The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

David Henkin has, for the second time, written a marvelous book. His first monograph, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia University Press, 1998), was a strikingly original account of an important new kind of literacy in mid-nineteenth-century New York City, exemplified in the reading of commercial signs on city streets. That book pulled the histories of literacy and of cities in new directions. Henkin's equally original new monograph, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America, broadens the concern to communications and nation. Whereas scholars tend to write the history of communications through the invention of technologies such as the telegraph or telephone, Henkin focuses instead on the everyday use of communications. This enables him to discern a "communications revolution" in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s premised not on technological innovation, but on popular culture—the sudden and concerted application of an old technology to new purposes, by new groups of people. Earlier in the nineteenth century the postal system operated by the federal government was primarily a carrier of newspapers, business correspondence, and letters on special occasions. By the 1870s that postal system had become a widespread communications medium enabling many ordinary Americans to experience a peculiar new and modern sensation of connectedness—for good, as well as for ill.

In making this argument Henkin's second book shares a common theme with his first, namely an unsung element in the emergence of modernity in the United States. In both books, Henkin asks us to appreciate the modernity of the nineteenth century with fresh and subtle eyes, without the usual technological determinism. Richard John accomplished something comparable with his account of the development of the federal postal system in the early national era, enabling us to appreciate the formation of perhaps the first modern large-scale enterprise, ironically by a government otherwise committed to smallness even in its military apparatus (Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Harvard University Press, 1995). John examined the role of the post office in crucial political debates of the early national era, but Henkin shifts our gaze in the subsequent antebellum era from political controversy to everyday life, from newspapers to letters, from the elite to the masses. The most important context was not political or institutional, but geographical and social: the extraordinary mobility animating the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century.

That mobility came from broad historical patterns like a rush of migration westward, and from concerted historical events such as the California Gold Rush (1848–1855) and the American Civil War (1861–1865). The United States Congress responded to the emergence of such geographical mobility—and mimicked the pioneering example of the British Parliament—by dramatically reducing the cost of postage, first in 1845 and again in 1851. The most significant result was not the speed of mail across space, but access to and use of the post by more and more Americans. The volume of mail carried by the postal system more than tripled in a decade, and Henkin highlights new practices and new expectations as ordinary Americans swiftly turned something novel into something normal—into habit, into culture. Americans of all sorts wrote more and more letters, and they used those letters to send money and daguerreotypes to one another, filling the mail with objects as well as words. The California Gold Rush was remarkable in propelling mail beyond the reach of post offices and propelling the creation of new post offices in, as a major instance, the mushrooming new city of San Francisco. In its turn the American Civil War was remarkable for an absolutely massive volume of correspondence between battlefront and homefront. Whether to gold fields or battlefronts, mail often transmitted supposedly female sensibilities into male domains, so that the idealization of "home...