Benjamin Franklin had been dead for nearly sixty-four years when he was summoned to Mrs Thomson's parlour. With teatime concluding on a spring day in 1854, Thomson's guests in her Washington home began a round of table tipping. This spiritualist ritual, wildly popular in the 1850s, asked participants to reach out to those who had passed in order to gain glimpses into the future. That afternoon, the guests did not summon Franklin for his diplomatic experience, statecraft, or knowledge of natural philosophy. Rather, they contacted him for his expertise in postal matters. Franklin had long served as an imperial Deputy Postmaster, then as the first Postmaster General for the revolutionary states. In the mid nineteenth century, he had a largely self-promoted reputation as a patron of postal innovation.Footnote 1 According to Elihu Burritt, a postal reformer present for the tipping, Franklin's spirit ‘was asked what message he had for us’. As the table tipped, the spirit appeared to respond: ‘Ocean Penny Postage shall prevail now or never.’Footnote 2
Ocean Penny Postage, the project of sending mail overseas for a mere British penny, was among Burritt's principal reform campaigns. American by birth but cosmopolitan in mind-set, Burritt found fame in New England as the ‘learned blacksmith’, teaching himself dozens of languages while labouring daily at his forge. He began anti-slavery agitation in the 1830s, afterward entering the global peace movement. In 1846, he voyaged to London to establish his League of International Brotherhood, an organization dedicated to fostering international bonds of peace and friendship. Before the year ended, he began stumping across England, lecturing liberal Victorians, from Quakers to free traders to temperance supporters, about the path of peace. An anticipated three months across the Atlantic turned into three years.Footnote 3
Among the planks of the League and subjects of Burritt's lectures, alongside eliminating war and human bondage, was international postal reform, or, according to the League's pledge taken by supporters, ‘the abolition of all restrictions upon international correspondence and friendly intercourse, and of whatever else tends to make enemies of nations, or prevents their fusion into one peaceful brotherhood’. Burritt's League posited a causal relationship between constricted flows of information and international strife, arguing that obstacles to communication between nations caused distrust, ruinous competition, and disastrous conflict. Burritt's remedy was global and inexpensive postal correspondence by government-supported steam vessels. When his campaign in Britain failed to produce results, he turned his sights on his home country, finding a receptive audience for his idea that Americans could transform the world with globe-spanning communication.Footnote 4
At the same time, other Americans sought to resolve the persistent problem of slavery by employing international mail steamers to help settle American free blacks in Africa. Newspapers circulated articles about the ‘Ebony Line’, imagining a direct steam route from the United States to the colony of Liberia. Supporters believed that previous efforts to resolve the moral stain of American slavery with African colonization had failed because infrequent and irregular transatlantic communication had prevented black Americans from developing emotional bonds with their ancestral homelands. One supporter of the project in Congress explained that Liberia remained ‘terra incognito [sic]’ to free blacks. If steamships travelled four or five times annually to Africa, he continued, ‘bringing back samples of its productions, with letters from those who have emigrated’, the information they conveyed ‘would operate powerfully upon our black residents’. The Ebony Line would not only transport emigrants, turning people into goods, but, more fundamentally, would establish communication routes to stimulate sympathies and entice emigrants in the first place. The Line promised a world in which free blacks not only transmitted and received information but were even the messages themselves.Footnote 5
Burritt's irenic theory of international postal communication and the Ebony Line's promise of racial purity through colonization were not the only campaigns of the mid nineteenth century linking international infrastructure projects with schemes of global improvement. Around the world, contemporaries believed that improved communication and transportation would facilitate a trans-boundary distribution of universal peace. In the 1850s and 1860s, promoters of both the Atlantic telegraph cable and the Suez Canal proclaimed that these projects would cultivate new communities of kindred nations and foster relationships of mutual respect and friendship. Commercial interests supported these projects, but the promise of a safer, more connected world appealed to millions more who would never benefit from them directly. Through the rest of the century, enterprising engineers, investors, and statesmen sought to overcome natural and centuries-old barriers, from mountain ranges to oceans, in order to facilitate the transportation of goods, people, and information for practical and ideological reasons. Yet, before the telegraph and ocean-connecting canals, Americans created the blueprint for such utopian visions. They looked to mail steamers as the first new communications and transportation infrastructure of the nineteenth century that they could invest with utopian potential.Footnote 6 However, reform schemes centred around steamers often saw people, goods, and information as interchangeable in a way that those based on later technologies would not.
