by John Freeman
Inventing the Modern Post Office
For letter writing to really explode, however, it needed to be affordable to the masses. Charles I was the first monarch to extend mail service to his subjects in 1635, largely because he needed money, and even then it was too expensive for most people to use it. In 1680, William Dockwra, an ex-merchant in the African slave trade, set up a penny post in London. For the first time, anyone could mail a letter anywhere in the city for a penny—the equivalent of roughly half a pound, or $1, today—which was a boon to business but not much help to people whose relatives and friends lived a hundred miles away. The government absorbed the service and then later squashed an attempt to establish a half-penny post in London. Sending letters was still very expensive, since rates were charged by distance and letters had to travel by armed coach. Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, however, could use the service for free.
Most of the features of modern mail come from the suggestions of a retired schoolteacher named Rowland Hill, who in 1837 published Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicality. Hill argued that mail should cost a penny, wherever it went; he believed the postage should be paid in advance; and he wisely suggested that envelopes be used. By 1840, every one of these suggestions had been taken to heart by the British postal service, the Royal Mail, and letter writing had exploded. Between 1839 and 1853, English letter volume shot up sevenfold, from 75.9 million per year to 410.8 million. By 1873, the Royal Mail was handling 1 billion pieces of mail, employing 42,000 men and women, and boasting more than 12,000 post offices.
The Royal Mail quickly went global. As early as 1860, mail traveled once a month via the Suez Canal between Great Britain and the Australian colonies, including Tasmania and New Zealand. It was dispatched from Southampton on the twelfth of each month. Postage for these international shipments had to be paid in advance: it was thirty-three cents per half ounce for a letter. Newspapers were sent for just four cents each.
Most impressively, the Royal Mail made money doing this. In 1860, a report showed that it had earned $6.5 million for the government. By 1873, the sum was creeping up to $8 million. The service became the model for mail systems the world around, its facility paving the way for a heyday of print. People wrote and read more and thereby began to develop a sense of their own ideas. The events of their lives mattered because they were being recorded. They wanted to be heard. Letters pages, like those Richard Steele had inaugurated in The Tatler and The Spectator in the previous century, filled with an array of new voices.
British citizens also seemed to enjoy testing the limits of this new civic invention. A report in 1874 revealed that among the curios to turn up in the dead-letter office were a horned frog (alive), a still squirming stage beetle, white mice, snails, an owl, a kingfisher, a rat, carving knives, a fork, a gun, and cartridges. One dead letter turned out to have more than £2,000 in banknotes in it; another, which arrived opened, was stuffed with Turkish currency. Thought to be old lottery forms, it was given to children of postal officers to play with.
The Business of Sending Mail in America
Tasked with covering enormous distances in a countryside prone to violence, where gun ownership was a constitutionally defended right, and a strong federal government was deeply distrusted, the U.S. mail faced far greater problems than the British. Early mail routes were marauded; carriers, who had to ferry all letters COD, many times couldn’t collect or simply pocketed the payments; bootleg companies covered the same terrain, often at cheaper rates. The postal service was also seen as a sinecure, a system of patronage. Far more letters than should have been were franked or sent for free, depriving the fledgling network of much-needed revenue. As postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin appointed his older brother postmaster of Boston; when James Franklin stepped down from the $1,000-a-year post, Benjamin Franklin appointed his brother-in-law as his successor.
And mail remained, for a long time, hideously expensive. In the early 1800s, it cost twenty-five cents to send a single sheet of paper more than four hundred miles. In a country where the average wage was a dollar a day this was beyond the reach of most Americans, and, not surprisingly, mail volume remained very low. In 1815, the entire United States was serviced by just three thousand post offices, doing a little more than $1 million of business. Two decades later, mail began traveling by rail and then by private stagecoach companies, operating under contracts that were so lucrative that if a company failed to get them renewed it immediately retired from the business. But the two coasts remained separate. To get to California, mail had to travel around Cape Horn, after which coaches and trains took it to the Oregon Territory.
