“His hand?” Harnden fumed. “Make them a foot square, and the color red. If a thing is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing thoroughly.”
Harnden made sure the flyers were plastered on the walls of hotels and railroad stations. It is estimated that he brought 100,000 foreigners to the United States by the end of 1844. It wasn’t uncommon to see families from Ireland and Germany parked with their luggage in Harnden’s American offices to be transported to the Midwest, where they were most likely to find work. Yet for all his human cargo, Harnden lost everything on the new venture, including his health, which had never been good in the first place. In his final days, he rode to work in a carriage because he didn’t have the strength to make the trip on foot. In January 1845, the man who would become known as the father of the private express industry died of tuberculosis at age 33. Harnden was buried outside Boston. His friends erected a monument above his grave with the biblical inscription: “Because the king’s business required haste.”
Unfortunately for the Post Office, Harnden had inspired many other mail-carrying outlaws. One of them was Henry Wells, an apprentice of Harnden’s and the future cofounder of Wells Fargo, the delivery company that would later turn itself into a bank that still exists today. Born in the village of Thetford in eastern Vermont in 1805, Wells was broad shouldered and more than six feet tall with a regal beard and curly brown hair. In his early thirties, he became Harnden’s agent in Albany because of his close connections to steamboat owners on the Hudson River. Wells tried to persuade Harnden to extend his service to Buffalo, but Harnden laughed at him. “If you choose to run an express to the Rocky Mountains, you had better do it on your own account,” Harnden said. “I choose to run an express where there is business.”
Wells thought Harnden was foolish. In 1841, he left Harnden & Company and formed his own company with George Pomeroy, another of Harnden’s protégés. They started an express service between Albany and Buffalo. There was no direct train line linking the two cities at the time. Wells would catch a train out of Albany and move his trunks between trains and stagecoaches at all hours for three days until he arrived in Buffalo. In the winter, he could be seen on Buffalo’s snowy streets making his deliveries door-to-door in a sleigh.
Later, Wells would boast that he endeared himself to the city’s residents by bringing them oysters. “It may amuse you to hear that the oyster was a powerful agent in expediting our progress,” he wrote. “That very delicious shell fish was fully appreciated by Buffalonians—and deeply they felt the sad fact that there was on one occasion toward spring no oysters in Buffalo and Mr. Leidly [a restaurant owner] asked me why the Express could not bring them. Bring oysters by coach over such roads? was my astonished exclamation. His answer was the keystone to all success in enterprise: ‘If I pay for them—charge just what you will.’ They were brought—opened in Albany and brought to Buffalo at the cost of three dollars a hundred—and the arrival of those oysters by Express at Buffalo created a sensation.” Presumably, Wells salted the open bivalves before taking them on their final journey, to keep them from spoiling.
Along with oysters, fresh fish, and bank notes Wells started a letter delivery service in 1844 that openly competed with the Post Office Department, despite its monopoly. His firm charged six cents to carry one letter between New York and Buffalo, less than one-fourth of the government’s 25-cent price for the same distance. Wells joined forces with other private carriers like Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company and James Hale’s Hale and Company (this was the same Hale who owned the Tontine Reading Room) to transport letters inexpensively up and down the East Coast and across the Atlantic to Europe. The insurgents used stamps before the Post Office, selling books of 20 for one dollar. As letters traveled though this alternative postal system, they often bore the postmarks and distinctively designed stamps of multiple companies. Hale’s stamps, for instance, were octagonal. Private carriers even provided home delivery, handing letters off to local companies like Boyd’s City Despatch in New York and Blood’s City Despatch in Philadelphia that had their own mailboxes on the streets of these cities long before the government instituted them.
For Charles Wickliffe, the flourishing private mail network was a nightmare. The Post Office responded by arresting private letter carriers as they boarded trains in cities with their mailbags. There is a painting from this era of postal inspectors on horseback pursuing one of Wells’s carriers through the night in upstate New York. But Wells argued that the government had no right to harass his company when it delivered mail more cheaply and efficiently than the Post Office. The public in the region supported Wells. Local businessmen put up bail money for his jailed employees. Town councils passed resolutions calling on citizens to boycott the Post Office.
A federal prosecutor brought the first case against George Pomeroy, Wells’s partner, in Utica. The lawyer representing Pomeroy told him to plead guilty. But Wells wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, the case went to trial and the jury exonerated Pomeroy. The same thing happened in other cases against other private carriers. Postal laws forbade them to operate horse and foot posts, but the lawyers for the private carriers said there were no rules against carrying mail on trains and steamships, and judges sided with them in many cases.
Reeling from its courtroom defeats, the Post Office tried to buy Wells’s company. Wells countered with an audacious proposal of his own. He offered to purchase the U.S. Post Office Department. Selah Hobbie, one of Wickliffe’s chief aides, was dumbfounded. “Zounds, sir,” Hobbie replied. “It would throw 16,000 postmasters out of work.”
