During it first century, the Post Office grew from 75 offices, most located on a single post road along the Atlantic seaboard, to a network of nearly 60,000 post offices serving every city, village, and hamlet in America. Mail delivery to each home and business in the nation began in 1863 with City Delivery service in the largest cities. In 1896, when delivery service was provided in every city having a population of 10,000 or more, Rural Free Delivery began in the West Virginia hills. Mail was delivered on over 27,000 rural routes by 1905. Through mail contracts and subsidies the Post Office played an important role in the development of transportation industries from express riders and steamships in the 19th century, through railroads and pneumatic tubes, to civil aviation in the 20th century. One impetus that led to the creation of the Government Printing Office in 1861 was a scandal in the printing contracts for millions of Post Office forms. When John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia department store magnate and Benjamin Harrison's Postmaster General, wrote his annual report in the centennial year (1889) he observed, "The post-office is the visible form of the Federal Government to every community and to every citizen. Its hand is the only one that touches the local life, the social interests, and business concern of every neighborhood. It brings the Government to every door in the land and makes it the ready and faithful servitor of every interest of commerce and society." With over 150,000 clerks, letter carriers, and postmasters that year, the Post Office represented half of the civilian employees of the federal government.
The Post Office Act of 1792 established three important principles that influenced postal policies for generations. That letters can not be opened and read without a warrant still largely holds true today. The establishment of favorable, subsidized postage rates for newspapers led to the widespread dissemination of news in the young republic. Until the advent of inexpensive, uniform postage rates for letters (3¢) in 1851, newspapers comprised up to 90% of the mail by weight. Finally, placing the establishment of post offices and post roads in the hands of Congress, not the executive branch, ensured that postal service would grow quickly into all areas of the country. Alexis De Tocqueville, traveling in Michigan, not yet a state in 1831, wrote, "In America one of the first things done in a new State is to make the post go there; in the forests of Michigan there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild but that letters and newspapers arrive a least once a week."
Postal history is much more than the rate paid or the route traveled for a particular piece of mail; it is American history from the perspective of how citizens and businesses connected with each other through the most pervasive agency of the federal government. As a window into daily lives, it is a social and cultural look at how ordinary Americans received news and information, participated in the commerce of the nation, and communicated with their family and friends. My postal history research places surviving pieces of mail, and other postal paper, in historical context while understanding their transmission through the mail stream. In the two articles linked here, a letter and a post office form provide starting points to examine the treatment of newspapers by the 19th century Post Office. The 1832 letter, in which the Liverpool, Pennsylvania postmaster instructs the Philadelphia postmaster to sue a newspaper publisher for hiding mail inside a newspaper, highlights the disparity between postage rates for letters and newspapers. The 1880 Post Office receipt for 8¢, for mailing one weeks' worth of the Allentown Industry, shows how little revenue the post office received from many publishers.
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