These developments towards more globalized communication and transportation ran in the opposite direction from the most significant transformation in political organization of the period: the emergence of the nation-state as the pre-eminent form of governance and territorial control.Footnote 7 For the predominant form of long-distance communication – postal correspondence – the developments of the mid nineteenth century were decidedly national in character. Between 1840 and the creation of the General (later Universal) Postal Union (UPU) in 1874, centralizing nation-states invariably formed or reformed post offices to serve national, not international, needs. As much as any institution promoting the formation of national identities, post offices facilitated the conversion of kingdoms, empires, and confederations into modern nation-states. Reinforcing the role of the state and connecting its citizens, these centralized post offices became hallmarks of modernity.Footnote 8
Britain's Penny Post of 1840 provided the model, lowering and universalizing the cost of sending letters to rates affordable by ordinary people, and introducing payment innovations such as postage stamps, while more generally binding together distant parts of the kingdom. Britain's most eloquent postal reformer, Rowland Hill, believed that postal reform would create good government and economic prosperity at the same time as improving British morals. Through ‘the unobstructed circulation of letters’, Hill expected to accelerate ‘the religious, moral, and intellectual progress of the people’. His successful campaign to introduce an inland penny post in 1840 derived from his faith that cheap postal communication would act as ‘a powerful engine of civilization’ to enlighten the British masses.Footnote 9
Over the next thirty-five years, postal reforms – from centralized control to rate reductions to the introduction of stamps – spread from Britain across Europe to Latin America, Liberia, Egypt, Persia, and Afghanistan. Brazil and Zurich adopted stamps in 1843. The United States slashed rates in 1845 and again in 1851, issuing its first stamps in 1847. The first French stamps of 1849 similarly accompanied dramatic rate reductions. Ottoman Turkey, which had permitted European states to operate their own postal networks within its empire since the early eighteenth century, opened its own post office in 1841 and began aggressively competing with the foreign services after it introduced stamps in 1863. By the early 1870s, Meiji Japan had begun rebuilding its postal system on the British model. Throughout this period, national consolidation remained a central motivation of postal innovation. As a leading French postal reformer declared in 1848, reform would forge ‘liens de confraternité’ and bind the French people, so divided in a year of revolution, together in ‘l'esprit de nationalité’.Footnote 10
In this context, it is somewhat mysterious how rhetoric grounded so essentially in national identities and government centralization could lead so quickly to one of the world's first international regulatory bodies, the UPU. In part, the answer is that many countries produced postal reformers and pursued more integrated communication networks for economic purposes. To promote trade, European states especially enjoyed creating international organizations. But what about the United States? Both before and after the creation of the UPU, the US remained deeply wary of international commitments. How did the great mass of American merchants and farmers, politicians, and urban labourers, come to accept a global vision of postal communication? What enabled Americans not only to envision but to welcome what Daniel Rodgers has called ‘Atlantic social politics’ – the transnational exchange of progressive ideas and institutions – in the context of international postal exchange?Footnote 11
The explanation, I argue, owes a large debt to American postal reformers such as Elihu Burritt and the promoters of the Ebony Line, who believed that cheaper, faster, and better-connected postal networks promised not only national pride or prosperity but also moral and social progress across national borders. Well before the creation of the UPU, Americans had been primed to seek communication abroad. The pursuit of commerce unquestionably played a large role, but equally important was the reformist vision that claimed that better communications could peacefully improve the world. This idea turned long-held domestic beliefs about postal exchange towards the international arena, and claimed for the state a new-found obligation to ensure global communications. Neither Burritt's Ocean Penny Postage nor the promoters of the Ebony Line succeeded in achieving their aspirations in the 1850s, but their work paved the way for the international postal arrangements of the 1870s and beyond.Footnote 12
In the following sections, I first place these postal plans in their larger economic contexts before tracing the emergence and eventual defeat of the two projects. Taken together, this history does not just reveal that our contemporary sense of the novelty of living in the ‘information age’ or ‘network society’ is not actually so new. It also shows that innovations in communication technology have long fostered such liberating expectations of social, political, and economic change that supporters are blinded to the very real limitations of technology alone as a sufficient agent of change.Footnote 13
Steam power and the globalization of the American postal system
From England, Americans inherited ideas about the role of the government in ensuring postal communication for both commercial and public purposes. Eighteenth-century American colonists patronized England's foreign postal service, an institution operated by the imperial government, with intermittent wartime interruptions, since the reign of Charles I. After declaring independence, the new American government retained responsibility for postal communication. Three of the twenty-five ordinances passed by the Confederation Congress between 1781 and 1788 involved the Post Office, the only national institution even contemplated by the drafters of the Articles of Confederation besides courts, armies, and a treasury.Footnote 14
While these ordinances involved domestic mail, attention quickly turned to foreign matters. After the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, the federal government legislated rules for international mail in 1792. It established postal rates for ship letters aboard government vessels sailing to and from foreign ports, mandated procedures requiring a ship's master to discharge mail bags to a port's postmaster before undertaking other activities, and licensed the postmaster general to undertake postal arrangements with foreign countries. Judging from the statute books, the US appeared to have the foundations for government-structured international communications.Footnote 15
Yet despite early aspirations for a federal role in international postal communication, by 1800 it was clear that government reach would remain limited. Aside from regulations on the discharge of incoming foreign mail, little came of the other provisions. A postal act of 1799 struck out any mention of government vessels or postage on outgoing mail, for, unlike in Britain, no American government vessels carried international mail. Soon, only postage provisions and procedures for receiving foreign letters remained.Footnote 16 Moreover, until mid century, little came of the provision authorizing the postmaster general to negotiate postal conventions with other countries. No conventions were ever undertaken, and in 1836 Postmaster General Amos Kendall complained that he lacked the authority to do so effectively.Footnote 17
Without strong state presence, before the late 1840s international mail communication from the US was a kind of private commercial activity constrained by existing trade routes. Typically, merchant vessels carried this mail. In the commercial capital, New York, mail bags for different ships hung at the Tontine Coffee House and, after 1827, at the Merchant Exchange on Wall Street, where traders, bankers, and insurers gathered to conduct business.Footnote 18 In the early nineteenth century, these ships sailed intermittently, meaning that communications travelled at unpredictable rates and uncertain times. Gradually, these intermittent ships gave way to American packet vessels, fleets of which sailed on regular schedules regardless of whether they carried marketable cargoes. By 1840, nearly fifty American packets dominated transatlantic postal communication.Footnote 19 They sailed from New York down the Atlantic coast and over to Liverpool, London, and Le Havre, and merchants and investors began relying on predictable sailing schedules for business correspondence, personal letters, and news.
