The railroad mail service is, in many ways, closely analogous to that of the express service. To it also, are devoted whole platoons and brigades of especially equipped cars, and it comes under the direction of the capable traffic officers of a great government department.
The Post-office Department is practically as old as the nation itself. For it was away back in November, 1776, that Ebenezer Hazard, who had been appointed Postmaster General to the Continental Congress, filed a memorandum of gentle complaint because of the long distances he was compelled to travel to keep pace with the wanderings of the Continental Army. But it was not until George Washington had become President of the United States, in April, 1789, that the Post-office Department came into any real semblance of organization. Samuel Osgood, of Massachusetts, was the man to whom was given the task of making a real business out of what had once been a haphazard courtesy of the past of stage-drivers and ships’ captains. Some men had made individual businesses out of the management of stage-routes—in fact, Benjamin Franklin was an early postman. But the United States Government from the beginning created the mail service as a monopoly for itself—following the rule of other nations.
In 1789 the Post-office Department was a crude enough affair. The Postmaster General had but one clerk, there were but 75 post-offices and 1,875 miles of post-roads in the whole country. In the first year of the department’s activities the cost of mail transportation is given as being $22,081, with the total revenue $37,935. The total expenditures of the department that year were $32,140, leaving a surplus for the twelvemonth of $5,795, a somewhat better showing than has been made in some years since that time.
The report of the Post-office Department for the year ending June 30, 1910, lies before us as we write this chapter. It tells the graphic growth of a great business in one hundred and twenty years. For in this last twelvemonth the receipts were $224,128,657—a really vast sum compared with that modest $37,935 for 1789-90. The expenditures for this year ending June 30, 1910, were even higher—$229,977,224—leaving a deficit of $5,848,567. The Postmaster General has asserted, however, that he will have succeeded in turning that loss into a slight profit for the year ending June 30, 1911. These figures do not alone show the growth of the mail service of a great land that has become entirely dependent upon this great function of its business and social life. Think of the 75 post-offices of 1789, compared with the 59,580 offices of 1910—and that because of the marvellous development of the rural free delivery during the past ten or twelve years, a decrease from the high-water mark of 76,688 in 1900. Figures are sometimes impressive and the statistics of the Post-office Department show that 78,557 postmasters, clerks, and carriers give the major portion of their time to its service. In addition to these, those same statistics enumerate 40,997 rural delivery carriers, who bring the entire post-office force up to the astounding total of 119,554 men and women.
Without the railroad the Post-office Department could not have come to its present great development as one of the chief arms of government activity. The postal service is an interesting adjunct of the railroad; the railroad is a vital factor in the successful conduct and development of the postal service. Away back in 1836, Postmaster General Barry, in his annual report, spoke of the rapid multiplication of railroads in all parts of the country and asked if it was not worth while to secure the transportation of mail upon them. He added:
“Already have the railroads between French Town, in Maryland, and New Castle, in Delaware, and between Camden and South Amboy, in New Jersey, afforded great and important facilities to the transportation of the great Eastern Mail.”
As General Barry wrote, the Baltimore & Ohio was spinning its extension lines from Baltimore to Washington, and he expressed an opinion that with that line a through mail service from New York to Washington might be accomplished in sixteen hours. That service is now made between those cities in five hours. General Barry’s appeal must have brought fruit, for Congress, on July 7, 1838, passed an act approving every railroad in the United States as a post-route.
The railroads accepted this responsibility with alacrity. The Baltimore & Ohio equipped compartments in baggage-cars running between Baltimore and Washington, which were kept tightly locked and to which only the postmasters of those two cities had access. Still the early methods of handling merchandise of every sort were crude and it was not until the days of the Civil War that the railroad mail service began to attain anything like its present precision and dispatch. Most great organisms are apt to trace their development to the brilliancy or the inspiration of one man or a group of men, and the railroad mail service has been no exception to that rule.
W. A. Davis, a clerk in the post-office at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1862, conceived the idea that railroad mail could be assorted on the cars before it reached St. Joseph. In those days, St. Joseph was a pretty important sort of a place. The overland mail started west from there, and Davis thought that if it could be at least partly assorted before it reached St. Joseph, there would be no delay in starting overland. The Post-office Department encouraged him and he began what was destined to become the most important and interesting function of the railroad mail service.