How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

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  THE CIVIL WAR FINALLY enabled African Americans to join the ranks of postal employees—a truly momentous development that had been a long time coming. The victorious Republican Party, which dominated the Reconstruction era (roughly from 1865 to 1877), used postal patronage jobs both to reward its supporters and reinforce its political values. Thus, Andrew Jackson’s spoils system now rewarded some of the four million formerly enslaved, particularly the men enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment—a group who now not coincidentally comprised the electorate’s majority in parts of the South.

  The 142 new African American postmasters faced formidable challenges. For many, these included producing considerable sums in order to be bonded, but James Mason, also known as James Mason Worthington, the first known black postmaster, had no such financial problems. He and his sister, Martha, were the privileged only children of an enslaved woman and Elisha Worthington, a rich Arkansas planter, whose legal wife had had their marriage annulled on the grounds of adultery. The young Masons studied at Oberlin Academy and later ran Sunnyside, their father’s biggest plantation. James became the local postmaster in 1867 and also served as a county judge and sheriff before his death in 1875.

  Most of the early black postmasters worked in small offices in rural districts, but not all. In 1881, the obituary of Benjamin A. Boseman, a black physician in Charleston, South Carolina, appointed to head the important city’s bustling post office, stated that he had been “civil and accommodating” and that “he enjoyed, deservedly, the reputation of being thoroughly honest”—strong praise for officials of any race at the time. Anna Dumas, the first known black woman postmaster, served in Covington, Louisiana, from 1872 to 1885. African Americans were also employed by the post in other white-collar capacities. John P. Green, who received a prestigious appointment as a postage stamp agent, oversaw a staff of eight white men charged with inspecting each issue of stamps for quality and uniformity. Isaac Myers, the first known black postal inspector, helped solve several notorious crimes, including thefts by Baltimore postal clerk George W. Claypole, which, according to The New York Times, had “puzzled the efforts of the shrewdest detectives in the Post Office Department.” George B. Hamlet, the only known African American chief postal inspector, proved to be more resilient than principled. He was demoted for abusing the privileges of his office, allowed to resign, and then, thanks to powerful political connections, reinstated and transferred to the Treasury Department.

  A position as a clerk at a major post office was very well paid and much sought-after, and William Cooper Nell, who served in Boston from 1863 to 1874, was one of the most accomplished. He was a civil rights pioneer who worked tirelessly to counter racial stereotypes and discrimination in Boston’s public schools, as well as the first published African American historian. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin had made her a celebrity, wrote the introduction to his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, which appeared in 1855. Its heroes were all the more remarkable, she observed, because they fought for a freedom that most of their people were denied. In 1863, John Palfrey, Boston’s white postmaster, appointed Nell to the clerk’s position he had long aspired to, giving this scholarly man another historical distinction as the federal government’s first known black civilian employee.

  The several hundred African American letter carriers who were hired around the time of Reconstruction were not as well paid as clerks, but they also experienced less friction in a culture that regarded them as less threatening blue-collar workers. William Carney, a Civil War hero, was born enslaved in Virginia, but his family later managed to migrate to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the Underground Railroad and jobs in the whaling and shipping industries had created a prosperous black community. When Lincoln welcomed African Americans to the Union Army, Carney gave up his dream of entering the ministry and enlisted in the all-black 54th Regiment of Massachusetts. During heavy fire at the battle of Fort Wagner, which protected the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, he grabbed the flag from its wounded bearer before it fell to the ground and, though shot in the leg, carried it to the ramparts. After the Union’s defeat was clear, he was shot three more times while returning it safely to his regiment, crying out, “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground!” He was promoted to sergeant and eventually returned to New Bedford, where he worked as a letter carrier. In 1900, Carney became the first African American to earn a Congressional Medal of Honor, and he and his regiment were celebrated a century later in the movie Glory.

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  FULL STEAM AHEAD

  THE POST IMPROVED IN major ways during the Civil War, but its Railway Mail Service was an innovation of a different order, which changed Americans’ concepts of distance and time, national and local, modern and old-fashioned. The completion of the five transcontinental railroads, starting with the Union Pacific and Central Pacific in Promontory, Utah, in 1869 and ending with the Great Northern in Seattle in 1893, was one of nineteenth-century America’s signature achievements. The advance opened both its own West to development and the Far East to commerce. At the same time, the vast rail networks allowed most of the nation’s intercity mail to be sorted as well as transported aboard moving trains—a tremendous boost to the country’s booming industrial economy and its population of passionate correspondents alike.

  Trains had improved considerably since their early days in the 1830s, and locomotives equipped with headlights now chugged down tracks of a standardized gauge even by night. By the 1850s, more mail traveled by rail than by stagecoach and steamship combined. Aside from a few experiments, however, trains initially carried bags of mail from place to place in the right general direction, just as post riders and stagecoaches had done. Then, the increase in letter volume generated by cheap postage, combined with the demands posed by the Civil War, required an American version of the “railway post office” (RPO).