One of the most famous chapters of U.S. mail history involved the shrinkage of delivery times across the country to a matter of days—a vast improvement, considering that in 1845 it took President James Polk six months to get a message to California, and a necessary one financially once gold was discovered in the state in 1848 and San Francisco’s population rocketed from 500 to 150,000 in just three decades. News of discoveries had to travel somehow. The problem was serious enough that in 1855 Congress even allocated $35,000 to exploring the use of camels to haul mail from Texas to California.
As has happened throughout the story of communication in America, government turned to private industry to solve the problem. Postmaster General Aaron Brown later awarded a $600,000 contract to the stagecoach entrepreneur John Butterfield to carry mail end to end if he could do it in twenty-five days. By 1858, after spending $1 million to set up a network of two hundred relay stations, two thousand horses and mules, and more than twelve hundred employees, Butterfield had done it. There was even a manual of employee behavior, in which lay this recommendation: “18.—INDIANS. A good look-out should be kept for Indians. No intercourse should be had with them, but let them alone; by no means annoy or wrong them.”
Coaches left from Saint Louis and arrived in San Francisco, carting mostly mail but passengers, too, in quarters cramped enough to make airline “coach” seats seem a luxury—especially as coach travelers paid $200 in 1860, the equivalent of $4,500 today, for a one-way fare from Saint Louis to San Francisco. Raphael Pumpelly, who rode the line west to Tucson, remembered, “As the occupants of the front and middle seats faced each other, it was necessary for these six people to interlock their knees; and there being room inside for only ten of the twelve legs, each side of the coach was graced by a foot, now dangling near the wheel, now trying in vain to find a place of support.”
But for those with money to spend, a need to travel, and a desire for adventure, it was worth the discomfort. The travel also facilitated the exploration and imagining of the American landscape. In Roughing It, Mark Twain described traveling around the western part of the United States on several coaches just like the one Pumpelly packed himself into, though not of the Butterfield line. “We three were the only passengers, this trip,” he wrote. “We sat on the back seat, inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags—for we had three days’ delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard.”
It says a lot about America’s idea of itself that Butterfield’s sensible, pioneering line—which never suffered an Indian attack in the two and a half years of its operation and never missed its twenty-five-day deadline—was eclipsed by the even shorter-lived Pony Express. Speed and brutality trumps efficiency in the imagination. This colorful solution was proposed by California senator William Gwin, a pro-slavery southerner who once participated in a duel (neither party suffered a gunshot, but a donkey was killed) and later traveled to France in 1864 in an attempt to interest Napoleon III in settling American slave owners in Sonora, Mexico. Gwin was a strong proponent of westward expansion and had carried through the U.S. Senate a bill appropriating money for steamers traveling between Califor
nia, China, and Japan. He was also an early proponent of purchasing Alaska from the tsar. His notion of mail would be similarly spectacular.
In January 1860, Gwin met with the Missouri freighter William H. Russell to discuss establishing a ten-day relay service to California. Gwin was enthusiastic enough to encourage them to go ahead; they had sixty days to do the job. Ads for riders went out in March of that year. They recruited 80 “skinny” young fellows, whose weight was not to exceed 125 pounds, and 400 tough characters to staff 190 relay stations over a 1,900-mile route from Saint Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. It was dangerous work, for which the young men were paid $50 per month plus room and board. In the beginning, the riders rode with bow knives, revolvers, and at least one rifle, eventually thinning down to just a pistol.
It was also expensive: $5 per half ounce. The saddlebags contained letters, some relaying news of gold discoveries in California, and condensed versions of eastern newspapers. In just 18 months of business, the Pony Express transported 30,000 pieces of mail a total of 650,000 miles. Its fastest delivery set a record in carrying President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address from Saint Joseph to Sacramento in seven days and seventeen hours. If only Lincoln had had Obama’s BlackBerry! At just fifteen years of age, William F. Cody was the youngest pony rider to carry the mail. On his second year on the job, he rode up to a station and, discovering that his relief rider had been killed, rode on with a new horse, covering some 384 miles without rest.
