How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  The government finally abandoned the hoary principle that the post must support iself, even as it was extending all the way to the Pacific. The institution was explicitly defined as a public service that, like the military, deserved financial support, and after the Post Office Act of 1851, deficits would be accepted as a matter of course. Congress shored up the post’s finances in other important ways, especially by passing legislation that reinforced its poorly defended monopoly. Known as the Private Express Statutes, these laws made it a crime for other carriers to transport mail in places served by the post, which soon put the independent competitors out of business.

  The legislators also took steps to cut the steep transportation costs that constituted about two-thirds of the post’s total budget. In 1845, they imposed a stricter, performance-based classification system on the railroads’ compensation and also established the Star Route service to make carriers’ contracts in remote areas more competitive. The work of getting the rural mail from one post office to another had traditionally been given to local stagecoach proprietors, who could charge the government for one or more horses, a wagon or coach, and a driver. Henceforth, the four-year contracts would be awarded to the lowest bidders, who might need only a mule, a sled, or a canoe to get the job done with “celerity, certainty, and security”—criteria soon abbreviated to the three asterisks that gave the Star Route service its name. Congress also tried to improve the very poor but surging international service between the United States and Europe by authorizing the building and operation of steamships to transport the overseas mail. The prospect of this government-subsidized transatlantic fleet was also generally applauded as a potential military naval deterrent to hostilities with Britain on the North Atlantic, although the lucrative postal contracts generated the predictable allegations of political favoritism and corruption.

  Most important, Congress embraced the arguments for cheap letter postage. In 1845, it passed the most popular of its midcentury reforms, which enabled Americans to send a half-ounce letter of however many pages within three hundred miles for five cents, more than three hundred miles for ten cents. Then, in 1851, Congress authorized three-cent postage on prepaid mail for distances up to three thousand miles, which mostly ended the privatization debate. Spooner and Hale had lost that battle, but they had arguably won the war by seriously challenging the post’s monopoly and forcing it to compete on price. (Spooner took on his next challenge: arguing for abolition on the grounds that, like the postal monopoly, slavery was unconstitutional.) Postal reformers turned their attention to securing cheap international postage and improvements in metropolitan post offices.

  In 1847, a delighted America got its first stamps: tiny receipts that turn letters and parcels into official mail. (Some “postmaster provisionals” had appeared a few years before, but they could only be used locally.) Just as Great Britain had put Queen Victoria on the world’s first postage stamp in 1840, the United States honored Franklin and Washington (based on the Gilbert Stuart portrait) on its five- and ten-cent issues, respectively. At first, the new stamps were mostly available at the larger post offices, but as more were issued, their sales soared along with the volume of letters and the department’s revenue.

  • • •

  INTENT ON POSTAL REFORM, the mid-nineteenth century Congress not only gave Americans cheap stamps but also, by increasing publishers’ subsidization, even more access to information. “The mail” had long primarily meant newspapers, and by the first third of the nineteenth century, postmasters general and others bemoaned the costly problem of transporting the heavy, bulky papers as well as franked matter throughout the rapidly expanding country. The freeloading materials almost guaranteed postal deficits, and postal managers and social critics suggested raising rates for publications and abolishing exchange papers and even the franking privilege. Americans were passionate news devotees, however, and the once struggling press was now a formidable industry with a built-in mouthpiece. Then, too, the politicians who relied on the frank to promote themselves and rally their bases were reluctant to relinquish it. To please the public and the press, as well as its own members, Congress lowered postage on most newspapers going anywhere, which would increase their circulation 166 percent between 1850 and 1860 alone.

  The government’s generosity particularly benefited the small-town press. Beginning in 1845, papers could circulate postage-free within thirty miles of their origin. Then, in 1851, legislators further reduced the local publishers’ overhead by permitting all county weeklies to circulate free within their entire counties, which secured their status as an American institution. Greeley’s weekly New-York Tribune still circulated widely, to be sure, but the combination of the pricing reforms, the railroad, and breaking news provided by the telegraph improved and further decentralized journalism. Regional papers in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and many other cities prospered, and the whole industry boomed. As the historian Richard Kielbowicz observes, “Far more than other government policies or actions touching the press, the routine operations of the post office shaped publications’ contents, formats, and circulation.”

  Congress’s bias toward smaller newspapers was not just a benign effort to help the little guy. The official explanation was that a robust civic life required the circulation of local as well as national and international news and opinions. That sounds reasonable enough, as does the desire to help small enterprises stay competitive. However, the rural papers were often highly partisan supporters of the local congressmen, who could be counted on to represent in Washington their constituents’ deep suspicion of city slickers and their supposedly radical politics and immoral ways. In any event, when urban lawmakers tried to get lower postage rates for the larger interstate papers, they were defeated on the grounds that such a step would be undemocratic.

