The Communications Revolution

Institutional history may be even more out of fashion than the study of great men. But with this perceptive “interpretive biography” of the postal system, Richard John, assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reminds us how important and useful institutional history can be. The creation of the postal system had two different, but inseparable, facets: one was the system itself, the network of post roads and post offices that allowed for the mail to be sent; the second, perhaps more important for John, was the nature of the mail itself. Taken separately or together, they had profound implications for American society. This is not merely the history of a postal network, but the history of a revolution in communications.

The creation of a postal network was in itself an achievement. While France in 1828 had 4 post offices for every 100,000 people, and Great Britain had 17, there were 74 post offices for every 100,000 Americans. The United States postal system was so efficient that Canadian government officials sent their interprovincial mail by way of the United States. In 1832 political scientist Francis Lieber ranked the post office with the mariner’s compass and the printing press as “one of the most effective elements of civilization” (pp. 7–8). Like the printing press and the compass, the postal system generated other innovations. Perhaps the most important was a system for sorting a large volume of mail, a “hub and spoke” system that remained in place from 1800 until the Civil War, when the “railway mail” system of continuous sorting on railroad cars displaced it. Still, the hub and spoke system continues to work for Federal Express, which routes all mail through its Tennessee hub.

Washington was the central hub for the postal system. From this hub, the post office reached into every community in ways other government offices did not. But the federal presence was personal, not architectural. Federal post offices, like court houses, did not have their own buildings until after the Civil War. Post offices were found in taverns, hotels, stores, basements, the postmaster’s house, and even a brothel. New York City’s post office for a time was in a former Dutch Reformed church, which served both as a post office and as a transit point for exhumed bodies being taken from one graveyard to another. Did Poe ever send or receive mail here?

While the physical space might not have been important, the postmaster was. The village postmaster (99 percent of postmasters were men) might have been the only U.S. government official some Americans ever saw. Throughout the antebellum period, some 70 percent of all civilian federal employees were postal workers. Usually this vast enterprise worked quietly, unnoticed by most Americans. But when the Jackson administration decided in 1829 to purge the post office of its political opponents, John Barton Derby reported that some villagers “go about the streets and . . . seem to be saying to themselves, ‘E’cod!—there is a United States government, or I’m darned!’” (p. 5).

Turning the postal system into a patronage empire was a relatively late development. More important than its potential for political patronage was the post office’s role in creating a national business community through, for example, its rapid transmission of market information. Much of this information circulated in newspapers, and newspapers formed the bulk of the material sent through the mail. In 1792 Congress decided to allow newspapers into the mail for a modest fee: one cent if it traveled less than 100 miles, one and a half cents if it went further. This was much less than private carriers charged, and much less than ordinary citizens paid for postage (to send two sheets from Albany to Buffalo cost seventy-five cents, at a time when the average laborer earned one dollar a day). Although editors argued for free mailings, this modest fee allowed a wide distribution of...