Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “Confederate folded letter” — 40 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 01:05 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Confederate folded letter
Artist not stated in the record · 1864

Congress of the Confederation delegate folded letter
Artist not stated in the record · July 25,1785

Folded Letter
Artist not stated in the record · 1839

letter from Confederate through the lines cover
Artist not stated in the record · June 20, 1861

Civil War Cover
Artist not stated in the record · February 16, 1861

Confederate adversity cover with handstamped paid
Artist not stated in the record · 1861-1865

Cayenne, French Guiana to New York via Boston folded ship letter
Artist not stated in the record · March 16, 1790

Confederate adversity cover
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1861-1865

Confederate flag-of-truce letter
Artist not stated in the record · 1864

Confederate patriotic envelope
Artist not stated in the record · 1861-1865

Confederate flag-of-truce cover
Artist not stated in the record · February 12, 1864

Confederate flag-of-truce cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1864
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 21784 matched · 40 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-01 01:05 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.