How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

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  POSTMASTER GENERAL MCLEAN’S STATUS as a serious presidential candidate reflected his own renown, but more important, the post’s centrality to American life. As the Early Republic’s politics became more partisan, however, the network designed to unite the country’s far-flung, ever more diverse population also helped to divide it into combative factions. By the 1820s, differences between the North and South had grown sharper, particularly regarding slavery and the economy’s transition from decentralized agriculture to centralized industrialization and banking. The Federalists had evolved into the liberal-minded National Republicans, later known as Whigs. They were still based in the Northeast and stood for business, progress, moral uplift, and an activist federal government. The populist Democratic-Republicans, soon simply Democrats, had expanded their power base from the South into the West. They defended state sovereignty and the common man from what they saw as an overweening Establishment that favored federal meddling, high finance, and the idle rich.

  The Democrats found a powerful leader in Andrew Jackson, the first celebrity president since George Washington. In 1828, he trounced the incumbent, John Quincy Adams, by promising to curb the banks, corporations, and federal bureaucracy that he believed were trying to wrest control of America from the people. A backwoods frontiersman of humble origins, “Old Hickory” was the very personification of the spreading of power from the established East to the developing West that the post had done so much to effect. (When his “fancy-pants” opponents sneeringly referred to him as Andrew Jackass, this master of the common touch embraced the association, and the rustic yet powerful mule became the Democratic Party’s symbol.) Jackson remains one of American history’s most complicated, polarizing figures—both the little people’s champion against the elite’s hegemony and a slave-owning oppressor of Native Americans—so perhaps it’s not surprising that he was both an eloquent advocate for the post and its expansion and the president who made it an overtly partisan political tool.

  True to his word, Jackson set about transforming Washington, D.C., with his “rotation in office” policy. This plan to redistribute federal jobs was officially meant to uproot ingrained corruption and give average citizens their fair share of government employment. However, Jackson was an outsider in the capital, and he needed a political base there and a way to reward his supporters. He swiftly solved the problem by firing, regardless of merit, about 13 percent of civilian federal workers who just happened to be National Republicans, then giving their positions to his Democrats.

  The post, which employed three-quarters of the government’s civilian workforce, was the particular target of what became known as Jackson’s “spoils system.” (The term refers to a remark made by New York senator William Marcy, himself a Democrat, in 1832: “They [Democrats] see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”) The department had never been utterly free of politics, but it had functioned without too much overt interference until Jackson’s mass firings, which were especially draconian among postmasters in the National Republicans’ Northeast, where mail service was best. This exercise in bald-faced political patronage was all the more audacious for ignoring the department’s tradition, only recently reaffirmed by Postmaster General McLean, of protecting competent employees’ jobs from political shifts.

  President Jefferson may have technically invented the spoils system when he replaced 10 percent of federal workers with his supporters, but Jackson took it to a new level by institutionalizing postal patronage and making it the financial engine of America’s two-party system. For nearly a century and a half, the government would effectively underwrite much of the country’s politics by enabling the camp that won the White House to reward tens of thousands of its supporters with postal jobs (although, as Lincoln would later observe, there were always too many pigs for the tits). The spoils system’s political impact was amplified by the fact that many of the postmasters appointed were the editors of their local newspapers, who were thus rewarded for their partisan electioneering in print. These new officials were supposed to quit journalism while in office, but they had the consolations of a federal position, the franking privilege, exemption from military and jury service, and insider access to lucrative government publishing jobs.

  Jackson had good reason to fear that McLean, a National Republican at heart, a moralistic former judge, and a potential rival for the White House, would regard his postal scheme as an outrageous abuse of power, as well as a personal attack. The wily president quickly solved this dilemma in 1829 by promoting McLean to the Supreme Court, where he would remain in the public spotlight but safely insulated from electoral politics for three decades.

  The manifestly unjust postal patronage system became a major and enduring public scandal. Generations of Americans would share the outrage of the anonymous author of an essay called “Seven Years in the Boston Post Office” over the fact that a dutiful clerk “should be rejected from his position, conscious of no fault, not even a difference of political opinion, discharged without recommendation, without the ghost of a reason!” The popular political cartoonist Thomas Nast later captured the popular sentiment with a drawing of a mock-heroic statue of Jackson, hero of New Orleans, in full military dress but mounted on a huge hog instead of the customary charger. The caption read IN MEMORIAM—OUR CIVIL SERVICE AS IT WAS.

  Unabashed, Jackson took yet another major step in politicizing the post in 1829, when he adopted McLean’s view that the postmaster general should belong to the cabinet and be treated—and paid $6,000 per annum—like the secretaries of the departments of Treasury, War, and State. This decision has often been attributed to the president’s desire to have even more control over the huge bureaucracy and to be able to reward his own top political fixer with a cabinet office—a juicy patronage plum. However, the post’s elevation in status also reflected its ever-increasing importance in American life and Jackson’s own earlier experience of it in the wilds. In a message to Congress in 1829, he declared that mail was to the body politic “what the veins and arteries are to the natural body—carrying rapidly and regularly to the remotest parts of the system correct information of the operations of government and bringing back to it the wishes and feelings of the people.”

