How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  The Pony Express’s real victory came on April 13, when it decisively beat the clock by delivering the mail across nearly two thousand miles even faster, by some hours, than the ten days promised. The service had proved itself and seemed poised for success.

  • • •

  AS AMERICA THRILLED to the exploits of the Pony Express, the wildly overextended firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell was in desperate financial straits. Rumor had it that it lost thirty dollars on every letter, and Congress had still not produced the long-term federal mail contract the partners had banked on. In January 1861, the discovery that the frantic Russell had conspired with a clerk at the Department of the Interior to “borrow” some bonds from the Indian Trust Fund to use as collateral to pay off debts caused a major scandal. Russell was arrested, and although he was not convicted, he and his partners were disgraced and bankrupt.

  History intervened to sustain the Pony, now on life support, for ten more crucial months. The secession of Texas in February had disrupted the operations of the southerly stagecoach mail line to California, so the federal government, in an irony surely not lost on Russell and his partners, decided to reroute service to the safer Central route blazed by the Pony. The Overland Mail Company was still the post’s official contractor but didn’t have the resources to take over the new northerly route. The federal government brokered a compromise in which the Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company, which was a separate entity from Russell, Majors and Waddell, became a subcontractor of the Overland Mail Company and continued semiweekly courier service. Thus, the Pony finally carried some U.S. mail.

  Not even the gallant Pony Express could outrace time and technology. The transcontinental telegraph line, proceeding at twenty-five miles per day, was finally finished on October 24, 1861, just in time to provide instant news for the war’s duration, and the cross-country railroad’s completion was now within sight. The government balked at supporting an expensive mail service that suddenly seemed antiquated. After carrying 35,000 pieces of mail over 650,000 grueling miles—equivalent to twenty-six times around the globe—the Pony was abruptly out of business when many of its riders were barely past adolescence.

  After triumphing over their rival expressmen, Henry Wells and William Fargo enjoyed a monopoly on transportation and mail service past the Missouri River. Their reliable, businesslike firm, which soon legitimately claimed to go everywhere and do almost everything for anybody, became the West’s biggest, most important institution, public or private. Indeed, for a while, the better-equipped Wells Fargo carried more mail than the U.S. Post Office in the West, even installing its green mailboxes next to the government’s red ones. By 1853, however, the post, always jealous of its monopoly, required private carriers to use government-stamped envelopes, to which they added their own franks—a clever scheme that enabled the post to reap revenue without doing the work.

  The days of the Pony Express and the Overland Mail’s stagecoaches have become so romanticized that fact and fable are not easy to tease apart. Indeed, the reputations of some famous westerners have been burnished with dubious Pony credentials. Scholars debate whether Bill Cody, certainly a remarkable horseman, actually rode for the service. However, he hired many of its former employees to perform in what he called his traveling historical exhibition of the Wild West, inaugurated in 1883, which drew Queen Victoria, the pope, and many thousands of others at home and abroad for nearly forty years. Bronco Charlie Miller, a native New Yorker, improbably claimed to have joined the Pony at the age of eleven, but he certainly became a riding-and-roping star in Cody’s circus. James “Wild Bill” Hickok, who had been a stableman for the Pony, only briefly shared the stage with Cody. (Hickok’s nom de guerre derives from a taunt from a drunken bully, who imprudently called the bucktoothed youth “Duckbill.” Wild Bill shot him dead, then was tried and released by a grateful community.) Seemingly indestructible “Pony Bob” Haslam—who had once completed a relay of 120 miles in eight hours and ten minutes on twelve horses despite bullet wounds to his left arm and a jaw fractured by an arrow—did work for Cody, whom he had also accompanied on a belated trip to persuade Sitting Bull to surrender in 1890. After stints as a Wells Fargo courier, an Army scout, and a U.S. marshal, Haslam eventually settled in Chicago, where he became a hotel porter, entertaining guests with stories of his adventures. He died at the age of seventy-two, a forgotten, impoverished hero of a bygone era in the new age of the automobile.

  During a crucial period before the completion of the transcontinental telegraph and railroad, the Overland Mail Company and the Pony Express united the East and West into one America in very real ways. They improved communications despite daunting circumstances, laid down important infrastructure for the frontier’s development, and also made vital contributions to preserving the Union. While California agonized over whether to ally itself with the North or the South, Yankee politicians decided that getting President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address to Sacramento as quickly as possible would help to rally the state. Gearing up for the task, the Pony hired extra men, added relay stations, and logged its fastest trip ever, and California remained a free state. Nor was this the only occasion on which the Pony aided the cause. General Albert Sidney Johnston, who was in charge of the Union’s Army of the Pacific in California, was preparing to surrender its stores to the Confederacy, to which he would soon defect. At the last minute, Lincoln got word of the scheme via the Pony and replaced Johnston with General Edwin Sumner.

