The American Postal Service

The American Postal Service, universally called the Post Office, is the postal administration of the United Kingdom of America. It was founded in 1785 by Benjamin Franklin in the Realm’s first ministry, under a clause of the Charter of Union that gives Parliament authority over the post, and it is one of the two or three oldest continuously operating institutions of the Realm’s federal government.

Three things about it are unusual and all three are deliberate.

The first is that it is not Royal. In a Realm whose Constabulary, armed forces, air force, navy, supreme court and parks system all carry the word, the post does not, and its absence was a decision rather than an oversight. Franklin’s position, argued at the founding and never successfully reversed, was that the post belongs to the people who use it rather than to the Crown that guarantees it, and that an institution whose whole function is to carry what private persons say to one another should not be named after the state.

The second is that it is a Crown corporation and a department of state at the same time, which no other body in the Realm is, and which produces a constitutional arrangement that lawyers describe as untidy and postal officers describe as the reason the thing works.

The third is that the mail may never be opened. Not on a warrant, not by a court, not by the Constabulary, and not in an emergency. The prohibition is statutory, it is absolute, it dates from a scandal during the Civil War, and it has survived every subsequent occasion on which a government might have wished otherwise, including 2006. The Realm operates a signals directorate that reads a very great deal and a postal service that may not read anything, and the gap between the two is noticed, discussed, and used.

The Post Office loses money, is expected to, and is voted a subsidy every year without much argument. It carries a letter to any address in the Realm for the same price, from a city street to a village in the Kingdom of Alaska reached by float plane. It issues passports, runs a savings bank, and carries the ballots by which the Realm votes. It is among the largest civilian employers in the country, its union is among the strongest, and when that union strikes the letters still arrive and nobody is charged for anything.

The name

Why it is not Royal

The question is asked constantly and the answer is on the record, because Franklin made it in the Commons.

His argument was that the great offices of state carry the Crown’s name because they exercise the Crown’s authority: the Constabulary keeps the King’s peace, the forces are commissioned by him, the courts administer his justice. The post exercises no authority at all. It carries what one private person has chosen to say to another, it is not entitled to know what that is, and it exists to serve people rather than to act upon them. To style it Royal would be to attach the Crown’s name to a bag of other people’s letters.

The second argument was practical and characteristically his. A post that is understood as the Crown’s post invites the belief that the Crown may read it, and a post that is believed to be readable will not be used for anything that matters. The institution’s usefulness depends on being trusted, its trustworthiness cannot be commanded, and the name is part of what people go on when they decide whether to write something down.

Proposals to add the word have been made in most generations and have never carried. The most recent, in the 1950s, was defeated in the Commons by a majority that included the whole of the then Conservative opposition, which is the sort of thing that happens when a proposal is felt to be in bad taste rather than merely wrong.

The eagle without a crown

The doctrine is stated, without a word, in the institution’s own device.

The eagle of the United Kingdom of America is crowned. It stands on the national flag, on the arms, on the seals of the departments and over the doors of the courts, and the crown above its head is what makes it the Realm’s eagle rather than merely a bird.

The Post Office’s eagle has no crown. Its head is bare, it grips a sealed envelope in both talons, and it is the only eagle in the Realm’s public heraldry that goes uncrowned.

The device is not old. It was adopted in the twentieth century, when the corporation regularised a collection of inherited marks, and the herald who drew it was asked whether the omission was an error. The reply, which is quoted in the Post Office’s own histories and has never been improved upon, was that the eagle carries what has been entrusted to it and does not carry the Crown, because the letter in its claws does not belong to the King.

Objections were raised at the time on the ground that an uncrowned eagle in a Crown realm looks like an oversight or, worse, like a statement. It is a statement. The Realm decided it could live with it.

The Post Office

Nobody says American Postal Service. The institution is the Post Office in every register from parliamentary debate to ordinary speech, the formal name appears on the estimates, on the letterheads and on essentially nothing else, and postal officers use the short form among themselves.

A person goes to the post office, meaning the building, and works for the Post Office, meaning the institution, and the Realm has never found this ambiguous.

Constitutional character

Two bodies in one

The Post Office is a Crown corporation and a department of state simultaneously, and the arrangement is genuinely unusual rather than merely a matter of description.

The corporation owns the estate, the vehicles, the aircraft contracts, the sorting plant and the counters. It employs the staff. It holds the postal monopoly and the universal service obligation as statutory duties owed to the public rather than as instructions from a minister. It has a board, it publishes accounts, and it can be sued.

