Figure 5.1 Thickening the Gossamer Network
These two maps compare post offices, unceded Native land (light gray), and reservations (dark gray) in 1880 (left) versus 1890 (right).
The western United States entered a new chapter in the 1880s. The preceding decades had been marked by wars of removal and dispossession against the region’s Native peoples and the rapid occupation of their land by American settlers. During the 1880s, the emphasis shifted from expansion to integration, from occupying the West to bringing the region more tightly within the national orbits of politics, economy, and culture. Once again, the US Post and its gossamer network provided the spatial circuitry for this process. The Post Office Department established some nine thousand new western post offices across the region during the 1880s. Although the US Post continued to extend its tendrils into distant corners of the West, the dominant pattern of growth in this decade, visible in Figure 5.1, was a thickening and filling in of existing areas of postal coverage as the department added new nodes to what was already the most expansive communications infrastructure in the world. Understanding how the system functioned and its integrative power in the western United States, however, requires zooming in on some of the individual nodes that made up the larger network.1
Figure 5.1 Thickening the Gossamer Network
These two maps compare post offices, unceded Native land (light gray), and reservations (dark gray) in 1880 (left) versus 1890 (right).
Two post offices in California serve as a useful starting point. In the state capital of Sacramento, a newly remodeled post office building reopened in September of 1881. It had been under construction for three months and was a welcome upgrade for the city’s residents. Although modestly sized, Sacramento was a hive of postal activity: the previous year, residents had sent some 3.4 million pieces of mail, an average of nearly 160 items for every woman, man, and child.2 The city’s postmaster, William C. Hopping, had managed the office for the past six years and oversaw a full-time staff of 15 employees.3 Ten postal clerks sorted mail, sold stamps, and provided other routine services, while five letter carriers delivered mail directly to residents’ homes. Fortunately for the city’s municipal coffers, the federal government paid these employees’ salaries while also covering the building’s rent, lighting, and upkeep. In short, it had many of the classic features of a government bureaucracy.
Seventy-five miles away from Sacramento, a very different kind of post office operated in the mining town of North Bloomfield. Located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the North Bloomfield Post Office was little more than a windowed partition in the corner of the town’s general store. If not for a painted sign hanging outside the building, a customer might have been completely unaware that there was a post office on its premises, nestled as it was among overflowing shelves of merchandise.4 There were no salaried letter carriers or mail clerks in North Bloomfield. The town’s storeowner, T. P. Crandall, simply handed out mail to the town’s residents as they came into his store and received a few hundred dollars each year in commissions and fees for this part-time work. Unlike the Sacramento postmaster, Crandall was a private businessman, not a full-time civil servant. The North Bloomfield Post Office exemplified the agency model of administration.5
Figure 5.2 The Post Office Window
The North Bloomfield Post Office, part of the historical reconstruction of the McKillican and Mobley General Store in Malakoff Diggins State Park. Photograph by the author, August 31, 2014.
It’s tempting to trace the lineage of the modern American administrative state back to the ordered, bureaucratic operations of the Sacramento Post Office. It’s much harder to trace the roots of American governance to the chaotic, shared-use space of T. P. Crandall’s general store. But the Sacramento Post Office was the exception, not the rule, in the 19th century. In 1881, only 4 percent of the nation’s post offices did enough business to employ a full-time salaried postal clerk.6 The rest of the nation’s tens of thousands of post offices looked like the one in North Bloomfield, run by a local businessowner who worked part-time for commissions and fees. These two administrative structures produced the divergent geographical pattern visible in Figure 5.3: post offices that were large enough to qualify for a salaried government clerk were confined mainly to cities; those that followed the agency model were, broadly speaking, everywhere else.
Figure 5.3 The Urban Post and the Gossamer Network
Far fewer post offices were large enough to employ salaried government clerks (left) compared to post offices without salaried government clerks (right) in 1881. Data on clerks was collected from Official Register of the United States, 1881, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 610–78.
The North Bloomfield Post Office can look like an antiquated relic from a bygone era.7 Perhaps not surprisingly, scholars of the American state have devoted far more attention to bureaucrats like William C. Hopping and more recognizable institutional contexts like the Sacramento Post Office.8 In doing so, they have missed a constellation of 19th-century governance that was far more widespread and just as consequential. To understand the full history of the American state means turning away from Sacramento’s municipal post office building and peering through the window of T. P. Crandall’s general store. What did these small-town post offices look like? Who ran them, how did they operate, and what roles did they play in their communities? How did post offices and postmasters link these places to larger systems of politics and governance, gender and race, commerce and capitalism? All of these questions revolve around the issue of scale. It is impossible to understand the significance of the US Post’s gossamer network without understanding the unique position of post offices as connection points between local and national geography. More so than any other feature of the network, this was where the different spatial scales of 19th-century society came together.
Nineteenth-century Americans cared a little too much about post offices. That, at least, is a conclusion one might draw from surviving political correspondence. Congressmen and other politicians were constantly adjudicating “post office rows” over, say, the location of a post office or who would be appointed as its postmaster. Congressman James Garfield found himself wading into one such row in his Ohio district. A cascade of competing petitions and letters flooded his desk opining about the proposed location of a local post office and who should be appointed postmaster, leaving Garfield to complain in his diary about “the smallness of the material out of which men can get up a fight.”9 These “post office rows” erupted everywhere. In the biography Old Jules, Mari Sandoz chronicled her father’s fleeting experience as a local postmaster in western Nebraska during the 1880s and 1890s. When Jules Sandoz was replaced as postmaster, he “took up his fight . . . with the local committeemen, the Congressman from his district, the fourth assistant Postmaster General, and the President.” He continued battling for years, leaving one of his friends to sigh in his old age, “Why did you have to spend your whole life fighting over stupid things like post offices, Jules?”10
The standard explanation for the cause of “post office rows” can be boiled down to one word: politics. Nineteenth-century party politics hinged on the control of government patronage positions. This was the height of the “spoils system,” in which the party that controlled the government used it to disburse jobs as a reward for party loyalists.11 And outside of times of war, the Post Office Department had more of these jobs than the entire rest of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches combined.12 One dataset collected by political scientist Scott James, for instance, contains information about 80,000 presidential-level appointments sent to the US Senate for confirmation between 1829 and 1917. As shown in Figure 5.4, more than three-quarters of these appointments were in the Post Office Department.13 And presidential-level appointments were themselves only a fraction of the US Post’s total patronage pie; the overwhelming majority (roughly 95 percent) of postmasters from this period didn’t need Senate confirmation and therefore aren’t captured in Figure 5.4.14 Exact figures for the total number of postmaster appointments are hard to come by, but it is safe to assume that hundreds of thousands of people worked as postmasters at some point in their lives during the second half of the 19th century. In a purely quantitative sense, post offices and postmasters fueled the era’s patronage machine.15
Figure 5.4 The Fattest Slice of the Patronage Pie
This chart shows all executive branch appointments submitted by the president of the United States for confirmation by the US Senate between 1829 and 1917. Many thanks to Scott James for providing this dataset.
