How the Post Office Created America
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By also raising the issues of freedom of speech and the right to uncensored mail, the Charleston postal conflagration powerfully illuminated the question of slavery for the entire country. Southern politicians protested that the post must be stopped from transmitting the Yankees’ incendiary propaganda. They were already horrified by the rebellions staged in South Carolina in 1822 by Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved carpenter who had purchased his freedom with lottery winnings, and in Virginia in 1831 by the enslaved Nat Turner. Their sentiments were shared by Jackson, who urged Congress to forbid the mailings, and even by John Calhoun, his political enemy, who proposed at least banning them from states that prohibited such materials. The southerners’ efforts to censor the mail, however, had come too late. In “Freedom’s Defense,” an essay published in 1836, the anonymous author, styling himself as “Cincinnatus,” remarked that “tyrants” are prone to single out an unpopular or controversial issue, then “call upon the people to restrain the freedom of speech and the press so far only as is necessary to remove this evil from among them.” Moreover, the idea that southern Democrats were attempting to turn the United States into a censoring “slave power” took hold and soon became a cornerstone of the post-Whig Republican Party.
The Post Office Act of 1836 reinforced the sanctity of the mail, abolitionist materials or no. Although the southern states mostly ignored the law within their borders, members of a voluntary association had highlighted the moral importance of slavery as a countrywide, not merely regional, issue and the North and South’s ideological divide, and it was the post that delivered their message. An early abolitionist, Benjamin Rush surely would have experienced mixed emotions had he lived to see the information network meant to unite Americans across borders also become the means of publicizing the political divide that would tear the United States apart.
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WASHINGTON, D.C.’S neoclassical General Post Office, designed by Robert Mills, is one of the city’s architectural glories and now a chic boutique hotel. When Jackson commissioned the capital’s first building to have an all-marble exterior, it seemed only fitting that the headquarters of the federal government’s biggest and best enterprise should occupy an American version of an Italian Renaissance palace, complete with Corinthian columns, vaulted ceilings, spiral staircases, and expansive skylights. Yet by the time the building was finished in 1842, the seemingly invincible post was facing the worst crisis in its long history and nearly went out of business.
5
CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY
MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA was a giant laboratory busily conducting massive experiments in social change. Census figures show that just between 1840 and 1850, the population increased by 35 percent to more than 23 million people, including many new immigrants from Scandinavia, Ireland, Germany, and central Europe, as well as more than 3 million enslaved persons. The economy’s transition from farming to industrialization and capitalism drew rural men and women to cities that offered new kinds of complex jobs in modern, centralized factories and office buildings. (As Mary Paul, a young girl who fled the country for a position in the textile industry, wrote to the folks back home in 1845, “I get along very well with my work. . . . I think that the factory is the best place for me, and if any girl wants employment I advise them to come to Lowell.”) As westward migration significantly increased, the era’s great technological breakthroughs of the railroad and Samuel F. B. Morse’s electric telegraph helped to make the vast continent seem smaller.
The telegraph was an extraordinary advance but one that primarily affected the stock market, big newspapers, and some other time-sensitive businesses. The lives of virtually all Americans, however, were changed by another communications revolution waged by a post suddenly on the brink of collapse.
By the early 1840s, the post’s vast system of 150,000 miles of mail routes had unified an ever-expanding America, but the institution was one of many enterprises, both private and public, to find itself in deep financial trouble. A burst of wild economic excess and speculation had culminated in the great Panic of 1837, which set off a recession that dragged on for seven years. A third of the states defaulted on loans for building railroads, canals, and other overly ambitious projects. Many banks closed, the real estate bubble burst, businesses failed, and unemployment climbed. By 1842, the catastrophe’s ripple effect had left even the U.S. Treasury nearly penniless.
Even as the economy staggered, the post had continued its exuberant expansion, abetted by its demanding new transportation contractor. That the railroads charged the post high fees for poor service was bad enough. Worse, the fast trains and their low fares had encouraged a new, semicovert industry of private express mail companies. These carriers challenged the post’s monopoly and seriously cut into its revenue by illegally toting carpetbags full of letters by rail for about a third of what the government charged. The upstart rivals had plenty of customers, especially during a recession.
Increased efficiency had cut the actual cost of transporting the mail, but letter postage had remained punitively high at a time when people still had no other way to communicate over distance. According to a complicated rate system based on the number of pages and the distance to be traveled, sending a single sheet from New York City to Troy, New York, in 1843 cost 18½ cents, but a heavy barrel of flour could make the same trip for just 12½ cents. The demand for reform when the average worker made under a dollar per day fueled the American version of the “cheap postage movement” that had originated in Great Britain.