The packets brought regularity to transatlantic correspondence but, as a private system, left many problems unresolved. Once deposited into a packet-bound mailbag, mail entered a kind of jurisdictional nether-region, with senders depending on the goodwill of ship commanders and foreign postal officials. At times, the British Post Office delivered American mail only after dispatching mail from British merchants, saddling Americans with a trade disadvantage when a day's delay could spell the difference between financial success and ruin. At other times, the British Post Office applied oppressive fees on shipping American newspapers, preventing American news and perspectives from penetrating continental Europe. The packet system also meant withstanding the boredom of transatlantic passengers: the traveller Harriet Martineau observed passengers aboard the packet United States dumping mail bags upon the deck and perusing letter after letter, lampooning foreign names and destinations.Footnote 20
Worse, while the packet system supported highly trafficked transatlantic trade routes, it left the rest of the world largely inaccessible. For American merchants, it was relatively easy to dispatch a letter to faraway London or Paris but much harder to reach a potential market in the nearby Caribbean. Dispatching mail without a packet line involved cajoling intermittently sailing ship captains, seeking special services from local American consuls, and relying on luck. These obstacles proved particularly acute in America's most global industry, the vast whale fishery. Whaling vessels spent years at sea without any reliable way of communicating with their ships’ owners, even when they anchored at predetermined ports. Americans saw vast commercial opportunities in South America, continental Europe, and East Asia, if only they had regular communication there. Private packet lines, however, would only invest in these routes if trade already justified the outlay. Leaving international communication to private vessels thus created a patchy and highly concentrated system of both communication and trade, not by design but by the persistence of historically contingent commercial patterns.Footnote 21
By 1840, British innovations in steam power appeared both to make the existing communications inadequacies comparatively worse and to catalyse a solution. In 1839, Britain contracted with Samuel Cunard for a steam packet between Liverpool, Halifax, and Boston. Soon, Britain added subsidized lines to the Caribbean and South America, around the Mediterranean, and beyond to India and China. Americans saw their control over transatlantic communication deteriorate while communications access to South Atlantic markets became harder than ever.Footnote 22 In response, between 1840 and 1860, Americans lobbied Washington to establish steam communication routes to every region of American commercial interest. Memorials flooded Congress proposing lines to Mexico and Caribbean sugar ports, Brazil and western South America, Rotterdam and Glückstadt, the Mediterranean, and China. These proposals sought commercial advantages through controlling information while promising an auxiliary naval force and cargo vessels to transport the fruits of new commerce.Footnote 23
In 1845, the American Congress began subsidizing the construction and operation of mail steamers along the British model. In March, Congress instructed the postmaster general to contract for foreign mail lines serving the public (that is, commercial) interest. In 1846, a contract for European service went to Edward Mills for a line to Bremen, via the southern English port of Cowes. Promoters invested this Bremen line with great potential. Steaming there would open northern Europe to personal and commercial correspondence, reaching deeper into Asia once a railroad connected Bremen with Trieste, accelerating communication by the Mediterranean. The tens of thousands of emigrants embarking from Bremen to America would maintain closer ties with their home countries. Not least, the line would facilitate what Henry Hilliard, a chief supporter of the plan in Congress, called ‘[a]n increased diffusion of our sentiments’, allowing continental Europe access to Americans in their own words – ‘our markets, our resources, and our institutions’ – all without an English filter. Hilliard explained that
The rapid and certain transmission of intelligence is of the highest importance to a commercial people and instead of relying upon the steamships of Great Britain for the transportation of our mails, we should enter at once upon an enterprise to which we are invited by the most powerful considerations connected with our relations to the world, and which can no longer be neglected if we would keep pace with the movements of an enlightened age.Footnote 24
Here, as had been the case with British mail steamers, the initial impetus for establishing new, subsidized mail lines was to seize national advantages for world trade.
By the late 1840s, the US government seemed to be pursuing a limitless new policy for girding the world with steamship lines. Under his authority under the Act of 1845, the postmaster general contracted for a line between Charleston and Havana; an Act of 1847 subsidized three additional lines: between New York and Liverpool; between New York, New Orleans, Havana, and Panama; and between Panama, California, and Oregon. Lawmakers expected the lines to benefit the whole country equally, while cities from Charleston to San Francisco jostled to be selected as termini for future lines. Petitions and memorials for new lines flooded Washington, many endorsed by city governments and state legislatures. As these proposals (of varying degrees of plausibility) reached Congress, some moral entrepreneurs sought to turn mail steamers into more than the infrastructure of commerce. These steamers, they believed, offered a potent new tool to improve the world.Footnote 25
The lost compromise: slavery, sectionalism, and postal reform
Between January and September 1850, Congress debated a package of legislation to avert southern secession, known after its completion as the Compromise of 1850. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the recent war with Mexico, the United States had added Upper California, New Mexico, and all Mexican lands below the 42nd parallel. The agreement made the United States a truly continental power, but gaining 500,000 square miles reopened old questions about expanding slavery.
For congressmen who were neither abolitionists nor ‘Ultra’ supporters of slavery, the debate led to a grand legislative bargain that benefited both northern and southern states while demanding sacrifices of both. Henry Clay led a bipartisan senatorial committee to craft the so-called ‘omnibus’, a single bill that would settle all outstanding sectional issues, from admitting California to statehood to eliminating the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Clay discovered, however, that he could not assemble a single congressional majority to pass the omnibus, and the bill collapsed in the Senate in late July. Pressure for a solution, however, did not abate. Within two weeks, Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Democrat whose pursuit of national economic development was matched only by his commitment to compromise for national unity, broke the omnibus into six bills that varying constituencies in the Senate swiftly passed piecemeal. Within a month, the House likewise reached consensus on issues ranging from settling the Texas boundary to strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act. Looking at Congress, the Washington correspondent for the Baltimore Sun explained that only one issue remained, ‘the last of the compromise measures which remains yet undisposed of’.Footnote 26
This last measure, to create a line of ocean steamers to colonize free blacks in Africa, would not pass. But in 1850, and for several more years, it attracted immense popular and political support. The Sun called it ‘destined to become a great rallying point of parties’.Footnote 27 Known as the Ebony Line, the project gave colonization new credibility as a solution to racial and sectional strife. Frederick Douglass, an old foe of black emigration to Africa, lamented that the steamship proposal breathed ‘[n]ew life … upon the dry bones of colonization’.Footnote 28 Most significantly, the proposal demonstrated how the twin innovations of technology and policy – of ocean steamships and federal mail subsidies – enhanced the perception in many northern and border states that removing over 400,000 free blacks in the United States was not only desirable but also possible.
