U.S. Stampless Folded Letters & Covers 1840’s.

Largest Size: 3 x 5 3/4 in. (folded)

This lot consists of three stampless folded letters and covers from the 1840’s,    all addressed to Nathan Ellis, a captain in the state militia from Blue Hill, Maine, a small town with less than 1500 people in the 1830’s. The three folded letters are from 1842, 1845, and 1846, and two of the covers have nice Paid 5 cancels from Blue Hill. 
There are also two folded letters with family records for the Ellis family that go back to 1772 and a folded letter for the family of Reuben Sewell that goes back to 1781 (with a final entry date of 1835), and six cartes de visite photos of members of the Ellis family that probably date to the 1870’s.
Stampless folded covers were used to mail letters before stamps were invented. 
People wrote a letter and folded the paper to create a secure packet without an envelope, the papers were sealed and held together with candle wax, the postmaster would write how much was due to send the letter and apply a hand-stamped marking on the outside of the folded letter, and the postmark would contain the name of the town where the letter originated. 
Ellis was part of the Aroostook Expedition, an armed civil posse dispatched by the state of Maine to arrest Canadian lumberjacks who were trying to harvest valuable white pine trees in the Aroostook and St. John River valleys in Maine. This happened between 1838 - 1839: the Maine legislature viewed this as theft of American resources and an invasion of American sovereignty, so the legislature authorized a Maine land agent and local sheriff to form a volunteer militia, Ellis was a captain in this militia. 
In 1839, the sheriff led about 200 armed men into the wilderness to arrest the Canadian loggers and confiscate their equipment, the force was officially dubbed the Aroostook Expedition. The lumberjacks resisted fiercely, breaking into an American government arsenal for weapons and capturing the state’s land agent. In response, the Maine posse retaliated by capturing the British lumber warden; the Canadian governor of New Brunswick declared Maine to be in open invasion and mobilized the British military. Maine countered by drafting 10,000 militiamen and allocating $800,000 for war, and erecting fortifications like the Fort Kent blockhouse to protect what they viewed as theirs, Despite thousands of soldiers marching to the border, there were no combat fatalities. (Legend has it that the only casualty was a black bear shot during a misunderstanding.)   
So with all this going back and forth between the United States and Canada    and wanting to avoid all-out war, U.S. President Van Buren dispatched General Winfield Scott to negotiate a truce, and three years later, all sides signed the Webster Ashburton Treaty of 1842, which finally established an official  international boundary between Maine and Canada that is in effect to this day, and luckily, this turned out to be a bloodless international boundary dispute. 
The first Ellis letter was also about a roster discrepancy that had to be settled before the men under Ellis’s command could be paid, and the stampless folded letters here, as well as the family records and cartes de visite, are all in very good condition. 

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