  The first postmaster general to be empowered by Jackson’s new policy was William Barry, a well-intentioned Kentucky lawyer, politician, and presidential crony. Like Jackson, he favored the department’s ambitious expansion, particularly in the West, which had already given America a hundred times more post offices than it had when the Constitution was ratified. This phenomenal growth had come at a high price, however, and had forced even the storied McLean to run a deficit for his last two years in office. Barry decided to address the financial problem not by cutting costs but by increasing revenue through more and better service. He doubled or tripled the frequency of many weekly routes and replaced many post riders with more efficient stagecoaches. By 1833, the mail traveled more than 26 million miles, up from 13.7 million in 1829. Postal revenues rose from $1.7 million to more than $2.6 million, but so did deficits, increasing from almost $75,000 to more than $313,000.

  Barry had acted boldly by increasing service but not always wisely, gullibly overpaying duplicitous transportation contractors eager to cash in on his desire to speed up the mail. In 1834, Congress began an investigation into postal finances. The National Republicans, now Whigs, were already outraged by the spoils system, not least because it had taken postal jobs from many of their partisans, and they regarded Barry as a surrogate for Jackson. They waved reports of outrageous contractors’ charges and disregarded delivery schedules and declared the department to be in a state of utter disarray. Although they failed to implicate the postmaster general in direct wrongdoing, the Whigs insulted and harassed him to the point that he threatened to fight a duel. The president finally took mercy on the beleaguered Barry and named him minister to Spain, but the ill-starred future dip
lomat died en route.

  Amos Kendall, Jackson’s next postmaster general, was a very different political animal. A lawyer and former newspaper editor and Treasury auditor, he was as shrewd a backroom player in Washington’s power politics as his predecessor and fellow Kentuckian had been inept. (He tellingly described Barry as too good a fellow to succeed in such a bare-knuckled job.) He quickly became Jackson’s right hand, the center of his intimate “Kitchen Cabinet,” and the first presidential press secretary. Though a Yankee by birth into a poor Massachusetts farm family, he had a visceral affinity for Jacksonian democracy, limited federal government, and the sovereignty of the common man. He used his Dartmouth education—he had graduated first in his class—and journalistic skill to write presidential addresses that gave Old Hickory’s political philosophy a new eloquence.

  Kendall was a skillful, hardworking postal administrator who quickly took the department’s finances in hand and reaped the belated rewards of some of Barry’s policies. Looking to the economic future, he further streamlined express mail between southern commercial capitals and northern cities by replacing bulky newspapers with paper slips containing the latest market information; he even added a western route to serve Cincinnati and St. Louis. When a massive fire demolished the post’s old headquarters on E Street in 1836, just as thousands of miles of new routes were being added to the network, Kendall set up shop in a nearby hotel and proceeded to implement the important new postal reform bill just passed by a friendly Congress.

  The Post Office Act of 1836 reorganized the department’s finances, from mandating new bookkeeping procedures to imposing stricter rules for scandal-ridden transportation contracting to authorizing the president to appoint postmasters who earned more than $1,000 per year. The law also made it easier for legislators to monitor postal finances. The department was ordered to submit its budget for the following year to Congress and to send all of its revenue, not just surpluses, to the Treasury, which would then dispense its operating expenses and cover its deficits. Despite expanding at a breakneck pace, however, the post was still expected to bring in enough revenue to pay its costs.

  One important provision in the act authorized the Office of Inspection, as the Office of Instructions and Mail Depredations was now called, to employ special inspectors (“reliable men for confidential work”) in order to curb corruption, particularly in transportation contracts, and to pursue perpetrators of mail-related crimes, such as fraud and theft. These agents were assigned to different geographical regions, where they also made unannounced visits to examine local postmasters’ operations and accounts, much to those postmasters’ dread. The Office of Inspection developed into an elite branch that, despite some partisanship, was generally highly regarded for the honesty, intelligence, and competence of its personnel.

  Like Jackson, Kendall was a complex character whose admirable and abhorrent qualities are hard to reconcile. He was a generous philanthropist, notably on behalf of the deaf, but also a key supporter of the racist president and his spoils system, as well as a brazen opportunist. Indeed, the gifted executive who managed to extend the postal network while briefly producing a surplus astutely resigned just as the department faced a grave crisis partly arising from its ambitious growth despite a troubled economy. In a characteristic move, just before he left office in 1840, Kendall sent franked notices to postmasters asking them to subscribe to the partisan publication he was about to join as editor.

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  JUST AS KENDALL AND JACKSON were enthusiastically wielding the post as a tool of their partisan agenda, some very different public figures were learning how to use it for very different political ends. As America’s population grew larger and more various in ethnicity, religion, location, and personal interests, kindred spirits began to draw together into “voluntary associations.” One of the nineteenth century’s major social developments, these activist organizations promoted particular causes, from literacy to chamber music, but the most influential focused on controversial moral issues, such as temperance, women’s rights, and abolition. Any group that aspired to attract support beyond the local level had to rely on the post to spread its message.