The department holds the policy, the estimates, the legislative programme and the Realm’s international postal obligations. It is a department like any other, it answers questions in the Commons, its expenditure is voted, and its officials are civil servants of the ordinary kind.

The Postmaster-General is the head of both. He sits in Cabinet as the minister of the department and he is ex officio chairman of the corporation, and the whole constitutional oddity of the institution consists in one person holding those two offices at once.

Why it is built that way

The reason is a distinction the Realm has never been willing to collapse.

The post has to be run at arm’s length from the government of the day, because a ministry that could direct the post could direct what the Realm reads, and because a service that must reach every address regardless of profit cannot be reorganised every time the Treasury has a difficult year. That argues for a corporation.

But the post also has to be answerable, because it holds a monopoly, spends public money, loses it deliberately, and touches every citizen. A corporation with no minister is a body nobody can question. That argues for a department.

The Realm declined to choose and built both, and the join is the Postmaster-General. He is the minister the Commons can question and the chairman the board must obey, and the arrangement works because he cannot use either office to escape the other.

Which half a postal worker belongs to

The corporation, and this matters more than it sounds. Postal workers are employees of a Crown corporation rather than civil servants, which is why they may lawfully strike, and why their union bargains rather than petitions. The departmental staff, who are far fewer, are civil servants and may not.

The Realm’s civil service unions have raised the anomaly repeatedly. It has never been resolved because resolving it in either direction would mean either taking the right to strike from the largest industrial workforce in federal employment or extending it to the civil service, and no ministry has wanted either fight.

The Postmaster-General

The office is held by a member of Parliament, sits in Cabinet, and ranks in the second tier of ministerial appointments: below the great offices, above most of the rest, and higher than an outsider would expect.

Its holders have generally been either senior figures near the end of a career or administrators of the unglamorous, competent sort, and the office has produced very few Prime Ministers. It is not a stepping stone. It is a post given to somebody a ministry trusts with a large budget and a great deal of unexciting responsibility.

The Commons vote

The Postmaster-General is the only member of the Realm’s Cabinet whose appointment requires a resolution of the House of Commons.

Every other minister is commissioned by the Governor-General on the Prime Minister’s advice and that is the end of it. The Postmaster-General is commissioned in the same way and cannot take up the chairmanship of the corporation until the Commons has resolved that he may.

The vote dates from the founding rather than from any later scandal, and it is a condition of the corporation’s independence rather than a check on the ministry. The reasoning is that a person who is simultaneously a minister of the Crown and the chairman of a body that must be insulated from ministers holds an obvious conflict, and that the only thing capable of legitimising it is the direct assent of the chamber to which both halves are ultimately answerable.

In practice the resolution passes on party lines and is treated as a formality. It has been refused twice. On both occasions the Prime Minister named somebody else within a week, and on neither occasion did the ministry fall, which is precisely what the arrangement is designed to permit: a chamber can reject the man without rejecting the government.

The Conservative objection

The Conservative and Crown Union and its predecessors opposed the arrangement for most of the nineteenth century, and the interesting thing is which half they objected to.

They did not attack the corporation. They attacked the department, and specifically the Cabinet seat. Their case was that a corporation obliged to serve every address at a loss should not have a politician at its head at all, that a Cabinet minister running a monopoly would inevitably run it for political advantage, and that the correct arrangement was a commercial body under a board with a junior minister answering for it from outside.

They lost, repeatedly, and they stopped making the argument after the air mail contract scandal of the 1930s, which demonstrated what a Postmaster-General could do and simultaneously demonstrated that a Postmaster-General in Cabinet could be destroyed by the chamber for doing it. The party’s modern position is that the institution is not to be touched, and the CCU is not among the parties that would touch it.

Foundation

The Charter clause

The post is a founding federal power. Article V.5 of the Charter of Union gives Parliament authority over “the common peace, defence, trade, navigation, public credit, the courts of the Union, customs, coinage, the post, the roads, external affairs,” and a later article repeats the enumeration.

Two consequences follow and both are load-bearing. The post is federal, exclusively, and no polity has ever had a lawful postal authority of its own. And the power is original rather than delegated, so the Post Office does not depend on any statute for its existence and could not be abolished by repealing one.