At the same time Wickliffe was trying to fend off Henry Wells and Wells’s fellow private express men, he had to contend with another set of critics: northern merchants and liberal activists calling for lower postal rates. Perhaps the staunchest of these advocates of cheap postage was Joshua Leavitt, an evangelical minister turned abolitionist. Born in 1794 and raised in Heath, Massachusetts, Leavitt graduated from Yale College with a divinity degree and preached in Connecticut before moving to New York and becoming the editor of the New York Evangelist in 1830. He transformed it into one of America’s most influential Presbyterian publications. The tall, gaunt Leavitt worked six days a week in a tiny office in downtown New York City, hounding subscribers to pay their bills so he could keep the paper afloat and support his wife and five sons. He often quarreled with his wealthy financial backers, who found him to be unyielding and irascible. But they had to admit that Leavitt knew how to get people to read the Evangelist.
The paper became his pulpit. Leavitt accused the city’s theater owners of corrupting the public with their titillating shows. He decried alcohol consumption, saying that it was destroying America. “Intemperance is filling our alms-houses with paupers, our hospitals with patients, our asylums with madmen, our penitentiaries with criminals, and our streets with vagrants,” Leavitt wrote. He denounced slavery, calling it “a national sin,” and became one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which enraged pro-slavery forces in the South with its mass mailing of abolitionist newspapers. Leavitt was spit on and attacked in the streets of New York by hooligans with southern sympathies, but all this only encouraged him.
In 1837, financial crisis followed by a depression brought an end to the Evangelist, and Leavitt considered returning to the pulpit. But the same year, the American Anti-Slavery Society named him editor of the Emancipator, a once sleepy house organ. Leavitt immediately set out to liven it up, publishing accounts by runaway slaves of the brutalities they had endured on the plantation. He lambasted his own Presbyterian Church for supporting slavery. “So long as the church sanctions and sustains it, slavery is impregnable against all moral influences,” he wrote. He excoriated his longtime allies in the American Anti-Slavery Society for refusing to allow women to vote in its elections. “Horrible!” Leavitt wrote facetiously. “What are we coming to? Why, the efforts of the last thirty years to educate and elevate the
sex has actually infatuated some of the dear creatures to make them think that women have souls, and intellects, and the capacity of forming opinions, even on such intricate subjects as the right or wrong of slavery.”
Leavitt thought that America’s progress was also being hobbled by an overpriced postal system that permitted only the wealthy and politically connected to freely exchange ideas through the mail. He became convinced that cheaper rates would not only bring Americans together, but also save the embattled U.S. Post Office Department. Leavitt pointed to England to make his argument. In 1837 British educational reformer Rowland Hill had published a pamphlet entitled Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicality, arguing that the Royal Mail should abandon its complicated system of high postage and adopt a low, uniform rate for a half-ounce letter. Hill favored a penny, saying it would spur such a boom in letter writing that the Royal Mail would actually make more money. He also called for the Royal Mail to sell stamps, which would encourage people to prepay for their letters and further increase its income.
Lord Lichfield, England’s postmaster general, dismissed Hill’s proposal as sheer folly. “Of all the wild and visionary schemes which I have ever heard of, this is the most extraordinary,” he proclaimed. But the British public wanted cheaper postage, and Parliament ultimately embraced Hill’s “visionary scheme.” When the new prices went into effect on January 19, 1840, police stood guard outside London’s General Post Office to manage the crowd eager to send letters. That year, the Royal Mail handled 169 million letters, more than twice as many as the year before. British letter writers began using envelopes, which people had previously shied away from because they would have counted as a second sheet of paper and doubled postage. There was a greeting card explosion as people started mailing each other Christmas and Valentine’s Day cards. Some prolific correspondents even traveled with a portable writing table, which some present-day historians have called “the Victorian laptop.”
Leavitt marveled at the British postal system when he visited England in 1843 to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention. “It is the complete leveler,” he wrote. “The poorest peasant, the factory-girl, the match-vender, the beggar, even, enjoy the benefits of the cheap postage, as they do of the vital air, on precisely the same terms with the richest banker, the proudest peer, or royalty itself.” He was convinced that cheap postage in America would pay for itself and even eliminate the nation’s vilest institution. “Give us the British system of postage, and slavery is dead!” Leavitt wrote.
At the U.S. Post Office Department, Charles Wickliffe was skeptical. He sent one of his assistants to study the English system and decided it wouldn’t work in his country. “The mode of managing and conducting the post office in the Kingdom of Great Britain is not only different from, but much less expensive than in the United States,” Wickliffe wrote, adding, “I am convinced upon a most thorough examination into the habits, conditions, and business of the people of the two countries—the circumscribed limits and dense population of the one, the extensive boundaries and sparse population of the other—that nothing like the same ratio of increase in correspondence in this country would follow the like reduction of postage as has taken place in England.” Cheap postage, Wickliffe concluded, would be as destructive to the U.S. Post Office Department as Henry Wells and his private mail conspiracy.
Finally, in 1844, Congress intervened with a rescue plan. William Merrick, a Whig from Maryland and chairman of the Senate Committee on Post Office and Post Roads, wanted to close the legal loopholes that allowed private couriers to transport mail on steamships and trains, but just as important, he argued, the Post Office, which he referred to as “the most important implement in the hands of civilization,” needed to regain the public’s support. “The operations of the system, as it exists, have become odious, and the subject of complaint everywhere—particularly in the most populous parts of the country” Merrick lamented on the Senate floor. “And it was found impossible to carry out the extensions called for by the wants of the people, because of the deficiency in the revenues of the Post Office Department produced by private competition in every portion of the populous parts of the country.”