  At a time when power was still centered in the Northeast, the ambitious Overland Mail and Pony Express highlighted the can-do spirit and huge potential of the emerging Midwest and West, which changed the way Americans saw themselves and were seen around the world. Here is Twain, while traveling west on a stagecoach, on the transporting experience of watching the Pony Express in action:

  “HERE HE COMES!” Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. . . . In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling— . . . another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider’s hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm! So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe.

  10

  WAR CLOUDS, SILVER LININGS

  WARFARE CHANGES through the ages, but the necessity for good communications remains one of its constants. Mail during the War of Independence was largely limited to official correspondence. Average soldiers and their families, like most civilians, depended on verbal or written messages delivered by willing travelers. By the outbreak of the Civil War, nearly a century later, a vastly expanded postal system, increased public education, and cheap stamps and stationery supplies had thoroughly democratized the mail. The Yankees would send more letters than the Confederates, but the two armies were the most literate in history, and these active correspondents imposed tremendous burdens on their posts.

  Long before the Civil War, the post had been involved in the great political and moral issue of slavery. In the eighteenth century, enslaved African Americans had routinely delivered letters between southern plantations, and some had even served informally as postal carriers after the Revolution. In 1794, Postmaster General Timothy Pickering, who strongly opposed slavery, wrote that if the citizens on one mail route in Maryland “should deem their letters safe with a faithful black, I should not refuse him.” Postmaster General Joseph Habersham felt similarly in 1801, “especially as it came within my knowledge that slaves in general are more trustworthy than that class of white men who will perform such services.”

  Such relative
tolerance was short-lived. Southern politicians increasingly feared that if enslaved people, some of whom were literate, had access to the mail, particularly newspapers, they might learn of the Haitians’ successful rebellion against the French in 1791 and follow their example. Gideon Granger, Habersham’s successor, shared this anxiety, writing in 1802 that because white masters chose the “most active and intelligent” slaves to handle the mail, “they will learn that a man’s rights do not depend on his color. They will, in time, become teachers to their brethren.” Congress responded by declaring that “no other than a free white person shall be employed in carrying the mail of the United States”—a prohibition that obtained until 1865.

  In the early nineteenth century, white southerners’ growing fear of rebellion had made the rules that had previously governed slavery tighter and much harsher, yet the enslaved generated a surprising amount of mail. Despite the constraints and the low literacy rate even among free blacks, some individuals managed to write or dictate letters to friends, family, and the abolitionists and celebrities whose support they sought, and even to masters and former masters. After he escaped from bondage while accompanying his owner to New York, John S. Jacob informed the latter of the fact in a letter wittily signed “no longer yours.” Henry “Box” Brown, born enslaved in Virginia, even successfully mailed himself to freedom inside a wooden crate that, with help from a white storekeeper and an unwitting private express company, delivered him to Philadelphia.

  By the 1830s, northern abolitionists’ mass mailings had helped to thrust slavery into the public arena and frame what had often been regarded as a regional matter as a moral issue for the whole country. From that point, the North and South alike saw the post as both a potent symbol of the federal government and, for better or worse, an active agent in fomenting rebellion. Even after the Confederate states had seceded and formed a government, in February 1861, President Lincoln and his postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, wanted U.S. post offices in contested territory to remain open as long as possible as a political statement. As the president put it in his inaugural address, “The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union.” In April, the Confederates fired the first shots at Fort Sumter, outside Charleston, and Lincoln, urged on by the bellicose Blair, finally declared war.

  The new Confederate States of America, like the revolutionary United States of America before it, urgently needed an independent, secure communications-and-information network. President Jefferson Davis chose wisely in appointing John Henninger Reagan as postmaster general. The Texan was a former U.S. congressman and a capable, experienced postal administrator who had initially turned down the job out of well-founded fears that the new network couldn’t possibly measure up to expectations. Once committed, however, he recruited many former federal postal employees, who brought their equipment as well as their experience to the huge task ahead. After Reagan announced that the South’s new network would begin operating on June 1, Blair suspended U.S. mail service to the rebel states as of May 31, and like the country itself, the postal system was sundered.

  The Confederacy simply seized the 30 percent of the federal government’s post offices and the 40 percent of its routes in rebel territory. Indeed, these resources had only recently been increased by a Congress eager to reinforce the increasingly precarious Union by wooing the testy South with federal handouts. The C.S.A.’s new post was closely modeled on its institutional parent, right down to its procedures and policies, including, much to the dismay of General Robert E. Lee, exempting transportation contractors from military service. Unlike the federal post, however, the Confederacy censored the mail. (That said, Blair authorized the North’s generals to declare articles that damaged the war effort to be treasonous and have them pulled from the mail, which set a precedent for the unpopular Palmer Raids designed to arrest political radicals in World War I.) Whether because of the expense or the desire to suppress unfavorable opinions and reports that weakened loyalties, it also didn’t subsidize newspaper circulation as robustly. In hindsight, these policies seem either unwise or unnecessary. Excepting border states, such as Missouri, the southern press mostly censored itself to reflect a unified Confederate point of view. Had the South done more to circulate newspapers, it might well have boosted rather than impeded its cause.

