Leslie insisted that the ability to craft a proper letter became a sign of good breeding. “To write a legible and handsome hand is an accomplishment not sufficiently valued,” she wrote. “And yet of what importance it is! We are always vexed when we hear people of talent making a sort of boast of the illegibility of their writing, and relating anecdotes of the difficulty with which it has been read, and the mistakes made by its decipherers. There are persons who affect bad writing, and boast of it, because the worst signatures extant are those of Shakespeare, Bonaparte, and Byron. These men were great in spite of their autographs, not because of them.”
Unlike the Royal Mail, however, which remained profitable after lowering its postage, the American Post Office fell into a pattern of generating deficits, one that would continue well into the next century. By 1854, the number of American post offices had risen to 23,584, and the number of postal roads had increased to 219,935. But the system cost a lot of money—$8.6 million to be precise. The Post Office’s revenues that year were only $6.7 million. In other words, Charles Wickliffe was right; the United States wasn’t Great Britain. However, Congress was content to subsidize the Post Office as long as people received their mail. The department still talked about how it needed to operate like a business, but Congress regarded it as a public service.
In a country as vast as America, this was inevitable. Gold was discovered in California in 1848, and the state became a mecca for fortune hunters. But the Post Office carried mail only to Missouri’s western border. Between St. Joseph, Missouri, and California, there was only wilderness populated largely by Indians who were understandably hostile to settlers and to anybody who tried to deliver mail. So initially, the Post Office loaded mail onto steamships that traveled from New York to the narrow Isthmus of Panama. There, laborers unloaded it, carried it nearly 50 miles to the Pacific Ocean, and reloaded it onto another vessel that went around the western coast of Mexico to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The entire journey could take three months. Bayard Taylor, a travel writer for the New York Tribune sent to cover the gold rush, described what happened in 1849 when the steamship Panama arrived in San Francisco with 37 bags bursting with 45,000 letters and what he described as “bushels of newspapers.”
That evening, Taylor ended up joining the postmaster and his eight clerks and sorting mail with them in the one-story San Francisco post office. People desperate for their mail tried to get in. “There were knocks on the doors, taps on the windows, and beseeching calls at all corners of the house,” Taylor wrote. “The interior was well lighted; the bags were emptied on the floor, and ten pairs of hands engaged in the assortment and distribution of their contents. The work went on rapidly and noiselessly as the night passed away, but with the first stream of daylight, the attack commenced again. Every entrance was barricaded; the crowd was told through the eyehole that the office would be opened that day to no one; but it all availed nothing. Somebody yelled, ‘Curse such a Post Office and such a Postmaster! I’ll write to the Department by the next steamer. We’ll see whether things go on in this way much longer.’”
When the postmaster finally opened the doors, thousands of people waited for the mail for more than six hours, standing in a line that stretched up and down the city’s hills. “Those who were near the goal frequently sold out their places to impatient candidates, for ten and even twenty-five dollars,” Taylor wrote. “Indeed, several persons, in want of money, practiced this game daily as a means of living! Vendors of pies, cakes, and newspapers established themselves in front of the office to supply the crowd, while others did a profitable business by carrying cans of coffee up and down the lines.”
Henry Wells shrewdly saw an opportunity in California. He and Fargo opened an office in San Francisco in 1852 and hired riders to provide mail service to mining camps in the surrounding hills where there were no post offices. To mollify the Post Office, Wells Fargo put its letters in stamped envelopes purchased from the government, which meant that its customers paid twice for their mail, but in a state with little government delivery, they didn’t have a choice. Naturally, the Post Office monitored Wells Fargo closely. “We have to request a more strict observance of stamping letters,” Wells Fargo wrote to its agents. “We are called upon by the mail agent, who assures us that fines will be imposed for any infringement of postal laws.” But as long as Wells Fargo paid the proper postage, the government didn’t interfere. For residents of these California towns, Wells Fargo was the post office. The alternative private delivery service that Congress had largely put out of business on the East Coast had resurfaced in the West.
