How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  Philatelic imagery was a far more decorous weapon in the antagonists’ psychological warfare than their flamboyant, highly emotional “patriotic stationery.” These specially designed sheets and envelopes were adorned with colorful partisan iconography meant to stir the sentiments and stiffen the resolve of the military and civilians alike. Some of the images—a lynched Abe Lincoln, an American eagle attacking writhing southern snakes—simply vilified the enemy, but much of it struck an exalted, inspirational tone. Gallant soldiers accomplishing glorious feats and fallen heroes were especially popular. The Union’s dashing young Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the Union’s first casualty, met both criteria. When a Confederate flag flying at an inn in Alexandria, Virginia, spoiled President Lincoln’s White House view, Ellsworth hastened to remove it, only to be shot by the outraged innkeeper, who in turn was killed by a Union corporal. Both men were quickly declared martyrs and emblazoned on stationery.

  Printers and stationers were eager to capitalize on the patriotic vogue, although the South was inclined to regard profiting from the brave fighting men as yet another crude, money-grubbing “Yankee-ism.” (Merchants also sold other war-related wares, such as special “correspondence packets” that even supplied little charms to send to the girl left behind.) Soldiers paid up to fifteen cents, then a considerable sum, for stationery depicting elaborate regimental scenes or battlefields created by skilled artists. Many chose bucolic scenes of camp life to convey something of their calmer everyday experience to distant loved ones. These elaborate landscapes offered insight and reassurance to those back home, and sometimes a nudge. One illustration showed two soldiers poring over letters outside their tent—a hint of mail’s importance to those who serve far away.

  Correspondence between the battlefield and the home front did more than sustain relationships. If soldiers’ messages reassured those left behind, their replies were reminders of a gentler world and a source of moral uplift for men engaged in a brutal conflict. Especially eloquent letters might be published in newspapers as reportage, widely shared as sources of inspiration, and used to comfort the dying. A slim bundle of carefully saved letters, accompanied by an officer’s note of condolence, was often the only relic of a soldier killed and buried far from home.

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  POLITICIANS OFTEN SPEAK OF turning a crisis into an opportunity, but Montgomery Blair, one of America’s most gifted and effective postmasters general, was a master of the art. The haughty scion of a prominent family of slaveholding Southern Democrats, who presided over an estate in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a mansion across the street from the White House (now the residence for the president’s state guests), used the Civil War to expand the post’s mandate and services in major ways. After graduating West Point, he became a protégé of the powerful Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, and then a lawyer, a district attorney, and a judge. Returning to the practice of law, he specialized in Supreme Court cases, notably as counsel for Dred Scott, an enslaved man. (In this famously controversial case, Scott argued that he should be emancipated by virtue of time spent in a territory made free by the Northwest Ordinance; the Court, however, ruled that Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in the territories.) By 1860, the powerful Blairs, mostly motivated by the preservation of the Union, decided to break with their family’s political tradition. They became major Lincoln supporters, war hawks, and founding members of the Whiggish new Republican Party that would run the federal government for the next twenty-five years.

  The influential family had been crucial in keeping both Maryland and Missouri in the Union, and the new president acknowledged the debt by offering Montgomery Blair the expected cabinet position. Given his West Point background and choleric temperament, he might have preferred to be Secretary of War, but he settled for postmaster general. The “Stormy Petrel” was not a beloved figure, yet he had a certain brooding charisma (inherited by his great-grandson the actor Montgomery Clift) that comes across in a description published in the London Times: “a tall, lean man, with a hard, Scotch, practical-looking head—an anvil for ideas to be hammered on . . . he speaks with caution, as though he weighed every word before.” Blair was the most conservative member of Lincoln’s cabinet, and he especially disliked Secretary of State William Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, whom he called “radicals.” The antipathy was mutual. These abolitionists doubted Blair’s commitment to their cause and thought him too soft on the matter of the South’s treatment after the war. Nevertheless, for several years, the brilliant, belligerent lawyer had great influence with Lincoln, especially regarding military issues.

