Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse

by Richard R. John

In the seven decades from its establishment in 1775 to the commercialization of the electric telegraph in 1844, the American postal system spurred a communications revolution no less far-reaching than the subsequent revolutions associated with the telegraph, telephone, and computer. This book tells the story of that revolution and the challenge it posed for American business, politics, and cultural life.



During the early republic, the postal system was widely hailed as one of the most important institutions of the day. No other institution had the capacity to transmit such a large volume of information on a regular basis over such an enormous geographical expanse. The stagecoaches and postriders who conveyed the mail were virtually synonymous with speed.

In the United States, the unimpeded transmission of information has long been hailed as a positive good. In few other countries has informational mobility been such a cherished ideal. Richard John shows how postal policy can help explain this state of affairs. He discusses its influence on the development of such information-intensive institutions as the national market, the voluntary association, and the mass party. He traces its consequences for ordinary Americans, including women, blacks, and the poor. In a broader sense, he shows how the postal system worked to create a national society out of a loose union of confederated states. This exploration of the role of the postal system in American public life provides a fresh perspective not only on an important but neglected chapter in American history, but also on the origins of some of the most distinctive features of American life today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History

384 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 1995

About the author

Richard R. John is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He teaches and advises graduate students in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in communications, and is member of the core faculty of the Columbia history department, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications.

Reviews

[sarai · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the early 19th century, a “Market Revolution” may have transformed rural American culture from a largely communitarian, subsistence-based barter economy into one of commerce, individualism, and capitalist ambition. Richard R. John’s Spreading the News elucidates one potential vehicle of that transformation – the American postal system, which stood apart from other systems of its time as a public institution meant for the common citizen that did not discriminate across geographical distance. Spurred by the Post Office Act of 1792, John argues that a sort of “communications revolution” unified the hinterland and the coastal metropolises into a national community by the 1830s before evolving into a dividing force in the years leading up to the Civil War. However, John fails to adequately link his “communications revolution” to the “market revolution” espoused by other historians of this time period.

Although the US Postal System was originally set up to generate revenue for the rest of the federal government, it transformed through the Post Office Act of 1792 into a system that served Americans by providing reliable and expedient (for the time) communication across all territories of the nation. However, its ubiquity turned it into an early battleground for controversies and competing ideologies that would later foment into dissent during the Civil War. Such conflicts included Sabbatarianism, or the dispute over the operating of post offices on Sundays, which John argues expanded the role and the moral obligation of the federal government. The author also writes about abolitionist mass mailings, which worried at already-tense loyalties divided between federal and state governments and had both Charleston postmaster Alfred Huger and New York City postmaster Samuel L. Gouverneur siding with state antiabolitionist laws rather than federal protection of the post.

Rooted in considerable archival work, this book draws extensively from letters, pamphlets, newsletters, memos, paintings, engravings, and other sundry paraphernalia to create a portrait of both the post office as a political system as well as a public good. This thorough research and detailed recounting includes discussions not only regarding class, religion, and geography, but also the marginalization of women and Black people within the postal system. Discussions of the role of stagecoach mail-carrier and newspaper circulation contracts in the expansion of the postal service further emphasize John’s geographical argument. Additionally, individual profiles of various postmaster generals such as John McLean and Amos Kendall as well as their immediate subordinates serve to illustrate both the transformation of the post as well as its perception in the public eye.
John’s other strengths lie in the narratives and case studies he uses to illustrate arguments, making the dense and detailed text still very readable. Despite this, however, his argument that the postal system brought together far-flung locales could have benefited from the occasional map to visualize, for example, the growth of post office locations during this time period. He also repeatedly cites illustrations, paintings, and engravings, analysing their representation of post offices but failing to show the original image to the readers – a “maddening” omission.

The most prominent weakness of this book, however, is John’s lack of real historiographical discussion. Despite devoting the end of his first chapter to a survey of the literature, John emphasises his own perspective and methodology in this section, claiming a place in the contextualist tradition of the study of public institutions. To be fair, John does point out that the history of the American post office had barely been written when he began work on this project, which gave him little immediate context to situate himself in beyond Wayne E. Fuller’s American Mail. However, there are substantial narratives and debates about the nature of the early 19th century in America, which John does not converse with outright. It appears that John is simply more concerned with the post office’s impact on the nation rather than the nation’s impact on the post office – in contrast with his claim to contextualism – and this manifests in a focus on archival resources rather than previous scholarly work.

