Vintage 1961 Civil War Centennial Series Keep Your Powder Dry Cover ✉️ Stamped Envelope

What Was DIXIPEX IV? ✉️ DIXIPEX IV Civil War Series Cover, 1861-1865 Centennial, Mailed in 1961

Size: 6 1/2" x 3 3/4" ~ Postally used, with a 4-cent stamp and a 1961 postmark. Choose your city from the menu.

These are real covers from the Civil War Centennial, cacheted by the Dixie Stamp Collectors of Birmingham, Alabama, and mailed in 1961, a hundred years after the war began. The cachet at the left shows a Confederate Stars and Bars flag with a seven-star canton on its pole beside a field cannon firing, under 1861 - CIVIL WAR - 1865 CENTENNIAL, with the motto "TRUST IN GOD AND DAVIS, BUT KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY" and DIXIPEX IV CIVIL WAR SERIES underneath.

Each cover carries a 4-cent U.S. stamp and a real 1961 machine cancel, and they were mailed from different towns on different days. You choose the town:

• Montgomery, Ala., June 1, 1961, with a 4-cent stamp marked JULY 4, 1959
• Charleston, S.C., April 13, 1961, with the 4-cent CIVIL WAR CENTENNIAL FORT SUMTER 1861-1961 stamp and a STRIKE BACK AT CANCER slogan cancel
• Bowling Green, Ky., December 9, 1961, with a 4-cent stamp marked JULY 4, 1960 and a PRAY FOR PEACE slogan cancel

The backs are plain.

📮 DIXIPEX

DIXIPEX was the annual stamp exhibition of the Dixie Stamp Collectors club of Birmingham, Alabama, and DIXIPEX IV was the 1961 show, held all through June. That year the club offered a series of cacheted covers giving extensive coverage of the Civil War Centennial, serviced at several points, and it made a point of creating a cachet for each individual event instead of one cover-all design. The proceeds from the covers went to promote the club's exhibitions and stamp activities.

⚔️ The Places on the Postmarks

Each of these towns has its own place in the war's first year. Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy in February 1861, where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated on the steps of the State Capitol, until the government moved to Richmond that May. At Charleston, the war began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and on the Charleston cover the stamp is the Post Office's 1961 Fort Sumter Civil War Centennial stamp, a cannon and gunner. Bowling Green was occupied by Confederate troops under General Simon Bolivar Buckner in September 1861, and that November the provisional Confederate government of Kentucky made it its seat. The Confederates pulled out in February 1862 after Grant captured Forts Henry and Donelson.

💥 Keep Your Powder Dry

The motto on the cachet is a Confederate twist on a much older saying. "Trust in God and keep your powder dry" is attributed to Oliver Cromwell, though it first turned up in print in 1834, in William Blacker's poem "Oliver's Advice," as "Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!" Here Jefferson Davis takes his place beside the Almighty.

📜 A Centennial Remembered Two Ways

Congress created the Civil War Centennial Commission in 1957, and the commemorations ran until the centennial of Appomattox in 1965. Northern and Southern states looked at the war in very different ways, and it showed. For the Fort Sumter centennial in April 1961, South Carolina raised a Confederate battle flag, and state lawmakers made its display permanent eleven months later. Meanwhile, Montgomery, the Confederacy's first capital, was already at the center of the civil rights movement, from the bus boycott of 1955 to the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, the same year the Centennial came to a close. A cover like this is a small piece of how the country was looking back at its hardest war a hundred years on.

🖼️ Display

It's a fine piece for a stamp collector, a Civil War historian or a postal history buff, and it looks great in a cover album or a frame beside other Centennial material.