  England and Canada had already experimented with these specially equipped train cars that enabled clerks to sort mail while moving between cities and drop it off at various destinations en route. In 1862, General William A. Davis, who before the Civil War had been employed at the post office in St. Joseph, Missouri, where the railroad ended, decided to follow their lead. Standard operating procedure called for the enormous volume of the East’s westbound mail to be unloaded from the trains, processed in the post office, and then transferred to the overland stage. However, Davis had been struck by the short-lived Pony Express’s efficiency in presorting its mail aboard trains before handing it over to the riders. He outfitted a baggage car that enabled a clerk to perform the same task on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, and the acceleration in service had attracted postal management’s attention.

  Two years later, a crisis brought on by the exigencies of war finally pushed the post to inaugurate the official Railway Mail Service (RMS). General U. S. Grant had made Cairo, Illinois, the headquarters for his western campaign because of its proximity to the railroad and the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The backlog of mail to and from the huge Union force stationed there forced Congress to allow the post to try something new. Always quick to seize an opportunity, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair authorized George Armstrong, an inventive assistant postmaster at Chicago’s huge distributing post office, to run America’s first official railway postal route, which operated on the Chicago & North Western line. The experiment was such a success that customized RPO cars were deployed on many routes between big cities. The service was well established nationwide by the 1880s, and sending a letter from New York City to Raleigh, South Carolina, which had taken ninety-four hours in 1835, took just nineteen hours in 1885. By 1910, the RMS would handle an astonishing 98 percent of America’s intercity mail.

  The RMS increased the post’s speed and efficiency not just by combining the mail’s processing and transportation but also by decentralizing certain costly, time-consuming operations. Previously, a letter from the East that was desti
ned for Michigan, say, or Wisconsin had to pass through Chicago’s big regional distributing post office, which would then forward it to the right local office. The RMS skipped the bottleneck of Chicago and got the letter right to Ann Arbor or Milwaukee in record time—an advance that also required fewer general clerks and distributing post offices. By the 1870s, the post collaborated with several large railroads to offer special express service between certain big cities on “Fast Mail” trains, equipped with four RPO cars, that were the locomotive equivalent of the Pony Express. One such train, traveling from New York City to Chicago with thirty-three tons of mail to be sorted and delivered en route, completed the nine-hundred-mile trip in twenty-six hours, but at the end, “the exhausted engineer fainted.”

  Fast Mail trains were especially important for businesses, but average Americans were also well served by regular RMS lines. Most correspondence traveled within a radius of fifty miles, and given good rail access and the multiple daily mail deliveries that many homes enjoyed, it was possible to send a postcard at 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. that invited a friend who lived thirty or forty miles away for dinner and receive a reply by 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. By the turn of the century, some big cities even had RPOs on streetcars.

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  THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHER Edmund Burke’s notion of the unfathomable “sublime” was customarily applied to breathtaking, even frightening, natural phenomena, such as a lion attacking its prey or a gale at sea. Their technological and bureaucratic equivalents included the nineteenth century’s great industrial looms, which transformed textile production and changed society (wonderfully chronicled in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South), and the RMS, a proverbial “wonder of the age.” Like the crouching tigers that fascinated the painter Eugène Delacroix, the almost inconceivable power of the huge black, smoking locomotives that sped the nation’s mail inspired the awe of average Americans as well as their artists. (They would later include the Futurists and musicians such as Hank Williams: “The midnight train is whining low / I’m so lonesome I could cry.”)

  The RMS was also sublime in the sense of its enormous complexity, which exceeded the comprehension of any single individual. Average folk puzzled over the new railway timetables, and even postal employees were hard-pressed to stay abreast of the continual changes in service. The department published a daily newspaper to update its workers and employed a topographer to adjust its twenty-six maps, which showed the great steel rivers of the populous East dividing into smaller streams as they flowed westward.

  Each state had hundreds of railway mail routes, which had to intersect at scheduled times both within and outside its borders. Pennsylvania, aptly named the “Keystone State,” had industrialized early and had both the most post offices and the largest RMS network. A letter sent from Philadelphia to a small town in, say, Illinois, traveled west on the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, known as the “Pennsy,” which had quickly become one of the nation’s largest companies and employers. Passing through Harrisburg and Altoona, it reached the major junction at Pittsburgh, then the great hub of Chicago, and finally its destination via one or more small regional railroads.

  Not even Theodore N. Vail, its gifted superintendent during the 1870s, could grasp the organization of the whole RMS. (Not coincidentally, he later became the president of American Telephone & Telegraph [AT&T], another extensive communications network, whose organization he based on the post.) Nevertheless, RPO clerks, who were known to have the hardest job in the entire department, were expected to master their pieces of the national puzzle. Only two-fifths of the applicants who passed the test for general postal clerk made the cut for this elite corps. They had to be much faster and more accurate sorters than average, and to prove it by earning at least 97 percent on a test of their home state’s hundreds of routes; many did better. Elijah Fraser, a musician and former soldier who rose from letter carrier to RPO clerk on the line connecting Detroit and Chicago, once “threw” 2,444 cards with only four errors, setting a record of 99.49 percent accuracy. Most of these clerks had better-than-average educations, but P. J. McDonnell, an unschooled Irish immigrant, scored 99.31 percent on a test involving 11,743 cards and also won a gold medal for outstanding service.