For example, Spreading the News shares themes of interstate commerce and community-building with articles more directly focused on the marketplace revolution of the early 19th century. However, John seems to be more concerned with the facts of the postal service than the conditions that led them there. He spends valuable time discussing the role of merchants in funding and utilizing the postal service; however, he does not converse with the causes behind these merchants’ success or their impact on previously rural communities – or for that matter, the development of capitalism in general. When John discusses the sheer volume of money transmitted through the postal system, he remarks on it only largely to discuss the security of the mail, taking the prevalence of cash itself for granted. However, Christopher Clark and James Henretta both explain that cash transactions themselves were a relatively new arrival in rural communities that had previously relied on barter and complex systems of credit.

Nevertheless, John does engage with the impact the postal service has on such rural families. Both Clark and Henretta point out that, although by the 1830s many women were leaving their families and farms to find work in industrial factories, they still retained ties to home through sending money and letters to their parents. Henretta explains that these customs reinforced “lineal values” even as mill girls worked outside the home for the first time, and certainly John reinforces this by pointing out the importance of “female-female” correspondence that preserved far-flung relationships.
As a matter of fact, while most historians of the time period postulate that the “Market Revolution” dissolved community bonds and negated communitarian values, John argues that the postal system provides evidence that the sense of community simply shifted to include an entire nation. This transformation occurred due to the power of the post office to provide far-flung Americans with opportunity to “participate directly in the political process through an ongoing discussion of the leading events of the day.” Through this argument and a few other assertions regarding the development of a “national market”, John clearly intends for his “Communications Revolution” to parrot the “Market Revolution”, thus sidestepping entirely the debate over the very existence of a marketplace revolution, the role of cash and barter economy, and the definition of capitalism. Such large-scale debates, which Winifred Rothenberg and Rona Weiss exemplify, are left out in John’s narrative, seemingly irrelevant to the specifics of a public, entirely cash-funded postal system. Although unwillingness to participate in a debate is itself not a flaw, John does not acknowledge the differing opinions regarding such a prominent historical theory, choosing instead to keep his head down and take the “Market Revolution” model for granted.

As a history of a public institution during a transformative historical epoch, Richard R. John’s Spreading the News performs admirably. The narrative he composes of the postal system as both a community-builder and -divider is compelling and supported by a substantial body of primary research. However, John seems to have largely written this in a historiographical vacuum. By not even acknowledging prominent debates regarding the very “Market Revolution” that he builds his thesis on, John narrows the relevance of his work solely to his specific analysis of the postal system, rather than joining a larger discussion on the historical context.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

At its best this book suggests what it proposes, that one of the most important institutions in the early American republic was the U.S. Post Office, and that early American history can really be told as a series of battles over the postal system. Of course, this is only in some moments, in others even the author seems to believe he is pushing the argument too far (such as maybe with his talk of the "bureaucratic sublime"), but this book does provide a crucial look at an under-appreciated player in early American politics.

Much of the first half of the book partakes a little too much of cultural or anthropological history, with an infinitude of scattered vignettes that are supposed to illustrate the importance of the post. The reader does come to appreciate how the blowing of the post-riders tin horn upon the entering of a new village (required by regulations) caused a whole town to move en masse towards the news, how the printing and mailing of congressional debates after 1812 led to new C-SPAN worthy speeches performed to empty Congress halls only for the people at home, and how the subsidization of newspaper transmission by the Post Office Act of 1792 succeeded in creating a national political community, but much of this could have been done better chronologically.

