If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
• • •
BEFORE THEY HAD EVEN WON their War of Independence, the founders had set a powerful precedent for the government’s financial and political support of the postal network that had helped to create it. That almost all of the revolutionary era’s mail concerned politics and defense had already underscored the post’s civic nature, and by the time the Constitution was ratified, in 1788, Washington, Rush, Madison, and other future-minded leaders were ready to expand upon it. These founders were no longer content with Franklin’s limited, conventional, revenue-oriented system, which had been inherited from Great Britain. They wanted a radical, thoroughly American institution that would help to unify and expand their new republic, in which the people were sovereign, not the king, and in which information about public affairs was not a privilege but a right.
2
BUILDING THE POSTAL COMMONS
THE BIRTHDAY OF THE United States may be July 4, 1776, but its federal government was not established until 1789, a year after the Constitution had finally been ratified. The period after victory in the War of Independence had been a difficult, dangerous one for the tenuous union of the thirteen former colonies, which were only loosely bound by the Articles of Confederation of 1777, ratified in 1781. Their differences were no longer muted by the shared goal of securing autonomy from Great Britain, and after more than a hundred years of developing their individual identities, each was protective of its own sovereignty, prerogatives, and culture, as well as broke. Congress appeared to be little more than an assembly of partisans pursuing their own states’ provincial interests, and even Thomas Jefferson wondered about the point of maintaining it once the common British enemy had been vanquished.
The post was essential to this experimental new union. Other than conducting foreign affairs, the federal government’s power was minimal at best and, within the prickly new states, so volatile an issue that it had jeopardized the signing of the Constitution. Indeed, until the Civil War officially settled the matter, many Americans would say “the United States are” rather than “is.” (For the same reason, many modern historians prefer to speak of the “union” or “republic” rather than the “nation” when referring to the country during the antebellum era, on the grounds that although America was a state, a self-governing political entity, it was not yet a nation, a tightly knit people who embrace a common culture.) No sooner had independence been won than George Washington was confiding his fears regarding the preservation of the hard-won, jittery union in a letter to Benjamin Harrison, a Virginia planter:
The disinclination of the individual States to yield competent powers to Congress for the Federal Government—their unreasonable jealousy of that body & of one another—& the disposition which seems to pervade each, of being all-wise & all-powerful within itself, will, if there is not a change in the system, be our downfall as a Nation. This is as clear to me as the A.B.C.; & I think we have opposed Great Britain, & have arrived at the present state of peace & independency, to very little purpose, if we cannot conquer our own prejudices.
Those biases were rooted in the former colonies’ very different origins. Puritan Massachusetts’s high-minded vision of a virtuous society clashed with the pragmatic view of the Dutch traders who set the tone for New York. The culture of the tolerant, egalitarian Quakers and other religious refugees who settled the mid-Atlantic region contrasted sharply with that of the South’s elitist, slave-owning planters. Maintaining a sense of unity was further complicated by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which sent the first wave of pioneers flooding into the territory that would become Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota—a vast wilderness that also had to be incorporated into the new country somehow. Washington knew that it was by no means certain that any single government, much less the brand-new republic—then the largest of the world’s few—could preside over the sprawling, diverse, thinly populated United States, to say nothing of the adjacent territories still claimed by mighty European rivals. He would brood over the challenge throughout his presidency, even raising the question in his farewell address: “Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere?” His own answer was surprisingly equivocal: “Let experience solve it. . . . It is well worth a fair and full experiment.”
Washington and other founders, notably Benjamin Rush and James Madison, believed that the success of that risky experiment required a postal system the likes of which the world had never seen. For thousands of years, both knowledge of state affairs and mail networks had been privileges of a chosen few. The infant United States, however, was based on an idea that was anathema to history’s great powers: if a people’s republic were to work, the people had to know what was going on. As Washington said, “The importance of the post office and post roads on a plan sufficiently liberal and comprehensive . . . is increased by their instrumentality in diffusing a knowledge of the laws and proceedings of the Government.” A physician and public intellectual as well as a politician, Benjamin Rush used more poetic language, describing the post as “the only means of carrying heat and light to every individual in the federal commonwealth.”
Officially an arm of the Treasury Department and run on a shoestring budget, Franklin’s old post was not up to the formidable task that Washington and Rush envisioned. In 1790, the system consisted of just seventy-five post offices and 1,875 miles of post roads and still catered to merchants and businessmen along a narrow band of the East Coast. Newspapers were still not classified as official mail, and their distribution largely depended on private arrangements among postmasters, publishers, and post riders; this uncertainty regarding delivery discouraged the kind of high-quality, competitive publishing that feeds democracy. Mail service was erratic and slow (a letter sent from Maine to Georgia took more than a month to arrive), thefts were frequent, and private competitors were numerous. After surveying the department, Samuel Osgood, the first postmaster general under the Constitution, concluded that postage fees were too high, the volume of letters was too low, and the population was too widely dispersed. Moreover, foreign mail was poorly handled, politicians abused the franking privilege, and many transportation contractors and even postmasters were more interested in serving themselves than in serving the public. (Something of the department’s financial constraints comes across in Osgood’s plaintive appeal for enough money to hire someone to lay the fire at its headquarters.) His dire assessment notwithstanding, Osgood underscored the egalitarian aspirations of America’s post by stressing that even remote parts of the country must have ready mail access to wherever Congress might choose to convene.