In 1853, Wells himself made his one and only trip to the West Coast, where he was overwhelmed by the fast pace of San Francisco at the height of the gold rush. “I am called sanguine at home,” Wells wrote. “But I am an old fogey here and considered entirely too slow for this market.” He preferred life in Aurora, New York, a town in the Finger Lakes region of the state where he built a mansion and later founded a women’s college bearing his name. But Wells had the right men in California. His company prospered while the Post Office struggled to get mail to California’s shores.
Though it wasn’t widely known at the time, Wells Fargo carried mail for the Post Office too. It underwrote the famous Overland Mail Company founded by John Butterfield, who won a $600,000 yearly contract in 1857 to carry mail by stagecoach on a 2,800-mile trail from Memphis through Texas, parts of what is now New Mexico, and Arizona to San Francisco. It took an average of 21 days for Butterfield’s stages to make the cross-country journey. “Remember boys,” he told his drivers, “nothing on God’s earth must stop the United States Mail.”
Along the way, Butterfield’s men faced Indian attacks, water shortages, and paths so rocky that their passengers feared the coaches would splinter. “Our heavy wagon bounded along crags as if it would be shaken to pieces every minute, and ourselves disemboweled on the spot,” wrote Waterman Ormsby, a correspondent for the New York Herald. When he finally arrived in San Francisco, he decided to stay awhile. “Had I not just come out over the route, I would be perfectly willing to go back, but I know what Hell is like,” Ormsby wrote. “I’ve just had 24 days of it.” Butterfield could withstand bad publicity, but in 1859, the Overland Mail Company nearly failed when Congress adjourned without appropriating funds to pay what it was owed for carrying mail. Wells and his partners chose this moment to oust Butterfield and take control of the company, continuing to carry the mail for the government.
Wells Fargo played a similar role in the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company, better known as the Pony Express. It would become the most famous story in American postal history, one that would be told over and over again, mythologized by Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling Wild West shows, and later featured in movies, comic books, and television shows. However, the Pony Express was more ephemeral than most people realize. It lasted for a mere 18 months and was really more of a publicity stunt than a business.
The Pony Express was the handiwork of three enterprising deliverymen—William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell—who desperately wanted to win a contract to move mail by stagecoach on a central route from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento and then on to San Francisco. The partners were not neophytes. Their firm had shipped supplies to military forts in Utah, where troops protected settlers from Indian attacks. It was a phenomenal business until President James Buchanan declared war on the Mormon Church in 1857. The church’s leader Brigham Young ordered his raiders to burn the company’s wagons, and this devastated Russell, Majors, and Waddell financially.
The partners were heavily in debt in 1860 when Russell, an extravagant character known for his expensive clothes and deal-making prowess, persuaded the Post Office to allow its riders to speed mail in nine days by horseback between Missouri and California using a relay system similar to the one that had worked so well for the fabled Persian couriers. As cannons fired and onlookers cheere
d, Johnny Fry, the first Pony Express rider, set off at nightfall on April 3, 1860, from St. Joseph, Missouri, with 49 letters, five telegrams, and copies of eastern newspapers specially printed on tissue paper so they would be less of a burden. Ten days later, William Hamilton arrived at 2 am in San Francisco where crowds stoking bonfires greeted him. “It took seventy five ponies to make the trip from Missouri to California in 101/2 days, but the last one—the little fellow who came down in the Sacramento boat this morning had the vicarious glory of them all,” the San Francisco Bulletin wrote. “Upon him an enthusiastic crowd was disposed to shower all their compliments. He was the veritable Hippogriff who shoved a continent behind his hoofs so easily; who snuffed up sandy plains, sent lakes and mountains, prairies and forests, whizzing behind him, like one great river rushing westward.”
