This riot of creativity was sparked by, of all things, a change in postal rates. For a brief period at the beginning of the war, envelopes were printed in the Confederacy as well, and Southerners could send letters with a portrait of Jefferson Davis, “Our First President,” or any number of depictions of the new nation's flag. These patterns range from simple flags and mottos to macabre revenge fantasies, with the hanged bodies of Southern generals lining the road to Washington. “You could buy a hundred different designs in a single packet for one dollar,” he says. There were many such envelopes to choose from: Over the course of the war, 10,000 or more Union designs were printed, says Steven Boyd, a historian at University of Texas, San Antonio. The volume of mail ticked upward with letters to distant homes, and when it was time to send a letter, soldiers and civilians alike reached for a new kind of envelope, freshly printed and decorated with red and blue flags, delicate engravings of eagles, poems about the girl left behind, or the faces of generals, whom people at home might never have seen. More than 2.6 million men joined the Union Army over the course of the war, while roughly a million joined the Confederate forces. Boys from Maine fought in the forests of Virginia. Farmhands from rural New York walked the streets of Washington, D.C., serving in the Union Army of the Potomac. In 1861 and the years that followed, many American men found themselves far from home.
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