Confederate cover with a ten cent CS blue stamp postmarked Amelia Courthouse, to Gustavus A. Myers, Richmond, Virginia.

The attorney G.A. Myers (1801-1869) was the most prominent Jewish citizen of Richmond, capitol of the Confederacy. During the Civil War he was the Confederate consul to Great Britain. When Richmond fell on April 2, 1865, following nine months of siege, Abraham Lincoln visited the city with his son Tad. Myers and two others formed the delegation that met with Lincoln aboard the USS Malvern and negotiated the terms of the surrender. An oral testimony from the 1930’s records that Myers' daughter “told me that when Lincoln was killed a few days later, [her father] was much perturbed and said that the South had lost a friend.” See Abraham Lincoln in Richmond, in: The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 41, no. 4, (1933) pp. 318–22.