Definition
The fee or charge established by law for the conveyance of letters, packets, and other mailable matter through the public mail system. In legal usage, postage refers specifically to a government-regulated charge — not merely a private shipping fee — and is understood as a creature of statute rather than contract. The rate structure for domestic postage is fixed by legislative authority; rates for international mail are set through arrangements entered into by executive postal authorities pursuant to congressional authorization.
A postage stamp (sometimes called a postage atom in older editions of Black's) is a government-issued ticket, typically adhesive, affixed to mail matter as evidence that the applicable postage has been paid.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The system of transporting letters and parcels; the charge for posting an item; a postage stamp or similar token affixed to an item as evidence of payment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The price established by law to be paid for the conveyance of a letter or other mailable matter by a public post. A postage stamp is a government stamp required to be affixed to articles sent by mail in payment of postage, especially an adhesive stamp issued and sold for that purpose.
The common and legal definitions align closely here. The one meaningful distinction is emphasis: ordinary usage treats postage as a practical matter of cost and convenience, while legal usage emphasizes its statutory character — postage is a rate fixed by law or by delegated executive authority, and disputes over postage charges are therefore disputes about the application of statute and regulation, not common-law contract terms.
Why It Matters in Research
Postage surfaces in legal sources primarily in three contexts: postal rate regulation, evidentiary questions about proper mailing (particularly in notice and service-of-process disputes), and tax or duty classification questions where postage charges were historically distinguished from other government-imposed levies.
In historical research, the statutory character of postage rates matters. Before comprehensive federal postal legislation, rate schedules were set piecemeal, and what constituted lawful postage varied by period and by class of mail. Researchers tracing notice requirements in older cases — particularly where statutes required mailing with "sufficient postage prepaid" — should verify what the applicable rate schedule was at the time, since underpayment could affect the legal adequacy of notice.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry in the source material above contains a transcription error: the postage definition is partially overwritten by text that appears to belong to an entry on postliminium. Researchers relying on that edition for postage should treat it as corrupted and defer to Black's or Bouvier's.
Postage is also relevant in evidence questions concerning the mailbox rule — the presumption that a properly addressed, stamped, and mailed item was received by the addressee. Courts applying this presumption typically require a showing that correct postage was affixed; proof of postage is therefore a practical element in establishing the foundation for the presumption.
Internationally, postage rates and arrangements carry public international law dimensions. Bouvier notes that foreign letter rates were set through executive arrangements authorized by Congress — a structure that persisted through the Universal Postal Union framework. Research into cross-border postal obligations may require tracking both domestic statute and treaty or convention texts.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the essential definition without meaningful disagreement: postage is a statutory fee for mail carriage. Black's first and second editions are substantively identical, with the second adding the "postage atom" terminology for postage stamps — a label that did not achieve lasting currency and does not appear in later editions or common usage. Bouvier's is the most detailed, adding the useful distinction between domestic rates (fixed directly by law) and international rates (fixed by the Postmaster General under delegated authority), which reflects the actual regulatory structure as it existed through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
None of the historical sources address the modern administrative and regulatory complexity of postal rate-setting, which shifted significantly with the creation of independent postal regulatory bodies and the transformation of postal services from direct government departments to quasi-governmental corporations in the twentieth century. Researchers working with post-1970 U.S. postal law should not rely on historical dictionary definitions as a guide to current rate-setting authority.