Since the eighteenth century, colonization had held a twofold political appeal. First, it resolved the anomaly of slavery in a republic of liberty without leaving the nation with what most white Americans believed were unequal and incompatible races. Second, it allowed Americans with very different visions of the country's future to unite around a common project.Footnote 29 The colonization movement became institutionalized in 1816 with the foundation of the American Colonization Society (ACS), a national organization whose later membership included leading politicians, publishers, ministers, and military officers.Footnote 30 With government support, the ACS's most significant accomplishment came in December 1821 with the purchase (literally at gunpoint) of a tract of land along Africa's Grain Coast. Within its first year, the new settlement, christened Liberia, had 135 black colonists from the United States, all struggling to survive. The ACS's fortunes rose and fell over the next three decades with political shifts and alternating periods of debt and solvency. Every year, it paid the passage of scores, and sometimes hundreds, of black men and women to Liberia. By the Civil War, over 10,000 American freedmen had left for Liberia; an additional 5,000 went by 1900. Despite the steady flow of colonists, most free blacks remained unwilling to emigrate and the ACS struggled to turn its colonization vision into a demographic fact.Footnote 31
Prior to 1850, the colonization movement enjoyed high-profile support but modest achievements. Hopes were reinvigorated in April of that year. While Congress debated Clay's omnibus, a Washington lawyer, Judge Joseph Bryan of Alabama, submitted his plan for Africa-bound steamships to the House of Representatives. Bryan's plan linked colonization to the existing policy of federally sponsored international mail steamers and answered the constitutional objections that had earlier forestalled federal money for colonization. Just as other mail steamship projects subsidized shipbuilders and engine manufacturers under Congress's authority ‘to establish post offices and post roads’, a mail steam line to Africa would allow the ancillary use of ferrying colonists (though ferrying colonists was, in fact, its primary purpose). Bryan proposed a line of four steamships, of 4,000 tons apiece, to ply between the United States and West Africa. Larger than the largest ships already subsidized (those of the Collins Line steamers to Liverpool), the ships would ferry black colonists eastwards, contribute to the international assault on the maritime slave trade, promote trade between Africa and North America, and, of course, transport the mail.Footnote 32
Members of the House's Naval Affairs Committee embraced the proposal, reporting a bill on 1 August 1850. The committee's chairman, the Tennessee Democrat Frederick P. Stanton, modified Bryan's original proposal, recommending a three-vessel fleet. One would depart from New York with colonists every three months for Savannah, loading additional freight and mail. A second ship would depart from Baltimore, stopping in Norfolk and Charleston, while a third would travel from New Orleans via the West Indies. All three would steam to Liberia, discharge their passengers and cargo, and visit other African ports, before reaching Gibraltar with mail for Mediterranean destinations. Final stops in Spain, Portugal, France, and Britain would maximize the trade and communications value of the line before returning.Footnote 33
According to Stanton, steamships offered incentives to emigration unmatched by sailing vessels. First, they would provide ‘a quick and pleasant passage’, mitigating what proponents of colonization imagined was a root cause of the reluctance to emigrate – the length and discomfort of the journey. The ships would also patrol African waters, combating the scourge of the African slave trade, then sending tens of thousands of slaves a year to Cuba and Brazil, thus helping ‘civilize’ the African continent and making Liberia a more appealing home for emigrants. Moreover, since each ship would carry up to 1,500 émigrés, the line would exhibit tremendous economies of scale, by slashing costs for transporting each colonist. The first two ships alone would ferry between eight and twelve thousand colonists a year. This was far below the seventy thousand comprising the ‘annual increase’ of the free black population, but, according to Stanton, it would hopefully be enough to stimulate more demand for emigration later.Footnote 34
Steamships helped Ebony Line supporters to re-imagine the large numbers that had previously constrained colonization. Like most ‘colonizationists’, these supporters focused on America's free black population, a group equally troubling to southern slaveholders and northern anti-slavery proponents of a white-only republic. By 1850, free blacks numbered over 430,000, nearly double the 230,000 just after the ACS emerged, but still under 15% of the much larger enslaved population.Footnote 35 In Washington, where much of the political activity around colonization occurred, the growth of the free black population was more dramatic still. Washington's black population had once been overwhelmingly enslaved: 3,244 slaves to 783 free in 1800. Both populations grew, but at different rates; by 1830 they reached equal size, each comprising some 6,000 people. But then the slave population began to decline, reaching just 3,687 in 1850, while the free one grew to nearly three times as large, at 10,059. Since the city's overall population was also growing, Washington's slaves shrank from 20% of the total population in 1800 to just 7% in 1850. The free black community's growth added urgency for those seeking to eliminate it; the larger its size, the harder the task.Footnote 36
To colonization supporters, these numbers were daunting but not insurmountable. Though many subsequent historians have called colonization ‘totally unrealistic’ or ‘wholly impracticable’, the nineteenth century saw many population movements of comparable scale.Footnote 37 During the 1840s alone, 434,626 immigrants arrived from German states, a quantity that was roughly equal to America's entire free black population. During the same decade, nearly double that number, 780,719, emigrated from Ireland to the United States. Although most immigrants still travelled by sail, regular trade routes and frequent voyages enabled their migration. The increasing use of steamships made these voyages more regular and frequent. For travel to and from Africa, however, nothing regular yet existed. The Ebony Line promised to resolve this deficiency. Yet in a century characterized by mass global migrations measured in the tens of millions, some voluntary and others forced, the Ebony Line raised the question as to whether steam communication could encourage a specific form of migration without becoming coercive.Footnote 38
Proponents argued that the line would encourage slave-owners to manumit their slaves. An architect of the original mail steamer policy in the 1840s, Thomas Butler King, composed an extensive endorsement, focusing on the need for southern states to protect slavery by sending southern free blacks to new settlements outside the United States. King, a former representative from Georgia, believed that Congress would have adopted colonization plans for free blacks in earlier years ‘but for the difficulty of providing for them a cheap and convenient mode of removal, and a comfortable home’. Turning to the Ebony Line promoter Stanton, he observed that ‘Your plan obviates these objections’.Footnote 39
