Secession and the U.S. Mail: The Postal Service, the South, and Sectional Controversy

By Conrad Kalmbacher

In Secession and the U. S. Mail: The Postal Service, The South, and Sectional Controversy, Conrad Kalmbacher tells the little known story of over fifty years of dissension between the Post Office Department and the South, culminating in the departments role in the events leading to secession and the Guns of April 1861.
Severe reductions and retrenchment in mail service throughout the South and on Mississippi River steamboats during the administration of Postmaster General Joseph Holt, 1859-1860, angered southern senators and congressmen against the federal government. Deploring the postmaster generals policy, southern leaders called Holt our bitter foe who, by a mere stroke of his pen had curtailed mail service in the South to such a degree as to render it no service at all. Because of this bitter anger, one Pulitzer Prize-winning historian characterized Holts policy as one of the less tangible factors leading to secession.
Drawing on House and Senate documents, postmasters general reports, and Congressional debates, as well as personal letters, diaries, memoirs, and newspapers of the time, the author makes extensive use of primary sources.
The book details how antagonisms between the Postal Service and the South had their beginnings early on in American history: Continual debates questioned whether the South received its fair share of federal dollars for post offices and post routes. Southerners defended the maintenance of unprofitable mail routes in remote areas. Negro postriders caused resentment among Southerners. And years of controversy inflamed the South over the distribution of abolitionist literature through the mails.
Today, when the role of government is a central issue in American politics, it is revealing to consider the ominous signposts of 1859-1860, as the Post Office Department - at that time the principal political agency of the federal government became embroiled in overheated debate, partisan bickering, and failed compromise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481744126

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2013 by Conrad Kalmbacher. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Cover Design: Mark Kalmbacher, Michael Kalmbacher

Author Photos: Sawyer Richardson; Margaret Kalmbacher (Shiloh Battlefield)

Published by AuthorHouse 05/29/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-4414-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-4413-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-4412-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013907399

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CONTENTS

Preface

1.   The Postal Service, From Boston Tavern To Three Cent Stamp: Like The Nation Itself It Was Young And Inexperienced

2.   The Postal Service And Sectionalism: The Southern Quarrel With The Post Office

3.   A Cabinet Appointment And Retrenchment: Joseph Holt And The Harsh Winds Of 1859

4.   The South And Retrenchment: A Southern Man Wields A Pruning Knife

5.   Corruption, Censorship, Politics: We Are Truly In Evil Times

6.   I Do Not Think A Restoration Of The Service Advisable At The Present

7.   Bitter And Bitter: The Postal Service, Joseph Holt, And Secession

Afterword

Timeline

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Author’s Note And Acknowledgements

About The Author

For Margaret

Nothing less will content me, than whole America.

-Edmund Burke

Speech on Conciliation with America

March 20, 1775

Every country has the government it deserves.

-Joseph De Maistre

Letters…

August 15, 1811

The people who live on the hill-tops and in the valleys, on the by-ways and around the hedges are to be denied all postal services… . The Postmaster General, by a mere stroke of his pen, has cut down the postal service.

-Senator Albert Brown of Mississippi

United States Senate

June 22, 1860

The Postmaster General has reduced routes that ought not to have been reduced… . The decrease has been a serious disadvantage to all that live upon the line of country mails… . The service has been curtailed to such a degree as to render it no service at all.

-Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina

United States Senate

June 22, 1860

PREFACE

On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, the shots that began the American Civil War, we heard those voicing reasons for the dissension of that time. It was to end Slavery! It was a fight for States’ Rights! It was to preserve the Union! These continue to be among the great issues argued by historian and Civil War buff alike, seeking the causes for fracture of the federal Union in 1860 and 1861.

One would not ordinarily think that problems resulting from mailing or receiving a letter through the United States Mail, complaints about the Post Office, or opposition to reductions in mail service would be considered contributing factors for secession and war, but one prominent historian proposed just such an idea. Roy Franklin Nichols of the University of Pennsylvania, in the work for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1949, The Disruption of American Democracy, suggests that the United States Post Office, in its policies and administration, was a contributing source of sectional controversy in the immediate pre-Civil War period. He concludes that the culmination of postal policy as a source of sectional controversy came during Postmaster General Joseph Holt’s administration in 1859-1860. According to Nichols, the postmaster general’s management of the Post Office so ignited southern anger and hostility against the federal government that it became one of the less tangible factors leading to secession.¹