The clause pairs the post with the roads, which has led generations of students to assume the two are connected. They are not. The Realm’s roads developed under separate powers, separate departments and separate finance, and the post has never built a road. The pairing in the Charter reflects an eighteenth-century view of communication in which both were means of moving things, and nothing institutional came of it.

Before 1785

What preceded the Post Office was not a system.

The colonies carried letters by riders working under a patchwork of arrangements, some official and most not: merchants’ networks, tavern keepers who held mail for collection, ship captains, and men who rode a circuit for whatever they could charge. Reliability varied from adequate to imaginary. A letter from Boston to Charles Town might take five weeks or might not arrive, and the sender generally had no way of establishing which had happened.

The Four-Year War made this intolerable. A war fought across a continent by colonies that needed to coordinate demonstrated exactly what an unreliable post costs, and the men who emerged from it into the Charter settlement had all spent years unable to find out what was happening a hundred miles away.

Franklin’s post

Franklin came to the office with more relevant experience than anyone alive. He had spent decades as a printer thinking about how information moves, had run postal arrangements in the colonial period, and had a settled view about what a post is for.

His founding decision was that the post is infrastructure and not a revenue source, and it is the single most consequential thing anyone has ever decided about the institution. A post run for revenue charges what the traffic will bear, which means it charges most where carriage is dearest, which means it serves the frontier badly or not at all. A post run as infrastructure charges what will bind the Realm together and takes the loss.

He put post offices and routes into places that could not possibly pay for them, on the argument that a government which cannot communicate reliably with its own provinces cannot govern them, and that a Realm whose distant parts cannot hear from its centre will not remain a Realm for long. The judgement was contested at the time by people who could do arithmetic. It has never been reversed.

The post and public reason

Franklin’s postal thinking was inseparable from his thinking about the press, and the two together constitute the nearest thing the institution has to a doctrine.

His view was that a government’s authority rests on its continuing ability to justify itself publicly, that public justification requires argument to circulate, and that argument circulates on paper carried by somebody. A cheap and reliable post is therefore not a convenience but a precondition of legitimate government, because it is the physical mechanism by which a continental population is able to conduct a single conversation.

He carried preferential rates for newspapers and periodicals on exactly that reasoning, and the preference survives in modified form to this day. It is defended now in the same terms he used, which is unusual for a two-hundred-and-forty-year-old subsidy.

The universal service

One price to anywhere

The Post Office carries a letter to any address in the United Kingdom of America for the same price, and the promise is unqualified. There is no zone system for letters, no surcharge for distance, no remote-area supplement and no address the service will not attempt.

A letter posted in New Westminster to an office three streets away costs what a letter posted in Miami to a settlement on the Bering coast costs. The second journey involves rail, road, two aircraft and in some months a boat or a snow machine, and the difference is absorbed.

Reaching the far places

The far places are where the promise costs most and where the institution’s reputation was made.

Alaska is served by bush pilots under contract, flying single-engined aircraft into settlements with no runway, on schedules that bend around weather for months at a time. Some communities are supplied by boat in summer and by air in winter, some by air in summer and over ice in winter, and a few by arrangements that the Post Office describes in its own documents as seasonal and local.

The Territory of Loreto, the desert peninsula that joined the Realm in 2027, presented the newest version of the same problem and was brought inside the universal service on the day of assent, which the Post Office regarded as a point of honour and which cost it a considerable sum.

Similar arrangements serve the mountain West, the island communities, the March of Arizona and the reservations of the Indigenous nations. The Post Office’s own institutional pride rests more on these routes than on anything else it does, and its recruitment material has featured float planes for eighty years.

The money

The Post Office loses money. It is designed to, it does so every year, and Parliament votes it a subsidy.

The annual argument that a foreign observer expects to find does not really happen. Estimates are debated, the sum is examined, select committees report on efficiency and are sometimes severe, and then the money is voted, because Franklin’s doctrine is not a sentimental attachment but the settled constitutional understanding of what the institution is. A post that made money would be charging the frontier what the frontier costs, and a Realm that charged the frontier what it costs would be a different Realm.

The proposition is occasionally tested by somebody. It has never survived contact with a member representing a rural constituency, of whom there are a great many, in all six parties.

Stamps

The first issues

The Realm’s first adhesive stamps were issued in the 1840s, following the British invention, and the first two bore Franklin and Washington: the man who built the post and the man who was the Realm’s first Governor-General.