Once the telegram reached California, however, the legendary service soon became cost-inefficient. The last Pony Express ran in October 1861, just eighteen months after its beginning. Its accomplishments were eulogized in the Sacramento Bee: “Farewell Pony… Farewell and forever, thou staunch, wilderness-overcoming, swift-footed messenger…. Thou wert the pioneer of the continent in the rapid transmission of intelligence between its people, and have dragged in your train the lightning itself, which in good time, will be followed by steam communication by rail. Rest upon your honors; be satisfied with them, your destiny has been fulfilled—a new and higher power has superseded you.”
Making a Nation with Words
Around the time the telegram began to take flight, postal rates plummeted. The Postal Acts of 1845 and 1851 reduced the cost of a letter to a flat three cents to anywhere in the United States. The rate wasn’t raised again until 1958, when it climbed to four cents. The effect on mail volume was overwhelming. Residential post office boxes, a hallmark of America, began going up in 1858 and soon became ubiquitous. In 1840, the average American sent three letters a year; by 1900 that figure was sixty-nine letters per annum and the total volume of letters outnumbered telegrams fifty to one. By 1950, the mail was almost out of control; in 1960, the U.S. Post Office was handling 63 billion pieces of mail—the equivalent of 350 pieces per year for every man, woman, and child in America.
From the Outpost to the Common
In the rapidly expanding country, the post office became one of the most important public commons. “Most early postmasters were storekeepers,” wrote an ex–postmaster general, Arthur Summerfield, in his book U.S. Post Office. “Their places of business were the community centers. They knew everyone in town and the surrounding countryside. They were respected. They knew something of elementary account-keeping. Having property, they were responsible and could be bonded.”
Mail carriers became people of note, and from a very early time some of them were women. When Franklin’s brother John died on the job in Boston, Mrs. John Franklin became not just the first woman postmaster, but also the first woman to hold public office in America. Women postmasters followed in Baltimore (1775) and Charleston, Maryland (1786). The first female carrier went to work in North Carolina in 1794. By 1893, there were 6,335 postmistresses, some of whom juggled several jobs at once, like this woman, described in an early report about mail carriers around the United States:
Mrs. Clara Carter of West Ellsworth, Maine drives the mail coach from that place to Ellsworth, seven miles away….
This energetic woman rises early in the morning, does the cooking for five in the family, starts at seven for the city with the mail and numerous errands that are given to her without memoranda. She returns at noon, gets dinner, goes to the blueberry fields and picks ten quarters of berries or more in the afternoon, and in the cool of evening does the family washing and ironing and other household tasks. This amount of work she performs six days in the week, varying the routine in the afternoon, out of berry season, by sewing for the family. She finds time, too, to play on the parlor organ an hour or more in the evening, or to entertain visitors.
Prior to rural phone service, the postman “would carry news of forest fires, of accident, or an outbreak of illness on a farm, to the nearest communication center. Unofficially he (or she) became the bearer of local news, or gossip if you wish.” People who read the news wrote to one another about what they learned, especially emigrants in America; it was a way to connect the past with the present over here with what was once home. “I see in the newspaper that they have had some trouble between Sweden and Norway,” wrote Olaf Larsson from Kellogg, Idaho, in a 1905 letter.
The mail was also a highly effective tool at keeping new emigrants in touch with one another. Here’s a letter Pet Stred sent to his brother in Sweden from Bay Horse, Idaho, in 1897:
I am well and work and grind away a little every day but I have been sick, not so that I was bedridden, but I was still very ill a few days ago but am now completely healthy again. I have worked at various jobs this summer. For a while I worked on a road that was being built. One month I worked for a farmer and now I work at a smelter where they smelt ore that is taken out of the mines. That is hard work and takes real Swedish strength to bear with it. The work is very tough and it is hot like a certain place [meaning Hell; underlined in original]. I do not know how long I will stay here, when I get tired of it [I] will have to try something else. Those who are young and inexperienced should try everything.
