The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia - Smithsonian ...

n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 1 5Figure 8. 1860 Postal transportation facilities—the national system before the rupture of war. Chart from 1860 annual report. From thecollection of the authors.Sunday post office hours, of course, did disappear, beginningin 1910. 34 The Distributing Post Office system disappeared,beginning in 1859 (replaced, during the Civil War,by Railway Post Office distribution). But the ‘expediency’argument—that a postal system needed to grow accordingto its own internal laws of transportation arrangements—held, and accommodated many postal reforms.Notes1. See Richard R. John, “The Invasion of the Sacred”, achapter in Spreading the News: The American Postal Systemfrom Franklin to Morse, Harvard University Press 1995; andWayne E. Fuller, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth- CenturyAmerica, University of Illinois Press 2003, chapters 1, 2, 3.2. When President Andrew Jackson elevated the position ofpostmaster general to a cabinet post after his 1828 election, politicalclout increased—see Dorothy Ganfield Fowler, The CabinetPolitician, Columbia University 1943.3. Few contemporaries believed Johnson actually wrotehis reports. Since they show such a nuanced appreciation of thepostal system, Johnson’s friend Amos Kendall was suspected, althoughLeland Winfield Meyer’s biography The Life and Timesof Col. Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky (Columbia University1932) gamely claimed Johnson was clever enough to havebeen the sole author. William Stickney’s 1872 Autobiographyof Amos Kendall (New York 1872), however, had revealed thatKendall believed the writing “doubtless attributable” to the Baptistpreacher and postal clerk Obadiah Brown with whom Johnsonboarded in Washington.4. We have recorded six different versions of Johnson’s SundayMails report printed on either muslin or silk—to be used asneckscarves, handkerchiefs, or attached to walking sticks, buggywhips, etc. Given the address changes of Henry Bowen (see thecompilation in Patricia Fenn and Alfred P. Malpa, Rewards ofMerit, Ephemera Society 1994), the printer of the four versionsof the 1830 report, it is likely that two different layouts on muslinwere produced in 1830 at the very beginning of Johnson’scampaign to run in the election of 1832, and then a second muslinversion with the same typesetting as one of the above but