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The United States’ founders decided reliable communication within and between regions of the country was not only vital to the new nation’s growth, but was required if the representative democracy they’d invented was to function. In those pre-railroad and pre-telegraph days, that meant total reliance on the mails, either carried privately or by the national postal service.
The mail, starting with the first post office department under Benjamin Franklin, was legally defined as anything carried in the “official portmanteau,” a large canvas or carpet satchel secured with a special lock. Postmasters were entrusted with a key for this lock. No one without one of the keys could be a postmaster because he (the number of female postmasters was vanishingly small at the time) could neither accept nor send mail.
While official mail was carried in the portmanteau, unofficial messages could be carried outside the portmanteau—“outside the mail.” Some of the earliest debates in Congress concerned what was considered part of the official mail and what wasn’t.
With the passage of the Post Office Act of 1792, Congress tried to settle some of those issues. Besides having a tremendous impact on the economic growth of the new nation, the act had a momentous impact on the settlement and economic development of the Old Northwest Territory.
Among the act’s most important provisions were:
*Congress’s assumption of the power to establish post offices and post routes. Previously, the Post Office Department, part of the Executive Branch, had established post routes. With Congress’s involvement, it was assured the number of post offices would greatly and quickly expand due to constituent pressure;
*Forbidding government inspection of the mails. With the new rules, the privacy of business use of the mail was assured;
*All newspapers to be included in the official mail. Previously, newspapers were carried outside the mail—outside the official portmanteau. The act required all newspapers, regardless of content, be carried in the portmanteau, thus assuring regular and prompt delivery of the kinds of information Congress deemed vital to an informed electorate.
Combined, these provisions assured the astonishing success of the government’s first venture into information technology—efficiently delivering private and business communications and news the mails carried. And each provision had a profound effect on the settlement and development of northern Illinois.
The Post Office Act of 1814 further strengthened the nation’s mail delivery. Among its provisions, the law mandated extending mail service to all county seats, including existing county seats and those contemplated in the future. With the Northwest Territory beginning to be divided into states (Illinois was granted statehood just four years later), this provision proved essential to settlement, since once a county was established, it would receive mail service through at least one location, no matter how small or how isolated that county seat was.
Postmaster General John McLean took office in 1823, immediately instituting a number of innovations that, by 1830, made the U.S. Post Office the world’s most effective postal delivery system. Among those decisions was mandating the mail be carried by private stagecoachs. Along with the stage delivery system, McLean perfected and expanded the “hub and spoke” sorting system adopted in 1800. The system relied on central distribution offices—the hubs—which supplied a number of satellite “common” post offices that were the spokes of the system.
While post offices were vital to the growth of the region, sending mail was an expensive proposition in those years. Regular postal rates remained constant from 1825 to 1838, but the rates themselves were high in comparison to the cost of living at a time when land on the frontier was selling at $1.25 an acre.
A single sheet letter mailed up to 30 miles was six cents. The cost went up to 10 cents if mailed from 30 to 80 miles, 12-1/2 cents for 80 to 150 miles; 18-3/4 cents for 150 to 400 miles; and 25 cents for a single sheet mailed more than 400 miles. Two sheet letters cost double to mail, while the postage was tripled for a single sheet that weighed more than an ounce.
A collection of letters in the archives of Oswego’s Little White School Museum confirm that postal rates continued unchanged for some years, and also suggests how effective the postal service was in maintaining communications between the frontier and the settled areas east of the Appalachians.
In December 1843, James Sheldon Barber arrived in Oswego after an 800-mile wagon train journey from Smyrna, N.Y. On Dec. 17, he wrote to his parents from Oswego describing his journey and his current circumstances. Barber’s family paid 25 cents to pick up the letter when it arrived at the Smyrna, N.Y. post office.
Barber’s letters are remarkable for his assumption that his messages would arrive safely and in a timely manner at his parents’ home in New York. At the time, Kendall County was just two years old, Oswego Township had been settled for only 10 years, and the village had yet to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its founding.
But even from such a presumably rough and tough frontier region, Barber’s letters made it back to his former home.
Indeed, when the mail did not arrive in a timely fashion, frontier residents wanted to know the reason why. Writing to the publishers of the Illinois Free Trader, published at Ottawa, from the new Kendall County village of Newark on Sept. 6, 1842, Samuel J. Jackson complained: “If you can account for the entire failure of the Free Trader I should like to know how it is done. I have not received a single one for the last three weeks. Please let me know whether the fault is in you, the post masters, or the mail contractors.”
Replied the publishers: “The above is one of a half a dozen similar letters we have lately received and we now inform those post masters through whose offices the above packages of papers passes, that we don’t mean to stand it any longer. Our papers are mailed every Friday with very few exceptions, at such an hour as to suit the different mails that leave on that day, and if they do not reach their destination it is no fault of ours.”
Although 178 years have passed, it seems as if some problems never disappear. Which is why history is so much fun.
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