In Congress, supporters focused on how the line would encourage large numbers of emigrants while stimulating communication (and hence trade for palm oil, gold, ivory, coffee, and tropical fruits and spices) and providing a reserve force of steam vessels for the Navy. Introducing the naval appropriation bill, Stanton sketched out a complete system of mail steamers – a policy that he called ‘in accordance with the spirit and progress of the age’ – singling out the Africa line as ‘one of the most important and efficient parts of the system’.Footnote 40 His colleague, Andrew Ewing, also a Democratic Representative from Tennessee, focused on how the frequency of Atlantic transit, coupled with the increased speed of each voyage, would bring Africa closer to American shores. By exchanging letters and news from Liberia, the line would familiarize free blacks with the African continent, while the frequent contact between Liberia and the United States enabled by steam would prevent the maw of barbarism from swallowing the fragile colony. For white Americans desiring greater emancipation, Ewing asserted that far more slave-owners would free their slaves if they had ‘a cheap, convenient, and expeditious mode for their transportation’ to Liberia. For fellow southerners fearful of the opening salvo of abolitionism, he insisted that colonization was slavery's ‘only true safeguard and protection’. That a single argument could embrace the simultaneous weakening and strengthening of slavery, however, was precisely why Representatives committed wholly to slavery or abolition distrusted it.Footnote 41
During a fast-paced debate in mid September, Stanton tried amending the annual naval appropriation authorizing the steamers but the House rejected it, ostensibly for reasons of parliamentary order but also reflecting growing opposition to the expense of subsidizing new lines of mail steamers in general.Footnote 42 The defeat, however, only bought more time for advocates to rally additional support for another push during Congress's second session in the new year. One active ally was the ACS, which had been reluctant to advocate for the line, given the ships’ anticipated costs and the still modest numbers of free blacks interested in emigrating. Now its leaders described ‘[t]he vast importance of such a line of steam ships’ to American trade and the ‘great and important results’ for the cause of emigration.Footnote 43 When Henry Clay delivered his annual presidential address to the ACS in January 1851, he applauded the ‘vast importance’ of government aid ‘to assist in that article which is the most difficult for the Society to command, the transportation of emigrants to that country’.Footnote 44
Missionaries in Africa, the most extensive on-going American connection to the continent, lauded the Ebony Line as ‘bold and original’ and praised it with biblical imagery. ‘Let these steamers’, wrote John Seys, a leading American Methodist in Liberia, ‘like so many arks, be provided for them, and the God of Ham as well as of Japhet will shut them in, and guide them safely above all the waves of prejudice, and bear them to a better country.’ If the steamship was a modern ark, then Congress and new technology, not divine intervention, were the principle agents of salvation.Footnote 45
Overwhelming support also came from northern and border states. The Virginia Reform Convention, the constitutional body convened in 1850 to resolve Virginian political tensions, endorsed the steamers. Members of the commonwealth's legislature added a supporting memorial. When a huge majority of Rhode Island politicians signalled their approval, Clay beamed at the seeming unanimity of opinion. The Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas noted that the entire municipal government of Washington had signed a memorial, save one member who had simply been out of town when signatures had been collected. Other memorials flowed to Washington from the legislatures of New Jersey, Delaware, Vermont, and Pennsylvania, along with nearly unanimous ones from Brooklyn and Georgetown. As befitted border states with ambivalent relationships to both slavery and free blacks, Maryland pledged US$200,000 in aid and Virginia US$40,000 a year.Footnote 46 As support rolled in, the ACS's journal, the African Repository, opined that ‘The steamships must be built. The great work must be done.’Footnote 47
But ‘the great work’ languished in a fiercely divided Congress. On the day before the end of the 31st Congress, Stanton tried a second time to insert the Ebony Line amendment in the naval appropriation and again failed, for the move violated House rules restricting appropriations to measures already authorized by law. More broadly, the congressional mood on mail steamers was shifting, with more representatives concluding that the policy enriched private contractors without adequate benefits for the rest of the country.Footnote 48 Afterwards, supporters continued to call for funding, but congressional backing remained tepid. At the same time, the technical constraints of steamship construction became more evident. By the summer of 1854, the original proposal for four 4,000-ton ships became three at ‘not less than 1,200 tons’; the emigration of 1,000–1,500 passengers per voyage became merely 350; budgets for ships shrank from US$900,000 to US$120,000; the fourteen-day passage became twenty-two or twenty-three to save coal.Footnote 49 An ACS committee concluded that the latest conflict over slavery launched by the Nebraska Bill made the times ‘unpropitious’ for bidding for congressional aid; instead it began stock subscriptions for a private United States and Liberia Steamship Company.Footnote 50 The organization ruminated about steamships for years but effectively abandoned pursuing them practically.Footnote 51
Ebony Line supporters had attempted to harness colonization to the policy of subsidized international mail steamers, yet the project proved too contentious amid growing sectional tensions. Vigorous supporters of slavery rejected it because it might weaken the institution; abolitionists rejected it because it might strengthen it. The failure to create the Ebony Line also revealed a weakness in the theory that communications infrastructure alone could improve the world. Economics and ideas about the social order mattered too, as did domestic politics, which undermined efforts to reach an international solution to domestic racial conflict. By 1851, the mail steam lines funded in 1845 and 1847 had failed to create significant returns. A few years later, despite lavish subsidies, the Collins Line to Liverpool collapsed after two ships were lost at sea. If steam lines to trading partners and prosperous European centres could fail, could a line to Africa sustain itself? Supporters would never find out. In the end, most congressmen appeared uninterested in colonization if it did not pay for itself in increased commerce. Yet, as interest in the Ebony Line ebbed, Americans began learning about another scheme to improve the world through mail steamers. This scheme, Elihu Burritt's plan for Ocean Penny Postage, relied even more on the idea that freely flowing information not only could but would improve the world.
Postal exchange for peace
Burritt first sketched out what he initially called ‘International Penny Postage’ (later Ocean Penny Postage) in Britain in 1846.Footnote 52 When he began his campaign, he believed that Britain would globalize this service. By the late 1840s, London was unquestionably the great focal point of the world's information. As Burritt put it, the city ‘inhales into its bosom all the intelligence which floats in isolated facts over the surface of the world’.Footnote 53 London could inhale so deeply because Parliament had spent the previous decade subsidizing mail steamers throughout the world, supporting trade and managing empire. The city also exhaled intelligence through its inland penny post, which, since its inception in 1840, had reduced the cost of sending mail to rates affordable by nearly anyone and had produced an eight-fold increase in mail volume within a quarter-century.Footnote 54 For Burritt, the inland penny post facilitated not only social intercourse and commercial exchange but also moral campaigns against slavery, alcohol, and vice, while supporting Christian benevolence, prison reform, and care for the indigent and insane. The mails provided the infrastructure for reform movements. ‘The penny post’, he wrote, ‘in the corporeity of British philanthropy, is what the system of veins and arteries is to the heart in the human body.’Footnote 55 As domestic reform campaigns benefited from this newly reliable and usable infrastructure of communication, Burritt reasoned that a larger effort towards international peace would similarly depend upon an international infrastructure uniting increased trade with cheaper, rapid communication.
