Nice Revenue Usage On 1866 Tennesee Check

The conversation ranged from "someone with too much time on his hands" to "there really wasn't any room to do anything else". I seem to recall that I thought the latter, but I had only been collecting revenues for about 8 years at that point. October will be the 49th anniversary of the first ARA meeting I ever went to. I wish I knew where it went. :-)

It? You mean the 49 years?

Yeah, I keep looking for them. :-)

Interesting to note that Brown Brothers went through the added expense of having their own watermarked paper made.

Revenuecollector, that adjoined second & third bill of exchange has me puzzled. I've never seen a pair attached, and clearly sent, like that. I always thought the whole point of having an original, 2nd, and 3rd copies was to send them all separately via different mail routes to ensure that at least one would arrive. Why bother to fill out two copies and send them together?

This also got me wondering about how they were taxed. You wouldn't put stamps on each one, so I'm assuming that the first one received would get the revenue stamp when it was cashed?

Greg,

All three were subject to the tax. Original and Second were sent by separate routes, the first arrival was cashed. In the event the Original and Second did not arrive, the Third could be cashed.

All three were taxed? That doesn't make sense to me. I thought the intent was to tax the transaction, not just document. Only one represents a transaction.

Greg,

May I suggest you spend some time reading Mike Mahler's seminal work on the first issue, A Catalog of Revenue Stamped Documents of the Civil War Era by Type and Tax Rate. Twenty years old and still the definitive work on understanding the documentary taxes of that era. Don't try to apply ideas that you may have formed from limited exposure to a subject. Go to the definitive source which is based on a study of the initial law and the subsequent revisions to understand the documents that we all cherish.

Good advice -- thanks!

Doc w/ 5c Proprietary x6 should have three taxes: the note itself @ 5c per $100, should have had 35c but looks like only 30c was paid; printed cognovit clause, agreeing to immediate judgement in case of non-payment, taxed at Agreement 5c rate; and as the note was not paid, the 50c stamp pays the Original Process tax (actually the Confession of Judgement subtype of Original Process). You only see this in Penn. as far as I know!

Oops I didn't look closely enuf, There are 7 5c Proprietaries, probably all affixed together. So I'd say the Agreement tax was probably unpaid. The Confession of Judgement usage is rare.

You would know, it's really your subject.