  A Congress as passionately devoted to the diffusion of printed knowledge as Benjamin Rush could have wished also spurred the growth of two other publishing industries. In 1851, books were finally admitted to the mail, then given a lower postage rate a year later. In 1852, magazines received the same very low rate as newspapers, which inspired enterprising publishers to churn out bulky new magazine-book hybrids that anticipated the wildly popular “dime novels.”

  • • •

  WHEN IT EMERGED FROM what remain its darkest days, the post had found new ways to enlarge upon the founders’ vision of an information and communications society mediated through the mail. In 1792, the emphasis had been on circulating news about public affairs in a young, experimental democracy. In 1825, this mandate had been expanded to include market information for an industrializing economy. Now, in a more educated, sophisticated society, the post’s mission extended to private communications as well, producing America’s golden age of letter writing. The recently endangered institution had entered the prelude to its glory days.

  6

  THE PERSONAL POST

  BY THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, the post, long primarily a vehicle for newspapers, now also enabled average Americans to enjoy easy, back-and-forth personal correspondence for pennies, and they did so in rapidly accelerating numbers. Statistics on volume are dodgy, but around 1820, most Americans still received fewer than one letter per year; that figure rose to nearly three by 1850, to seven by 1854, and kept on rising. In what historian David Henkin calls “the postal age,” their correspondence no longer had to be reserved for matters of life and death but could carry on casual written conversations between friends.

  Certain social advances encouraged the epistolary explosion. “Man of letters” referred to a learned, active correspondent before assuming its modern meaning of literary scholar or critic, and by the mid-nineteenth century, about 90 percent of America’s white population, male and female, was literate if not learned. Schoolchildren spent less time on rote exercises and memorization and more on asking questions and composing essays. The new vogue for writing letters encouraged adults to reflect on their experiences, sense of ident
ity, and worldview. Even mass-produced consumer goods, such as affordable steel-nibbed pens, paper, and books, helped to raise America’s general level of intellectual sophistication.

  That nearly all Americans could both write letters and afford to mail them would prove to be an enormous gift to historians, because correspondence now provided personal information from all social strata, not just the elite. Something of the enormous importance that average folk placed on their mail, which still required often-futile trips to the post office to retrieve, comes across in excerpts from an 1857 letter, written by a “Jamie” from Cleveland to a young lady in Mount Vernon, Ohio:

  My dearest Ella

  Another week has passed I have received no letter from you, and although I wrote to you on New Years Eve, I can not let this morning pass without writing a few lines at least.

  Every day have I been to the office, expect to find a letter from you, but every day I was doomed to be disappointed. I at last came to the conclusion that you had been so much engaged during the past week that you could not find time to write, but I hope this day will not pass without you writing. . . .

  I received a letter from Mrs. Smith on New Years day, a long time had passed since I had heard from her, you can imagine I was right glad to get it.

  I am very fond of sleigh riding, but I can not find any one to accompany me, whose company is half so pleasant as yours. . . .

  Postage for pennies profoundly affected ideas about and prospects for maintaining relationships over distances even greater than the hundred and five miles separating Jamie from his lady friend. The pioneers who could now afford to stay in touch with those left behind were the most obvious beneficiaries. Settlers wrote for and received seeds from treasured plants back home to grow in their new, faraway gardens. Miners and loggers in the West sent money to their families in the East and got daguerreotypes of their growing children in return. Cheap postage even popularized the hobby of collecting autographs, which now could be done inexpensively by mail.

  The new stamps also made correspondence far more convenient. Previously, letters of one or more sheets had been folded up, sealed shut with wax or an adhesive wafer, addressed on the “cover” side, and taken to a post office. The postmaster calculated the postage and jotted it on a corner of the cover, perhaps adding the date and name of his town or office. (Some postmasters also used hand stamps, occasionally very handsome ones, but postage rates were too complicated to standardize that technology.) If the sender prepaid the postage, that too was marked on the cover. Most of the time, however, the cost was paid by the recipient, who had to come to the post office to fetch it. He or she might well decide that, unless it was a love letter, the message wasn’t worth the expense and return it to the postmaster. This labor-intensive system naturally generated a huge backlog of unwanted mail and dead letters. In one of many schemes to avoid postage, a traveler promised loved ones that he or she would send a letter upon reaching a particular destination; when it arrived, the reassured recipients would refuse it. Indeed, Zachary Taylor did not realize that the Whigs had nominated him to be their presidential candidate in 1848 because their letter to that effect sat in his local post office amid a pile of mail that he had refused to redeem.

  Stamps revolutionized this cumbersome mailing process. Postage was standardized and prepaid by the sender, so recipients were no longer primed to reject all but the most important letters. (As a result, the volume of commercial solicitations, advertisements, religious tracts, and get-rich-quick promotions soared along with that of personal correspondence.) Moreover, stamps came in sheets that, although not yet perforated, were conveniently backed with adhesive and ready to stick on covers, which themselves were soon rendered obsolete by manufactured envelopes.