Like Joshua Leavitt, Merrick believed the answer was cheaper postage. “Find the proper rate,” he urged his colleagues. “Fix it there now, and the institution will grow and spread as the population grows and spreads westward, and in its progress will go on and spread with them, following the march of civilization, till it should have reached the banks of the Columbia river and the shores of the Pacific ocean, and will prosper even there.” Merrick advocated five cents for letters traveling less than 300 miles and 10 cents for those going beyond.
Senators from the industrial North who represented big cities with heavy mail users supported Merrick. But their colleagues from the agrarian South vehemently opposed his bill, saying that cheap postage would bankrupt the Post Office and cause the federal government to raise taxes to keep it going. “This is a bill for the benefit of cities, to the injury of the country,” protested Congressman William Payne, a Democrat from Alabama. “It is a New York bill; a New England bill.” Payne warned that Merrick’s bill might even destroy the Post Office altogether at a time when Americans were migrating to the western parts of the country far from their friends and family. “Look at the vast regions now uncultivated, which extend to the setting sun,” he said. “These are to be populated. Your children are to inhabit them. Are you prepared, by the adoption of this bill, to annihilate the Post Office Department, and thereby cut off all communication with them?”
Despite the southern opposition, Congress ratified the bill in early 1845 and President John Tyler signed it in his final days in the White House. Now that he could no longer undercut the government’s rates, Henry Wells stopped carrying letters, but he declared victory, saying he deserved credit for forcing the Post Office to lower its prices. He and William Fargo, his new partner, began ferrying packages across the Great Lakes from Buffalo to emerging cities like Chicago and Detroit. It wouldn’t be long before he would challenge the Post Office again.
As some skeptics predicted, the reduced rate didn’t spark an English-style letter boom. In 1847, the Post Office Department’s yearly letter volume had risen by only 15 percent to 47 million. But perhaps Congress simply hadn’t cut the prices enough. The Post Office was also slow to introduce stamps, so postmasters began creating their own that could be used for local letters within their districts. That year, Cave Johnson, President James Polk’s postmaster general, received authorization from Congress to issue a five-cent stamp bearing Benjamin Franklin’s portrait, and a 10-cent stamp commemorating George Washington. But Johnson had to persuade some of his own postmasters that the stamps were genuine and should be honored. Even then, most American still sent their letters collect.
It took another campaign by advocates of cheaper postage to get the transformative result that they desired. In New York and Boston, they formed societies that distributed Joshua Leavitt’s meticulously argued pamphlets praising the English mail system and condemning what he considered the backward American one. Influential magazines like the New Englander and Harper’s published articles calling for English-style postal reform. The public inundated Congress with petitions calling for lower rates. “No American citizen can hesitate to lend his aid to accomplish a measure which is fraught with so many blessings to every portion of our community,” the directors of the New York Cheap Postage Association wrote in 1850. “It benefits alike the post office and the people. And why should Congress delay any longer in complying with the wishes of the people, who have been for seven long years petitioning for cheap postage.”
In 1851, Congress lowered the postage for a half-ounce letter to three cents. People who didn’t use stamps would have to pay the old rate. In the weeks before the new law went into effect on July 1, people held back their letters so they could take advantage of the discount. The New York City postmaster worried
about running out of stamps and put a limited number on sale. Even so, New Yorkers mailed five times as many stamped letters on the first day as they had done previously. Philadelphians sent 20,000 stamped letters, double their usual number. Two years later, stamp usage became compulsory.
Americans were exhilarated by the changes. “Maybe the letters will come pouring upon you in such multitudes that you’ll wish for the old rate of postage,” a woman in Connecticut teased her cousin. Family members encouraged each other to write even if they had nothing to say. “It is a very good plan for you to correspond with your relatives in Wisconsin,” a father told his son. “It will do you and them good in several ways. Do not neglect it. Do not fall into the notion that you cannot write, unless you have some news to tell. Items of news may be gathered from the newspapers, but a friendly correspondence has, or should have, another purpose—to express sympathy and good feeling, and to keep up with an acquaintance with and a pleasurable remembrance of each other.” That may sound quaint in the age of e-mail, but it was an entirely new idea for people who had once avoided writing letters because they were so expensive to send.
These new American letter writers began using envelopes just as the English had done. “The practice of inclosing letters in envelopes is now universal,” wrote Eliza Leslie, author of The Behaviour Book: A Manual for Ladies, in 1853. “The postage now is in almost every instance pre-paid, it being but three cents when paid by the writer, and five if left to the receiver. Therefore, none but the very poor send unpaid letters.” Leslie told her readers always to keep a little box of stamps on their writing tables. “Be careful not to allow yourself to get entirely out of post-office stamps,” she wrote. “Replenish your stock in time. If the gum seems too weak, go over it afresh with that excellent cement, ‘Perpetual Paste.’”
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