Yet Jefferson didn’t curtail the Post Office’s expansion when he became president in 1801. By the end of his first term, the Post Office extended from Washington to Chicago and employed two men that it described as “faithful, enterprising, hardy young woodsmen” to carry mail from Cleveland to Detroit. Delivery times were improving too. “To write from Portland (Maine) to Savanna and receive an answer back required at the beginning of the century 40 days; now only 27 are necessary,” Postmaster General Gideon Granger boasted in a report to Congress. “For the same purpose, between Philadelphia and Lexington (Kentucky) 32 days were formerly needed, now only 16. Between Philadelphia and Nashville formerly 44 days, now only 30.”
However, Granger wanted to make sure that the postal service wasn’t used for what he considered to be sinister purposes. He urged Congress to pass a law forbidding anyone but a “free white person” to carry mail. He worried that if American blacks—whether enslaved or free—learned to send each other messages, they would rise up against their white masters just as blacks had done a decade before in Santo Domingo, a rebellion that led to the founding of an independent Haiti.
In a letter to the Senate, Granger laid out his vision of what would happen if Congress failed to act. “The most active and intelligent [blacks] are employed as post-riders,” he wrote. “These are the most ready to learn, and the most able to execute. By travelling from day to day, and hourly mixing with people they must, they will acquire information. They will learn that a man’s rights do not depend on his color. They will, in time, become teachers to their brethren. They will become acquainted with each other on the line. Whenever the body, or portion of them, wish to act, they are an organized corps, circulating our intelligence openly, their own privately. Their traveling creates no suspicion, excites no alarm. One able man among them, perceiving the value of this machine might lay a plan which would be communicated by your post-riders from town to town, and produce a general and united operation against you. It is easier to prevent the evil than to cure it.” Congress heeded Granger’s warning and banned all blacks from carrying mail. It would take a war between the North and the South to lift it.
2
Interlopers I
In December 1831, two unhappy Frenchmen could be seen trudging through the snow with their luggage on the bank of the Ohio River in Kentucky. The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, had hoped to travel from Pittsburgh to New Orleans on The Fourth of July, a patriotically named steamboat. But the temperature plunged below zero, and The Fourth of July became lodged in the ice on the Ohio River outside of Cincinnati and could go no farther. So Tocqueville and Beaumont disembarked and walked 25 miles in cold that Tocqueville described as “Siberian” to Louisville, Kentucky, where they arranged to travel in an open mail cart to Memphis, Tennessee.
Tocqueville recounted the bumpy ride in his Democracy in America, still considered one of the most insightful and prescient books about the United States. “Day and night we passed with great rapidity along the roads, which were scarcely marked through immense forests,” Tocqueville wrote. “When the gloom of the woods became impenetrable, the driver lighted branches of pine, and we journeyed along by the light they cast. From time to time, we came to a hut in the midst of the forest; this was a post-office. The mail dropped an enormous bundle of letters at the door of this isolated dwelling, and we pursued our way at full gallop, leaving the inhabitants of the neighboring log houses to send for their share of the treasure.”
Tocqueville described the American postal service as “the great link between minds.” The settlers in these woods, he observed, lived in rude wooden cabins, with a bed, a few chairs, a gun, and often a slave. But they almost always had a freshly published newspaper to read. “It’s difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought circulates in the midst of these deserts,” Tocqueville wrote. “I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous district in France.” For Tocqueville, the postal service was a distinctly American phenomenon, something that made the embryonic nation different from its older cousins across the Atlantic.
The General Post Office was indeed a marvel of its time. It now operated 8,686 post offices; this was twice as many as Great Britain, which had roughly the same number of citizens as the United States. It was five times as many as France, which had a larger population than the United States. The American Post Office used private contractors to transport mail by horseback, stagecoach, steamboat, and three-wheeled sulky over 116,000 miles of post roads, and often generated a yearly surplus.
Granted, many things about the General Post Office hadn’t changed since Franklin’s time. It didn’t provide much in the way of home delivery, which meant that people had to visit the post office if they wanted their mail. Americans still didn’t use stamps or envelopes. Most postmasters ran their operations out of their homes. This was true even in New York in the 1820s, when Theodorus Bailey, the city’s postmaster, padded downstairs every morning in his bathrobe and slippers to say hello to his clerks before eating breakfast with his family.
But whether Tocqueville realized it or not, he was witnessing an institution in the throes of one of most significant changes in its history. President Andrew Jackson, whom Tocqueville described as “a man of violent temper and very moderate talents,” had come to Washington two years earlier determined to cleanse the federal government of Republicans and Federalists and replace them with members of his own party. This was the beginning of the modern patronage-based political party system. Jackson got rid of many people at the General Post Office, which employed 8,764 postmasters whose ranks outnumbered the country’s 6,332 soldiers in the early years of his presidency.