In Britain, Burritt's campaign occurred in the larger context of ‘Manchester Liberalism’. This economic philosophy, best expressed by the merchants-turned-statesmen Richard Cobden and John Bright, proposed that universal peace and domestic prosperity would come from a revolution in international economic relationships. Instead of regulation, trade restrictions, and state-sponsored monopolies, Cobden and Bright advocated free trade and laissez-faire. As free trade enabled closer integration between rival nations, they imagined that no-one would risk prosperity for war. Burritt and Cobden also collaborated in the peace movement: during the 1850 Peace Congress at Frankfurt am Main, Cobden was elected a vice-president while Burritt served as secretary. Meanwhile, Burritt introduced Cobden to the campaign for cheap ocean postage. Cobden and Burritt both sought world peace and sympathized with the other's campaigns; in practice, Cobden emphasized trade more, while Burritt focused on direct communication.Footnote 56
Like twenty-first-century digital evangelists, Burritt believed in using new media to generate grassroots support. Along with his allies, Thomas Beggs, Henry Anelay, and Edmund Fry, he printed thousands of envelopes adorned with illustrations promoting Ocean Penny Postage, publicizing the plan just when prospective supporters sat down to compose letters. He produced at least five envelope designs, as well as Ocean Penny Postage stationery.Footnote 57 The first envelope, by the illustrator and Ocean Penny Postage supporter Henry Anelay, depicted a steamship, its foremast topped with a swallow-tailed flag inscribed ‘1d’, and below, a foresail adorned with the phrase ‘Ocean Penny Postage’. From its mainmast flew another flag depicting a letter envelope, while aft, the Union Jack fluttered from a gaff off the mizzenmast. Smoke and flame billowed from its funnel as the ship's central paddlewheel propelled it across the ocean. The engraving framing the image read ‘The World Awaits Great Britain's Greatest Gift, an Ocean Penny Postage To Make Home Everywhere and All Nations Neighbors’. The envelope proved popular, selling out in under two months.Footnote 58 A second design portrayed a sailor waving a Union Jack and standing amid mailbags posted for Australia, Africa, India, China, and America, while a steamer plied behind him in the background. ‘Britain! Bestow this Boon, and be in Blessing Blest’, proclaimed the surrounding text, ‘Ocean Penny Postage Will Link All Lands with Thee in Trade & Peace’. Reflecting Burritt's anti-slavery activities, a third envelope depicted two clasped hands, one black, one white, ringed by a laurel wreath and sheltered by a dove carrying an olive branch. On this envelope, too, a steamship appeared, this one flying a flag reading ‘Peace’, while the inscription implored: ‘Britain! From Thee the World Expects An Ocean Penny Postage to Make Her Children One Fraternity.’Footnote 59
Variants of Anelay's steamship appeared in nearly every illustration employed by Burritt's League of Universal Brotherhood. The ships were the essential technology that made Ocean Penny Postage conceivable at all. ‘Every person who watches the signs of the times’, Burritt wrote in one pamphlet, ‘must be struck with the new facilities, motives, and means of intercourse between Great Britain and North America.’ New technologies produced new social, political, and economic possibilities. He believed that, with competing steamship lines, the expense of mail contracts would be certain to fall.Footnote 60 He and his supporters conceived of steam power as a tool not of empire but of peace.Footnote 61
By 1851 Burritt had organized an extensive British movement to agitate for Ocean Penny Postage. His League of Universal Brotherhood, which maintained some hundred local affiliates, was tasked with ‘manufacturing public opinion’ (Burritt's phrase) through public meetings, petitioning Parliament, and circulating thousands of pamphlets and millions of promotional envelopes. Burritt also composed brief missives, which he called ‘olive leaves’, to distribute to copy-hungry newspapers. In 1849 he released Ocean penny postage: its necessity shown and its feasibility demonstrated, a thirty-two-page pamphlet including promotional verse that detailed his plan. Two years later, he published Ocean penny postage: will it pay? Simultaneously, he helped establish an international committee, chaired by Lord Ashburton and comprising MPs and delegates from Britain, the US, Prussia, Sardinia, Spain, France, and Austria to begin a coordinated strategy to put pressure on governments to reduce postage rates from within.Footnote 62 In 1852 Burritt launched a lecture campaign; a year later, he hung a giant poster in London's Royal Exchange, the commercial centre. ‘This is a new way of agitation’, he wrote, ‘but it is necessary to keep the subject before the public mind in new forms.’ By April 1853, he had addressed almost 70 audiences across Britain; within another year he topped 150. Nevertheless, there were limits to what public opinion could accomplish. MPs and postal experts such as Rowland Hill questioned whether ocean postage reduction could, like the inland penny post, really remain revenue-neutral.
As his work in England failed to generate legislation, Burritt resolved to reproduce his British postal campaign in his native United States.Footnote 63 There, his campaign for cheap ocean postage drew rhetorical strength from Irish immigration. With hundreds of thousands of mostly impoverished Irish immigrants flooding into American cities, sympathetic American reformers seized on any means available to alleviate their poverty and inculcate the values of self-government. Postal communication was no exception. Reformers frequently noted the disparity in rates between inland and overseas postage while appealing to the interests of those transplanted. By the early 1850s, sending a letter nearly anywhere in America cost 3 cents; postage over the same distance by sea cost eight times as much. With immigrants pouring in from Europe, and personal letters comprising three-quarters of all traffic, reformers insisted that reduced rates would not only strengthen what one editorial called the ‘exercise of social affections’, whose costs then burdened ‘the most indigent classes of our community’, but would lead to such an increase in correspondence that the volume would more than pay for itself.Footnote 64 By 1852, immigration meant that fully 40% of American mail to Britain was actually postmarked for Ireland. Burritt therefore saw Irish immigrants as a vast pool of potential supporters. ‘We have much to gain and nothing to lose by adopting it’, observed the US Minister to the Court of St James, Abbott Lawrence:
Our security for the preservation of our popular institutions rests upon the enlightenment of the people, and the extension of knowledge. Perhaps nothing does more to diffuse that knowledge than the constant correspondence which takes place among the people of the United States; and were it extended to these Islands a corresponding advantage would be gained, as well as a broader foundation laid for the maintenance of amicable and happy relations between the two Governments.
