Country postmasters were paid only a commission based on their mail volume, supplemented with post box rentals and fees from local “drop” mail sent and picked up in the same office; the total often amounted to less than $100 per year. Their real compensation came from the position’s perks: prestige, political clout, the franking privilege, free exchange papers—and especially the increased foot traffic that the post attracted to their primary businesses. Though twenty-four-year-old Abraham Lincoln didn’t own the general store in New Salem, Illinois, he was appointed its postmaster by Postmaster General William Barry and served from 1833 to 1836. Other than the valued benefit of access to lots of newspapers, his rewards were modest, amounting to $55.70 in 1835, but then, so were his duties, considering that the mail came to town only once a week. Lincoln obligingly delivered any letters not picked up in a timely fashion, carrying them in his hat.
In hardscrabble regions of rural and frontier America, many general store–post offices simply didn’t have enough business to survive, and postmasters had a high rate of turnover. Some months after his workplace was closed, the impoverished Lincoln moved to Springfield, Illinois, where a diligent postal agent hunted him down and asked for the final balance of New Salem’s revenue. Honest Abe produced some sixteen dollars in coins that he had dutifully stored in an old blue sock. (Harry Truman, who owned a haberdashery before taking up politics, continued this seemingly unlikely presidential association with storekeeping and the post. In 1914, he was named postmaster of Grandview, Missouri, but he promptly gave the job to a widow who was more in need of the income.)
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WOMEN’S PROGRESS IN SECURING postal employment was slow and came in fits and starts. They could not vote and had no legal public standing, period, much less the right to hold a federal office. Nevertheless, a small number of capable, sometimes extraordinary, women postmasters, clerks, and mail carriers somehow managed to secure official roles in civic life.
Many colonial women had handled the mail, and some had also been involved in printing and publishing, but with rare exceptions, such as Franklin’s wife, Deborah, they did so as their husbands’ or fathers’ unacknowledged, unpaid help. The rare woman who managed to become a postmaster—“postmistress” was a little-used nineteenth-century variation—usually inherited the position from a male relative. When postmaster-publisher Lewis Timothy died unexpectedly in 1738, Elizabeth Timothy, his widow, supported the family by running both the post office and the South-Carolina Gazette. Still, this enterprising woman had to publish her newspaper under the nominal male authority of her little son Peter.
The remarkable career of Mary Katherine Goddard illustrates the obstacles that confronted even the most competent women. Many postmasters came from families that, like the Franklins, also included printers and newspaper publishers in an era when combining the three careers yielded substantial benefits. Giles Goddard, her father, and probably Sarah, her mother, had taught the family trades to Mary Katherine and William, her brother and later founder of the revolutionary Constitutional Post, who learned on the job.
When the Revolution became inevitable, Mary Katherine joined the many women whose contributions to the war effort modestly improved their sex’s status. (Among the most celebrated was Temperance “Tempe” Wick, a fearless New Jersey equestrian who unofficially carried communiqués to General George Washington in the winter of 1777.) She freed William for his crucial service to the cause by leaving her native New England to assume his duties as Baltimore’s postmaster and publisher of the well-regarded Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser. In 1779, Postmaster General Richard Bache made her a U.S. postmaster, and Congress gave her the honor of being the first printer of the Declaration of Independence and the names of its signers.
Goddard’s high position in the intertwined worlds of the post, publishing, and politics was short-lived. The jealous, irascible William returned to Baltimore in 1784 and forced her to resign from the Maryland Journal. Then, in 1789, Postmaster General Samuel Osgood fired her from the postmaster’s job, mostly on the dubious grounds that a woman couldn’t handle the requisite travel in the rapidly expanding city. Political patronage is a likelier explanation for the dismissal, as few officials would waste a good federal position on someone who couldn’t even vote. Goddard was joined by 230 prominent Baltimore citizens in protesting this injustice and asserting the superiority of her postal operations. As a respected public figure, she also made personal petitions to the Senate and to President Washington himself, but for the second time, she lost a job in which she had excelled. The resilient Goddard next supported herself by running a bookshop, and one of her last acts before dying in 1816 was to free “Belinda,” an enslaved woman, to whom she left all her property.
Despite the barriers, a few other women managed to become postmasters during the Early Republic. Feisty Sarah Decrow, who was appointed to serve in Hertford, North Carolina, in 1792, was reprimanded for daring to protest her inadequate salary. As Assistant Postmaster General Charles Burrall put it: “I am sensible that the emolument of the office cannot be much inducement to you to keep it [the postmastership], nor to any Gentleman to accept of it, yet I flatter myself some one may be found willing to do the business, rather than the town and its neighbourhood should be deprived of the business of a Post Office.” Decrow’s position was soon filled by such a gentleman. Rose Wright succeeded in securing the appointment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1814, but not without hand-wringing by Postmaster General Gideon Granger. He wrote to a Pennsylvania official that, due to a revision in postal regulations, “a doubt has been suggested to me from a source that I ought to respect as to the strict legality of appointing a female.” His scruples, however, boiled down to the use of masculine pronouns when referring to postmasters. Mary Dickson, who served in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from 1829 to 1850, was a rarity among women postmasters in that she made the fifth-highest postal salary in her populous state. Moreover, her important office had been previously held by Ann Moore, who was appointed in 1809, and Dickson was eventually succeeded by Ellen H. Hager, who served until 1876.
