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

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3 0 • 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 yHer nearly forty years of research yielded data on onlya very few counties in a few states in colonial America.Hughes and Cain use the seventy-six-pound figure andthen note that “dividing this figure by various capital outputratios produces a result that is a measure of output(income) per head. . . . Historic capital output ratios fallsomewhere between the boundaries 3/1 and 5/1.” 4 Thus,the estimated income per head could be anywhere fromfifteen to twenty-five pounds, a rather wide range. Accordingto Abramovitz and David, income estimates for theperiod before 1870, “are surrounded by particularly widemargins of uncertainty.” 5 In this essay, the authors refer tohighly aggregated data on the national level. Detailed dataat the local level has heretofore simply been unavailable.Most income estimates made by historians who study theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries are built up from suchindirect data.It appears that virtually all of the standard informationused by economic historians to estimate income andeconomic activity in the nineteenth century is either highlyaggregated or, when microeconomic, irregular in time andincomplete in geographic extent. This state of affairs hasled to at least one highly creative attempt to obtain morecomprehensive data. Komlos used the heights and weightsof West Point cadets as surrogates for economic variables. 6The use of such data suggests that scholars in this field arewilling to use variables that have at best an extremely distantand at worst an ultimately unknowable relationshipto the actual variable(s) of interest.Economic historians agree that “measurement andanalysis of economic growth . . . call for a very large volumeof data.” Unfortunately, “before 1840 no regular orreasonably complete census of economic activities was carriedout in the United States.” 7 Even after 1840 data thatclosely mirrors economic activity at the local level and isavailable at regular chronological intervals throughout theremainder of the nineteenth century has not been know toeconomic historians.In the next section we describe a data set, previouslyunknown to economic historians, that contains data thatwe argue provides a measure of economic activity in everytown in the United States every two years from 1816 to1911 and which is much more accurate than anything previouslyknown.The Official RegisterFor most of the nineteenth century and the first decadeof the twentieth, the federal government publishedbiannually a listing of the salaries of every governmentemployee. While the exact title of this publication changedfrom time to time, 8 it is generally referred to as the OfficialRegister, abbreviated hereinafter as OR. The OR is ofspecial interest to economists and economic historians asit reports the salaries of the postmaster of each post officein the United States and its territories. Postmaster salarieswere, during the period the OR was published, a functionof the amount of business each post office did. The formulaefor deriving total postal income at a given post officefrom the salary data in the OR are available in the appropriateUnited States Statutes at Large. Happily, they havebeen summarized in a Congressional report. 9 By “postalincome” we mean income generated from the operation ofthe post office. It is our hypothesis that local postal incomecan be used as a measure of economic activity at the locallevel. By examining changes in local postal income overtime and space, local, regional and national trends in economicactivity can be charted at a level of detail previouslyimpossible. We will test this claim in the next section.It is important to emphasize the scope and detail ofthe OR data set. It gives the salaries of the postmaster ofeach town in every state and territory of the United Statesevery two years from 1816 to 1911. To the extent thatlocal postal income reflects local economic activity, thisdata set gives an unprecedented opportunity to examinepatterns of such activity across space and time in the nineteenthcentury in a manner never previously possible.The OR data was first discovered and used by postalhistorians, generally philatelists who are interested inpostal rates, the transportation of the mails, the postmarksand other postal markings used on envelopes (termed“covers” in philatelic jargon), and postal procedures. Thisis a major portion of modern organized philately and hasits own considerable technical literature.Postal historians have been interested in the OR dataas it gives an idea of how rare covers from various postoffices are. Generally, one would expect that post officesdoing less business would generate fewer covers andcovers from such offices would be rarer than those fromoffices doing more business. Stach has found that the correlationsbetween postmaster compensation and numberof known covers from post offices in the Nebraska andSouth Dakota Territories are, respectively, r = + .94 andr = + .88. 10By far the most sophisticated research using OR datahas been done by Harris, who first realized the importanceof this data for historical and economic analysis. 11 Harris’research has been mostly aimed at using OR data toshow the effects of local economic activity on post office