  Blair quickly mastered his new postal duties, starting with oversight of the spoils system that rewarded his fellow Republicans with postal jobs. Both he and Lincoln were besieged from morning to night by applicants whose only essential qualification was party membership. One appointee was remarkably candid about his lack of credentials: “I knew nothing of the postal service . . . ,” he wrote, “and was fortunate to retain an experienced clerk.” In a purge that made Andrew Jackson’s seem moderate, Lincoln’s administration replaced some twenty-one thousand of the post’s twenty-eight thousand employees.

  Next, Blair focused on using the war to expedite postal improvements that had been in the air but were too costly to implement before secession eliminated the burden of the South’s largely unprofitable system. The first of these much-needed advances was Free City Delivery, as bringing their mail to urban residents was called. Like their colonial forebears, mid-nineteenth-century Americans still had to trudge to the local post office to send and receive their mail. The advent of cheap postage had only increased the congestion in big cities’ facilities, where the atmosphere was more like that of a circus than that of a government institution. Even the opening of urban branch offices and the installation of mailboxes on streets beginning in the 1850s had done little to reduce the crowding, which consigned many customers to wait in long lines at the General Delivery windows only to be told they had no mail. Pliny Miles and other midcentury reformers had long insisted that Free City Delivery was an idea whose time had come. The service could be arranged in New York and a dozen or so other big cities, but it was not free. Indeed, the term “penny post” originally referred to the private letter carriers, such as Boyd’s in New York and Blood’s in Philadelphia, that offered services that skirted the postal monopoly, such as bringing a letter from a residence to a post office for a fee of one or two cents.

  The war supplied the emotional momentum necessary to make Free City Delivery a reality. No single person can take exclusive credit, but Joseph Briggs, a postal clerk in Cleveland, played a crucial role. Bad news came by letter, and soldiers’ families and sweethearts had to wait nervously in long lines to learn whether their loved ones had been wounded or captured or were among the 620,000 men who would die. Briggs’s excruciating experience of handing officers’ notes of condolence and bundles of returned letters to the suddenly bereaved had convinced him that post offices should not be public stages for personal heartbreak. He persuaded his supervisor to allow an experiment, and during the frigid winter of 1862, the city began to deliver correspondence free of charge—a valiant example that was not lost on his boss in Washington.

  Blair knew that the greatest obstacle to adopting Free City Delivery on a large scale was convincing Congress to pay for a new workforce of letter carriers—a huge financial burden for a government already strained by the war’s vast expense. However, he had an advantage in that he no longer had to deal with southern lawmakers, whose constituencies were likelier to be rural and who had long opposed the city delivery service favored by their peers from the urbanizing North. The canny postmaster general successfully retrofitted the argument used by the cheap postage movement to convince a cautious legislature that more convenient delivery would generate more postal business, which in turn would pay for the new corps of letter carriers, as it had in Britain. In 1863, despite some dithering abou
t the propriety of mailmen approaching homes where women might be alone, Congress authorized a new, peaceful army to march through the Union, starting with big northern cities. Blair sweetened the bitter financial pill for the legislators by adopting the popular policy of giving preferential postal employment to veterans and their families. He also recognized Briggs’s contribution by bringing him from Ohio to Washington to help administer the program, including the design of the carriers’ first uniform.

  The post’s new letter carriers had to work hard for their salaries, which ranged downward from $800 per annum. They walked an average of twenty miles per day, six days per week, fifty-two weeks per year until the 1880s, when they finally received two weeks of vacation, a shorter (eight-hour) workday, and overtime pay. They were obliged to hand letters directly to their customers, which entailed endless waiting and rapping—some mailmen used wooden knockers to save their knuckles—and often hauling the same letters back on their next round if no one answered. (Despite the obvious inefficiency, home owners were not required to install mail slots or boxes until 1923.)