At a meeting at the White House, John McLean, the highly regarded sitting postmaster general, who had been appointed by James Monroe, objected to Jackson’s demand to fire several of his deputies because they weren’t Democrats. Jackson rose from his chair and paced the room with his clay pipe in his mouth. Finally, he turned and said, “Mr. McLean, will you accept a seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court?” McLean went on to distinguish himself on the high court.
With McLean out of his way, Jackson named William Barry, a former lieutenant governor of Kentucky, as the new postmaster general and moved the position from the Treasury Department into his cabinet so he would have more control over what was now known as the U.S. Post Office Department. Jackson also fired a large number of its employees. Not all of them went quietly. One night General Solomon Van Rensselaer, the postmaster of Albany, New York, and a hero of the War of 1812, showed up at the White House after learning that he would be removed from his position because he was a Federalist. Van Rensselaer waited patiently until Jackson finished with a reception. Then he confronted the president. “General Jackson, I have come here to talk to you about my office,” Van Rensselaer said. “The politicians want to take it away from me, and they know I have nothing else to live upon.”
When Jackson ignored him, Van Rensselaer began to disrobe. That got Jackson’s attention. “What in Heaven’s name are you going to do?” Jackson asked. “Why do you take off your coat here?”
“Well, sir, I am going to show you my wounds, which I received in fighting for my country against the English!”
“Put it on at once, sir!” Jackson said. “I am surprised that a man of your age should make such an exhibition of himself.”
The following day, Jackson told his aides that Van Rensselaer would keep his position. “I take the consequences sir; I take the consequences,” Jackson said. “By the Eternal! I will not remove the old man—I cannot remove him. Why . . . did you know that he carries more than a pound of British lead in his body?”
But as the Post Office became most politicized, there were predictably scandals. Barry, the new postmaster general, awarded stagecoach contracts to the administration’s allies, and resigned in 1835 to a
void impeachment. Jackson replaced him with Amos Kendall, a former newspaper publisher and one of his chief political advisers. Kendall ran the Post Office more ably, but he too became engulfed in controversy. He will be forever remembered for trying to ban abolitionist literature from the mail. Within months of his appointment, the New York–based American Anti-Slavery Society flooded southern post offices with its newspapers addressed to politicians, businessmen, and ministers, an effort that has been called the first direct mail campaign. A mob broke into the post office in Charleston, South Carolina, seized a sack of the papers, and burned it that night at a rally. In other southern cities, citizens marched in torch-lit parades, protesting the northern mailers.
Rather than jailing the mail robbers, Kendall condemned the American Anti-Slavery Society, accusing it of using the public mails to spark a race war by disseminating “large masses of newspapers, pamphlets, tracts and almanacs, containing exaggerated, and in some instances, false accounts of the treatment of slaves, illustrated with cuts, calculated to operate on the passions of the colored men, and produce discontent, assassination, and servile war.” Kendall called for a federal law banning such literature from the mail. Jackson endorsed the idea, calling the abolitionist mailing “a wicked plan of exciting the Negroes to insurrection and to massacre.” But Congress rejected the proposal, calling it unconstitutional, and even southern senators, happy to let individual states block such material from the mail, objected to granting the federal government such broad censorship powers.
The Post Office weathered these crises. The greater threat to its survival was the public’s dissatisfaction with high postage rates. But in 1837, America was shaken by an economic panic. Banks failed along with many businesses they supported. In such a climate, people went to great lengths to avoid paying to send letters. They often mailed sheets of paper with short coded messages on the outside that recipients could quickly read and return without being charged. They created secret messages by circling words on the front pages of newspapers and mailing them to friends.
An easier way to send a letter cheaply was to bypass the Post Office altogether. It wasn’t uncommon to see people at steamboat wharves and train stations asking strangers bound for other cities to take their letters. Some realized that there was money to be made by doing this. When the Post Office discovered what they were up to, it arrested the interlopers. After all, the law forbade anyone to start a competing horse or foot post. But that didn’t stop the exodus of mail from the system. The only thing that could save the Post Office Department was a radical reform that it vehemently opposed.
The Tontine Reading Room at the corner of Wall and Water streets in Manhattan had long been a gathering place where bankers, stockbrokers and others in the financial industry traded stock tips over coffee. Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury, had met there with his Federalist allies. Some said that the New York Stock Exchange was founded at the three-story building in 1792 rather than under a nearby buttonwood tree, as legend has it.
One day in 1838, William Harnden, a frail high-strung 26-year-old with dark hair and extravagant sideburns, wandered into the Reading Room. He seemed out of place among the regulars. He came from a small town north of Boston. Harnden had previously worked as a conductor and ticket salesman on the Boston & Worcester Railroad, one of America’s earliest train lines, but the long shifts had become too much for him. Harnden quit and drifted to New York.
One day, Harnden confided to James Hale, the Reading Room’s genial proprietor, that he needed to find work. Hale had a suggestion. He sold tickets for the John W. Richmond, a steamship that traveled between New York and Providence. His customers frequently asked if Hale could get a passenger to carry their letters to Providence or Boston. “I immediately advised him to travel between the two cities and do errands for the business men,” Hale later recalled. “I also suggested that the new enterprise should be called ‘The Express,’ which gave the idea of speed, promptitude, and fidelity.”
