paper source at hand was fair game for the resourceful person in need of an envelope. Collectively, these handmade envelopes are called “adversity covers,” referring to the regional economic devastation out of which these envelopes were produced.¹
As the Smithsonian National Postal Museum notes, despite the difficulties in ensuring a letter was ever received, “families and friends persisted in writing, however, since the letters they exchanged were their only connection to their men at the front, and soldiers greedy for any reminder of home clamored for more mail.”² Because letters were so valuable for the writer and reader in both the Northern and Southern home, envelopes were creatively reimagined as an art form through envelope-making, or for the North, through envelope-designing.
Instead of making wallpaper envelopes, Northerners made “patriotic covers.” Patriotic covers began with propaganda and advertisements that were printed on the envelope’s front, but during wartime, Northerners began using the envelope space to draw slogans or colored sketches. Patriotic covers ranged from cartoons to political pictures and messages from the sender. Some senders drew wartime scenes on envelopes as well, transforming the materiality of the envelope in the same way that the “adversity covers” did.
All of this began with a single wallpaper envelope housed in Georgia College’s Special Collections, that was found by accident.³ While wallpaper envelopes are unique to the South and we are in Milledgeville, it is not definite that this particular envelope is indeed a “Southern” wallpaper envelope. However, it is likely, given the explicit connection between using wallpaper for envelope-making and the Southern region during the Civil War. Our envelope is made from a light green and pink wallpaper, but some envelope designs used different paper products simultaneously, floral wallpaper making up the bottom half with a bill of sale making up the top portion, for example. In others, all four corners of an envelope were made of different paper types, all glued and folded into one piece.
My research into Victorian envelope-making ended unexpectedly when our new Community archivist, Jessamyn Swan, commented that Victorian wallpaper often had arsenic in it, so we rushed to go pull our envelope! It’s possible that these wallpaper envelopes poisoned the Victorians with flakes of arsenic, so we then wondered (and hoped otherwise) whether our wallpaper envelope has arsenic in it? With that, my research began all over again, this time in search for arsenic in Victorian wallpaper.
¹“A Bit of Postal History: Advertising Covers from the Burleson Collection.” Baylor University, The Texas Collection, 2019. Web. https://blogs.baylor.edu/texascollection/2011/06/14/ a-bit-of-postal-history-advertising-covers-from-the-burleson-collection/.
²“A Nation Divided.” Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Web. https://postalmuseum.si.edu/ exhibits/current/binding-the-nation/a-nation-divided/index.html
³“Envelope.” Series 1, Box 3, Small Manuscript Collection, Special Collections, Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College, Milledgeville, Georgia.
Dispatches from Penitentiary Square 