The choice was made quickly and has never been regretted. It set the pattern that American stamps commemorate the Realm’s own people and its own history, and it established at the outset that the head on the stamp would not be the head on the coins.

The Realm’s name

American stamps carry the name of the Realm. They always have.

This distinguishes them from British stamps, which carry no country name at all, the sovereign’s head serving as identification because Britain invented the postage stamp and was for a time the only country that had one. The Realm, sharing that sovereign, could have followed the practice and deliberately did not, on the ground that a stamp is a receipt for a public service and ought to say which public issued it.

The practical consequence is that the two realms’ stamps are immediately distinguishable, which is convenient, and the symbolic consequence is that the Realm’s mail announces the Realm rather than the Crown, which is the point.

The rule against the living

No living person may appear on an American stamp, except the monarch.

The rule is a regulation of the corporation rather than a statute, it dates from the nineteenth century, and it exists for the ordinary reason: a living person can be embarrassed, can turn out badly, and can be seen to have been chosen. The exception for the monarch is there because a hereditary sovereign is not a person who was chosen and cannot become an embarrassment in the relevant sense, and because every other realm of the Crown puts him on its stamps.

The permission never used

The Post Office has never once put the monarch on a stamp.

The permission has existed for the whole of the modern institution’s life. Every Postmaster-General since has had it available, none has exercised it, no ministry has instructed one to, and no monarch has ever asked. Six sovereigns have reigned over the Realm since the rule was written and not one of them appears on its postage.

The reasons given, when the question is raised, are Franklin’s. The stamp is the receipt the public gets for a public service; the post is not the Crown’s; and the Realm’s letters carry the Realm’s name. What is striking is that none of this is compelled. The rule permits it, and it has simply never been done, which makes the restraint an institutional habit rather than a legal fact.

The Realm’s constitutional writers are fond of the example and put it alongside the reserve powers: an authority that exists, is complete, is available, and is not used, and which is more eloquent unused than it would be exercised.

Who chooses

The Postmaster-General chooses the stamps. Personally, on the advice of a standing committee whose recommendations he is not obliged to follow, and the decision is his alone.

It is the most visible discretion attached to the office and the one that generates the most correspondence. Every Postmaster-General discovers within a month that a large number of people care intensely about it, that they write letters, and that some of them are members of the House.

Collecting

Philately is a national habit in the Realm and has been since the nineteenth century.

The collecting culture is broad rather than rarefied: school clubs, exchange circles, county societies, dealers in most towns of any size, and a substantial trade press. The Post Office cultivates it deliberately, since a stamp bought and put in an album is revenue for a service never rendered, and the commemorative programme is designed with collectors in mind and has been for a century.

The most valuable American rarities are nineteenth-century errors of the ordinary kind, an inverted centre and a colour misprint among them, and the Realm’s collectors argue about their relative standing with an intensity that outsiders find difficult to account for.

The John Brown stamp

There is one, and getting it took forty years.

Proposals to commemorate John Brown were made in every decade from the 1920s and were refused by successive Postmasters-General on grounds that were never quite stated in full. The objections were real and were not trivial: Brown was a convicted felon whose convictions were never quashed, he had directed the killing of five men at Pottawatomie without charge or hearing, and the first person to die in his raid was Heyward Shepherd, a free Black railway worker with nothing to do with the enforcement of slavery. A commemorative stamp is an unambiguous honour and there was a serious question whether the Realm could confer one.

The stamp was issued in the 1970s, after a campaign that ran for years and that was joined by descendants of the raiders, by Black civic organisations, by a number of members and eventually by two former Postmasters-General who had themselves refused it. The design shows Brown as the portrait of his last years shows him, an old man in worn civilian clothes among books and letters, and it does not show the raid.

The row was substantial. It was conducted mostly in newspapers and in the Commons rather than through any formal process, since the choice was the Postmaster-General’s alone and he could simply do it. He did, and the Realm argued about it for a year, and the stamp is now unremarkable.

It remains the only occasion on which the Post Office’s stamp discretion became a national political question, and it is the standing example of why that discretion is left with one person who can be held responsible for it.

Slavery and the mail

The abolitionist mail crisis

In the 1830s the slaveholding polities tried to stop antislavery matter travelling through the post, and failed.