Controlling the Post Office Department provided political parties with a major electoral advantage. During the 19th century the United States did not provide public funding to run elections, instead leaving them in the hands of political parties themselves. Given their number, size, and frequency, American elections were often quite expensive. To help pay for them, the party that controlled the executive branch solicited campaign contributions or “assessments” from the nation’s tens of thousands of postal workers.16 Just as important as the size of the postal workforce was its spatial distribution. Post offices gave the ruling party a ready-made campaign office in every precinct in the country from which postmasters could distribute campaign literature, mobilize voters, hand out election ballots, and complete a variety of other electioneering tasks.17
Postmaster appointments brought clear advantages to political parties, but it is less obvious why people would actually want the position. Although some postal appointments paid well—a postmaster at one of the country’s largest post offices could earn a salary of several thousand dollars a year—most of them did not.18 Postmasters constantly complained about how little compensation they received for their work.19 In 1887, more than half of all postmasters received less than one hundred dollars a year, the equivalent of just a few thousand dollars today.20 The Post Office Department calculated postmaster compensation based on a percentage of the receipts from outgoing mail at their office, in addition to any fees a postmaster charged for renting out letterboxes or processing money orders. In 1889, for instance, the postmaster at North Bloomfield received just over five hundred dollars from his position. Of this, a small amount ($66) came from letter-box rental fees, while the bulk ($446.15) came from a roughly 70 percent commission on stamps that were canceled on outgoing mail from his office.21 Compensation was directly tied to the size of the surrounding community and how much mail they sent; as one postmaster put it, “There was no money in a post office where nobody lived.”22 And there were a lot of places where nobody lived, especially in the rural United States. In fact, the term “twelve dollar post office” became a recognizable turn of phrase during this period to describe the country’s tiny post offices where postmasters earned $12 a year, the department’s minimum annual commission.23
Not only did a postmaster appointment pay poorly, but it was also a precarious position. In one observer’s words, “In every Hamlet, at every cross-roads, each man asks his neighbor: How long will it be after the new President comes in before the old postmaster goes out?”24 Whenever the presidency’s electoral pendulum swung between Republican and Democratic control, thousands of postmasters lost their jobs. This revolving door of postmaster appointments reflected a wider pattern: tenures in public office were much shorter in the 19th century than they would be in the 20th and 21st centuries. Famous career politicians from this era such as John Quincy Adams, William Seward, or James Blaine were the exceptions rather than the rule. During the 19th century, the average career of a representative in Congress was never more than four years. Senate tenures were slightly longer, but even in that chamber the average time in office hovered between three and six years.25 Local postmasters occupied their office for even shorter periods of time. A dataset of some 21,500 19th-century postmasters from Texas reveals that the median time in office was a little over two years.26 Between their modest compensation and short tenures, postmaster positions hardly look like plum patronage jobs. Small rural post offices may have been at the front lines of partisan warfare, but this doesn’t explain why Americans fought so fiercely over them. To understand why “post office rows” carried the weight that they did requires dropping down to the level of local communities.
Post offices stood at the crossroads of American towns, often quite literally.27 If you unfold a 19th-century map of a specific town and look for Main Street, you will likely see a building labeled with two simple letters: “P.O.” This building was the center of a community’s social orbit. Prior to the launch of Rural Free Delivery at the turn of the 20th century, most rural Americans had to travel to the nearest post office to send and receive their mail. This meant that the local post office became the principal gathering place for communities, frequented by a wider swath of its residents on a more regular basis than arguably any other local institution, including churches, schools, or saloons.28 The clattering arrival of the mail stagecoach drew neighbors together at regular intervals to a central location in order to pick up their mail, read newspapers, trade gossip, buy stamps, and send letters. Arguably no other institution was so embedded in the everyday lives of so many different people.
Figure 5.5 The Crossroads Post Office
Like many small-town post offices, the North Bloomfield Post Office was located on Main Street and housed inside a general store. Sanborn Map Company, North Bloomfield, California, 1905, scale not given, 1905, Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867–1970, http://sanborn.umi.com.
Post office locations defined the spatial practices of millions of 19th-century Americans on a daily or weekly basis. Consequently, the politicized battles over postmaster appointments were as much about where a post office would be located as they were about who would occupy the position. Congressman James Garfield’s political lieutenant, for instance, wrote to him about two such disputes, “one at Wickliffe, where the P.M. [postmaster] is charged with drunkenness, and the other at East Claridon, where the P.M. is charged with being dead. The latter charge is true, but there is a trouble about location [of the post office] .”29 Many “post office rows” were, in effect, battles over local space. Since most post offices were housed inside the postmaster’s own private business or residence, operating a post office guaranteed a regular flow of potential customers for its proprietor. This made postmaster appointments especially valuable for a particular kind of businessowner: storeowners.
One business directory from 1884 contained listings for more than eight hundred postmasters in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. Only one-quarter of them listed “postmaster” as their sole occupation, while the rest had at least one other private business in addition to their public position. “General Store” was far and away the most common occupation, occurring roughly two and a half times more frequently than the next most frequently listed occupation of “Livestock.” These postmasters were joined by more specialized sorts of retailers, including stores that sold medicine and drugs, groceries, stationery, hardware, or tobacco. In aggregate, all of these different kinds of stores made up more than half of the private businesses operated by this set of western postmasters.30
Figure 5.6 Part-Time Postmasters
This chart list the most common alternate occupations for postmasters that were listed in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1884–1885 (Chicago: R. L. Polk & Co. and A. C. Danser, 1884).
