FREE: 12- FOREVER STAMPS: The Civil War 1861, A Nation Touched with Fire

The listing, 12- FOREVER STAMPS: The Civil War 1861, A Nation Touched with Fire has ended.

Have you seen these Civil War, FOREVER postage stamps? I did today and bought a package just to put on Listia. So, here is a little about these stamps.

Over the next four years, the U.S. Postal Service will issue a series of stamps commemorating the Civil War's 150th anniversary. A souvenir sheet of two stamps will be issued each year, with the final issue in 2015.

The first issue was released on April 12, 2011, the 150th anniversary of the war's beginning. It is a sheet of two stamps, one depicting the firing on Fort Sumter, April 12-13, 1861 and the other depicting the Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861.

The Fort Sumter stamp is a reproduction of a Currier & Ives lithograph entitled “Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor” (ca. 1861). The First Bull Run stamp is a reproduction of “The Capture of Rickett’s Battery," a 1964 painting by Sidney E. King that shows fierce fighting on the Henry Hill site where a key Union battery had been placed. The stamp pane features comments on the war by President Abraham Lincoln, black abolitionist/human rights leader Frederick Douglass, and Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. (It was at the First Battle of Bull Run that the latter earned his famous nickname.) Also included on the stamp pane are some of the lyrics to “Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier,” a folk song of sacrifice and lament that was popular during the Civil War. The stamp pane’s background image is a ca. 1861 photograph of a Union regiment near Falls Church, VA.