How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  The new ships were the harbingers of the transformative age of steam. Combined with the railroad—the first real advance over the horse in overland transportation since antiquity—they would by 1835 enable Americans and their mail to travel by water and rail from Washington, D.C., to Boston in a miraculous thirty-seven hours. Once the “Tom Thumb” steam locomotive chugged down the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad’s tracks at a dizzying eighteen miles per hour in 1830, railways quickly began to web the country east of the Missouri River. Most were smaller lines, such as the Saratoga & Schenectady and the Boston & Providence, that were backed by local entrepreneurs eager to improve transportation for their major businesses. (Later, the more ambitious Missouri−Kansas−Texas Railroad, nicknamed the Katy, would inspire the blues song “She Caught the Katy [And Left Me a Mule to Ride].”) The government didn’t directly fund the railroads, which were privately owned, but it encouraged the new industry’s growth, not least by reducing by some millions of dollars the protective tariffs on the imported iron required to build tracks. The companies had to ask the states in which they operated for the right of eminent domain, which prevented landowners from blocking their progress; then they had to buy the right of way from the landowners. In exchange for these considerations, the rail companies were required to promote the public good, which was soon translated to mean speeding up postal service.

  The railroad’s postal potential was immediately clear to William Barry, President Andrew Jackson’s first postmaster general, who authorized mail to travel by train in 1832 on a limited basis. Almost immediately, contract negotiations between the post and its new carriers grew heated. By 1835, the B&O was flexing its muscles by demanding $250 a mile per year to carry mail between Washington and Baltimore, which was several times the sum offered by the infuriated Amos Kendall, Jackson’s second postmaster general. (His pique inspired his choice of a galloping post rider—often mistaken for a later Pony Express courier—as the post’s insignia rather than a steaming locomotive.) Once other rail companies sensed their industry’s clout, they were similarly demanding, which drastically reduced competition for mail contracts.

  The post’s long relationship with the railroads, as with its other transportation contractors, was plagued by more serious versions of the same problems that it had experienced with the stagecoach proprietors. The government, like any buyer, wanted to pay less for more service than the seller had in mind, particularly considering that the transportation in question was underwritten by passengers’ fares. The post also wanted to control the scheduling of mail trains, as it had finally been able to do with mail coaches. The railroad owners, however, insisted that, as private companies, they were neither obliged to lower their rates nor inconvenience the customers who were their primary business. Their bargaining position was strong, as both parties knew that the industry that could transport mail the fastest had a lock on postal contracts. Both also knew that the railroads’ economic survival, unlike that of the stagecoach lines, didn’t depend on the desirable but not essential portion of their revenue supplied by the post. The choleric Jackson was so incensed by the railroads’ effective monopoly on carrying the mail that he considered forcing them to accept whatever compensation the post offered.

  In 1838, Congress acknowledged that the post’s future was tied to the railways despite the cost and made them post roads; a year later, the government also established steep rates to compensate the companies for what was already lackluster service. (Kendall had had the foresight to propose government ownership of mail cars to limit costs, but Congress refused his request.) The two great monopolies—the public post and the private railroad—went on to collaborate, if contentiously, in sending bright steel threads of civilization into the dark wilds, stitching the widely distributed states and territories closer together.

  • • •

  DESPITE THE RAILROAD, the stagecoach remained the dominant means of transportation in less developed regions for a long time, and it continued to carry the mail over more miles until the Civil War era. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher-historian who famously toured America in 1831, was astonished by the scale of the young country’s post, which was already the world’s largest, boasting twice as many post offices as Great Britain and five times more than France. Of a stagecoach trip through the Michigan boondocks, where the population had already climbed from 4,700 in 1810 to some 32,000 by 1830, he wrote:

  I traveled along a portion of the frontier of the United States in a sort of cart . . . which was termed the mail . . . along roads which were scarcely marked out through the immense forests. From time to time we came to a hut in the midst of the forest; this was a post-office. The mail dropped an enormous bundle of letters at this isolated dwelling, and we pursued our way at full gallop, leaving the inhabitants of the neighboring log houses to send for their share of the treasure.

  Tocqueville’s amazement at America’s post was matched by his incredulity at the abysmal state of its roads. The federal government subsidized the mail coaches, but the states’ sensitivity prevented it from funding the highways and byways on which they traveled. In a typical observation, Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville’s traveling companion, wrote of their trip from Louisville to Memphis: “Frightful roads. Perpendicular descents. Way not banked; the route is but a passage made through the forest. The trunks of badly cut trees form as it were so many guard-stones against which one is always bumping. Only ten leagues a day.” The Frenchmen were ruefully amused by Americans’ seeming indifference to such conditions. Beaumont recounts one example of the natives’ sangfroid: “‘You have some very bad roads in France, haven’t you?’ an American says to me. ‘Yes, Sir, and you have some really fine ones in America, haven’t you?’ He doesn’t understand me. American conceit.”