The prevalence of storeowners as postmasters is not surprising. A post office was the single most reliable way to drive steady foot traffic into their store. A person who went to pick up mail or buy stamps might also leave with a piece of merchandise under their arm. Especially for retailers with relatively low margins, a post office acted as a kind of insurance policy against fluctuating demand and a competitive edge against local rivals. Wholesale prices might rise or fall, consumer tastes could change, a competing store might open across the street, but people never stopped needing their mail.31
Although a majority of western post offices were housed in stores, they also appeared in other sorts of businesses. The same 1884 directory lists a total of 90 different occupations for western postmasters, from bakers and butchers to physicians and photographers. In one Utah town, the post office was even run by a professional organist. But another kind of organ was surprisingly scarce in this business directory: the partisan organs of local newspapers. Nineteenth-century newspaper editors were some the most politically active members of a community. In standard accounts of the era, political parties appointed droves of these partisan editors as postmasters.32 Yet the evidence simply does not support the connection between postmasters and newspaper editors, at least in the Mountain West. Of the six hundred postmasters with other occupations listed in the 1884 business directory, only seven of them were newspaper editors. In fact, a western postmaster was more likely to operate a saloon than a newspaper, despite an explicit department regulation prohibiting post offices from being housed on the premises of drinking establishments. The dearth of western newspaper editors does not necessarily translate into a dearth of politics within the US Post—a saloonkeeper could be as partisan as a newspaper editor—but it does imply that too much attention has been paid to postmasters as political operatives and not enough to their role as commercial actors.33
There were less obvious financial reasons to fight for a postmaster appointment. The position’s commissions and fees, no matter how small, offered a dependable revenue stream during an especially volatile economic period.34 Some postmasters were also exempt from militia and jury duty, freeing up more time to run their own businesses. And for much of the 19th century, postmasters could take advantage of the “franking privilege” to send their own mail free of charge. The department gradually restricted this privilege to cover only “official” government business, but postmasters nevertheless had little chance of repercussion if they decided to send personal correspondence under official envelopes.35 A postmaster appointment could also help secure loans, as agents for the Dun & Bradstreet Co. credit agency would frequently include the shorthand of “P.M.” (postmaster) or “P.O.” (post office) in their reports about local business owners as a proxy for judging their trustworthiness. Although not enough to guarantee creditworthiness on its own, the position of postmaster was nevertheless an indicator to these insurance agents about a person’s honesty, industry, and good character.36
Finally, postal appointments weren’t just about money. Postmasters were often civic leaders, on par with constables, school superintendents, and other local notables. In fact, “Justice of the Peace” was the third most common occupation for postmasters in the Mountain West behind “General Store” and “Livestock.”37 Postmasters were also some of the era’s most prolific information brokers. Arguably nobody knew more about the affairs of a town than the local postmaster, who had an intimate glimpse into the lives of their neighbors’ reading preferences, political allegiances, family news, and business connections. Companies solicited postmasters to provide information about a town and its residents. Government agencies relied on postmasters to collect information about everything from population statistics to veteran pensions to weather data.38 And families even turned to postmasters to track down wayward loved ones.39
Located at the crossroads of American communities, the nation’s tens of thousands of post offices were where all sorts of people came together. This meant that larger fault lines of gender and race left their imprint on the local space of post offices. Just two months after the renovated Sacramento post office opened its doors to the public in 1881, for instance, the postmaster printed his usual notice in the city’s newspaper listing the names of people who had letters waiting for them. He divided these letters into a “Ladies’ List” and a “Gentlemen’s List”—a gendered division that had become common practice across the nation’s urban post offices by the late 19th century.40 As more and more people adopted letter-writing practices, contemporaries fretted about women having to brave the crowds of rowdy men who congregated in urban post offices.41 The Post Office Department itself even felt the need to remind each postmaster to “keep his post-office in such a clean and orderly condition that it may be visited by women and children and others without impropriety or embarrassment.”42 To do so, urban postmasters like the one in Sacramento would segregate the interior space of post offices by requiring women and men to use two separate windows to send or receive their mail.43 Unlike in eastern cities, the Sacramento postmaster included one additional category of letters awaiting pickup at the post office: “Chinese.”44
Immigrants from China had first traveled in large numbers to the American West beginning with the California Gold Rush in the late 1840s and 1850s. Almost immediately, white westerners mobilized political campaigns against them. By the 1870s, California politicians were lobbying for national restrictions on Chinese immigrants and Congress passed a series of laws that culminated in 1882 with legislation that barred Chinese labors from immigrating to the United States—a watershed moment in the history of American immigration law. By the early 1880s, these racial tensions and exclusionary policies were inscribing the local space of western post offices, as illustrated by the Sacramento Post Office segregating its “Chinese” letters from the rest of the mail. 45 Of course, the farther one moved into the countryside and the chaotic, mixed-use spaces of rural post offices, the harder it was to maintain the strict segregated boundaries of urban post offices. This was especially true for places that relied on extractive industries such as mining and timber that employed large numbers of Chinese workers.46 Places exactly like North Bloomfield, California. The North Bloomfield Mining and Gravel Company employed hundreds of Chinese workers as part of California’s largest hydraulic mining operation, and as the company boomed during the 1870s, a local “Chinese Quarter” sprouted up in downtown North Bloomfield. The town’s Chinese residents quickly became part of the social fabric of the town, selling fresh produce to its residents and frequenting local businesses. One of these businesses was T. P. Crandall’s general store and post office on Main Street, less than one hundred yards away from China Alley.47
