Epistolary America

The nineteenth-century letter. Any historian of that century has spent countless hours fingering the aging stationery of that age of correspondence, imagining the past worlds suggested by idiosyncratic penmanship. The letters are everywhere, and always have been, at least as far as historians are concerned. And yet, there is something wonderfully eye-opening about David Henkin's new book, a study that sets out to get inside the letter-writing culture of that earlier era and is certainly one of the first scholarly works to make use of period letters purchased on eBay. The Postal Age doesn't simply use letters and their writers as sources; rather; they are the subject matter at hand. Or as Henkin puts it, "we have, in other words, barely begun to study the modern posted letter as its own distinctive historical practice" (p. 6).

Nearly a decade ago, Henkin published his first book, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998). That previous work took as its subject the proliferation of printed materials—handbills, commercial signage, and myriad forms of currency—that ran through the American city in the decades before the Civil War. Henkin's reading of urbanizing Manhattan stands as one of the most compelling arguments for "the democratic inclusiveness of the new urban public."¹ In this new study, Henkin builds out from the neighborhoods of New York to tell a national story of cultural transformation that returns to and advances his interest in democratization and public culture. The unprecedented world of the mid-nineteenth-century postal system, in Henkin's telling, marked "a powerful rupture and a fundamental divide," as "a critical mass of Americans began reorganizing their perceptions of time, space, and community around the existence of the post" (pp. 2, 3).

Taken together, Henkin's first two books stand as a brilliant recreation of the common cultures of midcentury Americans. Across these two texts, Henkin has come closest among nineteenth-century American historians to producing a history of antebellum mentalities. Moving beyond the merely private, Henkin offers a sophisticated reading of the history of the intersections between public and private life, an approach altogether appropriate to the terrain of the Civil War-era United States. Like his mentor Mary P. Ryan, Henkin brings Habermas to nineteenth-century America and manages to say something original about the nature of the modern public.² Unlike too many younger scholars prone to a kind of fetishization of the theoretical, Henkin is something of a model for at once taking seriously and moving beyond his theoretical sources; by engaging the complex particulars of the past, he produces a more compelling account of the making and remaking of American public life.

There is an elegant simplicity to Henkin's structure, with the book divided into two equally compelling and original parts. The three chapters that make up Part One—"Joining a Network"—tell the story of the creation and expansion of the national postal system in the middle of the nineteenth century. Henkin emphasizes the revolutionary impact of federal postal legislation in 1845 and 1851, arguing that these reforms, far more than earlier policies, brought about a nation of letter writers. Between 1840 and 1860, per-capita letters carried tripled, from 1.61 to 5.15 (p. 3). The critical shift, laid out in fine detail in the second chapter, occurred when the primary function of the postal system changed from the distribution of newspapers to the transmission of private letters. The first half of the book ends with Henkin's original reconstruction of the place of the post office in the antebellum American city. In this account, the federal government's primary presence in urban America is presented as the central grounds of public life.

It is in the book's second part—"Postal Intimacy"—that Henkin advances his most provocative and ultimately convincing readings of the culture of the post. An opening discussion of...