  The postal network’s bifurcation caused enormous private as well as institutional distress. There was now no official mail service between the two warring Americas. Individuals and organizations alike were suddenly unable to reach friends and family, colleagues and customers, across strange new borders. Previously, when Americans thought of themselves as citizens, some thought first of the republic—“nation” was not yet much used—but many others identified most with their states. After refusing to take a major command in the U.S. Army, Lee said to a friend, “If I owned four millions of slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?” Once war was declared, however, people became Confederates or Unionists, dirty rebels or damn Yankees, and the change was disorienting.

  Simply trying to carry on postal business as usual was a trial for both countries. Much of the correspondence addressed to the South after June 1 was hand-stamped MAILS SUSPENDED and forwarded to the post’s Dead Letter Office in Washington, which reeled under the added burden. The only letters that passed between the two sides were taken across enemy lines under a flag of truce in a border state, transported covertly by blockade runners, or carried by the likes of Confederate captain Absalom Grimes. Union forces arrested the former Mississippi River boat pilot five times for sneaking substantial quantities of mail across the shifting borders. He always managed to escape until 1864, when he was seriously wounded and finally scheduled for hanging. Union friends interceded with Lincoln, who, late in the conflict, commuted Grimes’s sentence to a brief imprisonment.

  The war perturbed postal service even far from the battlefield. Good access to transportation turned the quiet county seat of Elmira, New York, into a military depot and arguably the worst of the camps for Confederate prisoners. The town’s post office, which already served a sizable community, suddenly had to accommodate the needs of the Union forces now stationed there, plus some ten thousand POWs, whose letters were transported between the North and South on flag-of-truce ships. Elmira’s mail volume quadrupled, but the strenuous efforts of postmaster Daniel Pickering and his staff, particularly a teenaged clerk who had a special genius for “throwing the boxes,” or sorting mail, enabled the office to process between two thousand and four thousand letters each day.

  Writing to the folks back home was a major activity for soldiers, and humble privates as well as officers expected to send and receive mail regularly. (Narrative from their letters accounts for much of the poignancy of Ken Burns’s television series The Civil War.) They kept close tabs on their correspondence, often numbering as well as dating their letters to keep the chronology straight. Soldiers who lacked mothers, wives, or sweethearts to write to could become pen pals with respectable female volunteers, and those who lacked stationery supplies could receive special gift packs containing paper, pens, and pencils.

  Getting the mail to and from the armies in the field, even within the two sides’ own borders, took anywhere from a few days to a month or so, depending on the location of a soldier’s camp and the duration of his stay there. On the Union side, delivery was a collaborative effort between the post and the military, aided by such private groups as the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a relief organization headed by the civic-minded landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. In a typical scenario, the post forwarded a letter to a soldier’s brigade or regiment, where its own agents and army quartermasters worked together to send it down the line to the right unit. Then mail orderlies would carry the letter to the soldier’s company and, in a same-day turnaround, bring back outgoing mail for delivery. The Confederates’ process was similar but beset with
the same economic, material, and transportation disadvantages that plagued its government’s other functions.

  • • •

  STAMPS WERE A HUGE PROBLEM for both the North and the South, albeit for different reasons. The C.S.A. had none at all and had to start the entire philatelic process from scratch. (In the meantime, its so-called independent states often happily used federal stamps and postal markings.) Any postage still in rebel hands could also be used as money, so the United States had to void its entire existing supply, redeem any old stamps, and print and circulate new ones. (When the Union ran low on coins later in the war, stamps were sometimes enclosed in little discs and called “encased postage,” which functioned as currency.) Both governments recognized that soldiers didn’t always have access to stamps or money to buy them and forwarded many of their letters—but not those of officers—with a notation of “postage due.”

  The trouble Civil War stamps caused notwithstanding, they are one of American philately’s most popular categories, for several reasons. By that era, the Industrial Revolution had wrought major technological changes in the printing process that delight collectors who focus on production matters. To prevent counterfeiting, for example, so-called security printers, who made stamps as well as banknotes and stock certificates, developed intricate designs and distinctive markings that were very hard to duplicate. (One technique for producing these “printing varieties” soon after the war used a waffle-iron-type tool to make impressions and breaks in the paper, which also discouraged the practice of washing off a stamp’s postmark so that it could be reused.) The Confederacy didn’t have the same quality of facilities for engraving, so its postage was not as finely crafted as the Union’s.

  Both the North and South used stamps as political propaganda, starting with classical philatelic portraits of their heroes. The C.S.A.’s first stamp, issued in 1861, rebelled against U.S. tradition by honoring a living subject: Jefferson Davis, its new president, who was portrayed in green ink. Ceding nothing to the enemy, both governments staked philatelic claims to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, all southern icons as well as U.S. presidents.