Debates over race and immigration did not take place solely on a regional or national level. They also played out at a local scale through thousands of daily, mundane interactions between individual people. Inside the crowded confines of T. P. Crandall’s general store, a Chinese miner might stand next to a teamster’s wife as they waited to receive their mail through the store’s tiny corner post office window. One can imagine how fraught these interactions must have been during the 1880s. In May of 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act. In December, a local newspaper printed an editorial claiming, “A Chinese merchant’s wife becomes a Chinese prostitute within twenty-four hours after her debarkation.”48 The following month, night watchmen at the North Bloomfield Mining and Gravel Company shot and killed a Chinese laborer who they claimed was trying to skim off amalgam from the mine’s sluices.49 One year later, the postmaster in the neighboring town of North San Juan was arrested for stealing a package containing $950 that was in transit to a Chinese businessman.50 Over 1885 to 1887, roughly a dozen counties in California forcibly expelled all of their Chinese residents, and in other towns white residents boycotted Chinese businesses, destroyed Chinese homes, and assaulted Chinese workers.51 For Sue Kee, Ah Lie, and other residents of North Bloomfield’s “China Quarter,” all of these developments were probably at the front of their minds as they stood in line to pick up their mail.52
Post offices were inseparable from the people who ran them. By housing the post office in their business or home, a postmaster imprinted their personal identity onto a public entity—sometimes quite literally when they named the post office after themselves. In Colorado, for instance, the post offices of Allen, Bland, Bristol, Bush, Cockrell, Deane, Farnham, Gwillimville, Hardin, Hawxhurst, Hillsborough, Kuhn’s Crossing, Littleton, Lyons, Madrid, Mitchell, Parlin, Powell, Selak, Semper, and Wheeler all shared a name with their postmaster.53 The highly personalized nature of the position meant that, rather than a tool for making citizens legible to the state, a local post office made the state legible to its citizens. Post offices were not run by some far-off bureaucrat but by a nearby resident who temporarily took on the role of an official state actor.54 Which raises the question: Who could and could not act in this capacity as an agent of the state? Technically speaking, the Post Office Department had only a handful of qualifications to be a postmaster. The person had to live in the surrounding community, swear an oath of office, execute a bond, and secure two sureties to back that bond. Legal minors were barred from office, but married women and foreign-born residents were not (provided the latter had declared their intention to become citizens).55 All of this meant that a relatively wide swath of the population were able to serve as postmasters.
Women had long taken on prominent leadership roles in temperance societies, sanitation leagues, antislavery organizations, and religious movements. By the end of the century, they could add post offices to that list.56 No single source systematically records the number of women who served as postmasters in the Post Office Department on a year-by-year basis, but a number of quantitative indicators point to an upward trajectory. Between the 1860s and 1890s US presidents submitted the names of at least 1,200 women for the Senate’s approval to serve as postmasters in the nation’s presidential post offices. Although women made up a small percentage all presidential postmaster appointments, their relative annual share roughly tripled over the course of four decades.57 State-level datasets paint a similar picture. In Oregon, the proportion of female postmasters increased roughly fivefold between the 1870s and the 1890s.58 In Texas, only around 6.5 percent of all postmaster appointments went to women in the 1870s. By the 1890s that figure had nearly doubled to 12.5 percent, and 20 years later it doubled again. By the 1920s, more than one-third of Texas post offices were operated by women.59 Finally, historical newspapers from the database Chronicling America and the digital libraries of HathiTrust and Google Books show a meteoric rise in the phrase “postmistress” (a female postmaster) during the 1870s and 1880s.60 On their own, each of these measurements is incomplete. Together, they point to the same phenomenon: more and more women served as postmasters during the final decades of the 19th century.
Figure 5.7 The Rise of Women in the US Post
The phrase “postmistress” began to appear in published material much more frequently during the last three decades of the 19th century. This chart uses a three-year smoothing function to compensate for year-to-year fluctuations. Data from Google Books Ngram Viewer of American English Books between 1800–1900, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=postmistress&year_start=1800&year_end=1900&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpostmistress%3B%2Cc0, downloaded on April 5, 2017.
Although Americans became increasingly accustomed to women working behind the counters of post offices, their entry into these public positions was far from smooth. Female postmasters could elicit a good deal of derision, as when journalists and writers lampooned postmistresses as gossiping busybodies or made puns about their ability to handle both “the mails” and “the males.”61 In Colorado Springs, the postmaster fired his female clerk after he found out she was hoping to succeed him in office, declaring he “would take great delight in turning out into the world and in search of husbands every woman now in the employ of government.”62 But the Colorado Springs postmaster was fighting a losing battle. Just 15 miles away, a woman named Elvina Hutchins was appointed that same year as the postmaster at Fountain, Colorado. She was joined by a large cohort of western women such as Emily S. Hoyt in Summit County, Utah, and Isabella Howe, who ran the post office out of her general store in Ellsworth, Nevada.63 By 1891, a nationwide survey by the Post Office Department found 6,335 postmistresses serving across the United States, in roughly 10 percent of all post offices.64
The position of postmaster—and the larger agency model that underlay it—held several advantages for women seeking office. As a hybrid private and public space, post offices gave women an opening through which to step into public office without representing a wholesale transgression of traditional gendered boundaries. This was especially true if the office itself was housed within the postmaster’s home, a space over which women held traditional authority.65 The nature of the work helped as well. Postmasters did not wield regulatory or coercive power. They were not tax collectors or constables. They instead acted as vendors who provided a popular public service, a much more familiar position for women who were already running stores, laundromats, and boarding houses. Moreover, some women were already acting as postmasters in an unofficial capacity. Across the country, male postmasters would leave the day-to-day operations of mail service in the hands of their wives or daughters.66 Finally, the sheer ubiquity of postmasters, both numerically and geographically, along with the era’s ever-revolving carousel of partisan patronage, gave women many more opportunities to serve in federal office. The local post office was one of the likeliest places an American would first catch glimpse of a woman in an official government position, paving the way for them to take on larger roles in the federal government.67
Yet the US Post’s decentralized agency model also tested the boundaries of officeholding within the department. In Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), for instance, postal officials were tasked with operating a skeletal postal system to connect its federally administered Indian reservations. Although most of these post offices were run by white government agents, the localized nature of the US Post meant that occasionally Indians would act as a postmaster. In 1882, an Eastern Shawnee minister named Charles Bluejacket was appointed postmaster of a new post office within the Cherokee Nation. In many ways, Bluejacket embodied a typical postmaster working through the agency model: he named the post office after himself, operated it on a part-time basis, and earned less than one hundred dollars a year in government commissions. But Bluejacket and other members of American Indian tribes were not technically American citizens. The question of whether they could legally serve as postmasters eventually made its way up to the attorney general for the United States, who in 1885 ruled that “an Indian citizen . . . is not eligible to the office of postmaster.” As was often the case in rural areas, the new regulation proved difficult to enforce. Charles Bluejacket continued to serve as his town’s postmaster and receive a government commission for at least two more years after the new rule was adopted.68