The post defended its pricing policy with the traditional argument that it needed the revenue from letters, particularly in populous, cost-effective areas, in order to serve the entire country, especially the labor-intensive, unprofitable regions in the South and West. Then, too, the post also had to deliver officials’ free franked materials and the newspapers that comprised most of the mail’s bulk but brought in only 13 percent of its revenue, while the private carriers had the luxury of concentrating on letters in the Northeast’s profitable urban corridor. An essay by an anonymous writer identified only as “Franklin” laid out the position vigorously defended by Postmaster General Charles Wickliffe: “It is the care and duty of the Post Office Department, to provide proper mail facilities for every section of the country, whether thinly settled or densely peopled.”
Aggrieved Americans were unmoved, particularly residents of the eastern cities, who resented subsidizing mail service in remote areas. Some correspondents economized with such tricks as writing messages both horizontally and vertically on a page or in the margins of newspapers. Many others simply turned to the private carriers, whose advertised services might include convenient home delivery. These competitors were emboldened when the government lost a lawsuit against one express company for violating the post’s monopoly, and before long, they carried a very substantial portion of America’s mail.
By the early 1840s, the triumphant post so admired by Tocqueville only a decade before was fighting for its life. The toxic combination of the troubled economy, the system’s relentless westward growth, and competition over pricing produced a string of big deficits that further fueled the public’s dissatisfaction. Beset with complaints from everyone from the man on the street to Horace Greeley, who sounded his loud laments on the so-called moral organ of his New-York Tribune, Congress was forced to contemplate a massive reform of postal policy.
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BOTH MAJOR SCHOOLS OF thought on the subject of letter postage reflected nineteenth-century America’s moralistic view of economics and politics. Members of the cheap postage movement argued that encouraging people to correspond freely would promote the values of sociability and cohesiveness—a goal equal if not superior to financial considerations, particularly at a time of tremendous mobility and migration. Senator James Simmons of Rhode Island implored Congress to eliminate any obstacle to the circulation of “a current of affection through every inhabited portion of this
extended country, producing such harmony as has not been witnessed by created beings since ‘the morning stars sang together.’” In a January 1845 article in the Boston Post, Oberlin College economist Amasa Walker similarly questioned whether the public good wasn’t more important than a self-sustaining post, which was obliged to charge rates that were “exceedingly onerous and unjust” and “almost prohibitory upon the friendly and social correspondence of the people.”
The cheap postage movement had an economic as well as ethical rationale. According to what was later called the “quantity production principle,” the larger the volume of goods or services, the lower the cost. Henry Ford would capitalize on this idea much later, but as Clyde Kelly, an influential Republican congressman and postal historian, would observe in the 1930s, “Lower unit cost through the increased volume due to decreased prices was patiently and persistently proved by the Post Office for half a century before its implications were realized and put into practice by private industry.”
Pliny Miles, a popular journalist and spokesman for the cheap postage movement, combined both the high-minded and pragmatic arguments by preaching that price slashing would bestow an important social service on America’s large, footloose population and also increase the department’s revenue. He asserted that the many migrants who were on the move to the cities or the western frontier in search of better lives should be able to send half-ounce letters to the folks back home and vice versa, regardless of distance, for a mere penny. (His New York Times obituary described this classic nineteenth-century reformer with a Dickensian flourish: “a striking figure—tall, thin, of nervous-sanguine temperament, wearing a beard that never scraped acquaintance with a razor; a rapid walker, keen observer, talking with wonderful volubility, always cordial, open-hearted, and everywhere welcome for his agreeable social qualities.”)
Members of another bloc of dissatisfied Americans went further than advocates of the cheap postage movement by challenging the post’s monopoly, whether in hopes of privatizing it or at least forcing it to lower its rates. They allowed that the Constitution said that the government should have a post office department and transport the mail, but they asserted that nowhere did it say that an independent firm could not offer the same service. Many Americans little concerned with legal fine points enthusiastically agreed with them that it should be possible to send a letter anywhere in the country for five or six cents. Determined to force postage reform in 1843, James Webster Hale, a swashbuckling sea captain and entrepreneur also known for promoting Chang and Eng, the famous touring Siamese twins, established Hale & Co., an independent mail service that he considered legal. At a time when the government charged almost nineteen cents to send a letter from New York to Boston, say, he charged five cents. His business boomed, and he soon employed 1,100 workers in 110 offices in major eastern and midwestern cities.
