🏛️ Graded 1888 N76 W. Duke, Sons & Co. Great Americans #WEBSTER Daniel Webster Tobacco Card SGC 5 – A Piece of Victorian-Era American Commercial History, One of the Rarest Antique Card Series in Existence, Issued 137 Years Ago by the Duke Tobacco Empire Alongside the Nation's Greatest Statesmen and Figures, Graded SGC 5 Excellent, Surviving the 19th Century Intact

🏛️ The tobacco card format – the small, stiff picture cards inserted into cigarette packs as premiums, stiffeners, and advertising vehicles – is where the collectible card hobby began. Before the baseball card was the dominant format, before the trading card became a children's product distributed through retail channels, the tobacco companies of the 1880s discovered that customers would seek out particular packs specifically to find particular cards, that series created demand that individual cards could not, and that the face on a card could make a product more desirable than the tobacco it accompanied. W. Duke, Sons & Co. was among the most aggressive and inventive practitioners of this discovery. The Duke family's tobacco operation out of Durham, North Carolina – the enterprise that would eventually become American Tobacco Company, one of the most powerful corporations in American history – issued tobacco cards across multiple series in the 1880s with a prolificacy and a visual quality that made their cards among the most collected of the era. 🏛️

🏛️ The N76 “Great Americans” series is among the most historically significant of those Duke sets. Where other tobacco series of the period focused on athletes, entertainers, or national flags, the N76 series reached into American history and political culture for its subjects – the presidents, senators, orators, and statesmen whose portraits decorated the halls of government buildings and whose names appeared in the history books that every American child of the 1880s was expected to learn. Daniel Webster among them: the Massachusetts senator, Secretary of State under three presidents, and one of the most celebrated orators in American political history, whose career spanned the founding generation and the antebellum era and whose speeches on the nature of the Union were studied as models of rhetoric for decades after his death in 1852. 🏛️

🏛️ SGC 5 Excellent grade confirms that this card – issued in 1888, 137 years before the current date – survived the Victorian era, two world wars, and the attrition of time that has eliminated the majority of tobacco cards from the historical record entirely. To hold an N76 in any condition is to hold one of the oldest collectible cards in existence. To hold one in SGC 5 is to hold one that the last century treated with relative respect. Condition: NOS. 🏛️

🏛️ 1888. N76 Great Americans. W. Duke, Sons & Co. Daniel Webster. Statesman. Orator. Senator. American Tobacco History. Victorian Era. SGC 5 Excellent. Hall of Fame Sports. Condition: NOS.

🏛️ Graded 1888 N76 W. Duke Sons Great Americans Daniel Webster Tobacco Card SGC 5. Hall of Fame Sports. Condition: NOS.