n u m b e r 5 5 • 3 1receipts. DeBlois and Harris analyzed the postal receiptsof small post offices in Rensselaer County, N.Y., andfound examples of the exquisite sensitivity of the OR datato local events. 12 For example, for the period 1827 to 1833the receipts of the Sand Lake post office grew at more thanthe national average. When other post offices were openedin the vicinity of Sand Lake, that office’s receipts dropped.The receipts of the Sand Lake post office showed a sharpdrop between 1851 and 1853, a drop not seen to any greatextend in the other regional offices. DeBlois and Harrisnote that on December 25, 1852, a glass factory in SandLake was destroyed by fire. They argue that since the factorywas the major industry in the town, this loss can explainthe greater decline in revenues from this office.The original printed volumes of the Official Registerare extremely rare. Even the largest institutional librariesdo not have anything approaching a complete set. Such aset does exist in the collection of the Library of Congress.However, efforts are now under way to digitize the ORdata through the 1871 volume. 13OR Data and Economic VariablesThis section provides a preliminary analysis, using thedata from New Hampshire post offices, of the relationshipsbetween postmaster compensation data and economic anddemographic variables. New Hampshire was chosen becauseone of us (TH) has copies of the New Hampshiredate from all the ORs and because New Hampshire is theonly state for which census data is available on-line. Thisdata can be found at the web site of the New HampshireHistorical Society, www.nhhistory.org.The specific date reported in the OR varied over thealmost one hundred years of this title’s publication. Forthe entire period, 1816 through 1911, compensation foreach postmaster is reported. For the years 1841 through1869, in addition, the “net proceeds” at each office arereported. Adding the compensation to the proceeds resultsin the total postal income for the post office that year. 14While it was always the case that as postal incomeincreased, postmaster compensation increased, this relationwas not a simple one but an incremental one. Thatis, as income increased, postmasters received a decreasingpercentage of incremental income. Further, the exact formulafor compensation varied over the years as Congressaltered the way postmaster compensation was computed.The details of these changes in compensation rates are beyondthe scope of this paper but can be found in JointCommission on Postal Salaries. 15 As an example, underthe Act of June 22, 1854, postmasters received sixty percentof the first $100 of income, fifty percent of the next$300, forty percent of the next $2,000 and fifteen percenton all income over $2,400.The incremental nature of the compensation formulaepresents a problem for some statistical analyses. This is becausethe formulae result in distributions of compensationvalues that have smaller variances than the distributions ofactual income values. In other words, the distributions ofcompensations are compacted relative to the distributionsof actual incomes. Especially for correlational analyses, therestricted range of the compensation data may cause oneto miss effects that would be found were the total postalincome data, with its greater variance, to be used. This, ofcourse, isn’t a problem for those years when both compensationand net proceeds are provided as one may simplyadd the two (but see below). However, for years whereonly compensation is provided, it is necessary to calculatethe income based on the compensation schedules providedin the Joint Commission on Postal Salaries publication. 16Happily, for most years this is rather straightforward.Preliminary AnalysesBefore undertaking an analysis of the compensationdata, it is important to establish that the basic data ofpostal income is economically relevant. One way to approachthis question is to examine postal income data atthe national level and see if it is correlated with importanteconomic variables. The 1911 Annual Report of the PostmasterGeneral gives the audited postal revenues for eachfiscal year from 1837 through 1911. 17 These figures werecorrelated with the nominal Gross Domestic Product ofthe corresponding years taken from the on-line economichistory database at www.eh.net. The resulting Pearsonproduct-moment correlation is r = + .976 (p < .001). Thisvery high correlation shows that, at least at the nationallevel, postal revenues do correlate impressively with GDPand thus suggests that postal revenues do reflect economicactivity. For even earlier years, the 1831 Annual Reportof the Postmaster General reported total postal receiptsfor 1789 through 1830. 18 Correlating these numbers withnominal GDP (starting with 1790–nGDP is not availablefor 1789) resulted in another high correlation: r = + .84(p < .001). These high correlations gave us some confidencethat postal data have some relationship to economicfactors and spurred further analyses.As noted above, for some years the OR reportedonly the postmasters’ compensation. Using the formulae
Page 1 and 2: Smithsonian InstitutionScholarly Pr
Page 3 and 4: smithsonian contributions to histor
Page 5: ContentsLETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR OF
Page 9: AcknowledgmentsThe symposium would
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Page 39: Explorations in the Official Regist
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Page 47: Introduction to the Second Symposiu
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Introduction to the Fourth Symposiu
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 2 3and prepai
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 2 5Figure 3.
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 2 7Figure 5.
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 2 9A Final No
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America’s First Carrier Service:T
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 3 3Figure 3.
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 3 5The glazed
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 3 7Intercity
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 3 9The End of
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The U.S. 1847 Issue:Stamps That Cha
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 4 3the positi
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 4 5stamps as
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From the Pulpit to the Post: Anti-
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 4 9The allege
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n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 5 1Individual
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