Lysander Spooner, a lawyer, philosopher, anarchist, abolitionist, labor activist, entrepreneur, and maverick by any measure, didn’t merely want to force the post to reform; he wanted to privatize it. Based on an idiosyncratic system of justice that he called the Natural Law, Spooner opposed any government interference in matters of personal liberty, the free market, and the right to private property. Monopolies of all kinds, notably the post’s, were the libertarian’s major bêtes noir. In a pamphlet called “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress, Prohibiting Private Mails,” he stated that “the constitution expresses, neither in terms, nor by necessary implication, any prohibition upon the establishment of mails, post-offices and post roads, by the states or individuals.” In 1844, Spooner put his theory to the test by starting the independent American Letter Mail Company. Its offices in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other cities sold stamps and dispatched mail couriers traveling by rail or boat to various cities, where local messengers delivered the letters to their final destinations. The company, which charged just 6¼ cents for a half-ounce letter, provided good service and was a commercial success. The government fought back by plaguing both Spooner and Hale with multiple lawsuits, but Washington was shocked by the vigorous legal debates sparked by the beleaguered post’s new rivals.
In what seemed like the final blow, the post was even losing its grip on the telegraph. In 1843, after Morse failed to find private funding, he secured a government grant of $30,000 to build a prototype of his transformative network, which transmitted information through electrical impulses carried by wire. On May 24, 1844, to much acclaim, he famously tapped “What hath God wrought?” on a line from the U.S. Capitol in Washington to the train depot in Baltimore. (In October, the Washington terminal was moved to the second floor of the General Post Office.) In 1845, Congress supplied $8,000 for expenses and put the postmaster general in charge of the new service, which initially was mostly used by merchants in need of speedy market information.
The telegraph dazzled the nation. One journalist rhapsodized that the technology “seizes upon the lightning itself, and endows it with flashes of intelligence. . . . The speaking lightning has no limit.” The civic-minded Morse and many other influential figures, including Henry Clay, the Whig presidential candidate in 1844, regarded the technology as an obvious extension of the post’s mission to speed information throughout the country. Morse envisioned a system in which the government owned the patent and licensed and regulated private companies that would provide the actual service. The case for postal control was strengthened by the argument that the lightning-quick delivery of news was a valuable asset, and that if the telegraph were in private hands, it could become both a monopoly and a tool for other monopolies. If the post were in charge, the government could ensure that everyone, not just market speculators or big urban newspapers, would get the same information at the same time.
Government policy, however, is shaped by shifts in political and cultural attitudes as well as objective technological and economic changes. The public’s initial enthusiasm for the postal telegraph waned as the 1840s unfolded and attention shifted to the looming Mexican-American War. Postal reformers were far more interested in securing cheap letter rates for the entire population than in developing a new service largely for the business sector. Politicians were leery of making a huge investment in postal infrastructure when the department’s deficits were already high. Then, too, the perennial opponents of a big federal government agreed with the editor of the New York Post, who declared that if Washington ran the system, “it would suffer as all enterprizes suffer, which are taken out of the hands of individuals.” The postal telegraph that had once seemed inevitable was in jeopardy.
In 1847, Morse offered to sell his patent to the United States for a mere $100,000. As a congressman, Cave Johnson had been known as the “Watchdog of the Treasury” and the scourge of postal patronage, and he had disparaged the new technology as little more than “mesmerism,” or pseudoscientific quackery. As postmaster general, however, he had come to understand its value and potential and desperately wanted to acquire it for the department. He argued that the post would be “superseded in much of its important business in a few years, if the telegraph be permitted to remain under the control of individuals.”
Congress fatefully declined Morse’s offer. The disappointed inventor chose former postmaster general Amos Kendall to head up a consortium of eager private investors who bought the patent, and he himself remained involved with the group. Telegraph lines were extended to New York, Boston, Buffalo, and Philadelphia, and by the early 1850s, Wall Street and other big businesses would heavily rely on the technology, although the huge discrepancy in cost compared to mail restricted its general use. The post had lost the first round in the debate over the telegraph as an obvious extension of its mandate, but the argument would continue into the next century.
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THE POST HAD EITHER broken even or generated small surpluses until its expansion in the 1820s, when it generally began to report progressively greater losses. By 1844, the department was losing
so much business to competitors that a reluctant Congress, fearing the political consequences of either cutting mail service or paying to support it, was forced to act, despite southern politicians’ suspicion of costly federal schemes that called for tax increases and strengthened Washington’s hand. As it is wont to do in such situations, Congress created a special commission to assess the crisis and make recommendations for fixing it. This group of experts took the high road, concluding that the post had not been created to generate revenue but for “elevating our people in the scale of civilization and bringing them together in patriotic affection,” as well as to “render the citizen worthy, by proper knowledge and enlightenment, of his important privileges as a sovereign constituent of his government.” Accordingly, starting with the Post Office Act of 1845 and continuing through 1851, Congress passed a series of reforms that would stimulate the full flowering of what the historian Wayne Fuller called “the people’s post office.”