Harnden came up with a professional-sounding advertisement that he placed in the New York Evening Post: “IMPORTANT TO MERCHANTS, BROKERS, BOOK-SELLERS AND ALL BUSINESS MEN,” it declared. “Wm. F. Harnden having made arrangements with the New York and Boston Transportation and Stonington and Providence Rail Road Companies, will run a car through daily from Boston and New York and visa versa, for the purpose of carrying specie, package of goods, small bundles, mail, and be early the following morning in any part of the city, free of charge. Responsible agents will accompany the car for the purpose of collecting drafts, notes and bills, and will transact any other businesses that may be entrusted to his care.”
The advertisement, as one period writer put it, was “an elegant fiction.” Harnden had no railroad car, just a seat on the train and a carpetbag in which he carried his customers’ goods, and not many at first. He showed up one day at the Reading Room ready to give up. “I can’t make it go,” Harnden said, slamming his fist on the counter. Hale calmed him down and told him that the Cunard steamship company would soon begin carrying passengers between Liverpool and Boston. These well-to-do travelers would arrive in the United States with letters and parcels that they needed delivered to cities like New York and Philadelphia. Perhaps Harnden could be of service?
Harnden promptly negotiated a deal with Curard to handle all the shipping for its customers on the new line. As his business grew, Harnden hired the kind of “responsible agents” that he promised in his advertisements and they carried trunks rather than carpetbags. He moved his office from the back of a stationery store to a proper building on Wall Street and opened branches in Philadelphia and Boston. Top-hatted customers often brought him bundles of letters, which Harnden boxed up and carried for 25 cents, which was what the Post Office would have individually charged for many of them.
Everything seemed to be going Harnden’s way until January 13, 1840, when he dispatched his younger brother, Adolphus, to Boston on a steamship known as the Lexington with $40,000 in cash and valuables. After boarding, Adolphus, who was slight like his brother but more easygoing, locked up the cash in a portable safe and went belowdecks to relax. Around 7 pm, cinders from the smokestack ignited bales of cotton piled on the deck. The wind fed the flames and soon the Lexington was ablaze. So many people crowded into the ship’s lifeboats that the vessels sank along with the passengers. Other travelers leaped into the icy Long Island Sound and tried unsuccessfully to swim for the shore. Only four people survived the wreck. Adolphus’s body washed up on a Long Island beach. He didn’t have the $40,000, but police found a pouch on his corpse containing 146 letters, which they took to a local post office and mailed.
That’s when the Post Office Department discovered all the letters that Harnden’s company had been carrying, It was one thing for him to transport packages; the Post Office didn’t handle those at the time. But in the department’s view, Harnden was violating its letter monopoly and it decided to investigate him, along with the other private express operators that he had inspired. Harnden seems to have found out about it. “Receive nothing mailable,” he warned one of his associates. “You will have no small number of Post Office spies at your heels. They will watch you very closely. See that they have their trouble for the pains.”
It was too late for that. In 1841, President John Tyler appointed Charles Wickliffe, a former speaker of the Kentucky house of representatives, to be his postmaster general. A ruddy-faced man with dark hair that flowed past his collar, Wickliffe released the results of the investigation in his first annual report to Congress. Philadelphia’s postmaster lamented in the report that Harnden was “making a deep hole in the coffers of Uncle Sam.” The postmaster of New York said he was losing a third of his letter business to Harnden and Harnden’s imitators. However, the report also included a remarkable admission by Nathaniel Greene, Boston’s postmaster. Greene said he had hired Harnden to transport mail between New York and Boston because he thought it would more problem
atic to shut him down. “Mr. H. deservedly enjoys the highest confidence of the business community,” wrote one of Greene’s aides.
Wickliffe vehemently disagreed. He argued that if the private express companies weren’t put down, they would destroy the Post Office. “These private expresses will only be found to operate upon the great and profitable thoroughfares between great commercial points, while the extremes are left to depend upon the operations of the United States mail, crippled and broken down for the want of means,” Wickliffe wrote. “Between New York and Boston, between Philadelphia and Baltimore, or between New York and Buffalo, individual enterprise might supply the wants of the community in the rapid and cheap transportation of letters and packets. Will the same enterprise penetrate the savannahs and swamps of the south or the wilds of the west and daily or weekly convey to the door of the planter and husbandman the letter of business or friendship, the intelligence of commerce and politics?”
After being singled out by Wickliffe, Harnden started a different kind of delivery service, the Harnden Foreign Passenger Express, which brought European immigrants to the United States. He opened offices in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany and promoted the new service fanatically. When one of his agents informed him that he had ordered a thousand advertising cards for the new business line that were “a little smaller than my hand,” Harnden became enraged.
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