United States postmasters' provisional stamps

[1] In Great Britain, such uniformity had been adopted as a necessary prelude to the issue, in May 1840, of the world's first adhesive postage stamps, to be used for the prepayment of mail.

(Before this 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.)

It was clearly Britain’s standardization that led the U.S. Congress to do likewise in 1845; but while preliminary versions of the Act of March 3 also dealt with the possibility of issuing stamps, the law finally enacted did not authorize the U.S. Post office to do so.

According to census data supplied by Siegel Auctions, only six additional copies of the Alexandria Provisional are known, all on buff-colored paper.

[5] The national U. S. stamps introduced on July 1, 1847 essentially conformed to the design features of the New York Postmaster's provisional—not surprisingly, given that both the provisional and national issues were designed and printed by the same New York firm (Rawdon, Wright, Hatch and Edson).