  Free City Delivery was a great success, and as it gradually spread, the service changed America in significant ways. After all, trips to the post office, convenient or not, had been part of life’s rhythm and structure since colonial days. Home delivery also altered and reclassified the country’s physical and social landscape. Communities that sought it had to demonstrate that they were populous enough to pay for the necessary carriers and amenities, such as decent sidewalks. Delivery required that streets be named and marked, and houses and buildings be numbered. Many Americans got their first formal addresses, which added a new dimension to their identity and sense of how the world was organized. The wealth of addresses also encouraged the new industry of large-scale commercial mailers, as well as the perpetrators of fraud and get-rich-quick swindles, which swelled the volume of junk mail.

  In 1864, Blair used the post to help democratize America’s financial services by introducing the department’s money order system. For most of history, only the wealthy had enjoyed banking privileges in the modern sense. Even registered mail, which since 1855 had provided a safer way to deliver currency, important documents, and small valuables, had primarily benefited the businesses that could pay a premium for the service. The popularity of unguarded urban mailboxes had proved Americans’ trust in the post’s security, and Union soldiers’ pressing need to send their salaries home without the risks of mailing cash provided the final impetus for postal money orders; the first averaged about five dollars delivered for ten cents. The program soon proved to be a huge boon for the population at large, and by 1880, the orders’ total amounted to several times the postal budget.

  The indefatigable Blair even tried to impose some order on the byzantine postage-rate system. In 1863, dismayed by his department’s hundreds of fees, he oversaw the categorization of mail into three groups. The most expensive “first class” letters, weighing a half ounce or less, could travel any distance for three cents. “Second class” newspapers, periodicals, magazines, and pamphlets, which continued to make up the bulk of the mail, still paid just a fraction of their delivery cost. Advertisements and other printed materials that constituted the “third class” paid a higher rate. These numerical classifications also caught on with other organizations and became part of American speech.

  That same year, Blair tapped his skills as a statesman and initiated the heroic effort to standardize the chaotic international mail service and postage rates by proposing a conference on the subject. Since 1844, Congress had tried to help by authorizing postal “conventions,” or bilateral agreements, with England, France, and Germany; the first was with the city of Bremen, then the locus of much trade and emigration between central Europe and the United States. The International Postal Congress, held in Paris in 1863, was more ambitious. The U.S. delegate was the impressive Congressman John Kasson, a former assistant postmaster general and future diplomat, who advocated that international postal policy should be based on the American precedent. This important meeting laid the foundation for the formation, in 1874, of the General Postal Union, one of the world’s first multinational organizations, which initially set standardized postage and reconciled accounting among Western nations; four years later, as more countries joined, it became the global Universal Postal Union.

  Despite Blair’s many achievements, his influence with Lincoln was waning. He was already greatly disliked by the cabinet’s abolitionists. Then, in 1864, General Henry Halleck, the president’s military adviser, demanded that the postmaster general be fired for accusing Union officers of cowardice after they failed to stop rebels from burning Blair’s family seat at Silver Spring. Lincoln finally asked Blair to resign, which he did in that year, then gamely proceeded to campaign for the president’s second election.

  Mail service during the war had significantly improved in the North even as it had deteriorated in the South. After the war, strained postal finances as well as lingering political resentments kept the region from regaining its full complement of post offices until 1878. (Indeed, Blair himself rejoined the Democratic Party to protest the Republicans’ policies during Reconstruction.) Over time, however, the resumption of good federal mail service helped draw the South back into the United States and its economy. Former Confederate postmaster general Reagan, who had been arrested after the surrender, was not only pardoned but also returned to Congress, where he became chairman of the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads.