In neighboring Kansas, tens of thousands of Black southern migrants had resettled during the “Exoduster” movement of the late 1870s. The town of Nicodemus, in the northwestern part of the state, was at the forefront of this migration. In the spring of 1877, a group of Black ministers and promoters had chartered the Nicodemus town site. A few months later the first group of 60 or so Black settlers arrived, mainly from Tennessee and Kentucky. A few of them expressed dismay at the barren and windswept landscape, especially given that the promoters had distributed circulars promising rich soil, abundant water, and plenty of timber. Included in this list was an additional amenity that the town actually did have: a post office. In September of 1877, a storeowner named Zachary Fletcher was named postmaster of the brand-new Nicodemus Post Office, part of a small cohort of Black officeholders who worked as postmasters during this era.69
The end of the Civil War in 1865 and the emancipation of millions of freedpeople ushered in a new era of political mobilization for African Americans, who streamed to the polls to vote members of their communities into office as constables, state legislators, and even US senators.70 In 1867, James W. Mason of Arkansas was appointed the nation’s first Black postmaster. Both Mason in Arkansas and Fletcher in Kansas embodied a larger trend during Reconstruction. Black postmasters and other local officeholders came mainly from majority-Black “plantation counties” like Mason’s Chicot County or all-Black towns like Fletcher’s Nicodemus, Kansas.71 This was partly due to the localized agency model in which postmasters were drawn from a post office’s surrounding community.72 A postmaster was different, however, from a constable or other local elected office, in that it was a federal appointment made by the Post Office Department itself. An aspiring Black postmaster needed to have not only the backing of their community but also the backing of politicians and postal officials in Washington, DC. In practice, this tied the fortunes of Black federal officeholders like Mason and Fletcher to the ongoing electoral success of the Republican Party. If the pro-southern Democratic Party were to win the presidency, they would almost assuredly be kicked out of office.
A large swath of the American populace may have served as postmasters during the 19th century, but the Post Office Department erected subtle institutional barriers to officeholding. Perhaps chief among these for aspiring Black officeholders was the “bond question.”73 Like other government agencies, the Post Office Department required an officeholder to provide a bond as security against any losses incurred by negligence or theft while in office. A postmaster bond could range from five hundred to thousands of dollars at the nation’s largest post offices. On top of that, two local sureties needed to own enough property to back the bond for at least twice its total amount.74 For formerly enslaved people without wealth or property, these seemingly benign institutional requirements effectively barred them from office. Black postmasters like Zachary Fletcher in Nicodemus were thus relatively rare during this period. One investigation found a total of 142 Black postmasters appointed in the postwar decades, over a period in which literally hundreds of thousands of white Americans filled the same position.75
National debates over gender, race, and citizenship set the backdrop for who could and could not serve in federal office. Women like Elvina Hutchins might have been barred from the federal ballot box, but they were nonetheless able to serve as postmasters in ever-growing numbers. African American men like Zachary Fletcher could cast votes, but the Post Office Department’s regulations erected institutional barriers to their holding federal office. American Indians like Charles Bluejacket weren’t allowed to be postmasters, but sometimes they were anyway. As personalized and localized institutions that were nevertheless closely linked to federal administration, post offices were sites where many of the larger tensions and contradictions in American society came into collision.
The agency model wove together public and private space within small-town post offices like North Bloomfield, and it did so in ways that made these two threads all but impossible to disentangle. In the Nevada town of Sodaville, for instance, M. L. Stanfield ran a post office, railroad depot, telegraph station, and express company office, all inside the same building. In 1885, Stanfield received an annual commission of $139.60 from the Post Office Department. The rest of his income came from working for the Carson and Colorado railroad company, the Western Union telegraph company, and the express company Wells, Fargo & Co. The Sodaville Post Office was a one-stop location for a suite of different services, as Stanfield could check their luggage, deliver them a telegram, send a package, and then add their postcards to a pile of outgoing mail. In practical terms, customers who walked into the Sodaville Post Office wouldn’t have noticed much of a difference between the private operations of these companies and the taxpayer-funded, publicly administered system of the US Post.76
The agency model was not a one-way street. Even as the US post grafted itself onto an existing business infrastructure, some of those same private companies grafted their operations onto the public space of a local post office. After all, the benefits of managing a post office weren’t confined to local storeowners. Being at the crossroads of a community conferred similar advantages on any business, local or national, that wanted to sell goods and services to that community. National retailers, for instance, recognized postmasters as ideal sales agents. For one, a postmasters was a trusted figure drawn from a community’s own ranks. They were already well versed in clerical duties such as collecting payments, processing items, and distributing them to customers, and unlike a traveling salesman or saleswoman, a postmaster’s potential clients had to come to them rather than the other way around. Finally, the nature of the position gave a postmaster an intimate glimpse into townspeople’s interests and spending habits.77 National sales companies recruited postmasters by advertising to them directly in the Post Office Department’s monthly postal guide. Publishers offered to send discounted books to postmasters to sell at a markup, while others agencies promised free gifts or raffle tickets for each new client a postmaster secured. Other postmasters hawked subscriptions to magazines like Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Lady Magazine.78 Postmasters sold everything from farm equipment to hair-loss gadgets to pocket knives on behalf of national retailers. One company summarized its strategy this way: “Every Postmaster an Agent. Every Post Office a Centre of Distribution.”79 This captured the essence of the agency model: a larger organization delegating a local agent to act on its behalf. This time, however, the public appointment of a postmaster provided the infrastructure for private services rather than the other way around.
