The John A. McAllister Civil War Envelope Collection

Abstract

By June 1861 an “Envelope Mania” had taken hold of the Union, which, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, was an economic boon for engravers, stationers, and printers who had “no cause to complain of a lack of business” while others struggled to adjust to the new wartime economy. This collecting fad was made possible by recent innovations to methods of graphics printing. Civil War–era printers in the North fed the frenzy by producing patriotic, sentimental, and satiric illustrations that covered the entire fronts of wrappers and rendered them nearly unusable as anything other than collectors’ items. Consequently, many of these pieces never made it into circulation, but rather were saved in the scrapbooks of “collectors of curiosities” like Philadelphian John A. McAllister (1822–1896), who gave his collection of Civil War ephemera to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1886.