Transforming Franklin’s limited post into an information and communications dynamo was a wildly ambitious proposition for the fledgling government of a country much of which was wilderness. As soon as the Constitution took effect, Washington asked an anxious Congress three times to assuage his anxieties about the country’s inadequate network, but the nervous politicians had good reason to delay and temporize. Complying with the president’s request would resurrect incendiary issues regarding the central government’s authority within the states that had almost derailed the Constitution.
The rather vague language regarding the post in previous legislation had not resulted from mere carelessness. A mail system is a so-called network enterprise, which by definition is both centralized and local and becomes more valuable as it grows. Politicians of all stripes understood that the expansion Washington desired would put a post office—a federal outpost—in every town and village, thus greatly increasing the federal government’s footprint at a time when, compared to the powerful states, it had few functions. The question of the national government’s right to build post roads was particularly inflammatory, because the states regarded the prospec
t as an invasive threat to their sovereignty.
Legislators had hitherto dodged these federal-versus-state sensitivities by not getting too specific about the nature of the post and what it could and couldn’t do. The Articles of Confederation simply gave Congress “the sole and exclusive right of establishing or regulating post offices from one state to another, throughout all the United States, and exacting such postage on the papers passing through the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of said office.” This careful phrasing glided over the touchy question of Congress’s postal authority within the states, several of which, notably Vermont and Maryland, had even established their own posts during the 1780s.
The Constitution, too, had been evasive regarding the structure and prerogatives of what was then also called the General Post Office. It merely said that Congress would “establish Post Offices and post Roads.” Interestingly, the post was not specifically given the exclusive right to operate a mail system, either because such a monopoly was assumed or was associated with Britain and political patronage. Lest its ratification be jeopardized, the Constitution’s framers preferred to keep things simple and left many postal particulars up in the air, presumably to be settled at a later, ideally less fraught time.
Complying with Washington’s requests to clarify and update postal policy would force legislators to revisit the state-federal conundrum at another particularly tricky moment. A proposal that Congress—the government’s legislative branch—should delegate its constitutional authority to establish post offices and post roads to the postmaster general—the executive branch—had set off a heated debate about control of the network’s design. The Senate supported the idea on the sensible grounds that the system would grow in a more efficient, orderly fashion under the charge of a single able administrator, as was the case in Great Britain. At the time, however, senators were not directly elected by the people and were considered less knowledgeable about local districts than members of the House of Representatives. The mere thought of congressmen surrendering their power to designate new post routes to a federal mandarin struck many of them as unconstitutional and undemocratic, to say nothing of politically unwise, as it would diminish their clout with their constituents.
Political minefields notwithstanding, Congress finally rose to the president’s challenge. After much heated argument, the legislators passed the comprehensive Post Office Act of 1792, which laid down important policies that would affect the country’s political, social, and physical development for generations to come and help expand the founders’ provincial East Coast into the transcontinental United States. Just as the republic truly came into its own with the signing of the Constitution, the post assumed its permanent status and open-ended, truly American character with this landmark legislation.
• • •
THE POST OFFICE ACT helped turn the abstract idea of democracy into a concrete reality by authorizing mail service for the entire population rather than just the privileged few or the conveniently located. This huge expansion, however, required some jesuitical phrasing to get around thorny federal-state conflicts. The Constitution had authorized Congress to establish post “Roads”—a very contentious term from the states’ viewpoint. The act used less precise, more diplomatic language to empower Congress to establish postal “routes,” based on the close reasoning that a route was merely a commitment to deliver the mail by whatever means available, perhaps a river. (Washington and Jefferson favored federal road building, and the latter brooded over the meaning of “establish”: did it suggest that Congress could actually make post roads or only select among existing ones?) The need to appease the ornery states resulted in America’s poor roads and patchy overland transportation network, which appalled foreign visitors. By the time President John Adams left office in 1801, however, the country had 903 post offices and almost 21,000 miles of post routes, and just as the act’s authors had planned, settlers and economic and civic development followed the mail.