In the 19th century there was wasn’t a clear division between the public sector and the private sector—even when it seemed like there should be. This blurriness was especially prevalent in the relationship between the US Post and private carriers of parcels and packages. Congress had granted the US Post a public monopoly over the nation’s mail. The reason for this was simple: the US Post had a mandate to provide a universal service to all Americans, even in places where it wasn’t profitable to do so (such as the rural West). Without this mandate, private letter carriers could undercut the US Post by only operating along the most densely populated, profitable routes while leaving the federal government to provide service to costlier parts of the country.80 The postal monopoly did allow private companies to provide some kinds of mail services, most notably in transporting packages and parcels. The US Post’s weight limit of four pounds on mail material meant that anything heavier had to be transported via private express companies. In the western United States, the largest of these express companies was Wells, Fargo & Co.81 First established in the early 1850s, the company originally transported freight, money, and gold dust for miners during the California Gold Rush. It also provided a shadow mail service, taking advantage of a loophole that allowed private carriers to transport letters provided they did so using prepaid stamped postal envelopes. During these early years, Wells, Fargo & Co. provided a faster, more reliable (albeit more expensive) alternative to the US Post, which initially struggled to operate on the Pacific Coast.82 This early history, combined with a romanticized iconography of swashbuckling stagecoach drivers fending off bloodthirsty Indians and highwaymen, has turned Wells, Fargo & Co. into a totemic example for those who trumpet the virtues of the private sector over government bureaucracy.83 It is also more myth than reality.
Wells, Fargo & Co. was never a viable competitor to the US Post and its letter-carrying service. After some initial stumbles during the California Gold Rush, the US Post rapidly caught up to, and then surpassed, the express company. By 1880, the US Post was carrying approximately 10 times the number of letters that Wells, Fargo & Co. carried “outside the mails” in the West.84 Moreover, as shown in Figure 5.8, the US Post’s coverage dwarfed that of the regional express company. Even within the western states where Wells, Fargo & Co. was active, the US Post still operated close to four times as many offices as the private express company.85 This was the direct outgrowth of offering a universal public service versus a profit-generating private one. In the words of one writer, “Express companies extend their business wherever it promises to pay. The Post-office extends its operations wherever there are settlers.”86
Figure 5.8 Public and Private Space in the West
These maps compare office locations of Wells, Fargo & Co. (left) versus post offices (right) in 1880. Wells, Fargo & Co. data was transcribed from Wells, Fargo & Co., “List of Offices, Agents, and Correspondents,” July 1, 1880, in Pamphlets on California, Bancroft Library, F858.C18 v.3x.
Comparing the spatial coverage of the US Post to Wells, Fargo & Co. shows that anywhere the express company operated, so too did the nation’s postal system. In fact, the two networks sometimes shared the same infrastructure and workforce. One postal official estimated that postmasters made up fully one-fifth of the Wells, Fargo & Co.’s California agents.87 At the local scale this overlap between private company and government institution is clearly visible. In Guerneville, California, for instance, a jeweler named Gerhard Dietz was appointed the town’s postmaster in the spring of 1880. Soon after he started working as an agent for Wells, Fargo & Co.88 This was a case of the private company grafting its services onto the public infrastructure of the US Post. Public and private were endlessly entangled inside Gerhard Dietz’s jewelry store and across the US Post’s wider network.
Figure 5.9 The Hybrid Space of the Gossamer Network
Wells, Fargo & Co.’s Express, 1880, black-and-white photograph, Sonoma County Library Photograph Collection, Sonoma County Library, ANNEX PHOTO 6084, https://digital.sonomalibrary.org/digital/collection/p15763coll2/id/14282/rec/4, accessed April 19, 2020.
The entanglement of public and private space within the US Post spoke to larger debates during the late 19th century about the proper role of government within the nation’s economy. This period has long been characterized as a “Gilded Age” of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism dominated by corporations and robber barons, but it was simultaneously an age of reform. As corporations like the Southern Pacific Railroad and Western Union Telegraph Company came to dominate the national economy in the post–Civil War years, a coalition of small producers and wage workers pushed back under a broad movement known as antimonopolism. They argued that the sheer size of private monopolies allowed them to buy politicians, control information, and levy unfair price and wage discrimination. Antimonopolists called for the government to curtail the power of companies over ordinary Americans. The movement accelerated during the 1880s and crested in the mid-1890s with the dramatic rise of the Populist Party within national electoral politics.89
In one sense, the US Post should have been a bogeyman for antimonopolist reformers. After all, its monopolistic power was more extensive than that of any private corporation. It was one of the largest institutions in the world, an organizational octopus whose tentacles touched more people in more places than Western Union, the Southern Pacific Railroad, or any other company. And its payment system funneled millions of dollars of public funds into private pockets each year, including the very railroad companies loathed by so many antimonopolists. Despite all of this, antimonopolists embraced the US Post as an exemplar of a “natural monopoly”—a service that was so central to the public good that it should be managed by the government rather than left in private hands. For them, the US Post epitomized effective public enterprise so much that they repeatedly called for the Post Office Department to radically expand its functions into gathering weather and farming statistics, setting up a system of postal savings banks, and, perhaps most dramatically, taking over the nation’s private telegraph network. The US Post was so popular with antimonopolists that the People’s Party, the populist agrarian reform party, included its expansion as a core plank of its official party platform in 1892.90
Geography was at the heart of antimonopolists’ admiration for the US Post. Unlike telegraph, railroad, or express companies, the US Post did not discriminate on the basis of distance. Even if a westerner lived miles and miles away from the nearest railroad station or telegraph office, there was still likely to be a post office nearby. Even more radically, that same westerner paid a single, uniform postage regardless of where they lived or how far their mail was traveling—in sharp contrast to railroad freight rates or telegram prices. In a political economy that increasingly left the western and southern United States beholden to corporate and financial interests in the East, the US Post reversed this sectional power dynamic. The US Post was one of the largest 19th-century institutions explicitly tilted in favor of rural parts of the country. Finally, unlike the private “monied interests” that seemed to have captured politicians on both sides of the aisle, the nation’s postal system was a public institution that was unequivocally tied to the democratic process. Through petitions to their elected officials, constituents in large part determined where post offices were located and who operated them. Although the postal machinery was influenced by partisanship, every four-year election cycle brought a fresh chance to seize control over the nation’s postal affairs. The agency model meant that local communities had a say in public services.91
In other respects, the US Post’s reliance on the agency model made it a target for reform. During the 1870s and 1880s, a growing cadre of professionals and social elites became fed up with the “spoils system” of officeholding that defined so much of 19th-century governance. These so-called civil-service reformers pushed for a more meritocratic system of appointing and promoting public officials, one in which effective management would take precedence over partisan affiliation. In 1883, the movement secured the passage of the landmark piece of legislation known as the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. This set up a framework for bringing government positions under new civil-service rules and regulations, including entrance exams for appointment and promotion and instituting curbs on partisan electioneering while in office. During the presidential election the following year, both national parties adopted a civil-service plank at their conventions. The Democrats, however, were able to paint the incumbent Republican Party and their candidate, James Blaine, as corrupt “spoilsmen,” helping their candidate, Grover Cleveland, eke out a narrow victory.92 Once in office, Cleveland installed William F. Vilas as his new postmaster general. A lawyer and professor from Wisconsin, Vilas embodied the kind of professional, elite administration championed by organizations like the Civil Service League. Vilas subsequently tried to move the Post Office Department in the direction of bureaucratic reform. In his annual reports to Congress, he called for increased efficiency and greater uniformity across the nation’s tens of thousands of local post offices, warning of the need for “disengaging private interests from the public business” in these offices and lobbying for an administrative overhaul that would bring them under greater centralized oversight.93 In short, Vilas was calling for a stronger bureaucratic structure under the purposeful guidance of professional civil servants.