Of course, it did not take a former importer and textile magnate such as Lawrence to recognize that cheap postage promised benefits not only to immigrants but also to American commercial interests. Unsurprisingly, the leading American supporters of cheaper postage were merchants who cared less about world peace and more about growing export markets to Ireland, England, or anywhere profitable, as well as about achieving at least parity with Britain in ease of reaching potential consumers in Europe, South America, and the Far East.Footnote 65
Those American commercial interests would learn more when Burritt returned to the US in the autumn of 1853. In Boston he launched his campaign in Faneuil Hall, whose din, he wrote, ‘was like speaking to Niagara’. Mayor Benjamin Seaver presided, flanked by Josiah Quincy and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.Footnote 66 The meeting's storied location and assortment of local dignitaries drew coverage in the national press, and attendees adopted a memorial to Congress cataloguing those oppressed by burdensome postal rates: merchants and their customers; scientists, authors, and missionaries; and ‘especially … the millions of immigrants, with many of whom it virtually sunders the dearest relations of life’.Footnote 67 Burritt next travelled to New York, where he visited the famed minister Henry Ward Beecher. Helped by the abolitionist and silk merchant Lewis Tappan, Beecher arranged a public meeting in Broadway's grand Tabernacle a few days later. Aside from Burritt, the Tabernacle speakers included Tappan, the former New Hampshire Senator John P. Hale, and the city's mayor and shipbuilder, Jacob Westervelt.Footnote 68
Burritt next spent three months in Washington, where his articles in the city's prominent newspapers kept up a steady drumbeat of agitation.Footnote 69 He lobbied congressmen and strategized with Charles Sumner and Thomas Jefferson Rusk, the powerful Texas Senator who chaired the Senate's Post Office Committee. Both men supported Cheap Ocean Postage (Sumner claimed that ‘Such a reform will be a true step on the road to universal international peace’), and Rusk accepted Burritt's offer to compose a report for his committee.Footnote 70 Meeting with Stephen Douglas, Burritt learned that the Illinois Senator ‘had watched the movement from the beginning; that while in Europe he saw and felt that cheap Ocean Postage would be the greatest agency for indoctrinating and enlightening the masses of the people, especially in Germany, where our newspapers could not be read’.Footnote 71 Douglas's reference to newspapers is telling; as the American press faced prohibitive expenses sending its papers to most of the world, Americans worried that commercial rivals such as Britain would better cultivate trade, or worse, that foreign papers would poison international sentiment against the US, while Americans had no voice to counter false claims. The influential Whig paper the Albany Journal declaimed that, aside from settling the Nebraska issue, ‘there is no other which demands more of its especial attention’ than cheap ocean postage.Footnote 72 In March, Burritt dined with President Pierce at the White House.Footnote 73
Nevertheless, despite promises of support from both Democrats and Whigs (and especially the Free Soiler Charles Sumner), no legislation was forthcoming. In part, sectional animosities made politicians wary of the politics of international postage. As early as 1852, some southern politicians began to conclude that government spending on mail steam subsidies benefited small cabals of northern investors while burdening southern merchants with unjustifiable expenses. ‘I am opposed openly and forever to any system which would plunder one half of my country for the emolument of the other’, thundered the Kentucky Democratic congressman John C. Breckinridge during a debate over additional payments to the Collins Line of mail steamers. For him, the fact that the federal government had adopted a program of supporting steam lines that he considered monopolistic was bad enough; that southern merchants had to pay a premium (in postage rates and tariff duties) for these principally northern monopolists was even worse.Footnote 74
Yet in 1854, merchants themselves, even in the south, remained open to Burritt's postage plan. Eventually concluding that his Washington labours had accomplished all that they could, Burritt embarked on a circuit campaign. He first visited Richmond, where twenty-five leading merchants hurried to sign his memorial.Footnote 75 Next came Petersburg, then Weldon, North Carolina. There, he arrived in time to address a state convention, where representatives from across the state signed his petition and promised to draft their own upon returning home.Footnote 76 Everywhere the reception was similar: Burritt connected with leading editors, merchants, lawyers, and politicians; within a few days, a petition with scores or hundreds of signatures was sent to Congress.Footnote 77 From Amesbury, Massachusetts, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier lent his support.Footnote 78 In Oberlin, the evangelist and college president Charles Grandison Finney signed a petition, along with more than half the school's regular faculty. In Columbia, South Carolina, the jurist, political philosopher, and future author of America's first laws of war, Francis Lieber, himself an immigrant, scribbled into the margins of a Burritt petition that he not only considered ‘the reduction of ocean postage feasible, but of the first importance to peace, and advancing civilization’.Footnote 79 Petitions flowed into Washington from every major city – Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland – and dozens of small towns such as Vassalboro, Maine and Milledgeville, Georgia. The records of Congress contain over one hundred individual petitions with thousands of signatures.Footnote 80 Additionally, between 1854 and 1855, the legislatures of Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Iowa, and California passed their own resolutions in support of Ocean Penny Postage.Footnote 81
Ben Franklin's ghost, however, had promised Ocean Penny Postage now or never. It turned out that neither alternative quite captured how postal rates would develop. In the short term, and despite a tremendous outpouring of popular support, Burritt's own campaign failed. Neither the US nor Britain reduced international postal rates. One Burritt biographer claims that he could not produce a sustained movement, but the American interest in postal rate reform, both domestic and international, long outlasted his particular efforts. Just two years after his trek across the country, in 1856, New York merchants organized a Postal Reform Committee that renewed calls to reduce ocean postage within a broader campaign that embraced uniform postage rates, urban free letter delivery, the abolishment of the franking privilege, and other demands to stimulate domestic and international correspondence. Leather-bound and gilded, their petition to Congress totalled nearly 900 pages and gathered over 10,000 signatures from the city alone. Charles Sumner continued to press the issue in the Senate until at least 1870.Footnote 82