The title of Nichols’ book, The Disruption of American Democracy, referred not to Democracy as a system of government but to the disruption of a political party: American Democracy was the self-styled official name of the Democratic Party in the 1850s. The American Democracy, the Democratic Party, governed the nation for twenty years, beginning in 1829 after the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828. Democratic control of the White House continued under Martin Van Buren, later followed by James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, and finally the administration of James Buchanan in the critical period leading to secession and disunion. The only interruption in Democratic power was the eight-year reign of Whig Party presidents, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. Two of these, Harrison and Taylor, died in office—Harrison after serving only thirty days and Taylor after sixteen months. Tyler and Fillmore were the respective Whig vice presidents succeeding to the presidency. (The term, Whig, derived its meaning from whiggamor or cattle thief, a label derisively assigned to 17th century parliamentary opponents of royal power in Scotland. Later, Whigs in England sought to limit the power of the Crown. In the 1830s, anti-Jackson forces, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, formed the Whig Party in the United States—calling the president, King Andrew—but later became divided over the issue of slavery. The last Whig candidate for president, General Winfield Scott, lost the 1852 election to Franklin Pierce. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig in his early political career.)

Nichols contends that the Democratic Party lacked sorely needed leadership as the nation faced disunion in 1859-1860. The party machinery was broken. Faltering government replaced decisive judgment. Personal agendas obstructed constructive policies. In Nichols’ view, the ineffectual role played by the Post Office Department as the key political agency of the Buchanan administration, and well-meaning but imprudent decisions of the postmaster general, were prime examples of missteps within the federal government affecting Democratic chances in the election of 1860, and aggravating tensions between North and South.²

Because the postal service was of vital importance to all sections of the nation in the years before the Civil War, and because it was subject to budget appropriations by the Congress, it was destined to become involved in whatever sectional quarrels the nation would encounter. The role of the postal service was mainly influenced by the continual debate over whether it was to be primarily a service agency or a self-supporting institution; by the needs and demands of the sections, North, South, and West, for mail service in a developing country; and by the administrative policies of the United States Post Office, prior to secession, in attempting to serve the nation’s requirements for mail communication. From this emergence of postal development and philosophy, the growing influence of a government institution, and the policies and personal motivations in the administration of that institution—all would become significant in a time of national crisis.

Controversy over mail service in the southern states resulted from the importance of postal service in the culture and daily life of old America—the America before the Civil War. The Post Office was probably the closest to the individual citizen of any government institution. An inscription on the old city post office building in Washington, D. C., proclaims the postal service as the Messenger of Love, Servant of Parted Friends, Consoler of the Lonely, Bond of the Scattered Family, Carrier of News and Knowledge, and the Instrument of Trade and Industry…³ Before the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and internet, the postal service was the communication bond that served a nation. The letters, parcels, and newspapers of the day made up the contents of a U. S. Mail satchel—delivering good news and bad, telling of birth, sickness, romance and love, recording moments of tragedy, despair and death, reflecting a soldier’s thoughts from a battlefield, measuring business progress, enabling people to write about the high and low points in their lives and to share their hopes and dreams.

Early America was slow in developing a postal system linking the English colonies. Not until the 1690s when the British government granted a private contract to operate the mails was a postal service established. Lack of success in operating the private system led the Crown to resume control in the early 18th century and continue its authority until the eve of the American Revolution.

In the first half of the 19th century the postal service was the one government institution that represented Washington and the federal government in the lives of most Americans. America’s first post office, in colonial times, had been established close to the people—in a Boston tavern! Later, as a new nation developed, the postrider, the stagecoach, and the river steamboat carried the eagerly awaited U. S. Mail to rural hamlets, and growing towns and cities. Country stores were gathering places for rumor, gossip, politics, reading newspapers, and sending and receiving mail. A twenty-four year old Abraham Lincoln in New Salem, Illinois, at a salary of fifty dollars a year, was a prototype of the country postmaster, North and South—playing an influential role in the daily life of village and town communities.

But problems were endemic to the story of the United States Mail in those early days of the republic, particularly in the South. The postrider and the stagecoach were constant targets of robberies along the lonely stretches of the post roads. This, coupled with bad weather, increased the hazards and expense of mail service. Letters were stolen, mailbags were left by the side of the road and crumpled newspapers arrived smudged as the ink had not been allowed to dry before they were stuffed in a saddlebag. All this, combined with a sparse population that did not often send or receive mail, made a paying postal service in the South almost impossible.

From the beginning of the federal government, dissension developed between the Post Office Department and the South. Continual debates questioned whether the South received its fair share of federal dollars for post offices and post routes. Southerners defended the maintenance of unprofitable mail routes in remote areas. Negro postriders caused resentment among Southerners. And years of controversy inflamed the South over the distribution of large quantities of abolitionist literature through the mails, resulting in attacks on post offices, the burning of mail sacks, and even imprisonment under state censorship laws prohibiting reading or possessing antislavery publications delivered by the U. S. Mail!

