How the Post Office Created America
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3: MOVING THE MAIL
“an infant people, spreading themselves”: Quoted in Albert J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall, vol. 1 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), p. 250.
“great travellers; and in general better acquainted”: Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in America from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois (London: James Ridgway, 1818), p. 34.
“large stage chair, with two good horses”: Quoted in Oliver W. Holmes and Peter T. Rohrbach, Stagecoach East: Stagecoach Days in the East from Colonial Period to the Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), p. 11.
“so artful that the postmaster cou’d not detect them”: Finlay, Journal Kept by Hugh Finlay, p. 18.
“the establishment of stages”: Quoted in Clyde Kelly, United States Postal Policy (New York: D. Appleton, 1931), pp. 30−31.
Hazard had used his travels: Ebenezer Hazard, Historical Collections: Consisting of State Papers and Other Authentic Documents; Intended as Materials for an History of the United States of America (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1792).
“carrying and delivering of any letters”: The Articles of Confederation; the Declaration of rights.
“It is extremely to be lamented”: George Washington, letter to John Jay, The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, Volume 30: June 20, 1778-January 21,1790, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931), p. 16.
“every Monday morning at five o’clock”: Dallas Bogan, “Warren County Local History, Part 1: Early Ohio Postal Systems and Post-Riders,” September 4, 2004. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ohwarren/Bogan/bogan248.htm.
“persons of integrity, sound health, firmness”: Ibid.
The territory’s first regular overland route: Ibid., “Part 2: Profiling Ohio’s Postal Routes and Carriers.”
“All teams and vehicles were prompt”: Ibid.
treed by a pack of wild hogs: Ibid.
Still another escaped from an Indian attack: Ibid.
“I traveled along a portion of the frontier”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), p. 303.
“Frightful roads. Perpendicular descents”: Quoted in George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938), p. 579.
“counteract every tendency to disunion”: John Caldwell Calhoun, “Speech to the House of Representatives,” February 4, 1817, in Richard Kenner Crallé, ed., The Works of John C. Calhoun: Speeches Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States (New York: D. Appleton, 1864), p. 190.
“covered with advertisements of elections”: John Fowler, Journal of a Tour through the State of New York in the Year 1830 (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1970; reprint of 1831 original), p. 72.
“It’s a great constitutional question”: Quoted in Pierson, Tocqueville in America, p. 653.
“There isn’t anyone who does not recognize”: Quoted in ibid., p. 590.
4: THE POLITICIZED POST
“to increase the ease of communication”: Pierson, Tocqueville in America, pp. 589−90.
“astonishing circulation of letters”: Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 283.
“If it were possible to communicate”: The Express Mail, 1827. McLean Papers, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., quoted in John, Spreading the News, p. 86.
“On all the principles of fair dealing”: Ibid., p. 85.
“To the victor belong the spoils”: William Learned Marcy, remarks in the Senate, January 25, 1832, Register of Debates in Congress, vol. 8, col. 1325, quoted in I. D. Spencer, The Victor and the Spoils (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1959), pp. 59-60.
“should be rejected from his position”: An Ex-Clerk, “Seven Years in the Boston Post Office” (1854), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 1, p. 182.
“what the veins and arteries are to the natural body”: Andrew Jackson, “First Annual Message to Congress,” December 8, 1829, in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989).
The first postmaster general to be empowered: For more information on the decade’s changes, see Robert Dalton Harris Jr., “The Three Postal Networks of the United States in the 1830s,” Business History Conference 2004. http://www.thebhc.org/sites/default/files/Harris_0.pdf.
“reliable men for confidential work”: Quoted in Louis Melius, The American Postal Service (Washington, D.C.: National Capital Press, 1917), p. 48.
“very strange, that such a provision”: Jeremiah Evarts, “An Account of Memorials . . . Praying that the Mails May not be Transported, Nor Post-Offices Kept Open, on the Sabbath” (1829), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 3, p. 5.
“it does me no injury”: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 165.
“Is it not necessary”: Barnabas Bates, “An Address . . . on the Memorials to Congress to Prevent the Transportation of the Mail . . . and the Opening of the Post Offices on Sunday” (1829), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 3, p. 102.
“tyrants” are prone to single out: Cincinnatus, “Freedom’s Defense: Or a Candid Examination of Mr Calhoun’s Report on the Freedom of the Press” (1836), in ibid., vol. 1, p. 149.
5: CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY
“I get along very well”: Quoted in Kathryn Burke, “Letter Writing in America,” http://postalmuseum.si.edu/letterwriting/lw03.html.
“It is the care and duty of the Post Office Department”: Franklin, “An Examination of the Probable Effect of the Reduction of Postage” (1844), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 3, p. 125.
they carried a very substantial portion: In The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon evokes the postal crisis of the 1840s and the rise of private mail services in the saga of Oedipa Maas, a Californian who gets caught up in a mystery upon becoming coexecutor of a former suitor’s estate. The dead man’s extensive philatelic collection includes some stamps possibly linked to an underground postal service called the Tristero, which had seemingly been vanquished by its Thurn und Taxis rival in the eighteenth century. The book’s title may refer to the California Gold Rush of 1849, when poor communications in the West became a vital national concern and encouraged private postal services.