The best parts of the book are the last three chapters, on the Sabbatarian controversy (those evangelicals who tried from 1810-1817 and again from 1826-1832, to ban mail on Sundays (they lost then, but succeeded in 1912)), the battle over post office patronage in Jackson's years, and the battle over the interception of abolitionist literature in 1835. These chapters all, fortunately, deal with stories with clear arcs and characters, and are well told. The one on patronage in Jackson's administration is wonderful, describing how Jackson's friends, "money-martyers" they called themselves for their donations to his presidency, muscled into the post office and began using postmasterships as routes to solvency. The large hand-outs made to contractors with Jacksonian leanings, along with surreptitious loans gotten from New York banks to fund them without Congress's approval, almost bankrupted the service and almost cost Jackson's lieutenant, Martin Van Buren, the 1836 election. The Senate "Ewing Report" on post office skulduggery was printed and mailed by the thousands by Whig propagandists. Yet in 1840, to fight the well-supplied Jacksonian postmasters/partisans, the Whigs promised offices of their own, and then kicked the Jacksonians out. The spoils system was born, and American democracy would never be the same.

So this book, despite its faults, provides an essential and eye-opening look at early America. The post office was more important, and more interesting, than one might would think.

[Evan Þ. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This history of the early United States postal system opened my eyes to so many parts of the story of America I hadn't appreciated or known about - even up to how the postal service unified the country through providing reliable communication, both through the mail itself (which admitted newspapers at rates heavily subsidized by business letters), and through the stagecoach lines to just about every corner of the country that it funded through mail contracts. On top of this, the details of the mail itself could almost be called an afterthought - though its impact on American society was merely delayed until after an 1845 postage reform made letter-sending affordable to the average person.

This eye-opening book made me remember the postal service was the most visible part of the federal government for such a long time, and made me appreciate how important it was before telegraph. It might easily have expanded to the telegraph - as in many European countries - except that Congress wasn't interested in enabling it to do that. John doesn't speculate what impact that decision had, but it would've clearly been significant.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

It turns out that the U.S. Postal Service has a far more interesting history than it would appear on the surface. Richard R. John essentially tells the political and social history of the United States, 1792-1844, through an institutional history of the U.S. Post Office. He advances a straightforward, but perhaps controversial argument that the through the U.S. Post Office the United States federal government became an "agent of change" during the Early Republic by tying an expanded postal service, a subsidized coach service, and a subsidized mass media into one large mechanism for making possible an "American" identity before the telegraph and railroad.

John divides the book into two components. The first three chapters examine the institutional development of the post office after the Post Office Act of 1792. The last three chapters explore, respectively, the Sabbatarian movements between 1810-1817 and 1826-1831 that both failed to close the post offices on Sundays; Andrew Jackson's decision to fill postmasterships with political allies that used the postal service to advance party agendas; the controversy stemming from the dissemination of abolitionist literature through the postal service. These final stories are perhaps the best written, contain distinct characters and a narrative arc, while also illustrating some components of John's thesis (e.g. how the Postal Service fostered an imagined community, or became an instrument for creating mass parties, voluntary organizations, or the national market).

One might trace the development of the USPS by three legislative acts: The Post Office Act of 1792, the Post Office Act of 1846, and the Post Office Act of 1851. John envisions the first as the most important piece of legislation for the modern USPS, and also the one with the most far reaching consequences for how the United States developed into a simultaneously unified and divisive social and cultural system. The 1792 Act did three things for the Post Office. First, it secured for Congress the sole right to expand the Post Office throughout the growing nation. For quite some time, Post Office expansion proceeded by the logic of the "financial rationale," that is the Post Office created new posts and routes based solely on the potential for those routes to provide self-sustaining revenue. The 1792 Act allowed Congress to expand the Post Office into the hinterland at a net loss. Second, the 1792 Act subsidized the cost of mailing newspapers, magazines and pamphlets. This had profound repercussions for the print industry. Printers re-tooled books to USPS standards as serializations (books were not delivered until much later) and national and local newspapers suddenly found a much wider market. Third, the 1792 Act prohibited tampering with the mail and government censors could not prohibit the dissemination of dissent via the USPS. Therefore, individuals and groups could express critical opinions of the central government through the mail with impunity, and this eventually made possible widespread factionalism and pamphleteering through the mail (with the notable exception of Abolitionist literature in the South).

