The Tumultuous History of the U.S. Postal Service—and its Constant Fight for Survival
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Building a nation through its postal service
In the 1830s, French aristocrat, historian, and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville chronicled our new country in part by riding in a mail coach into Michigan Territory. “From time to time, we came to a hut in the midst of the forest; this was a post-office,” he wrote. The carriers dropped off the mail and sped on into the night. De Tocqueville admired the system’s efficiency: “It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought circulates in the midst of these deserts,” he wrote.
This was exactly the point: In forming the Post Office, the Founding Fathers had wanted a service that would bind together the scattered populous of the new United States. It was, in other words, a tool of nationalism. Over the course of two centuries, the agency would drive the expansion of roads and transit, strengthen the nation’s connections with its rural communities, and brave all conditions to bring packages to citizens’ front doors.
The Post Office helped build an empire, quite literally. Though postal routes had been established in the colonial era—most notably under Benjamin Franklin, who had been a royal postmaster and later became the first U.S. Postmaster General during the American Revolution—the system expanded under the new nation. The Constitution granted the federal government the power to establish “post roads,” which by 1823 spanned more than 80,000 miles. By 1860, these roads linked 28,000 post offices, where people sometimes waited in long lines to pick up their mail in an era before home delivery.
The growing need for contractors who could carry the mail across all those roads also spurred the growth of private businesses, including cross-country travel lines. The Post Office often gave mail contracts to stagecoach lines, rather than to faster and cheaper horseback riders, in order to promote the nascent passenger transportation network for the new nation. Later, the Post Office did the same for private steamboats and railroads, even airlines—a practice that continues today. “If you ever look out the window of a jet you're on, you often see them loading the first-class mail into the cargo hold,” notes Richard Kielbowicz, a communications scholar at the University of Washington.
President George Washington also saw the Post Office as a way to cultivate committed American citizens. In its early years, the Post Office focused on delivering newspapers to keep Americans informed and connected. To keep newspaper subscriptions cheap and accessible, the Post Office subsidized their distribution by charging exorbitant prices for letter postage—as much as a full-day’s wages, which meant the cost of mail was largely supported by merchants.
By the late 1830s, though, all those steamboats and railroads had created a problem. Private “express” companies used them to carry mail at cheaper rates—cutting into the Post Office’s letter deliveries by as much as half. Suddenly, the Post Office was staring down an out-of-date business model and crippling finances.
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