To implement his push for administrative reform, Postmaster General William Vilas turned to the Post Office Department’s Inspection Division, which was responsible for investigating violations, frauds, and outright criminal activity in the nation’s mail service. Postal inspectors were hailed by both postal officials and the general public for their tenacity in hunting down criminals and fraudsters across the country. Scholars have since pointed to the Inspection Division as a paragon of professionalism and effective administration during an era of rampant partisan appointments and high turnover in office.94 Small wonder, then, that Vilas entrusted the Inspection Division to bring the nation’s sprawling network of local post offices under a more systematic, orderly, and centralized administrative system. Vilas suspected that thousands of postmasters were falsifying their quarterly reports in order to inflate their government commissions and ordered postal inspectors to ramp up their visits to post offices in order to review their account books. Between 1886 and 1887, inspectors reviewed all of the country’s larger presidential post offices and several thousand fourth-class post offices. The following year Vilas managed to secure a temporary hundred-thousand-dollar appropriation from Congress to expand this system-wide review, which helped postal inspectors visit nearly 25,000 post offices between 1887 and 1888. The system-wide inspection represented an unprecedented effort to extend centralized oversight across one of the federal government’s least centralized institutions—exactly the sort of administrative overhaul that one might expect from a reform-minded civil servant.95
From the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act to Vilas’s push for oversight and accountability, government reform appeared to be ascendant during the 1880s. A closer look shows a more muddled trajectory. Despite Grover Cleveland’s public embrace of civil-service reform during the 1884 presidential campaign, his administration quickly reversed course once in office. One month into his presidency, newspapers printed a leaked, confidential circular that had been distributed to Democratic congressmen promising to remove thousands of incumbent postmasters installed by the previous Republican administration. In the subsequent two years, some 12,000 fourth-class postmasters were kicked out of office, with another 16,000 incumbent postmasters “resigning” over that same span. One of the most drastic partisan purges in the Post Office Department’s history was overseen by none other than Postmaster General William Vilas, the very same reformer who issued such vocal calls for bureaucratic efficiency, uniformity, and oversight.96
William Vilas’s management of the Post Office Department underscores the limits and contradictions of reform movements during the late 1880s. Vilas was not a technocrat. He was a leading partisan operative for the Democratic Party who had chaired its national convention during the 1884 election. Shut out of the executive branch for the past quarter century, Democrats took control of the presidency and immediately followed a decades-long tradition in American politics by installing one of its most prominent partisan figures as postmaster general.97 Vilas had a relatively free hand to revamp the department along partisan lines. After all, the Pendleton Act had only imposed civil-service regulations on a small fraction of government positions. In the Post Office Department, that grand bastion of partisanship and patronage appointments, the legislation caused barely a ripple. Civil-service rules did not apply to most of its workers, including the tens of thousands of fourth-class postmasters. The purge under Grover Cleveland became the blueprint for subsequent administrations. As the presidency seesawed between Democratic and Republican control during the subsequent elections of 1888, 1892, and 1896, each new administration in the Post Office Department embarked on similar waves of removals. Not until the 1910s—three decades after the Pendleton Act—were all of the nation’s postmasters finally brought under civil-service regulations. The sheer size of the US Post and its deep well of patronage positions shielded it from civil-service reform, and in an era of razor-thin electoral margins, political parties were loath to give up such a powerful partisan tool.98
Figure 5.10 The Spoils System
This chart displays the number of postmasters who were removed from office over the preceding fiscal year (July 1 to June 30) between 1865 and 1900. These numbers were transcribed from the Annual Reports of the Postmaster General, 1865–1900.
William Vilas was better at appointing Democrats as postmasters than he was at regulating their behavior once they were in office. His campaign to standardize the operations of the nation’s fourth-class post offices met with limited success. When Vilas reported that postal inspectors had visited 24,889 post offices during this campaign, he neglected to mention the fact that this still left around 30,000 post offices unaccounted for. Even armed with an extra hundred-thousand-dollar appropriation, the vaunted Inspection Division still failed to visit more than half of the nation’s post offices. The reason was simple: there were too few officials tasked with overseeing far too many post offices. At the outset of the 1887–88 regulatory campaign, the Post Office Department had 75 postal inspectors on its payroll and 55,000 post offices. To review the operations of all these offices, each inspector would have had to visit roughly two offices every single day of the year. This would have been a full-time job in and of itself, but this was only one part of their responsibilities. The main function of the Inspection Division was to investigate mail theft and fraud: stolen letters, illegal lottery schemes, and the era’s notorious “Comstock laws,” which banned the transmission of obscene material. Over the course of the 1887–88 fiscal year, the Inspection Division ended up investigating nearly 94,000 total “cases,” or an average of more than 1,200 per inspector.99 No degree of professionalization could overcome basic arithmetic. Fewer than one hundred government officials were supposed to police a system that transmitted several billion pieces of mail each year.100 Making site visitations to every post office in the country was simply infeasible.