  In the 1820s, the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath waged perhaps history’s first direct-mail campaign, which changed American politics. These “Sabbatarians” mostly belonged to evangelical sects, such as Methodists and Baptists, whose numbers and clout had increased. They were determined to keep holy the Lord’s day and were outraged that even on Sundays, the post circulated modernity’s evils in the form of newspapers and their worldly advertisements. They were particularly riled by a federal law, which had seemed unremarkable enough when it was passed back in 1810, that ordered post offices to be open for business every day on which mail arrived there. Thus, by the Sabbatarians’ lights, postmasters in the many places where the mail was delivered on Sundays were compelled to violate the holy day by working, perhaps joined by wayward males who, at the sound of the mail coach, would abandon their pews to read newspapers, smoke, gossip, and even drink at the post office.

  The post’s policy of treating all seven days of the week as the same struck the Sabbatarians as sacrilegious. Jeremiah Evarts, a prominent Congregationalist evangelical, found it “very strange, that such a provision should have crept into the law, for it was clearly a repeal of the Fourth Commandment.” These zealots also saw the ruling as a federal attack on the long accepted right of state and local governments to exercise some moral as well as civil authority, as many did in imposing the mostly uncontroversial “blue laws” that banned commerce on Sundays. Rather than trying to repeal the federal law, the Sabbatarians tried to circumvent it by stopping stagecoaches from delivering the mail on Sundays, thus effectively closing many post offices. Not coincidentally, businessmen who were devout observers of the Lord’s day, including many in the movement’s own ranks, would no longer be at a disadvantage in reading Sunday’s market information a day late. The Sabbatarians decided to use mass mailing to drum up support for their cause and their case against the federal government.

  Many Americans disagreed with the Sabbatarians and disliked their proselytizing. The pious movement was concentrated in New England and Pennsylvania, where good mail service had been long established. Many “anti-Sabbatarians” lived in small towns and rural areas that had fought hard for the right to timely communications and information, particularly in the South. Then, too, the Democrats’ stronghold was less inclined than the National Republicans’ Northeast toward lofty reforms and evangelical fervor, favoring Jefferson’s view that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The anti-Sabbatarian ranks also included religious dissenters and supporters of the egalitarian viewpoint of minister-postmaster Barnabas Bates: “Is it not necessary that something should be done to guard the equal rights of all, whether Jews or Christians, believers or unbelievers, whether they belong to any sect, or to no sect at all?”

  The federal government ultimately sided with the anti-Sabbatarians, and mail delivery continued on Sundays. Nevertheless, a voluntary association’s activism, mediated by the post, had raised enduring questions about federal versus state rights, freedom of speech, and the relationship between religion and government. Public morals had long been the concern of state and local authorities, but the Sabbatarians challenged the rectitude of the federal government itself by politicizing the post in a very different way than Jackson. Their example inspired other groups to use the mail to fuel countrywide, long-distance debates on contentious public issues that tested the founders’ vision of a republic united by its information-driven post.

  Arthur and Lewis Tappan were very successful, very religious brothers and business partners who were quick to use the connections between publishing, politics, and the post to influence public opinion on behalf of a particularly controversial voluntary association and cause. Afte
r securing their fortunes in the silk trade, they had divided their formidable energies between private enterprise and the moral movements encouraged by the Second Great Awakening. These dual ambitions were neatly expressed in Arthur’s New York Journal of Commerce, a kind of early Wall Street Journal, which starchily rejected “indecent” advertising.

  The Tappans were determined to use the post to disseminate the viewpoint of the American Anti-Slavery Society, a powerful voluntary association they helped found. In the South, slavery was increasingly regarded, at least officially, as a benign, paternalistic institution sanctioned by the Bible. In the North, opinions on the subject ranged from indifference to enthusiasm for a back-to-Africa movement to support for abolition. In 1835, the Tappans’ organization sent unsolicited abolitionist tracts and newspapers, such as The Emancipator, to large numbers of randomly chosen southern officials, ministers, and prominent businessmen, most of whom were offended by both the Yankees’ proselytizing and their use of the post to circulate it. This direct-mail campaign sparked the country’s first crisis over postal content and a historic antebellum riot.

  America’s simmering regional differences regarding slavery reached the boiling point in July, when a load of the inflammatory abolitionist publications arrived at the post office in Charleston, South Carolina. Alfred Huger, the city’s postmaster, was obligated by federal law to deliver the materials, yet public sentiment and his own native sympathies gave him pause. When he asked Postmaster General Kendall, his boss and Jackson’s intimate, what he should do, that smooth politician had only temporized, vaguely citing a so-called higher law of respect for community mores. (In a characteristically paradoxical move, Kendall later supported the Union in the Civil War.) In any event, vandals took the matter into their own hands, broke into the post office, and stole the offending mailbags, which were burned by a large, enthusiastic mob. (This was not the first time that the post was blamed for bearing what the locals perceived as bad news. During the War of 1812, the residents of pro-war Democratic-Republican Baltimore wrecked the headquarters of the city’s antiwar Federalist newspaper; in response, its publisher had his journal printed out of town and mailed back to the city, where the militia had to protect the post office from the rioters.)