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  THE POST OF THE turbulent Civil War era underwent important internal as well as external changes, particularly regarding the employment of women and African Americans. Like the Revolution before it, the war had of necessity provided opportunities for women to show what they could do outside the home, which affected their standing in society. Blair even took the extraordinary step of allowing female clerks to work in the august postal headquarters in Washington, although they had to use a segregated entry and work space. By 1865, the women employed in the high-profile Dead Letter Office, a popular destination for tourists, outnumbered their male colleagues thirty-eight to seven.

  Americans were fascinated with the Dead Letter Office for several reasons. In an era when money and valuables routinely traveled by mail, they imagined a kind of federal Aladdin’s cave filled with cash, jewelry, banknotes, wills, deeds, and other treasures gleaned from undeliverable letters. The office was presided over by a highly professional staff that unusually included many clergymen as well as women, because both groups were considered more honest and diligent than the average man. These skilled detective-clerks did not read the letters but strove earnestly to get their contents, which amounted to millions of dollars per year, to the rightful recipients. They successfully redirected a letter addressed only to “Dr. Washburn, Roberts College,” and an accompanying $1,000 check, to him at an institution not in the United States but in Constantinople (today, Istanbul), Turkey. They forwarded another letter, sent to “Mr. James Gunn, Power-Loom Shuttle Maker, Mass., America,” to the addressee in Lowell, Massachusetts, a center of the textile industry. At a time when many people were phonetic spellers, one clerk was even able to translate “Reikzhieer, Stiejt Kanedeka” as Roxbury, State of Connecticut. Some curiosities that remained in limbo ended up in the Dead Letter Office’s museum, a major attraction that suggested the startling range of arcana that circulated in the mail, from loaded pistols to butterfly cocoons. While examining its vitrines, one visitor discovered two valuable miniatures that had been stolen from her family home six years before.

  Blair praised the female Dead Letter clerks as “more faithful in the performance of their duties than the men,” yet they earned just $400 to $700 per year, about 35 percent less than their male colleagues. The men opened the dead letters to see if they contained valuables, while the women researched the addressees’ whereabouts, which would cause a droll reader writing in to the New York Times to attribute
the former’s higher wages to the fact that “immoral things are sometimes found in [the mail, and] to see these things would, it is supposed, corrupt the morals of women.”

  Vinnie Ream, a Dead Letter clerk who became a world-famous artist, is among American history’s least heralded, most fascinating heroines. In 1862, the bright fifteen-year-old girl took the job to help support her family in the wake of their recent move from Wisconsin to the capital. During her wanderings in the city, she came upon a sculptor, picked up some of his clay, and modeled an Indian chief’s head with preternatural skill. Soon Ream was making widely admired busts of some of the government’s most powerful figures, including President Lincoln, who was charmed by her and her story. After much debate, Congress gave the obscure teenaged postal clerk a $10,000 commission for a full-size statue of Lincoln to stand in the Capitol Building, which made her the youngest artist and first woman to receive such an honor. Ream went to Europe to supervise the process of translating her clay model into marble and was feted by famous figures from Franz Liszt to the pope. She described the unveiling of her sculpture, completed in 1871, as her life’s supreme moment thus far and seemed destined for many more. She went on to produce highly regarded works until her marriage at the age of thirty, when her husband insisted that she give up art.

  The end of the Civil War also created a modest increase in employment opportunities for women postmasters, both on the expanding western frontier and in the historically Democratic stronghold of the South. Prospective postmasters had to take an oath affirming that they hadn’t aided the Confederacy, which eliminated men who had served in its army but not most of their wives and daughters. However, the case of Mary Sumner Long, who aspired to become the postmaster of Charlottesville, Virginia, was particularly complicated. Powerful friends in Washington pleaded her case to President Ulysses S. Grant, stressing that she was the daughter of the Union’s own General Edwin V. Sumner. The president tartly observed that as much as he respected her father, her spouse was no mere soldier but Confederate general Armistead L. Long, who had been one of Lee’s closest aides and friends. Nevertheless, shortly before leaving the White House, Grant appointed Long as postmaster of Charlottesville, where she served until her death, in 1900.