As in England, some people enjoyed seeing just how far the mail could go. In 1903, one man set up a Nonsense Correspondence Club and began sending unusual items through the mail. “I owed a friend a dollar,” the man wrote. “I mailed him a silver dollar with a two cent stamp stuck on one side and the address on the other. He received it.” His next prank, however, created more havoc. When dining in Key West, he filched some croquettes off the dinner table, wrapped them in tinfoil, and mailed them to Philadelphia, labeled NATURAL HISTORY SPECIMENS. The packet burst in the mail, and, worried that it had scattered someone’s remains, the Philadelphia post office sent the remains to the morgue and placed them on ice. It then mailed him a letter saying he would be responsible for the cost of this treatment.
The Fastwriter
As the range of communication options proliferated and messages traveled ever faster, two inventions made them go swifter yet. The first actually made it easier to write, once people learned how to use the darn thing. Although the earliest model dates back to 1714, the typewriter was finally perfected in 1868 by a newspaperman, printer, and politician named Christopher Latham Sholes. He tried to sell the rights to manufacture the machine to Western Union, which turned him down, eventually settling with the Remington Arms Company, which made farm machinery, sewing machines, and, most famously, guns.
Remington took the typewriter to market in 1873, and it raised a stir at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, while the Hammond typewriter—the first single-element machine, which featured a curved keyboard—stole the show at the Paris Exposition of 1889.
Mark Twain purchased one of Remington’s earliest models in 1874 for $125 and became the first author to submit a manuscript typed on one. In a letter to his brother, Twain described the way the machine established an element of speed in writing that had not yet been there before—even though one could, as yet, type only in capital letters:
I AM TRYING TO GET THE HAND OF THIS NEW FANGLED WRITING MACHINE. BUT I AM NOT MAKI
NG A SHINING SUCCESS OF IT…. I PERCEIVE I SHALL SOON & EASILY ACQUIRE A FINE FACILITY IN ITS USE…. I BELIEVE [THE MACHINE] WILL PRINT FASTER THAN I CAN WRITE.
Aside from Twain, most of the typewriter’s early users were not authors, however, but rather stenographers and typists, whose numbers in America shot up from 154 in 1870 to 112,364 in 1900. Many of them were women. “Some of the more enterprising of the girls secure an office in a big building, where lawyers are numerous, put out a sign, and find employment all day long,” wrote a reporter in The New York Times. “The regularly-employed girls get $10 and $12 a week, but the owners of the machines manage in some cases to earn so much as $20 and $25.”
And they typed fast. To be a member of the New York State Stenographers’ Association, for example, one had to be able to take dictation at 150 words per minute for five consecutive minutes. The first woman ever hired by New York City’s Health Department was Miss Martha N. Manning, a typist. Typewriting contests began to be held. One of the earliest was won in New York City by F. E. McGurrin of Salt Lake City, who then closed the contest with an encore act of typewriting 101: words a minute while blindfolded. In 1889, a woman named Miss M. E. Orr “made her fingers fly over the keys for a minute and 139 correctly printed words was the result.”
Henry James briefly made dictation a craze when, to overcome a writer’s block, he hired an amanuensis to take dictation. He found that he wrote more, his sentences grew longer, and he could work only to the rhythmic click of the Remington. The shadow of this method was large enough that when William Dean Howells was interviewed by The New York Times in 1882, he was asked if he, too, wrote by dictation. “I do not dictate,” he said, “but use a little Hall typewriter. I use it entirely if I have a clear block of stuff before me; if I have to come down to close quarters and feel a little anxious about my work I take a pen.”