With such florid coverage, the story of the Pony Express was destined to take on mythic qualities. Wild West characters like Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok would become associated with it. Decades later when both men had become international celebrities, they didn’t bother to explain that nether of them had been a Pony Express rider, though they did work for the freight-hauling operation owned by Russell, Majors, and Waddell. Hickok had been too old and heavy at the time; he would have weighed down his steed and slowed the mail.
This is not to say, however, that the Pony Express didn’t have heroic riders. Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam covered 360 miles in a single ride while all around him Indians attacked settlers. He didn’t plan to be in the saddle that long; when Haslam arrived at the appointed way station, he found that the relief rider was too afraid to travel the route, so Pony Bob continued on with the mail. Haslam didn’t encounter any hostile natives himself during that famous ride, but when he carried President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address in 1861 through Nevada, he narrowly escaped an attack by Indians, one of whom shot him in the jaw with an arrow, knocking out five of his teeth.
The tale of the Pony Express is often told as an allegory for the American West. As Pony Bob and his fellow horsemen raced to deliver mail on time, workers erected telegraph poles along their route that would hold wires running from St. Joseph, Missouri, to San Francisco and ultimately connect the East and West coasts. When the transcontinental telegraph line was completed in October 1861 and people could send electronic messages in the blink of an eye, the Post Office no longer needed the Pony Express and its colorful horsemen to provide urgent delivery. They had been rendered obsolete by the arrival of new technology and the modern world. As for slower mail, the Post Office could send that via stages or steamships until railroads enabled it to transport mail between coasts by the end of the decade.
But the story of the last days of the Pony Express is more nuanced. Russell, Majors, and Waddell charged five dollars a letter, but they never carried enough mail to turn a profit. The Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express (COC & PPE) became known among riders as the “Clean Out of Cash & Poor Pay Express.”
In April 1861, the owners were so strapped that they turned over the final third of the route in California to a competitor. And who might it have been? Wells Fargo could easily handle the extra mail. Ultimately, the Pony Express failed, and its owners lost $200,000, the equivalent of $5 million today. Its legendary riders, Pony Bob among them, became Wells Fargo employees. The glory days of the Old West weren’t over yet; Wells Fargo continued to operate pony expresses between Sacramento and places like Virginia City, Nevada. Small wonder that the company’s ensuing decades became fodder for movies, such as Stagecoach and The Music Man; a television show called Tales of Wells Fargo; and a comic book series.
The battle between the Post Office and private competitors would continue for decades. It wasn’t until 1894, for instance, that the Post Office finally put a stop to Wells Fargo’s extensive letter delivery business in California. But who was the villain in this ongoing saga? For the Post Office, the interlopers threatened its ability to serve all Americans. But private companies like Wells Fargo saw themselves at odds with a powerful government agency that was bent on destroying its rivals even when it couldn’t provide the same services as efficiently. At various times in the postal service’s history, both sides were right.
3
Comstockery
It was a crisis unlike any the postal service had previously experienced. In February 1861, six southern states—South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana—declared themselves a new nation and seized 9,000 post offices within their borders. Jefferson Davis, president of the newly formed Confederate States of America, appointed John Henninger Reagan to be his rebel postmaster general. A former Texas congressman with a fiery gaze and a thick, wavy beard, Reagan didn’t know much about letter delivery. He appealed to southern postal officials in Washington to join him and bring along copies of the most recent annual report, maps of southern mail routes, and anything else that might be helpful. He hired an English firm to create Confederate stamps with Davis’s portrait. Unlike his rivals in the north, Reagan wanted to run a self-supporting southern postal operation, setting a five-cent rate for half-ounce letters and eliminating money-losing routes.
Reagan’s northern counterpart was Montgomery Blair, Abraham Lincoln’s postmaster general. If Reagan looked like a warrior, Blair resembled a scholar, with clean-shaven face and delicate features. But Blair was just as formidable. He was the son of Francis Blair, a Kentucky newspaperman who befriended Andrew Jackson and became the publisher of the Congressional Globe and a member of Jackson’s kitchen cabinet in the 1830s. Young Monty Blair grew up in a house across the street from the White House that still stands, where his father received visitors like John Calhoun, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other towering political figures of the antebellum era.
