In The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America, David M. Henkin “explores the social practices and cultural stakes that developed around that moment of connection [of the 1840s-1860s] and around the new forms of intimacy and alienation that it came to represent. Seen from the perspective of ordinary people, what may have been most remarkable about the middle decades of the nineteenth century was the novel experience of being accessed and addressed by a system of mass communication” (pg. x). Examining the Congressional reduction in the cost of postage, Henkin argues, “The dates 1845 and 1851 thus stand at the center of a revolutionary era in nineteenth-century U.S. history, when a critical mass of Americans began reorganizing their perceptions of time, space, and community around the existence of the post” (pg. 3). In disrupting narratives that present Americans as a homogenous group, Henkin writes, “A fuller history of the nineteenth-century post must consider separately the impact of the nineteenth-century postal revolution from the perspectives of city dwellers, Native Americans, college students, upcountry Southern farmers, illiterate German-speaking immigrants, employees of the federal government, Jews, unmarried adult women, slaveholders, and many other groups with distinctive relationships to the mail” (pg. 8).
Henkin writes, “From its creation, the U.S. Post Office was committed principally to facilitating the wide circulation of political news, allowing an informed citizenry to live far from the metropolitan centers of government while remaining active in its affairs” (pg. 21). He continues, “Among the various social forces that contributed to the move toward cheap postage, the most powerful were demographic. Antebellum Americans were far more likely to patronize the post than their early national ancestors and counterparts because they were even more mobile and had more economic and social ties to people who lived at a distance” (pg. 27). According to Henkin, “As the mail system grew into a popular, participatory network in the 1840s and 1850s, Americans registered their integration into the new postal culture in their everyday epistolary practices, as they confidently scheduled and anticipated correspondence with family members, social contacts, and commercial partners” (pg. 38). While the majority of early mailings were newspapers, “For postal uses who exchanged papers [from different towns], the post office was no longer simply a newsstand. It was, instead, a point of access to a world of social relations that required special gestures of solicitation and inquiry” (pg. 51). Photography further cemented these bonds. Henkin writes, “By sending daguerreotypes (and, later, wet-plate collodion photographs, from which multiple prints could be produced from a negative) to absent friends and family, mid-century correspondents sought to negotiate the vast distances that frequently defined a postal relationship” (pg. 60).
The post further altered gender relations. Henkin writes, “Like feminist conventions, mail bags and post offices threatened to collapse, if only for a fantastic moment, divisions of gender” (pg. 72). He continues, “The physical presence of women in post offices introduced particular problems and triggered particular anxieties. By mid-century, postal spaces were designed to regulate and mitigate the forced heterosocial intermingling that Blythe’s images of the post office accentuated” (pg. 73). Even separate windows for men and women did not work, though, as Henkin writes, “Despite attempts to regulate or conceal the intermingling of men and women, post offices remained dangerous and transgressive places in the eyes of many contemporaries at a time when women, especially those in the middle-class, were enjoined to avoid public self-presentation” (pg. 78). Henkin further writes, “Claims about the epistolary practices of men and women, many of which were fairly old clichés by the time of the postal revolution, served some new and interesting cultural functions at mid-century. A popular discourse about gender and letter writing helped Americans map out boundaries between business and personal correspondence in everyday life and between the public and the private in the world of the post” (pg. 108).
The Gold Rush and westward expansion further demonstrated the transformational effect of the post. Henkin writes, “In an era of widespread transition and dislocation, the posted letter became for many Americans a powerful symbol of personal continuity and a badge of membership in some distant network of personal relations. More specifically, mail became the privileged mode of performing familial affiliations, especially for a growing middle class” (pg. 120). In his final section, Henkin writes, “As a festival of the mail system, Valentine’s Day projected a set of images of postal life that differed strikingly from those in articles about lonely forty-niners or young men at war. Such images resonated, nonetheless, for they indicated uses and aspects of the post that were not about conventional epistolary intimacy” (pg. 150). ( )