By the mid-nineteenth century, women’s opportunities for postal employment had somewhat increased, particularly in thinly populated areas where the lack of enough men to fill the jobs superseded bias and Victorian proprieties. Their sisters in the cities still faced opposition. Several prominent citizens in Columbus, Ohio, petitioned Postmaster General Cave Johnson to name the widow of General Jacob Medary to her late husband’s position as postmaster. He replied that it “has not been the practice of the Department to appoint females . . . at the larger offices; the duties required of them are many and important and often of a character that ladies could not be expected to perform.” Johnson took pains to point out that his opposition was by no means personal but extended to all women. Despite the pleas of “many leading members of Congress, of the Legislature of Missouri and many distinguished citizens in different Sections of the Union,” he had rejected a similar appeal to appoint the widow of Senator Linn of Missouri as the postmaster of St. Louis: “I felt myself constrained from a sense of duty to the public to advise the President against the appointment.” Mrs. Medary’s brother-in-law got the job.
Most female postal employees were postmasters, but a handful of women also transported the mail. Because carriers generally worked for the transportation contractors—often family members—rather than directly for the post, their service often went unrecorded. However, in 1794, Ann Blount covered the route between Edenton and Indiantown in North Carolina, then a remote frontier. By the mid-nineteenth century, the new Star Route service produced some more opportunities for doughty women, such as Polly Martin, a Massachusetts teamster who became its first female carrier around 1860. While driving her rounds on a night as “dark as a pocket,” she later recalled, a malefactor had tried to climb into her wagon, which had compelled her to horsewhip him “until the blood ran down,” causing him to fall beneath her wag
on’s wheels. As she remarked, “He had tackled the wrong customer that time.”
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POLITICIANS KNEW THAT creating a postal bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific was crucial to America’s continued growth and development for many reasons. Establishing post offices and mail routes was a concrete way for the federal government to stake its claim to barely explored and perhaps still internationally contested territory. As the founders had foreseen, newspaper circulation helped to unite widely dispersed pioneers under one flag. Moreover, decent mail service heartened prospective settlers and their loved ones and provided epistolary accounts of life on the frontier that encouraged westward migration.
8
LINKING EAST AND WEST
AMERICA’S PHENOMENAL westward expansion in the middle third of the nineteenth century was the greatest overland migration in history. Beginning in the 1830s and accelerating during the fifteen years before the Civil War, an estimated four hundred thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail. Some were driven by the exigencies imposed by the great financial Panic of 1837, others by the American tradition of moving on if life in one place fails to meet expectations, and still others by the stirring rhetoric of the imprecise, emotionally charged principle of Manifest Destiny. This theory of American exceptionalism proposed that the United States was a unique, divinely favored country that had a moral duty to spread its enlightened values and government from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The concept cleverly blended the era’s “postmillennial” Protestant belief that Christ was already building his new kingdom right here in America and the hard-edged Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared that North and South America were now off-limits to new European colonization. Manifest Destiny generally played well in the press and with Democrats, including President James Polk, who used the idea to rationalize taking half the Oregon Territory from Britain and seizing a big hunk of the Southwest from Mexico. Many Whigs, however, later including Abraham Lincoln, suspected that the theory was just wolfish imperialism in sheep’s clothing.
Divinely inspired or not, large numbers of peripatetic Americans left their homes back East to pursue such goals as homesteading, mining, commerce, and converting the Indians to Christianity. Armed with Yankee pragmatism, ingenuity, and independence, they were prepared to pay steep personal costs for the chance of a better life, starting with traveling for four to six months in the wilderness past St. Louis, the new gateway to the West. Peter Burnett, an early Oregon Territory settler who later became the first governor of California, described their austere existence with a wonderful economy: he and his few neighbors were “all honest, because there was nothing to steal; they were all sober, because there was no liquor to drink; there were no misers, because there was no money to hoard; and they were all industrious, because it was work or starve.”
Among the worst hardships of life in the strange, sometimes savage West was the pioneers’ almost complete bifurcation from the locus of civilization back East. This “old” America now enjoyed mail carried by railroads, steamboats, and modern stagecoaches on decent roads. The new country had poor if any postal service, no navigable rivers except the limited Missouri, and no roads other than glorified game trails. Everyone, including politicians, recognized the tremendous need for decent coast-to-coast postal service, but until the completion of the transcontinental telegraph and railroad, there simply was no good way, either by water or overland, to transport mail or anything else west of Missouri.