“a current of affection”: James Simmons, Remarks of Mr. Simmons, of Rhode Island, in Support of His Proposition to Reduce Postages to a Uniform Rate of Five Cents for a Single Letter, for All Distances (Washington, D.C.: J. & G. S. Gideon, 1845), p. 12.
“exceedingly onerous and unjust”: Amasa Walker, “Cheap Postage, and How to Get It” (1845), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 3, p. 135.
“Lower unit cost through the increased volume”: Kelly, United States Postal Policy, pp. 88−89.
“a striking figure—tall”: “Death of Pliny Miles, the American Advocate of Cheap Postage,” New York Times, May 4, 1865.
“the constitution expresses, neither in terms”: Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress, Prohibiting Private Mails (New York: Tribune Printing Establishment, 1844), p. 1.
“seizes upon the lightning itself”: James De Bow, The Cause of the South: Selections from “De Bow’s Review,” 1846−1867, eds. Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel J. Wilson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 71.
“it would suffer as all enterprizes suffer”: Quoted in Fuller, American Mail, p. 174.
“superseded in much of its important business”: Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 1846. Quoted in United States Postal Service, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/telegraph.pdf.
“elevating our people in the scale of civilization”: Quoted in Gerald Cullinan, The United States Postal Service (New York: Praeger, 19
73), p. 57.
“the people’s post office”: Fuller, American Mail, p. 42.
Congress shored up the post’s finances in other important ways: For more information on the postal monopoly, see Richard R. John, “The Postal Monopoly and Universal Service: A History,” School of Public Policy, George Mason University. http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/system/documents/704/original/Appendix_D.pdf.
“Far more than other government policies or actions”: Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 1.
6: THE PERSONAL POST
David Henkin calls “the postal age”: David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
“My dearest Ella”: Letter from the private philatelic collection of Matthew Liebson.
The lid of this “Victorian laptop”: Catherine J. Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), p. 116.
precocious fifteen-year-old Carrie Deppen: Diane DeBlois and R. D. Harris, “Connections of a Lady Telegrapher,” The Congress Book 2009 (Philadelphia: American Philatelic Congress, 2009).
“Three weeks ago I received thy letter”: Lucretia Mott, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, eds. Beverly Wilson Palmer et al. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 233.
“Oh, could I hear thee once declare”: Thomas Cooke, Universal Letter Writer (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1855), p. 222.
“Weddings now are all the go”: http://www.mtholyoke.com/pcsite/pcs/images38/Howland11.jpeg.
Many were simply mean or sarcastic: Quoted in “The Days of the ‘Vinegar Valentines,’” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2277508/The-days-Vinegar-Valentines-How-cards-1900s-used-tell-suitors-DIDNT-fancy-them.html.
the hobby of philately: Philately’s open-ended, democratic, do-it-yourself quality helps explain its enduring global popularity. Stamp collecting has no rules that must be followed and no particular requirements of time or money. The salesclerk who collects stamps of birds and the Silicon Valley mogul who hunts for costly arcana can both enjoy the same pleasures of learning new things, making exciting discoveries, and contributing to philatelic knowledge. Like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Dell’s Michael Dell, and Symantec’s Gordon Eubanks, many begin as children, almost all of whom collect something for a while. Those who take up the hobby later in life do so for many reasons, which include relief from workaday stress. A small minority pursues expensive rarities, but most collectors gravitate toward stamps that connect in some way to their personal lives. Some trace their families’ histories in America or abroad and others complement their interests in a particular sport, celebrated figure, or historic period. Philately attracts the young and old, rich and poor, but men predominate. King George V of England passed the world’s largest, finest stamp collection to his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II, who is the most famous woman philatelist today. (Other famous collectors have included Amelia Earhart, Yul Brynner, Jasha Heifetz, and John Lennon.)
“we have substituted the Head of Franklin”: Quoted in “The First Postage Stamp Honoring Benjamin Franklin,” http://postalmuseum.si.edu/collections/object-spotlight/franklin.html.
7: GROWING THE COMMUNICATIONS CULTURE
“the visible form of the Federal Government”: United States Post Office Department, Report of the Postmaster-General (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), p. 3.
Many small rural and frontier settlements came and went: According to resident and local historian Cheryl O’Brien, the first white settlers of the Upper Wind River region of northwest Wyoming, who arrived in the 1870s and ’80s, were ranchers. They were followed by homesteaders, gold miners, and the Scandinavian “tie hackers” who lumbered the vast pine forests to build the railroad. A community needed fifty residents to get a post office, and in 1889, the town of Dubois, which had first proposed to call itself Tibo (Shoshoni for “white man”), had the area’s earliest, which was 200 miles from a railroad. The first postmaster was Charlie Smith, a legendary explorer and rancher who was celebrated in the diary of Owen Wister, author of the best seller The Virginian and friend of Teddy Roosevelt. After moving from place to place, the Dubois post office settled down for a while in Welty’s general store, presided over by postmaster Alice Welty, the first of several women to fill the position. This sociable Victorian matron, who has a cameo in Rising from the Plains, John McPhee’s book on the region’s geology and characters, was known for her enjoyment of the latest gossip and inclination to have a gander at her customers’ letters as she handed them over.
