Rush’s advocacy for newspapers as egalitarian educational tools that were “absolutely necessary” to adapt the “principles, morals, and manners of our citizens to our republican forms of government” is writ large in the Post Office Act’s remarkable provisions for the circulation of information. The law essentially subsidized the growth of America’s struggling press by recognizing all newspapers as patriotic enterprises that, for the first time, qualified as official mail—a marked contrast to the policy in Great Britain. As such, papers were now entitled to a place in the sacrosanct portmanteaux and the same secure handling as letters—and at a very low postage rate meant to encourage the development of an informed citizenry.
Inventing an altruistic public policy is well and good, but in a brand-new government with a very tight budget, opinion had been divided on the question of how to pay for it. Along with authorizing newspaper circulation at nominal rates throughout the entire population, the Post Office Act extended congressmen’s franking privilege to enable them to communicate with their constituents about government matters for free. (Legislators quickly flooded the mails with text from speeches given less to influence policy than to impress voters back home; such material was later called “bunkum,” derived from Buncombe County, North Carolina.) The money for delivering the overwhelming bulk of the mail had to come from somewhere, which had occasioned a spirited debate.
The “restrictionists,” who included Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton as well as postmasters, who were paid from commissions on mail volume, believed, as Franklin had, that the post should support itself and even, like Britain’s, turn a profit for the government. From their perspective, the system should remain concentrated along the cost-effective East Coast, where both the population and profitable business and commercial correspondence were centered. The restrictionists also insisted that newspapers that paid no postage could hardly be considered legitimate mail worth delivering. Taking the opposing view, Rush, Washington, and their fellow “antirestrictionists” argued that the post was no mere moneymaker for the Treasury but what Rush described as “the true non-electric wire of government,” which should circulate papers for free whether the service paid for itself or not—a startling notion indeed.
In the end, the act embraced the Platonic ideal of a post that if not profitable should at least be self-supporting—a fateful decision that marked it as the rare federal agency that was expected to sustain itself on its revenue. The law also adopted a compromise, proposed by Madison, that papers would pay some postage, in order to ensure postmasters’ diligence, but not much, because the information they carried was “among the surest means of preventing the degeneracy of a free government; as well as a recommending every salutary public measure to the confidence and cooperation of all virtuous citizens.”
The legislators came up with a radical Robin Hood−style scheme to finance their ambitious new post. Revenue from populous areas, where the volume of lucrative letters was highest and service the most cost-effective, would cover the expense of supplying newspapers throughout the whole country, including the least profitable rural regions. Mailing a single-page letter would cost between six and twenty-five cents, depending on the distance traveled, but a big broadsheet could travel for one hundred miles for a mere penny, and any distance for a penny and a half. (Two years later, “periodicals,” such as pamphlets and magazines, were also admitted to the mail, for slightly higher postage.) Most letters were sent by businessmen along the settled northeastern corridor, so Americans in the rustic South and on the expanding western frontier particularly benefited from this policy.
The Post Office Act set off the greatest explosion of newspapers in history. Few papers had survived the war and its tumultuous aftermath, but with the delivery problem resolved, any aspiring journalist who could afford a hand press could now set up as a publisher. The act also mandated that all newspapers were to be treated equally, so country editors received the same informative exchange papers as their urban peers, which helped to decentralize journalism further. By 1794, newspapers comprised seven-tenths of the mail’s volume, and their numbers kept on climbing. By 1801, America would have perhaps 200; by 1810, some 365; by 1820, about 1,200. The increased competition ensured that the change was qualitative as well as quantitative.
Newspapers soon began to replace congressmen’s bunkum-filled letters as major sources of public information, setting the stage for the great political debates of the momentous nineteenth century. Wherever Americans gathered, in Philadelphia’s elegant salons or the Michigan Territory’s cabins, they were able to discuss the same important events and ideas. Much of the credit for this enormous advance belongs to the man who was fittingly eulogized by two of his great peers. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “a better man than Rush could not have left us, more benevolent, more learned, of finer genius, or more honest.” To John Adams, “as a man of Science, Letters, Task, Sense, Phylosophy, Patriotism, Religion, Morality, Merit, Usefulness, taken all together, Rush has not left his equal in America, nor that I know of in the world.”
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THE POST OFFICE ACT OF 1792, designed to inform and bind the people, also established their right to secure, private correspondence and unfettered access to news, opinions, and ideas, no matter how contrarian. European governments still regarded this as a heretical idea, but Americans’ exposure to foreign censorship had made them allergic to such interference. Fear of the Crown’s practice of intercepting and opening mail had inspired the development of the foundational committees of correspondence and the Constitutional Post and fueled the fires of revolution. When abroad, Jefferson, Madison, John Jay, later the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, and other politicians had been forced to write in code lest their letters be read by officials in England’s Secret Office or France’s Cabinet Noir. When Franklin served as the ambassador to France, his secretary was a double agent also paid by Britain—a perfidy that the wily old philosophe may have exploited for his own advantage. More recently, Americans had witnessed some ugly partisan censorship on their own soil during the debates over the Constitution, when the post office in Boston, where ratification was widely supported, refused to release material sent from Pennsylvania that opposed it.