At first, very few Americans had followed Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery into the vastness of the “Great American Desert,” where the lush prairie of the Great Plains gave way to treeless steppes punctuated by the impregnable “Stony Mountains,” an early name for the towering Rockies. Lewis and Clark’s harrowing Northwest Passage was initially thought to be the only way to cross the forbidding three-thousand-mile-long range, but some so-called mountain men were lured into looking for better options by the prospect of “brown gold.” Europe’s booming hat trade had turned the beaver, whose fur made the best felt, into a precious natural resource that had been wiped out east of the Rockies. In 1812, some trappers working for John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company had stumbled upon the one gap in the mountains through which a wagon could be driven. News of this “South Pass” in what’s now Wyoming was initially slow to circulate, but by the early 1830s, a few hundred men were crossing the “desert” each year to pursue the lucrative fur trade.
The mountain men were not just trappers but also gifted explorers who mapped much of the West. Jedediah Smith had already become the proverbial “first white man” to travel, mostly on foot, across what’s now Nevada and Utah and climb the High Sierras when, in 1831, some Comanches killed him at the age of thirty-two. Kit Carson served as a guide to John Charles Frémont, the Army topographer known as the “Pathfinder,” who charted much of the Great Desert in the 1840s. (In 1848, while employed by the Army, Carson also became the first person to carry mail sent overland from one side of the country to the other.) Paradoxically, these adventurers who had fled farming and civilization for a wild life in an unspoiled natural world were crucial to opening it to the military, followed by the waves of settlers who clamored for development and postal service.
Both of the major routes to the West Coast started in western Missouri. The 800-mile Santa Fe Trail dipped southwest to that city. The more northerly, 2,200-mile-long Oregon Trail had begun as a series of game trails—the best ones trampled by buffalo—that were adopted by mountain men, on foot or horseback. From the later 1830s, the rough thoroughfare was gradually improved to accommodate wagons and eventually extended from Missouri through parts of what are now Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. At the South Pass, settlers heading to what would become California and Utah branched off onto the California and Mormon trails, and those destined for the Pacific Northwest continued on the Oregon Trail. With the help of Native American friends, Jim Bridger, a particularly gifted mountain man who had a photographic recall of geography, later identified Bridger’s Pass, an alternative to the South Pass that shortened the trip by sixty-one grueling miles.
The vast Oregon Territory sprawled from the Pacific to the Rockies across what are now the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana as well as British Columbia. Its rich natural resources and coastal ports had first attracted Russia, Spain, Great Britain, and France, whose colonial forays had created a live-and-let–live, polyglot culture that mostly revolved around commerce. (“Oregon” comes from fleuve d’ouragan, or “hurricane river,” as the French called the great Columbia.) The other imperial powers eventually relinquished their claims, leaving the United States and Britain to an uneasy joint occupancy. England initially had the upper hand. Its explorers had claimed the region for Great Britain in the late eighteenth century, and its chartered Hudson’s Bay Company, based at Fort Vancouver, provided what passed for government and postal service for Europeans, Indians, and Americans alike. Mail delivery elsewhere in the territory depended on accommodating travelers by water, horse, or foot. By the 1830s, however, the Oregon Territory began to exert a powerful pull on swelling numbers of variously motivated American expansionists, from farmers to missionaries.
Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, who was among the very earliest and most famous of the Northwest’s pioneers, merits special attention, because this prodigious correspondent’s story illustrates the mail’s importance both to pioneers and to propagandizing Manifest Destiny. Her much-publicized epistolary accounts of her adventures as one of the first two white women to cross the Rockies helped to popularize Far West settlement—then nearly unthinkable for women and families—and made her one of nineteenth-century America’s heroines.
Whitman was a pious, well-educated young teacher from upstate New York’s “Burned-Over District,” which was known for its fiery fervor during the Second Great Awakening. (The term derives from the assumption that all its residents had been converted, or “bur
ned,” so there were none left to evangelize.) She and Marcus Whitman, her husband, were determined to devote their lives to missionary work among the Pacific Northwest’s “heathen,” of whom they knew very little. To symbolize her death to mere worldly ambition, Narcissa had dressed in funereal black for her marriage in 1836. The next day, the couple set out on the bone-rattling six-month journey to establish a mission in the wild Oregon Territory at what’s now Walla Walla, Washington.
The Whitmans took a steamboat to St. Louis, where white civilization and postal service stopped, then traveled overland by wagon and on horseback on the Oregon Trail in the company of trappers, traders, and Henry and Eliza Spalding, another clerical couple. They reached the South Pass on July 4, 1836, in a mile-long pack train led by the legendary mountain man Tom Fitzpatrick and Sir William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish laird and intrepid adventurer. The Indians who had gathered there for a raucous rendezvous with their rugged white peers were amazed by the sight of the blue-eyed, fair-haired bride, who thoroughly enjoyed her unusual honeymoon. “I never was so contented and happy before,” Narcissa wrote to her sister and brother. “Neither have I enjoyed such health for years.”
How the Post Office Created America Page 12