  The correspondence craze debuted during the Victorian age, and many Americans as well as Britons embraced that fussy era’s emphasis on doing things “the right way.” Less educated participants in the new postal culture, along with immigrants grappling with English, could turn to popular manuals for help in refining their correspondence. These guides offered formats for terse business letters and flowery declarations of love, along with glossaries of formulaic expressions, such as “I take pen in hand . . .” Sometimes even the well educated consulted more advanced reference books for advice on, say, the propriety of writing or mailing letters on the Sabbath while a houseguest or the correct salutation for a letter to a titled person. Correspondents no longer had to cram as many words as possible onto each sheet, so they could afford to pay more attention to aesthetics. Good penmanship, or a “fine hand,” long a marketable skill for clerks, was now also an indication of character, and many Americans mastered the beautiful copperplate script later associated with formal wedding invitations.

  The Victorians’ obsession with correctness was physically expressed in their desire for multiple accouterments for every activity, right down to different spoons for eggs, marrow, and coffee, and they were mad for stationery, pens, inks, wax, and sealing wafers. The correspondent’s ultimate accessory was a handsome wooden lap desk: a small, portable office-in-a-box that could rest on a table or one’s knees. The lid of this “Victorian laptop” served as a writing surface and lifted to conceal the necessary supplies, and perhaps a tiny dictionary. A lock and key, or even a secret drawer, protected ribbon-bound relics that preserved the sensory memory of a beloved person: letters sanctified by a precious signature, teardrop, kiss, or whiff of cologne.

  Cheap postage was a particular boon for women. Previously, most hadn’t been able to afford the luxury of mailing letters, which makes the correspondence of an Abigail Adams or Jane Franklin so relatively rare. When stamps plunged to three cents, women took up their pens in earnest. Despite the era’s popular conduct manuals, which deplored the practice of women reading and writing their own letters without their husbands’ or fathers’ supervision, correspondence became so important a part of their daily lives that lockets designed to hold stamps were a popular accessory.

  Some of the social rules governing women’s correspondence were predictable. The style thought proper for their letters was more discursive and emotive than the more focused, taciturn tone considered appropriate for men’s. (That said, precocious fifteen-year-old Carrie Deppen, who worked as a telegrapher, was neither windy nor sentimental. A collection of her correspondence includes flirtatious notes that she mailed to male colleagues down the line and a letter to her supervisor asking for a raise on the grounds that she was paid less than other workers, particularly the men. Her boss responded that Deppen was lucky to have a job at all and that she received a modest salary because she still lived at home.)

  Many women wrote letters primarily to maintain their bonds with loved ones, but others were activists, such as suffragists, temperance advocates, and abolitionists, for whom correspondence, like meetings and marches, was a political tool. They often divided their letters into a section for news that was meant to be circulated widely in reform circles and another for personal communication between friends. In 1855, Lucretia Mott opined on women’s history at some length in a letter to her colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was planning to write on the subject, but she began on an affectionate note: “Three weeks ago I received thy letter announcing thy plan of a Book,—and 3 weeks ago it ought to have been answered. Repeated absence from home, and the care of a family of 20 when at home, are not sufficient reasons.” Then she added some warm encouragement for her friend’s projected history: “This is the right work for thee dear Elizh., and success will no doubt attend the undertaking.”

  Women were now important postal customers, but their increased presence in post offices, which had always been male-dominated public spaces, posed a special challenge to prissy Victorian social mores. The era’s bourgeois establishment tried to impose order on the Industrial Revolution’s rapidly changing, topsy-turvy, urbanizing world by constructing social and architectural honeycombs that sorted and segregated diff
erent social groups: public and private, rich and poor, adults and children, masters and servants, and especially males and females. Middle- and upper-class Victorian women were in most ways far more restricted than their mothers and grandmothers had been in terms of the freedom to choose their own pursuits and move about in the world. Particularly in big cities, architects struggled to find ways for women to appear in public places without impropriety—an effort that among other things popularized the new department stores, which offered ladies’ restrooms and restaurants for dainty luncheons safe from the male gaze.

  The post reflected the larger society’s ambivalence about women’s public status by commissioning buildings that used separate windows, counters, and other such contrivances to segregate them from men. The architect Ammi B. Young showed a particularly Victorian zeal in designing special female entrances and even, in 1861 in Philadelphia, a “ladies’ vestibule” screened by a heavy iron grille of the sort associated with cloistered convents. The San Francisco post office took delicacy to the nth degree by installing a separate window for men who were picking up mail addressed to women—an “amenity” that also encouraged keeping them sequestered at home and their correspondence under male supervision.

  • • •

  THE MOST COLORFUL AND engaging addition to America’s great democratization of personal correspondence must be the greeting card. The ancient Egyptians and Chinese were the first to use special forms of written rhetoric to mark occasions and express good wishes, and by the fifteenth century, printed and handmade cards had become rather expensive holiday gifts in parts of Europe. America began to manufacture cards in the mid-nineteenth century, the first of which celebrated Christmas and the New Year (as well as Jewish versions of the latter), soon followed by St. Valentine’s Day.