he Smithsonian Institution houses an extraordinary array of Civil War artifacts in nearly a dozen of its museums and archives. They range in interest from personal effects—Abraham Lincoln’s black beaver top hat—to examples of uniforms and weapons, some of which were manufactured in the tens of thousands. Many artifacts, like a sheet of ninety-six Confederate postage stamps accessioned in 1886, were gifts to the Smithsonian from the American people. In the case of these stamps, they were the first items in what became the national philatelic collection, housed today under its own roof at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum.

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