The law that unified Americans as a postal people also gave them an unprecedented say in the network’s design—an almost unimaginable experiment in democracy in action. Modern Americans take for granted the “universal-service mandate,” which says that all citizens everywhere are entitled to mail access for the same price, but this principle was rarely discussed in such absolute terms until the twentieth century. The act didn’t make it a basic right, like freedom of speech or religion, but it fostered the idea that if a group of citizens could establish their need for postal service, they could reasonably hope that the government would provide it.
Encouraging the people’s expectation of a place on the country’s communications grid was essential to the republic’s physical and political development as well as the post’s. Pioneers were likelier to venture into the wilderness if they anticipated maintaining a link to the great world and having an outpost of the federal government, a place on the map, and a civic identity. The first step in the so-called petitioning process for mail service required a community to badger the Post Office Department or their congressman for it. In many instances, the congressman then submitted the constituents’ appeal to the postmaster general, who had retained the constitutional power to establish post offices. If service was deemed warranted, he authorized a new post office, and Congress, responding to the direct will of the local people, determined the route by which the mail would reach it.
Petitioning processes were very often successful, especially in the freewheeling territories, as areas under federal jurisdiction but lacking the status of an official state were called. Indeed, complaints about the overabundance of post offices created by legislators’ pork-barreling were voiced by the turn of the century. Nevertheless, Americans had objective proof of their national government’s responsiveness to their direct input, which not only brought them mail but also turned clusters of cabins in the middle of nowhere into villages with names, and rutted trails through dense forests into roads on a map. By the time President Jefferson left office in 1809, America had almost 2,300 post offices and 36,000 miles of routes—more than thirty times and twenty times, respectively, than in 1790, before the act passed.
• • •
IN GREATLY EXPANDING THE reach of the postal system—and the federal government—the Post Office Act precipitated what the historian Richard R. John calls “a communications revolution that was as profound in its consequences for American public life as the subsequent revolutions that have come to be associated with the telegraph, the telephone, and the computer.” To Washington, such a robust post would “tranquilize” a restless, fragmented young America and unify its footloose population: “There is no resource so firm for the Government of the United States as the affections of the people, guided by an enlightened policy; and to this primary good nothing can conduce more than a faithful representation of public proceedings, diffused without restraint throughout the United States.” To Rush, Madison, and others, however, the post was also a transformative agent that would ensure democracy in their new government of opinion, educate the people, and change society.
Madison is one of the best known and celebrated of the founders, while Rush, also a leading philosopher of the American Enlightenment, is among the most misunderstood. His modern reputation ironically rests on his brief service as the Continental Army’s surgeon general, yet he was an inept doctor who relentlessly purged and bled his patients, not infrequently unto death. (The high mercury content of his popular Bilious Pills, laxatives also known as Rush’s Thunder Clappers, later helped researchers trace the path of the Lewis and Clark expedition.) He’s also remembered as America’s first psychiatrist and the mediator of the late-life reconciliation of presidents Jefferson and Adams, who were, like Franklin, Madison, and Patrick Henry, his close friends. Despite his psychological insight, however, Rush could be self-righteous and judgmental. Indeed, his injudicious complaints about military hospitals had antagonized his superiors in the Continental Army, notably Ge
neral George Washington, and ended with his resignation from the service.
Personality quirks notwithstanding, Rush was the quintessential humanitarian and a beloved public figure, whose widely read essays helped Americans figure out who they were and what they wanted as a people. He was an early, outspoken advocate for compassionate treatment for the poor, the mentally ill, and the imprisoned. His writings on social reform ranged from “An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping” to “An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body and the Mind.” Like Franklin, his fellow Philadelphian, Rush didn’t just talk about the Age of Reason’s lofty principles but also practiced them. As a young man, he had joined both the cerebral American Philosophical Society and the feisty Sons of Liberty. Perhaps most important, he inspired others with his sanguine view of humankind in general and the new United States in particular. Of Rush’s infectious optimism, Oliver Wendell Holmes later said, “His own mind was in a perpetual state of exaltation, produced by the stirring scenes in which he had taken a part.”
Rush championed many causes, but his conviction that the post must circulate information and promote literacy among average folk—still a truly revolutionary idea abroad—was an extension of a particular passion: the government’s obligation to foster public education, including free schooling from the primary grades through college. His zeal was grounded in personal experience. Only about half of the founders had attended college, and Rush, the son of a simple farmer and gunsmith, was among the many who were the first in their families to do so. When his father died, his mother was obliged to send her brilliant eight-year-old to live with an uncle who was a clergyman and schoolmaster so that the boy could have a proper education. He went on to attend what is now Princeton University, receive his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, and then spend several years abroad studying science and languages, particularly excelling at Greek. He returned to Philadelphia and prospered as a physician, professor of medicine, and popular writer, but he never forgot that his good fortune began with the schooling that so many born in similarly humble circumstances were denied.
How the Post Office Created America Page 4