  Washington, Jefferson, and other forward-thinking politicians had wanted to create a system of decent highways to promote settlement as well as postal service and weave the frontier into the fabric of the mother country. Their commonsensical desire was almost always thwarted by the states’ concerns over sovereignty. In 1806, President Jefferson and an obliging Congress authorized a rare exception to the rule: the construction of the tellingly named National Road. This trans-Appalachian highway, also known as the Cumberland Road and later as Route 40, eventually extended from Maryland through Pennsylvania to the Ohio River and nearly to St. Louis; it doubled as Main Street in many of the towns and villages it bisected. (The popularity of the celebrated “pike”—short for “turnpike,” a toll road—peaked twice: first with increased westward settlement in the mid-1820s, then again in the 1840s, when Americans in covered wagons and stagecoaches began the great cross-country migration.) In 1817, John Calhoun, the prominent southern senator and later vice president, proposed that Congress could “counteract every tendency to disunion” by funding more such highways if it would simply reinterpret the postal “routes” as “roads,” but President James Madison, also a southerner, vetoed the bill.

  America paid a steep price for the sovereign states’ touchiness in the form of its patchwork of poor-to-terrible highways, but so did the imperious minirepublics. In most cases, the states and their local governments were stuck with the bill for providing any roads that were needed for mail service, and congressmen’s habit of wooing constituents with new routes regardless of physical conditions made this a constant trouble and expense. Officials had to levy taxes or tolls to pay contractors to build or improve roads or assemble crews to do the work. Moreover, once a post road was established, locals were obliged to keep it in good condition, and even to improve it if they wanted better, more frequent service.

  Living near a major mail route conferred many benefits, from higher real estate values to proximity to a multitasking stagecoach tavern. This venerable institution, which combined the services of a hotel, a barroom, a restaurant, a stable, and often a post office/community center, was vitally important to public life. Washington himself had frequented Geor
getown’s Fountain Tavern, where he transacted much business, including the purchase of land for the new “federal city,” as the capital later named for him was first called. John Fowler, an early travel writer and contemporary of Tocqueville’s, described the barroom of one such inn as a bustling information center, its walls “covered with advertisements of elections—fares of stages and steamboats . . . auctions—sales of land—sales of stock . . . sales of everything that can be sold—quack medicines without end—the most prominent being specifics for dyspepsia.” True to America’s egalitarian ethos, everyone dined family style at one long table. This democratic practice surprised European travelers, as did the facts that innkeepers were important, well-informed persons likely to be postmasters and politicians, and that servants were not disposed to cater to fussy guests.

  Tocqueville had the chance to discuss the perplexing state of America’s roads with Joel Roberts Poinsett, a distinguished South Carolina politician and the first U.S. minister to Mexico (where he encountered the festive flower that was renamed “poinsettia” in his honor). Congress was then debating responsibility for the maintenance of the National Road, which it later decided to upgrade, then hand over to the states to operate as toll roads. When Tocqueville asked him to explain the government’s philosophy on road building and upkeep, Poinsett gave a thoughtful reply that’s particularly interesting coming from a southerner: “It’s a great constitutional question whether Congress has the right to make anything but military roads. Personally, I am convinced that the right exists; there being disagreement, however, practically no use, one might say, is made of it.” He admitted that, generally, “our roads are in very bad repair” because Washington, D.C., lacked “the central authority to force the counties to do their duty. The inspection, being local, is biased and slack,” and “no one wants to have a suit with the local authority.” Anticipating the federal government’s ambitious national highway policy of the next century, Poinsett added, “The turnpike system of roads seems to me very good, but time is required for it to enter into the habits of the people.”

  While traveling on the Mississippi River in more comfort than the roads afforded, Tocqueville underscored the connection between improvements in America’s postal and transportation systems: “There isn’t anyone who does not recognize that the discovery of steam has added unbelievably to the strength and prosperity of the Union, and has done so by facilitating rapid communications between the diverse parts of this vast body.”

  4

  THE POLITICIZED POST

  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AGREED with Washington, Rush, and Madison that the only “infallible” means of producing a strong, thriving country was “to increase the ease of communication between men.” He added that America,

  which is the country enjoying the greatest sum of prosperity ever yet accorded a nation, is also the country which, proportional to its age and means, has made the greatest efforts to procure the easy communication I was speaking of. . . . In America one of the first things done in a new State is to have the mail come. In the Michigan forests there is not a cabin so isolated, not a valley so wild, that it does not receive letters and newspapers at least once a week; we saw it ourselves.

  By the time of Tocqueville’s trip, the post circulated 1,200 newspapers offering a wide array of political views. Many were small-town weeklies that were coddled and protected by local congressmen who depended on their partisan editorializing, but some were more ambitious urban journals meant for a wider readership. (A New York City paper could be sent to, say, New Orleans for 1½ cents, while a two-page letter to the same destination would cost a whopping 50 cents.) Tocqueville noted that average Frenchmen had neither the “astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers” that even Americans in the “savage woods” enjoyed nor their knowledgeable opinions about what was going on in the world.

