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

6 • s m i t h s o n i a n c o n t r i b u t i o n s t o h i s t o ry a n d t e c h n o l o g yFigure 2. Joshua Leavitt. Photograph by unidentified photographer.From Portraits of American Abolitionists. Courtesy of theMassachusetts Historical Society, Photo 81.404.enactment of two laws—the Post Office Act of 1845 andthe Post Office Act of 1851—which instituted a host ofreforms that include, in addition to a steep reduction inthe basic letter rate, the rollout of the first postage stamps.Under other circumstances, the campaign for cheappostage in the United States might have taken its placein the historical imagination alongside the better- knownreform movements of the period: temperance, abolition,women’s rights. Yet it did not. The only general history ofthe United States to treat the campaign for cheap postagein detail is John Bach McMaster’s History of the People ofthe United States, and it was published over a century agoin 1910. McMaster heaped praise on the movement, yethe failed to link it to any larger theme—such as, for example,evangelical reform or abolition—that might haveincreased the likelihood that it would become incorporatedinto general accounts of the American past. 13McMaster’s treatment of postal reform was the exceptionthat proved the rule. None of his contemporariestreated the campaign for cheap postage in any detail. HenryAdams, for example, ignored it entirely in his Education,which Adams had completed by 1907, even though it canbe credibly argued to have been no less important an innovationthan the three events of the mid- 1840s that Adamscredited with throwing into an “ash heap” the politicaluniverse of his youth: namely, the commercialization ofthe telegraph, the spanning of the Appalachian mountainsby the railroad, and the first regularly scheduled trans-Atlantic steamship. 14Adams’s priorities became the conventional wisdom.For historians of the United States, not only the campaignfor cheap postage—but also the history of the mail—werelong topics that they felt safe to ignore. Had Cornell historyprofessor J. B. Bretz published his long- promisedhistory of the U.S. Post Office Department in the earlyrepublic, a project that originated in Bretz’s 1906 Ph. D.history dissertation at the University of Chicago, it is conceivablethat the situation might have been different. YetBretz sat on his manuscript for his entire academic career.Bretz’s dissertation has disappeared, making it impossibleto know how he might have treated the campaign forcheap postage, or even if he would have taken his storyup to the 1840s. In all likelihood, he would not: the twoessays that he cobbled out of his dissertation focused onthe period before the adoption of the federal Constitutionin 1788 and the War of 1812. 15 Yet this much is known:Bretz never published his magnum opus, and the opportunitypassed. Not until the 1990s would any topics in thehistory of the American postal system begin to attract sustainedattention, and it would not be until the very recentpast that the institution would figure in a more than incidentalway in synthetic overviews of the American past. 16Modern historical writing on the American postalsystem began with the publication in 1972 of Wayne E.Fuller’s American Mail—a thoughtful topical survey ofAmerican postal history from the colonial era onward.Fuller’s overview included a cursory discussion of thecampaign for cheap postage, which he analyzed through aneo- progressive lens as a victory of the “people” over the“interests.” While Fuller’s account has much to commendit, he was, in the end, less concerned with the campaignfor cheap postage than with its implications for postalfinance. 17 More recently, Fuller’s Morality and the Mailexpanded our understanding of several related nineteenthcenturyreform movements, including Sabbatarianism and