The Post Office Act’s tough stance regarding any interference with the mail was a powerful reinforcement of the people’s right to free speech, which the First Amendment had established the previous year. The law made it a crime for anyone other than the addressee to open a piece of mail. The only exceptions were poorly addressed or otherwise undeliverable letters, which were forwarded to postal headquarters, where special “dead letter” clerks strove to get any valuables that had been enclosed to the rightful recipients or return them to the senders. Just months after the act was passed, Postmaster General Timothy Pickering, who later served as secretary of the departments of war and state, encapsulated many of its reforms in his “Instructions to the Deputy Postmasters.” He addressed administrative matters, such as the proper basis for postage rates and the need for accurate accounting, but his stress on postal employees’ responsibility for protecting the mail’s inviolability is particularly striking. They were not to open any correspondence themselves, nor “suffer any person, but such as you entrust in the execution of your office, to inspect or handle the letters under your charge.”
The act also imposed the death penalty for stealing mail, which was a grave problem at a time when the post was the only means of delivering sums of money over distances. A law passed in 1799 modified this sentence to forty lashes and imprisonment, but only for a first offense. President Jefferson himself would complain not only that his opponents published material from his private correspondence but also that he daren’t abolish flogging for postal theft because the problem was “so frequent and great an evil.” For many years, however, the government lacked adequate resources to enforce its laws against postal crime. (Pickering recommended a British practice for thwarting th
ieves: “I know of but one effectual Security—To cut bank notes into two parts—send one and wait an acknowledgment of its receipt, before the other is forwarded.”) Still, the act had laid the legal foundation for the security of Americans’ mail, which would markedly improve in 1830 with the inauguration of the Office of Instructions and Mail Depredations—the federal government’s oldest law enforcement agency.
Just seventeen years after Benjamin Franklin became America’s first postmaster general, the Post Office Act utterly transformed his modest mail network. He would have been flabbergasted by the speed at which the post would become the federal government’s biggest, most important department and prime the United States to become the world’s most literate, best-informed country within two generations—surely one of the most significant, least appreciated developments in American history.
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AMERICA’S RADICAL NEW POST both reflected and affected the lively society of the Early Republic, the variously defined period roughly extending from the Revolutionary War’s end to the Civil War’s prelude or outbreak. This long era between cataclysms is often overlooked, but it was a time of phenomenal physical growth and social change for the young United States. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the republic’s size to include everything from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. Just a year later, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery took the first steps toward America’s future as a Pacific nation. This territorial growth spurt was accompanied by a matching increase in population, which surged from 3.9 million in 1790 to almost 12.9 million by 1830, and to 23.2 million in 1850.
In some ways, the society of the Early Republic was an early version of the Age of Aquarius. The old colonial class structure, derived from Great Britain’s, that had distinguished people who lived off their wealth from those who earned a living was giving way to a more fluid meritocracy. The ranks of gentlemen had expanded beyond those who inherited the distinction to include, in John Adams’s formulation, anyone who had a liberal education, including him. The literacy rate climbed as high as 90 percent in populous regions, and most citizens were farmers who, unlike their European peers, owned their own land. Pragmatic American geniuses accelerated the Industrial Revolution with the cotton gin (short for “engine”), mechanical reaper, steamboat, and other inventions, which also expanded employment opportunities. Merchants, skilled artisans, and others who both worked and owned property formed the new class of “middlings”—the advance guard for the later nineteenth century’s huge bourgeoisie.
The Early Republic’s exuberant optimism and determination to realize the Enlightenment’s philosophical and spiritual principles inspired a great interest in individual rights and efforts to uplift society. The widespread Protestant revival known as the Second Great Awakening advanced a more hopeful view of the human condition and encouraged the involvement of disenfranchised groups, notably women and African Americans, which helped set the moral tone for early feminist and abolitionist movements. The old institution of indentured servitude disappeared, and slavery was outlawed by the northern states. New academies, colleges, and other educational institutions flourished. The socialist Owenites, who rebelled against industrialization by forming utopian settlements dedicated to cooperation, sharing, and respect for nature, emerged simultaneously with community-oriented, cooperative, agrarian Mormonism.