  Much was expected of an RPO clerk, because, as Postmaster General John Wanamaker said, “On his memory, accuracy, and integrity hang the engagements of the business and social world. An idle minute on the railway post car may be felt across the continent.” Clerks trained for the Herculean feats of memorization that their job required by continually drilling with flash cards. (One side was printed with a location—say, “Hoboken, N.J.”—and the other with pertinent railroad information, such as “Jersey City Direct.”) However, their work called for quick thinking and dealing with complexity as well as rote learning. If a train missed a connection, the clerk had to choose the best alternative route for the mail while continuing to rocket down the tracks. Letters that were headed north didn’t necessarily have to wait for a northbound train, because a southbound one might be able to speed a “turn-back pouch” to a quicker northbound connection farther down the line.

  Functioning as a human computer was essential but not sufficient for success as an RMS clerk. Candidates also had to be physically hardy enough to handle two-hundred-pound mailbags and work shoulder to shoulder for hours on end while traveling at high speed without succumbing to seasickness, a common problem. (Suggested questions for an applicant’s mandatory physical included “Any indications of derangement of abdominal viscera?”) The “pouch clerk,” who had to drop off and pick up the leaden mailbags at train stations, was often a muscular ex-farmer. If no stop was scheduled at a particular station, he had to toss or kick the station’s incoming mailbag onto the platform from the streaking train, then wield a heavy hooked metal arm to snag the outgoing bag suspended from a crane. A miss cost him five demerits.

  RPO clerks were charged with keeping the mail secure, so they were expected to be trustworthy and temperate enough to forswear drinking on duty. They also needed to be flexible. Many clerks worked for a week straight on the railroad, putting in thirteen-hour days, followed by nights passed in dormitories or rooming houses. Then they spent a relaxed week or two at home with their families, during which they also caught up on paperwork and mastered the constantly updated routes and schedules. Those able to adjust to the job’s demands enjoyed some real rewards, starting with good wages. (During the twentieth century’s Great Depression, unemployed teachers and other professionals were among those to take refuge in the job’s security and benefits.) Clerks had to reside within five miles of their assigned rail line, so that they could “deadhead,” or ride free, from their local station to the larger hubs where they caught their “head-outs.” Thus, workers who lived in small towns enjoyed what struck many as the best of both worlds: experiencing the big cities’ excitement without leaving comfortable homes in bucolic communities where comparable salaries were hard to come by.

  Some of an RPO clerk’s perquisites defy categorization. The late-twentieth-century singer Andy Williams recalled that one of the greatest pleasures of his Depression-era boyhood in Wall Lake, Iowa, was to hop a train with his father, who was an RPO clerk. As they approached their hometown, his dad would pop him into a big canvas mailbag and “deliver” him to the train station, where his mother waited to feign astonishment at finding her child in the sack.

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  SORTING THE MAIL on the go called for a new workplace as well as a new workforce. The custom-designed interior of a long, narrow RPO car was lined with shelves with pigeonholes for sorting letters, sliding racks for holding heavy mailbags, and locked drawers, cupboards, or even a small safe or cage to secure registered mail, which often contained money or other valuables. Just supplying and maintaining all this special equipment was a huge undertaking that was handled by regional repair facilities and the post’s huge Mail Equipment Shop in Washington, D.C. (Hattie Maddux, a blind expert in crochet who work
ed there in the late nineteenth century, was paid forty dollars per month for fixing damaged cords.)

  Not even the gaily painted exterior of the cheap wooden RPO car could disguise the fact that it was a very dangerous working environment. Fire was a constant threat. The cars were lit by oil or gas lamps, heated by burning stoves, full of tinder-like mail, and located right behind the locomotive, which threw off sparks. If a train was derailed by an open switch or errant livestock, a flimsy RPO could be crushed between the heavier engine and the passenger cars. Between 1890 and 1905 alone, 143 RMS employees were killed and 3,887 were injured in wrecks and other mishaps.

  Some understandably anxious clerks turned to superstition to ward off the danger of fires, crashes, robberies, and other disasters, and a classic shaggy dog called Owney (1888−97) became their legendary talisman. He had strayed into the post office in Albany, New York, one day and soon began riding mail wagons to the train station. Before long, he was traveling by rail to New York City and beyond, wearing a metal baggage tag that gave his name and address for the return trip. The clerks he encountered on the journeys began to add their own lines’ tags for good luck, until the smallish dog was so heavily decorated that the postmaster general gave him a special fabric vest that allowed him to wear his ornaments in comfort. When Owney died, RMS clerks hired a taxidermist to preserve him, and he was eventually enshrined at the National Postal Museum, in Washington, where he’s among the most popular attractions. (Nero, a collie at the post office in Germantown, Pennsylvania, never enjoyed Owney’s celebrity, but he reported to the railroad tracks six times a day just as a train was due, jumped up and down at its approach, and caught the mail pouch.)