  That said, it was increasingly apparent that supplying Americans with information didn’t necessarily lead them to greater understanding and harmony. Circulating uncensored news and views on public affairs may prevent a monopoly on political opinion and feed democracy, but, as Rush, Madison, and their peers had understood, it can also undermine government. They took that risk. Indeed, foreign visitors were often shocked by American journalism’s irreverent, rowdy tone and questioned the value of cheap newspapers, on the grounds that they catered to the lower class’s presumably lower tastes in order to expand circulation. There was no question that the founders’ radical post had fostered a peculiarly American political culture that was both vital and disputatious.

  • • •

  THE DYNAMISM OF adolescent America’s postal network in no small part reflected the prodigious talents of John McLean, one of the country’s most capable postmasters general ever. Around the time of his appointment, in 1823, the system that had long clung to the East Coast now included more than 4,000 offices and almost 85,000 miles of routes spread throughout the republic. Politicians eager to woo voters kept adding more, and this tremendous growth inevitably led to big deficits. James Monroe, the last of the founder-presidents, was eager to end the resulting bad publicity for his expansionist administration, and he chose McLean—significantly, a westerner from Ohio—to reform the federal government’s largest, most important, and most popular enterprise.

  The new postmaster general was a little-known but charismatic former lawyer, judge, congressman, and newspaper publisher, and he quickly demonstrated that he also had that rare combination of grand vision and zeal for details required to excel at running what Americans would later call a bureaucracy. (Huge administrative offices or departments that conducted government business in an organized way had existed since ancient China and Rome, but in the United States, such institutions, notably the post, came into their glory days later in the nineteenth century.) He set about reorganizing his chaotic department and instituted sound accounting and record-keeping systems. He also established a centralized Dead Letter Office, where expert clerks dealt with inadequately addressed mail from all over the country, and took major steps toward cracking down on postal crime.

  The post had long lacked the means of enforcing its own stringent laws, particularly regarding the theft of money from the mail. Such robberies had only increased as the population grew; immigrants and a decline in old-fashioned agrarian values were customarily blamed. Mail coaches often transported amounts of $50,000 or more, plus whatever money passengers carried. In 1818, the Great Eastern mail coach en route to Philadelphia had been robbed of $90,000, then an almost incalculable sum, which caused a national scandal. The thieves were caught, and the money was sent to its intended recipients, but this success was an exception to the rule. Determined to change that status quo, McLean increased the post’s surveillance capabilities and cleared the way for the establishment in 1830 of the Office of Instructions and Mail Depredations, the department’s investigative branch.

  Speed is the hallmark of good postal service, and McLean was remarkably successful in accelerating the mail. Indeed, he even foresaw that the telegraph, although then only the optical sort employed in France and Sweden, was a logical extension of paper mail: “If it were possible to communicate by telegraph all articles of intelligence to every neighborhood in the Union,” it would be “proper to do so.” Expeditious delivery depended on the efficiency of the mail coach network, which was then the General Post Office’s major concern. McLean’s talented assistant postmaster general, Abraham Bradley, a lawyer and respected topographer, mapped every route and charted every delivery to every post office in the United States. (His popular maps hung in local post offices, which helped acquaint Americans with their rapidly expanding country’s size and shape.) Mail service under McLean accelerated to the point that newspapers eager to convey their timeliness incorporated the words “post,” “express,” and “mail” in their titles; even “limited,” which referred to fast mail coaches that offered fewer seats because of their bulky cargo, became nearly synonymous with “sp
eed.”

  McLean’s concern with celerity reflected his anticipation of the economy’s shift from agriculture to manufacturing and trading. In 1825, he pushed Congress to expand the department’s original mandate to bind the country with news about public affairs to include the latest market information. The new “express mail” service, which used round-the-clock relays of post riders between the major cities, charged much higher rates, but it expedited transactions between, say, brokers in the cotton capital of New Orleans and financiers in the economic capital of New York City. The democratized access to economic news also enabled all traders, not just big-city speculators and insiders, to receive the same information at the same time. As McLean put it, “On all the principles of fair dealing, the holder of property should be apprised of its value before he parts with it.”

  McLean accomplished all these feats while also greatly expanding the system westward, adding nearly four thousand new post offices, and even generating a profit. Postmasters general had traditionally kept a low profile, as befitted administrators of a revenue office within the Treasury. McLean became something of a celebrity, however, and not only because of the post’s increased size and stature. He was as skilled in public relations as in management and actively burnished the reputation of Americans’ favorite government institution and his own as the knight in shining armor in charge of it. He insisted that the General Post Office was every bit as important as the cabinet-level departments of Treasury and State and began to refer to it officially as the Post Office Department. (It had long been called that informally, but Congress would not make the designation until 1872.) He reported directly to the president instead of to the Treasury secretary and ensured that his annual reports were covered in the newspapers, which also publicized his long workdays, short vacations, and newly popular fervent Methodist Christianity. Attuned to the cultural impact of the Second Great Awakening, the first evangelical presidential contender went so far as to call his worldly office a sacred trust and to promise job security to dutiful employees regardless of changes in political administrations.