POST OFFICE

"Among the improvements in the United States, there is, perhaps, no one that has advanced more rapidly, or proved more extensively useful, than that of the transportation of the mail." So wrote a contributor in 1810 to the Port Folio, a Philadelphia-based literary magazine. Elaborating on his claim, the essayist credited the Post Office Department with an indispensable role in the creation of a geographically extensive public sphere. "In point of public utility, it holds a rank but little inferior to printing. Copies may be multiplied at the press, but, without this establishment, how limited must be their distribution!"

The essayist's observations highlighted a dimension of public life in the United States during the early Republic that is sometimes overlooked. In the decades following the adoption of the federal Constitution, the United States underwent a communications revolution that had enduring consequences for American public and private life. This revolution was predicated on the elaboration of the long-distance information infrastructure: the postal system, the stagecoach industry, and the periodical press. It was fostered by innovative legislation that included the Copyright Act of 1790, the free press guarantees in the federal and state constitutions, and the federal Land Ordinance of 1785. And it was set in motion by the Post Office Act of 1792, a landmark in American communications policy and one of the most far-reaching pieces of federal legislation to have been enacted in the half-century following the adoption of the federal Constitution.

growth of the post office

In 1788 the Post Office Department boasted a mere sixty-nine offices, only two more than the sixty-seven offices maintained by the royal postal system in 1765. Most were located in a single seaboard chain on what is today the "Old Post Road," just as they had been prior to the break with the crown. No periodical received a government subsidy and few circulated in the mail. Although postal administrators sometimes permitted printers to trade copies of their newspapers, this practice was merely customary and lacked the force of law. The Post Office Department, as one postal administrator explained in 1788, had been established by Congress "for the purpose of facilitating commercial correspondence," and, as such, had, "properly speaking, no connection with the press."

In the great constitutional debates (1787–1788), few contemporaries regarded the limited character of long-distance communications as a major problem. James Madison articulated the conventional wisdom when, in his Federalist essays, he presumed that ordinary Americans would receive the bulk of their information about public affairs when their representatives returned to their home districts to meet constituents face-to-face. In Federalist 10, Madison went so far as to hail poor long-distance communications as a safeguard for minority rights. The enormous geographical extent of the country, he conjectured, prevented majoritarian factions from organizing across state boundaries to tyrannize the few.

Madison took for granted the limited facilities for long-distance communications then in existence. At that time, ordinary Americans living far from Philadelphia learned only sporadically about the activities of their congressional delegates. When information did arrive, it often came courtesy of individual delegates, who had the right to transmit or "frank" through the mail an unlimited number of items, making them de facto news brokers for the public.

The only public figure in the 1780s to propose a significant augmentation in the facilities for long-distance communications was the physician Benjamin Rush. To adapt the "principles, morals, and manners of our citizens to our republican form of government," Rush proclaimed in a widely circulated essay published shortly before the Constitutional Convention, it was "absolutely necessary" that the government circulate "knowledge of every kind … through every part of the United States." Rush hailed the Post Office Department as the "true non-electric wire of government" and the "only means" of "conveying light and heat to every individual in the federal commonwealth."

With the passage of the Post Office Act of 1792, Rush's vision acquired a legal imprimatur. To expand access to information on public affairs, Congress admitted every newspaper into the mail at extremely low rates. To ensure that the news was broadcast far and wide, it established an administrative mechanism that guaranteed the rapid extension of the postal network into the hinterland. And to safeguard the sanctity of personal correspondence, it proscribed its surveillance by postal administrators, ending a practice that remained common in Great Britain and France.

No issue proved more contentious than the designation of new post routes. Some wanted to retain this power in the executive, others to shift it to Congress. In the end, proponents of congressional control prevailed. By retaining control, Congress established a legislatively mandated entitlement that was broadly egalitarian and easily adjusted to keep pace with the expansion in the area of settlement. From 1792 onward, popular pressure ensured the expansion of the postal network well in advance of commercial demand. No single piece of legislation did more to create a geographically extensive public sphere.

the proliferation of printed matter

Government newspaper subsidies gave printers ample reason to increase their supply. By 1794 newspapers made up fully 70 percent of the weight of the mail, while generating a mere 3 percent of postal revenue. By 1832 newspapers accounted for an astonishing 95 percent of the weight of the mail, but only 15 percent of postal revenue. Without this substantial federal subsidy for the press, the United States could not have emerged in the early Republic as the leading publisher of newspapers in the world. Federal postal policy was particularly instrumental in spurring the rise of the rural or "country" press, which had been virtually nonexistent before 1792.

After 1794 magazines enjoyed an analogous subsidy and received a parallel boost. By the 1830s postal patrons enjoyed a wide range of reading matter that ranged from learned essays in the North American Review to fashion tips in the Lady's Book. Writers of imaginative fiction like Edgar Allan Poe, Catherine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne took advantage of this new literary venue to invent the modern short story. Though fiction-writers preferred to publish books, the steady influx of British imports reduced their marketability in urban centers, as did the proscription of books from the mail in the hinterland. Not until 1851, after the coming of the railroad, was this ban relaxed.