By then, pressure for international postal rate reductions had begun to take hold. At the close of the Civil War, sending a letter from the United States to Great Britain cost 24 cents, unchanged since the late 1840s. Within a decade, however, this rate plummeted. After the Cunard Line lost its lucrative contract to carry transatlantic mails in 1867 and more competition prevailed in postal conveyance, rates between the United States and Britain were halved to 12 cents in 1868 and halved again to 6 cents in 1870. Postage for both letters and newspapers to other countries fell as well, albeit at uneven rates, until the General Postal Union treaty took effect in 1875. The union set rates between all contracting countries, including the US, Britain, France, Germany, Egypt, and Turkey, at the historically low cost of 5 cents. It was not quite penny postage, but it was very close. At Burritt's death in 1879, his obituary attributed the development of the postal union to his pioneering campaigning thirty years earlier.Footnote 83
In his own time, Burritt's challenge was not a lack of popular support but the growing intractability of sectional politics in the 1850s. His campaign must be seen as part of a larger debate about the application of steam power to international postal communication: would steam be for national or humanitarian benefit? For war or for peace? For commerce and brotherhood or for empire and colonialism? In the 1850s, answers to these questions grew increasingly tangled with sectionalism as southern states believed that the benefits of existing government-subsidized steam communication fell disproportionately in the north. Further aid judged to benefit northern commerce proved increasingly impossible. Once again, fractious domestic politics thwarted efforts to bring American leadership to international postal connection and reform.Footnote 84
Conclusion
In May and June 1863, representatives of fifteen states gathered in Paris for the world's first international postal conference. Postal administrators from Prussia, Austria, Britain, France, and even the Sandwich Islands poured into the ancient Hôtel des Postes, gathering to discuss ways to simplify the transit of news and correspondence. The organizer was the American representative, John A. Kasson, a man who had begun planning the conference as Assistant Postmaster General with charge over foreign mail, a position that made him keenly aware of the obstacles to global postal exchange. He was also a product of the preceding two decades of utopian postal reform campaigns spearheaded by people such as Elihu Burritt. Kasson had resided in Worcester, Massachusetts, just as Burritt, then another resident, began his prominent reform movement. Kasson's biographer speculates, perhaps fancifully but certainly plausibly, that he must have spent years reading accounts of Burritt's activities in England and hearing the approbation of leading Massachusetts politicians such as Charles Sumner and Edward Everett. More concretely, Kasson served as delegate to the 1848 Free Soil Convention in Buffalo that enthusiastically placed cheap postage on its official campaign platform. Yet as a mid-century American, he was hardly exceptional. ‘Improvement’ through the inexpensive flow of information had become a widely accepted belief. This belief would gradually yield concrete accomplishments, as the 1863 conference produced a set of principles for international postal exchange that would be expanded into a formal international organization following another conference in Bern in 1874.Footnote 85
This belief would prove tenacious, and today the language of Burritt's Ocean Penny Postage campaign sounds remarkably familiar. Simply replace ‘transatlantic post’ with ‘the Internet’ to find the same kind of technological utopianism in contemporary claims. Take Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian Google executive who used Facebook to coordinate early protests in Tahrir Square in 2011. Ghonim's arrest and detention helped galvanize protesters in Cairo. In a CNN interview after his release, he described how he saw the path to freedom: “If you want to free a society, just give them Internet access. Because people … are going to all go out and see and hear the unbiased media, see the truth about … other nations and their own nation. And they're going to be able to communicate and collaborate together.’Footnote 86 It is a powerful, hopeful, and compelling vision that links the contemporary communications technology of the Internet with a free society and global cooperation. The faith in global communications lying behind Ghonim's statement in the early twenty-first century can be located in the nineteenth century of Elihu Burritt and the Ebony Line to Liberia.
This new utopian idea took hold in the mid nineteenth century because of a confluence of pressures for expanding commerce, new policies for government subsidies for mail steamships, the new technology of ocean-going steamships themselves, and the resurgence of existing social movements. But there is another aspect of the story that deserves further investigation. These two campaigns also reflect complementary facets in the historical formation of the nation-state against the backdrop of globalization in the nineteenth century. Burritt's campaign sought to raise each state to an equal status on the world stage, binding them together as peaceful, coequal units and preventing real imbalances of power from threatening international harmony and security. The Ebony Line, in contrast, sought racial homogenization of the United States, separating out those residents who prevented the American state from looking exclusively like the American nation. Like nationalists throughout the globe in the mid and late nineteenth century, Ebony Line supporters believed that peace would come not from the increased commingling of peoples but from greater separation, or at least from greater physical separation alongside better communications across borders. In both cases, the key element of effecting change, whether between states or within them, was found in an embrace of a new communication network for the world. These two nearly simultaneous histories suggest that the evolving concept of the nation-state deserves further investigation as an element at the conjuncture of global communications and social reform.Footnote 87
Whatever the role of the idea of the state, tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands believed that cheap ocean postage could unite the world in the bonds of friendship and that well-subsidized steam communication with Africa would somehow use technology to ‘solve’ the problem of American slavery. These were reasonable conclusions for a generation that witnessed such extraordinary transformations in the speed and reliability of global information. Through new machines and postal policies, for the first time in history, transatlantic communication was measured in weeks not months. Communication from the Far East to New York was measured in months not years. That later generations could attribute such utopian hopes to new communications technologies, however, seems more foolish than optimistic. Reductions in domestic postage rates did not prevent the deaths of 600,000 soldiers during the American Civil War. Telegraphy did not prevent the First World War. Radio did not save the world from the carnage of the Second World War. And the Internet by itself will not produce liberal democracies. Empathy, trust, and cooperation between nations could not be imposed by a new communications technology any more than democracy can be ensured with written constitutions alone. Ben Franklin's ghost probably could have communicated that.
Peter Shulman is Assistant Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. He studies technology, science, and American politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special interests in the history of energy, environmental history, communication and transportation history, and the history of American foreign relations.