Continuing problems of the postal service were magnified as the brewing controversy over sectional interests began to engulf the nation. Mail service policies on the southern routes, particularly in the rural South, led to heated complaints. Arguments over service versus revenue grew into emotional debates over the interests of each section. Southern opinion had been supportive of several postmasters general who had expanded service on the southern mail routes, despite diminishing revenue. Now, in 1859, things were changing as new leadership in the Post Office emerged. Discussion of mail contracts for service on the Mississippi River became a cause of ill feelings and mutual distrust. Any attempt at curtailment of a mail route in the South became a battle cry for preservation of the southern economy and continuation of nonproductive routes because they were necessary in the daily life of the people of the South. Any counter-argument that revenue must have priority over service led southern political leaders and newspapers to accuse northern interests of intent to disregard fairness and cripple the economy of the South. The hue and cry of politicians and newspaper editors throughout the South excited the rural postmaster in Tennessee and the farmer living on the banks of the Mississippi River. Popular reaction began to see the administration of the Post Office in Washington City as the enemy of the South. (In antebellum America, the nation’s capital was usually called Washington City.)

It was as if the Southerner was thinking: They’re trampling our states’ rights; they’re interfering with our way of life! And as if that’s not enough, this same Yankee government in Washington City is slashing our mail service, and acting like the tyrant King George in 1776!

And so, as the sectional controversy over the larger issues of the extension of slavery and the continuing debate about states’ rights grew to fever pitch, Postmaster General Joseph Holt, in 1859, initiated policies affecting the southern mail routes that would be certain to inflame southern opinion and, in particular, the attitude of southern members of Congress.

As the First Session of the Thirty-sixth Congress convened in late 1859, heated tempers flared and some members were even carrying pistols and knives. Harsh words and invective sentiment filled the air.

Blundering misrule.

Gross ignorance.

Incendiary agitation.

Espionage of the mails.

The mail service slaughtered.

Tyranny.

Black Republicans.

Dark clouds of slavery.

Reign of Barbarism.

Gigantic conspiracy.

Southern fire-eaters.

Southern hot-heads.

Secession—a great crime.

A traitor’s knife at the throat of the republic.

These words and phrases heard in Congress and written in newspapers and letters of the time, reflected the deep hatreds and intense feelings overshadowing attempts at compromise. Political argument disintegrated into personal rancor. Even earlier, an abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, while speaking on the floor of the Senate, had been attacked and severely beaten by a South Carolina congressman; and a former postmaster general from Pennsylvania, at odds with Southerners in Congress, was challenged to a duel by a United States senator from Louisiana.

Strident voices and actions continued to surface in the halls of Congress after war engulfed the nation. Noah Brooks, correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, reported that in the midst of the conflict, as political opposition mounted from some quarters in the North, a staggering, intoxicated senator from Delaware, one of the border slave states that had remained in the Union, launched a profane, verbal attack on President Abraham Lincoln from the floor of the Senate. After the lawmaker called the president an imbecile, the vice president presiding ordered the sergeant-at-arms to restrain the senator who then pointed a pistol at the sergeant and threatened: Damn you, Bassett, if you touch me I’ll shoot you dead. Fortunately, the senator was subdued and removed from the Capitol building—the last instance of such in the history of the Congress.⁴

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The story of the postal service as a source of sectional controversy is very much the story of Joseph Holt’s tenure as postmaster general. He was the catalyst that propelled the postal service into further controversy during the twenty-two months of his administration of the Post Office prior to secession. Holt was of the South, a Kentucky Democrat, with roots also in Mississippi, who had become a member of President James Buchanan’s cabinet with support from prominent southern leaders. In 1859, apparently motivated by a sense of public duty and the failure of a postal appropriation in the previous session of Congress, Holt embarked on a policy of retrenchment, consisting of service reductions on southern mail routes, but the measures he enacted to make up the large postal deficit backfired. The postmaster general had saved federal dollars—almost two million—but, in the long run, the cost in southern opposition resulted in a higher price for the Union. Holt’s further reductions of the steamer mails on the Mississippi and service between Charleston and Key West brought southern anger to the boiling point.⁵

The postmaster general also began investigations into charges of corruption and political patronage in several big-city post offices. Unfortunately for the Buchanan administration, these investigations were directed at stalwarts in the Democratic Party political machine, and served to further split the Democrats in the coming 1860 election. As a result, Democratic Party disarray ensured the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, leading to secession and dissolution of the federal Union.

Postmaster General Holt was roundly denounced by southern leadership, seeing him as a southern man who had turned against his own people, and a number of southern senators were soon seeking vengeance.⁶ Holt had indeed become a Unionist and did as much as anyone to successfully keep his native Kentucky from joining the Confederacy.