Blair became a prominent lawyer, representing Dred Scott, a slave who sued for his freedom in a landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled that blacks had no rights under the Constitution. Blair also assisted in the defense of John Brown, who attacked a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 in hopes of leading an armed slave rebellion. Blair’s reedy voice irritated some, but he could make a persuasive argument, bolstering his points with references to the Bible and Greek mythology. The Blairs helped found the Republican Party and supported Abraham Lincoln when he ran for president in 1860. When Lincoln won the election, he rewarded Blair by naming him postmaster general.
Blair found himself besieged by job seekers. “They left him at 2 this morning and commenced at 8 this morning,” wrote his brother-in-law Gustavus Fox. Lincoln was consumed with postal appointments too. Charles Francis Adams, his ambassador to England, was surprised when Lincoln spent most of their first meeting discussing a vacancy in the Chicago post office rather than international affairs. “I have troubles enough,” Lincoln wrote to a friend. “When I last saw you, I was having little troubles; they filled my mind full; since then, I have big troubles and they can do no more—what do you think has annoyed me more than any one thing? . . . Now I tell you; the fight over two post offices—one at Bloomington [Illinois] and the other in Pennsylvania. That is the thing that is troubling me most.”
Of course, Blair also had to operate a wartime postal system. As the Union army moved around the country, small-town post offices with a single postmaster and one or two clerks would be flooded with more mail than they could ever hope to handle. Blair assigned a postmaster to each regiment who made sure the troopers got their letters. He also wanted to punish the Confederates for seizing post offices. Reagan had hoped to negotiate a treaty with the North that would allow for the flow of letters between the two sides, but Blair wasn’t in a conciliatory mood. He responded to Reagan’s overtures by cutting off mail service to the South on March 31, 1861. Letters sent to the South were forwarded to the Dead Letter Office and returned to their senders. Blair also canceled all existing stamps so southern postmasters couldn’t use them as currency (a common practice at the time) an
d issued new ones.
Southern sympathizers in border states like Missouri had to rely on mail smugglers to get letters to their sons fighting in the Confederate Army. Absalom Grimes, a riverboat captain from St. Louis, posed as a traveling salesman to pass unmolested through enemy lines with a carpetbag full of mail. Sometimes, he made his furtive rounds with several young women who carried dozens of letters in their ruffled skirts. Meanwhile, the line between the North and the South kept changing. Sometimes, residents of Nashville got their mail from the Confederate post office; other times, they received letters via the northern one. It all depended on which army was occupying their town that week.
But secession had its advantages for Blair. Without opposition from conservative southerners in Congress, he was able to introduce sweeping postal reforms. Blair eliminated the long-distance charge for letters, so that northerners could send letters weighing half an ounce anywhere in the Union for three cents. He also introduced the money-order system so that people no longer needed to send currency through the mail, which could be stolen by robbers or sticky-fingered postal workers.
Haunted by the long lines of women who waited at post offices for letters from their husbands and sweethearts in the Union Army, Blair started free home delivery in 1863. For the first time in its history, the Post Office hired a permanent staff of letter carriers—449 in the first year—to walk the streets of 49 northern cities. New York got 137; another 113 delivered letters in Philadelphia. Smaller cities like Pittsburgh got three carriers. Syracuse, New York; and Nashua, New Hampshire, made do with one carrier each. In many cities residents enjoyed at least two deliveries a day, which meant they could send dinner invitations in the morning and get responses in the afternoon. The system worked even though there were no home mailboxes. If the postman’s knock or whistle received no answer, he returned later in the day and tried again. Free home delivery soon spread to other cities, and within three decades only people in rural parts of the country had to go to a post office to get their mail.
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