Federal postal policy also encouraged the proliferation of pamphlets, congressional speeches, and government reports. In any given year, public documents constituted approximately one quarter of all the imprints published in the United States. During presidential campaigns, electioneering tracts made up a substantial fraction of the total weight of the mail.

The only form of literary production that postal policy discouraged was letter-writing. The cost of postage on a single letter, which was customarily paid by the recipient, could easily total 50 cents, a substantial sum at a time when a laborer might make one dollar a day. Prior to the 1830s, the high cost of letter postage troubled few Americans, since correspondents (the vast majority of whom were merchants) were presumed to be able to cover the cost. Personal correspondence, of course, was by no means unknown. As one country curate noted in 1820, "a few days carries a communication with mathematical certainty from one point of the Union to the other. Distance is thus reduced to contiguity; and the ink is scarcely dry, or the wax cold on the paper, before we find in our hands, even at a distance of hundreds of miles, a transcript of our dearest friend's mind." Judging by lists of unclaimed mail that newspapers routinely ran, women posted as many as 20 percent of all the letters in the mail. Yet if an ordinary American received anything in the mail in the period between 1792 and 1840, it was more likely to have been a newspaper than a letter.

Just as postal policy favored certain literary forms, and not others, so too it hastened the creation of a particular kind of informational environment. In 1800 the postal network included 903 offices; in 1810, 2,300; in 1820, 4,500; in 1828, 7,641. The resulting informational environment was more decentralized—and less biased toward major commercial centers—than its counterpart in Great Britain or France. After 1800 the national capital ceased to be a major newspaper-publishing center, a situation inconceivable in Europe. By 1828 the United States had seventy-four post offices for every 100,000 inhabitants, as compared to seventeen in Great Britain and four in France. Even some hinterland congressmen concluded that the postal network was complete. Yet Congress opted not to improve mail delivery in urban centers, which remained rudimentary, but instead to press for even better stagecoach service in the South and West. To boost the stagecoach industry, Congress encouraged the postmaster general to lavish generous contracts on stagecoach proprietors.

Throughout the early Republic, it remained illegal for any public officer to open personal correspondence. (The only exception was undelivered mail, which could be opened by a special class of postal administrators known as dead-letter clerks.) The prohibition on government surveillance extended, at least initially, to newspapers, pamphlets, and magazines. Had Congress found it possible in 1798 to enlist government functionaries to police the mailbags—a practice common in Europe—it would have had less need to pass a sedition act to check the spread of malicious ideas. Critics of the Alien and Sedition Acts, such as Thomas Jefferson, preferred to leave the regulation of printed matter to the states.

the impact on trade and public life

Nowhere were the implications of the communications revolution more fundamental than in the conduct of American trade. Long before the railroad created a national market for goods, the federal government established a national market for information. To move crops to market, merchants relied on the Post Office Department to transmit orders and even banknotes, all of which went uninsured. The high-speed transmission of market information was such a priority that Congress refused to suspend the transportation of the mail on the Sabbath, or even to permit localities to suspend the opening of the post office on this day, an incursion into local autonomy that troubled many, and that prompted the first large-scale petition effort in American history.

Equally far-reaching were the consequences of the communications revolution for public life. After 1792 the public sphere was no longer limited to the relatively small number of people located close to the seats of power, such as Philadelphia or a New England town; rather, it came to be located in the minds and hearts of millions of people. Party strategists relied on the improved facilities for long-distance communications to build the mass party; Evangelicals established voluntary associations on a nationwide scale. When Madison published his Federalist essays in 1788, public opinion had yet to emerge as a major category in political theory. By the time the French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, it had become a keystone of the new "science of politics" for a democratic age. As Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America (1835; 1840), "there is no French province in which the inhabitants knew each other as well as do the thirteen million men spread over the extent of the United States." This new, disembodied public sphere was dramatized by painters like John Lewis Krimmel, whose Village Tavern (1814) portrayed a crowd awaiting the arrival of the mail at a village post office during the War of 1812.

The principal beneficiaries of this new informational environment were the white men who dominated the electorate. Losers included women, slaves, and free blacks. Discouraged from participating in public affairs, they risked harassment every time they ventured into the post office to pick up their mail. Still, by empowering ordinary white men to join together in countless post offices to discuss public affairs, the federal government had helped establish a national community that a generation of men would fight and die for in the Civil War. Long before the advent of the steam railroad and the electric telegraph, the postal system, the stagecoach industry, and the periodical press had prepared the way for the emergence of the United States, in the twentieth century, as the most powerful media empire in the modern world.

See alsoAlien and Sedition Acts; American Character and Identity; Book Trade; Democratization; Federalist Papers; Fiction; Madison, James; Magazines; Newspapers; Nonfiction Prose; Politics: Political Pamphlets; Press, The; Print Culture; Public Opinion; Religious Publishing; Transportation: Roads and Turnpikes; Women: Writers .

bibliography

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——. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835, 1840. Edited by J. P. Mayer. Translated by George Lawrence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.

Richard R. John