As in the 1960s, the Early Republic’s brilliant, forward-looking culture had a shadow side. More young people chose their own spouses, but more sexual experimentation increased the number of out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Alcohol production and consumption rose, as did urban crime and suicide. Educated youth rioted on campus, much like young rowdies in the cities. Ominously, the new, more democratic ideas about status and the meaning of labor and leisure sharpened the distinctions between the northern states, which admired work as enterprise, and the southern ones, which associated it with slavery.
The newspapers circulated by America’s democratized postal system helped to spread the Early Republic’s new ways of thinking, but they also fanned the flames of the country’s increasingly combustible politics. Few people hewed to Washington’s original high-minded ideal of eschewing parties in the interest of unity, and most supported one of two major camps. The Federalists of the Northeast favored a robust federal government and Alexander Hamilton’s vision of an economy based on business and banking. Their opponents accused them of elitism and Anglophilic, aristocratic pretensions. The Democratic-Republicans, who were first centered in the South, agreed with Thomas Jefferson on the need to keep the federal government modest in size and aspiration, beware of bankers (“more dangerous than standing armies”), and cleave to an agricultural economy of independent, literate farmers and artisans. They were criticized as rabble-rousing, Francophile anarchists.
Both political parties had mouthpieces in highly partisan newspapers, which served up vitriolic opinion and patriotic poetry along with material from exchange papers, franked documents, and even the occasional interesting private letter. (Confronting a news lull in 1800, the editor of the Palladium, in Frankfort, Kentucky, published George Washington’s will.) Noah Webster’s bruising experiences as a journalist and founder of the Federalists’ American Minerva, New York’s first daily newspaper, surely helped inspire the great lexicographer’s efforts to clarify and standardize the country’s speech with An American Dictionary of the English Language. He objected to the Early Republic’s over-the-top rhetoric, in which a political rival might be referred to as a “prostitute wretch,” “spiteful viper,” or “maniacal pedant,” because such language was not just uncivil but also imprecise: “metaphysical abstractions that either have no meaning, or at least none that mere mortals can comprehend.” (Not surprisingly for a publisher, Webster had a personal connection with the post, albeit not the usual one: he had once served as a postal surveyor, or inspector, charged with arresting mail robbers between New York City and Hartford, Connecticut.)
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THE POST HAD EXISTED on the East Coast in some form since colonial days, but the Post Office Act of 1792 extended it to the frontier’s constantly moving western edge. As Timothy Pickering, who expanded mail service as far west as Louisville, Kentucky, rather grandly put it, “Our fellow citizens in the remote parts of the Union seem entitled to some indulgence.” To keep growing, however, the countrywide communications system required a countrywide transportation network. The post was prohibited from actually building the necessary roads, but it did the next best thing by subsidizing the transportation industry that would spur their development. This vast public-private venture further shaped the can-do national character and enabled increasingly peripatetic Americans to experience the almost mystical entity called the United States through the post that was both its most localized and its most universal enterprise. Indeed, the postmaster was the only federal employee whom most citizens would ever meet.
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MOVING THE MAIL
MANY CITIZENS OF THE Early Republic exhibited the restlessness that was already an American character trait. In 1800, only about 10 percent of the people lived west of the Appalachians, but by 1824, that figure had jumped to 30 percent. As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall, who was born in a log cabin on the Virginia frontier, put it, Americans were “an infant people, spreading themselves through a wilderness occupied only by savages and wild beasts.” Morris Birkbeck, an early Illinois pioneer and social reformer who was born in England, described his new countrymen as “great travellers; and in general better acquainted with the vast expanse of country, spreading over their eighteen states . . . than the English with their little island. They are also a migrating people; and even when in prosperous circumstances, can contemplate a change of situation, which under our old establishments and fixed habits, none, but the enterprising, would venture upon, when urged by adversity.”
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sp; In the first half of the nineteenth century, more than half the population moved from one place to another over the course of ten years, including a surprising number who ranged far indeed. Extending the young republic’s central nervous system to circulate information to settlers in the Wild West that began on the other side of those mountains was no easy task. Yet just as Washington and Rush had intended, the postal and transportation networks worked in tandem to enable an increasingly diverse population spreading across a vast landscape to feel and function like Americans. Mail service drew settlers into the daunting frontier with the promise of providing both newspapers and the letters, albeit infrequent, that were an emotional lifeline to loved ones perhaps never to be seen again. Supplying it, however, required forging a transportation system in the bush. This phenomenal physical challenge was complicated by fierce political opposition, especially in the South, to federal road construction within the states. Nevertheless, the public-private collaboration between the post and the independent carriers it paid to move the mail caused dirt roads to shoot through dense forests, turned remote hamlets into centers of civic life, developed the market, and supported the sense of an American identity.
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How the Post Office Created America Page 5