The Upper Wind River area had ten other early post offices, each with a story to tell. Mary Rhodes, the postmaster at Leesdale, was a good friend of the outlaw Butch Cassidy, who worked on a ranch nearby; he even left her a ring. (She may have been among the many locals who reported seeing him around long after his alleged death in South America.) The short life of the log-cabin Tipperary post office, named for the still-popular World War I song, ended in 1940, after the white homesteaders’ grazing rights on tribal land, granted in the early 1900s, were revoked. The town of Lenore—named for the first postmaster’s daughter and consisting of ten buildings, a cemetery, and a stagecoach stop—had been founded on optimistic speculation about an imminent railroad spur that had never materialized. After the main highway was relocated, Lenore’s post office closed in 1942, but the small community lived on and is known as the onetime home of Charles Henry King, its postmaster, who was a grandfather of President Gerald Ford. (Presentation for the Dubois Outreach Center of the Central College of Wyoming, February 9, 2013.)
The books were published five times as frequently: For more information about these surveys, see Diane DeBlois and Robert Dalton Harris, “Using the Official Registers: Local Sources of Postal Revenue,” Winton M. Blount Symposium on Postal History, November 4, 2006, National Postal Museum. http://postalmuseum.si.edu/research/pdfs/Harris_paper.pdf.
To re-create a sense of what: The general store–post office of Headsville is now located in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, next to the American Philatelic Center and its legendary library of twenty thousand books, which was formerly housed at nearby Penn State University. The charming Victorian town lies in the heart of central Pennsylvania’s iron country, and its ironworks cast the cannons for Admiral Perry’s fleet in the War of 1812 and, later, much of the Brooklyn Bridge. A beacon of commercial and social progress, Bellefonte was one of the first places in the world to have electricity, and its skilled workforce in the mid-nineteenth century included hundreds of former slaves eager to find jobs. Its prominent residents have included five governors of Pennsylvania.
Some were slapdash shanties: Carl Scheele, The American Philatelist, October 1971.
“He is a Democrat in politics”: Quoted in Marshall Cushing, Story of Our Post Office: The Greatest Government Department in All Its Phases (Boston: A. M. Thayer & Co., 1893), p. 462.
“I am sensible that the emolument”: Quoted in United States Postal Service, “Women Postmasters,” July 2008. http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/women-postmasters.pdf.
“a doubt has been suggested”: Ibid.
“has not been the practice of the Department”: Ibid.
as “dark as a pocket”: “Brave Polly Martin, Who Used to Drive the Attleboro Mail,” Boston Daily Globe, May 5, 1884. Quoted in United States Postal Service, “Women Mail Carriers,” June 2007. http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/women-carriers.pdf.
8: LINKING EAST AND WEST
“all honest, because there was nothing to steal”: The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Portland, Oregon, June 1904, p. 174.
Her much-publicized epistolary accounts: Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, The Letters of Narcissa Whitman, 1836–1847 (Fairfield, WA: Y
e Galleon Press, 1986).
“I never was so contented”: Narcissa Whitman to Harriet and Edward Prentiss, 3 June 1836, ibid., p. 16.
“There is one manner of crossing”: Narcissa Whitman, journal entry, 13 August 1836, ibid., p. 27.
“We must clean after them”: Narcissa Whitman to Clarissa Prentiss, 2 May, 1840, ibid., p. 93.
“fraught with as much promise”: Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (Ithaca, NY: Mack, Andrus & Woodruff, 1840), p. 329.
“My dear Mother, I have been thinking”: Narcissa Whitman to Clarissa Prentiss, 5 December, 1836, ibid., p. 44.
“I do not know how many”: Narcissa Whitman to Clarissa Prentiss, 2 May, 1840, ibid., p. 96.
“My Dear Mother, I cannot describe”: Narcissa Whitman to Clarissa Prentiss, 2 May, 1840, ibid., p. 93.
“This country is destined”: Narcissa Whitman to Stephen and Clarissa Prentiss, 9 October, 1844, ibid., p. 181.
“once here I think”: Narcissa Whitman to Stephen and Clarissa Prentiss, ibid., p. 184. Mrs. Whitman did not date this letter, but it appears in The Letters of Narcissa Whitman between letters dated October 9, 1844, and February 10, 1845.
“Can the aged mother read”: Henry H. Spalding to Stephen and Clarissa Prentiss, 6 April, 1848, quoted in William A. Mowry, Marcus Whitman and the Early Days of Oregon (New York: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1901), p. 329.
“Go west young man”: John Babson Lane Soule, editorial, Terre Haute [Indiana] Express, 1851.
“So little confidence have we”: Quoted in David Nevin, The Expressmen (New York: Time-Life Books, 1974), p. 24.
“a glorious triumph for civilization”: Quoted in Arthur Chapman, The Pony Express (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932), p. 71.
“No one who has not seen”: Quoted in Nevin, The Expressmen, p. 53.
“an imposing cradle on wheels”: Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1886; orig. publ. 1872), p. 25.