To most Americans, Holt is an obscure figure. But his story is one of those intriguing what-if’s of history causing us to wonder what might have been. Had the postmaster general tempered his exposure of postal corruption and patronage in the big cities, perhaps the Democratic Party in 1860 would have had a better chance of electoral success in key northern states. The result of the election of 1860 could have been that none of the candidates for president received a majority of the electoral vote. Congress would then have had to decide the issue, perhaps denying Lincoln the presidency and forestalling secession. And in 1864, would a nod from Abraham Lincoln have placed Joseph Holt on the National Union (Republican) ticket as the vice presidential candidate rather than Andrew Johnson? Holt was under consideration for the selection, and it could have been he taking the presidential oath on April 15, 1865, the morning after Lincoln’s assassination.

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Joseph Holt, the central figure in the story of the postal service and secession, briefly emerged from obscurity in a new motion picture released in 2011. The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford, tells the story of the trial and execution of Mary Surratt and three other accused conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Holt, serving as judge advocate general of the army during the Civil War and chief prosecutor in the trial, is ably portrayed by actor Danny Huston as relentless in obtaining convictions of the defendants. Perhaps others, in the future, will shed more in-depth light on the important role played by Joseph Holt in 19th century American history.

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The United States Mail was one of many government institutions serving the federal republic, spanning the history of old America from the Revolution to the Civil War. As such, it was akin to institutions designed to protect the young nation: the old army of muskets and dragoons, and the old navy of sail and wooden ships. The postal mail rider galloping over narrow trails and fording wide streams, guarding his saddlebags filled with valuable packets of correspondence, the dusty stagecoach carrying overstuffed bags of letters and newspapers—these scenes were as much a vivid picture of American life during this period as the dragoon in Zachary Taylor’s army in Mexico or the seaman on the deck of the USS Constitution.

In old America, an agrarian society began the gradual transformation to an increasingly urban, business-oriented economy. Migration from the eastern seaboard to western frontiers was a constant focus. After the War of 1812, one observer of the exodus said, All old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward.⁷ Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Whigs, Democrats, and later, in the 1850s, a new Republican Party, vied for political power. The Monroe Doctrine set the course of foreign policy for an infant nation. And Manifest Destiny symbolized belief in the inevitable conquest of a continent.

America and its institutions, both governmental and societal, changed after Fort Sumter and Appomattox. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a requiem for old America. Some ideas and institutions also died, others evolved or were replaced by new influences.

Slavery was abolished after Union victory on the battlefield. Reconstruction of the South became mostly a failed experiment. Slavery was replaced by a debilitating system of racial segregation and enactment of discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the former Confederate states. Second-class citizenship and often violent intimidation of the freed slaves and their descendants would not begin to be overcome until the mid-20th century with emergence of the Civil Rights Movement inspired by Martin Luther King, and far-reaching decisions by four American presidents: Truman, desegregating the armed services in 1948; Eisenhower, enforcing school integration at Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957; Kennedy, acting to quell violence at the University of Mississippi in 1962; and Lyndon Johnson, driving enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Industry and manufacturing fueled the economic growth of the nation. Muskets were replaced by new weapons of war. Wooden ships gave way to ironclads and modern warships. Immigration from across the globe changed the face of America and created a diverse nation. The frontier became a conceptual goal as well as a geographic reality. Women finally achieved the right to vote in 1920—fifty years after former male slaves were guaranteed that right with adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. The assertion of states’ rights was transformed from a cause for secession to contemporary efforts to limit the power of the federal government. The two-party system emerged as the dominant force in modern-day politics.

And America became a world power at Manila Bay and in the trenches of the Argonne—and a superpower from the ashes of the Second World War.

For the postal service, after the controversy over the southern mails ended, the inflamed passions generated by the distribution of antislavery literature through the mails became a bitter memory. The Post Office, having been a vital part of the nation’s growth every step of the way, now sought new innovations. The Pony Express completed transcontinental delivery of the mail. The Civil War years gave rise to the use of money orders to protect the paychecks of Union soldiers. And free city delivery was first initiated so that women who had received notification of the loss of a loved one in battle could avoid public grief—up to that time, women posted or received letters at the traditional ladies window in large city post offices.⁸ Later, railway mail cars added increased speed in delivery of the mail. Rural Free Delivery (RFD), Parcel Post, and Collect-on-Delivery (C.O.D.) brought convenience to millions of Americans. Corruption and patronage in the old Post Office system would yield to civil service reform. In the 1920s, regular air mail service spanned the continent. The daring air mail pilot flying in an open cockpit without radio communication captured the imagination, as had the intrepid rider for the Pony Express, sixty years before. Thousands of new post offices spread across the land—many with imposing marble columns and elaborately styled architecture. Beginning in the 1960s, Zip Codes became almost as important to Americans as Social Security numbers. And in 1971, a reorganized postal system became the United States Postal Service, a new self-supporting public corporation.

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The role of the United States Mail in sectional controversy was defined by the nature of the sectional conflict. Within the framework of a society half free and half slave, the work of