The geography of the gossamer network imposed real limits on institutional reform. With such a sprawling and decentralized network, it was in many ways easier to change who operated a post office and where it was located than it was to change how that office was operated. As the Inspection Division could attest, postal officials struggled to monitor, much less police, the day-to-day operations of so many different places scattered across such a huge area. They could, however, replace officeholders with relative ease. After all, fourth-class postmasters were not protected by civil-service rules and served at the discretion of the postmaster general, who in turn outsourced decisions to congressmen, senators, and other party operatives. In order to revoke an acting postmaster’s appointment and install his or her successor, a congressman or senator would often simply submit the name of one of their constituents to postal officials. After the appointee secured a bond, swore an oath of office, and filled out a few forms, they could then step into the position within a matter of weeks. This arrangements benefited both politicians and postal officials.101 Although some members of Congress complained about the burdens of having to adjudicate “post office rows,” these conflicts still gave them a form of political pork to dole out to constituents.102 The Post Office Department, meanwhile, benefited from a national network of politicians who were far more familiar with local affairs than officials in Washington. This allowed them to maintain a massive workforce of part-time agents scattered across the countryside with a comparatively small workforce of centralized administrators.
There is a general consensus that government officials should act according to the public good rather than their own private gain. For scholars of the state, this perspective dovetails with a tendency to privilege certain kinds of organizational structures and state actors—namely, centralized bureaucracies and reform-minded administrators. By these standards, it is easy to see the gossamer network’s post offices as a failure of governance, riven as they were with partisanship, profit-seeking, and squabbling local interests. In fact, one political scientist’s influential account of the 19th-century postal system argues that by the 1880s it was teetering on the brink of institutional collapse. In this narrative, the US Post was saved by a cadre of forward-thinking reformers who carved out “bureaucratic autonomy” and instituted much-needed administrative overhauls. But this perspective leads to a kind of circular reasoning: the US Post’s agency model was ineffective and flailing precisely because it was not a centralized, civil-service bureaucracy.103
The decentralized, non-bureaucratic nature of the rural postal network in the 19th century was not some glitch in the system; it was what allowed the system to work. A diffuse and ever-shifting network of agents was the mechanism by which the state extended a public service to tens of thousands of far-flung communities. Without the agency model, the nation’s mail service would have slowed to a crawl. Once again, the California town of North Bloomfield underscores the importance of these local private actors. In the early winter months of 1892, the North Bloomfield found itself without a postmaster. Donald McKillican had suddenly passed away while in office, leaving behind a widow, a general store, several mining claims, and a vacant postmaster position that needed to be filled. The town turned to Walter L. Mobley, McKillican’s 27-year-old store clerk, to replace him. A familiar face for the town, Mobley had been born in nearby Sweetland before moving to North Bloomfield with his parents after they opened a boarding house for miners. Following a short stint in San Francisco, Mobley moved back to North Bloomfield and began working at Donald McKillican’s general store in the 1880s. Social ties defined young Mobley’s career. The store’s co-owner was married to a relative of Mobley’s, which likely helped him secure the position. When McKillican passed away, his widow and brother served as sureties on Mobley’s official bond to the Post Office Department, despite the fact that the brother lived hundreds of miles away in Oakland.104 After Mobley became the town’s new postmaster in 1892, he purchased a one-third stake in the North Bloomfield general store from McKillican’s widow for $1,000.105
Walter Mobley’s appointment as postmaster exemplified the way in which the nation’s most expansive national network flowed through webs of local social ties. North Bloomfield’s former postmaster may have passed away, but the office remained in the same corner window of the town’s general store, where it had operated for the past two decades. The man who replaced him had been working in the store for years, and his bond to the government was backed by the former postmaster’s family. These were the types of relationships that wove the nation’s gargantuan national postal system into the intimate scales of 19th-century society. In an age of growing anxiety over corporate behemoths and market forces running roughshod over the public good, the localized nature of the US Post cast the institution in an entirely different light. The face of Western Union was Jay Gould, the millionaire financier and robber baron; the face of the US Post was Walter Mobley, the store clerk who weighed his neighbor’s weekly pouch of tobacco.
Local agents like Walter Mobley did more than just put a familiar face on the US Post’s expansive power. These men and women kept the system running. The driver who carried the mail to the North Bloomfield Post Office in the back of his stagecoach needed to know which bridges were washed out and what time Mobley opened up his general store. Mobley himself needed to know the identity of every person who received mail at his post office.106 In fact, somewhat paradoxically, local actors often needed to act outside the Post Office Department’s bureaucratic regulations to keep the system running smoothly. Take the case of the postal registry system, which allowed a sender to pay an extra fee to have their letter or package tracked while in transit, after which they would receive a signed receipt when it finally reached its recipient. The department insisted that registered mail had to be picked up and signed for by the recipient alone, and that “no exception can be made to this rule because of relationship of any nature between the addressee and the person claiming the matter.”107 But that wasn’t how Americans actually picked up their mail. In practice, relatives and neighbors fetched each other’s mail all the time. Despite the department’s regulations, more than half of the registered letters that arrived at the North Bloomfield Post Office were handed over to people other than their addressee. Fathers regularly signed for registered letters addressed to their wives, and sons and daughters often fetched their parents’ letters. As postmaster, Walter Mobley used his local knowledge of the town’s residents to grease the wheels of the mail system: allowing Violet Rouner to sign for a parcel addressed to her mother, or forwarding a package to J. Pagliosoti after the miner had moved to neighboring Grass Valley. Without Mobley’s intimate knowledge of North Bloomfield’s residents and his willingness to bend the rules, the town’s mail service would have been slower and less effective.108
Each “P.O.” marked on a 19th-century town map was a node within a communications system that did far more than just transport the mail. A post office connected the different scales of society, enmeshing the local space of a community within larger commercial, political, and social systems. It was where bags of mail left in the back of a stagecoach, on their way to a neighboring village up the road or a distant city on the other side of the country. It was where the economic prospects of a small-town business owner were bound up with the political fortunes of the Republican Party. It was where Mrs. Elvina Hutchins in Colorado could serve as a postmaster but Charles Bluejacket in Indian Territory could not. It was where the American state operated at its smallest possible scale, in the form of a letter passing across the counter of a general store.