If the 1792 Act made print media far more affordable and accessible to the general public, then the 1846 and 1851 Acts made it possible for many Americans to send and receive private correspondence. John explains that before 1846, Americans sent private letters without pre-payment (recipients had to pay at time of delivery), paid by the page, and sometimes incurred charges upwards of 25 cents when the average worker made only 1.00$ a day. The 1846/1851 Acts introduced stamps and a flat, weight-based rate of .03$/ounce. This allowed women, free blacks, and primarily white men greater capabilities to send and receive letters across the country.

What's most remarkable about the early Postal System, as John lucidly explains, is that it functioned without a dependence on steam technology. Between 1792 and 1844, the Post Office hired private contractors in the stage coach industry to deliver mail with specific guidelines for time-tables and punctuality. The central government also incentivized stage travel for Americans by subsidizing the cost of traveling by coach (or, "following the mail"). Thus, the communications revolution occurred before the advent of the telegraph (1844) or "Rail Mail" (1840s-1850s).

Other aspects of his book illustrate how the Post Office played a central role in the consolidation of white, male rule during the "Age of Democracy" and excluded women, slaves and free blacks from playing a part in the public arena. Throughout the nation, the Post Office became another place for fraternal bonding.

While this probably isn't a book on most readers' bucket-lists, it's certainly an intriguing account of an institution that we take for granted in the twenty-first century. As John illustrates, the Postal communications revolution was as novel and profound for 19th century Americans as the telephone and internet were for Americans in the twentieth century. Perhaps his most important insight is that communications technology (regardless of form) has allowed like-minded Americans to increasingly find one another through various social and political forums, and has made it possible for minority interests (e.g. Sabbatarianism during the 1810s/1820s) to achieve greater followings, publicity, and influence than ever before.

[Frank Calberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was during the learning process of "The active citizen in a digital age" https://app.novoed.com/#!/courses/act... that I came across this book. Reading it, I found these extracts particularly useful:

What values, purpose, and competencies were dominant in the postal system?
- Page 10: Many compared the postal system to parts of the human body. For one New York Times correspondent, it was that "mighty arm of civil government" without whose cooperation the press would be "crippled and disabled."
- Page 116: Many postmasters had a military background. Other postmasters had important careers in the press.
- Page 133: The military model shaped postal administration in a variety of ways. Like the army corps of engineers, the staff of the general post office quickly became a leading authority on logistics.
- Page 138 - 142: At the start of the 19th century, more or less all women and people with dark skin were excluded from working at the post office.
- Page 161: The local post office was far more than the place where you went to pick up your mail. It was a gathering place, a place for having a chat with people.

How quickly did the postal system grow? Pages 4 and 51.
- In 1790, there were 75 post offices in the USA. 43,000 people per post office. 0.1 letter per capita delivered. 0.2 newspaper per capita delivered.
- In 1840, there were 13,468 post offices in the USA. 1,087 people per post office. 2.9 letters per capita delivered. 2.7 newspapers per capita delivered.

How was the postal system organized, owned, and managed?
- Page 86: From a present-day standpoint, it might seem strange that the federal government could once have committed itself as a matter of principle to outspeeding private entrepreneurs in the transmission of market information. At that time, however, the commitment was widely shared.
- Page 88: Most shared the conviction that the electric telegraph was too powerful to be left under private control.
- Page 110: By bringing the postal industry and the stagecoach industry together into a new configuration, by indisting that the stagecoach industry be coordinated in accordance with a regular schedule, and, most importantly, by establishing a network of distribution centers to coordinate the whole, the central government created a communications infrastructure that was largely independent of the preexisting routes of maritime trade and that far outstripped anything that had existed before.
- Page 252: Few Americans believed that the postal system could be administered as a private enterprise. Due to the size, comlexity, and importance, it was assumed that it must necessarily be administered by the central government.

[Lyra]

If you're an academic reader, you could do far worse than this engaging look at the postal system and how its institutional development both fostered and undermined democracy.

If you are a lay reader, the straight from the dissertation obtuse language will give you a headache.

[Sean Chick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a bad read and the argument is interesting although overblown in a strange effort to make the Post Office the center of American political life in the early republic.