The attempt was organised and was not merely local. Abolitionist societies had begun a campaign of sending pamphlets, newspapers and tracts through the mail into the southern polities in very large numbers, on the accurate calculation that the post was the one channel into those polities that polity law could not close. Mobs seized and burned mail. Polity legislatures passed statutes making the circulation of antislavery matter an offence. Postmasters in several southern towns announced that they would not deliver it, and some of them asked the Postmaster-General to authorise them formally.

He refused, and the refusal is one of the founding acts of the modern institution.

The reasoning was jurisdictional rather than moral, and it was unanswerable. The post is a power of Parliament under the Charter. A polity statute cannot bind a federal officer in the performance of a federal duty. A postmaster who withholds mail because a polity legislature has told him to has substituted a polity’s law for the Realm’s and abandoned his office. And the Post Office is not entitled to know what is in a letter, so it cannot possibly be entitled to decline to carry it on the basis of what it contains.

The southern legislatures could do nothing about it. They could and did prosecute recipients under their own laws, which was within their competence and which they used. What they could not do was reach into the mail stream, and the Realm’s own account has always held that the 1830s crisis is where the inviolability principle was first stated, thirty years before the statute that made it absolute.

The postmaster who was also a station

The most quoted illustration of what the office actually was belongs to a man who later became notorious for something else.

John Brown served as postmaster at Richmond in Pennsylvania in the 1820s and 1830s, while simultaneously running a station on the escape routes out of slavery. The office was modest, unpaid beyond a small commission, and required only reliability. It also placed him at the point where information, commerce and public trust met in a small town, embedded his family in local networks, and gave him the standing of a man the federal government had trusted with other people’s letters.

The Realm’s postal histories return to this repeatedly, and not to make Brown respectable. The point they draw is about the office rather than the man: that the postmastership was held by ordinary people in ordinary places, that its whole content was trustworthiness, and that a service composed of several thousand such people could reach into every corner of the Realm precisely because it asked so little and required so much.

The Civil War

Delivery continued

The most remarkable fact about the Post Office in the Civil War is that it went on delivering.

Service to the rebel polities was never withdrawn. Mail addressed to places in rebellion was carried as far as the Realm’s authority ran and, where it could be got further, was got further. The Post Office’s position, which was the Realm’s position, was that no polity had left the Union, that the people living in the rebel polities remained subjects of the Crown entitled to the ordinary services of the Realm, and that a government which stopped carrying letters to its own people because some of them were in rebellion would have conceded exactly the proposition it was fighting to deny.

Cutting the rebel polities off was never seriously proposed. It is not clear from the record that anyone raised it at all, which the Realm’s historians find more telling than a debate would have been.

The rebel post

The rebel state ran a post of its own, issued its own stamps and appointed its own postmasters, most of whom were the same people who had been federal postmasters the year before.

The Realm never recognised the rebel stamps and never made an agreement of any kind with the rebel post, since recognising its stamps would have been recognising it. What the Post Office did instead was simply carry what reached it. A letter arriving in loyal territory bearing rebel postage was not returned, was not destroyed and was not treated as contraband. It was delivered, and the postage was disregarded on the ground that the addressee had done nothing wrong and that the Post Office’s business was the letter rather than the label on it.

The arrangement was never written down as policy, and the surviving instructions to postmasters deal with it in a sentence or two of the most deliberately unspecific prose in the institution’s archive.

The opening

And then the Post Office opened the mail, which is the worst thing it has ever done.

It began in the border counties, on military authority, and it began with a defensible object. Rebel sympathisers in Maryland and the loyal parts of Virginia were corresponding with the rebellion, the correspondence moved by post, and officers commanding in those districts began detaining and reading letters in search of it. Nobody at the top authorised this in writing. Nobody stopped it either.

It spread, as such things do. Within a year the practice had extended beyond the border counties, beyond suspected correspondence with the rebellion, and beyond the military. What a Commons select committee established after the war, from the Post Office’s own records, was that letters had been opened on the requests of officers with no particular grounds, of departments with no business in the matter, and in a number of documented cases of political figures who wanted to know what their opponents were saying. The reading of a member’s correspondence during the conscription debates was the item that ended several careers.

The volume was never large as a proportion of the mail. That was not the point. What the committee reported, in a passage that is still quoted, was that a service whose entire value rests on the certainty that it does not read what it carries had been discovered reading it, and that the certainty once broken could not be restored by a promise to be more careful.

The statute

Parliament’s answer was the Inviolability of the Mails Act, and it is one of the shortest important statutes in the Realm’s law.

It provides that a postal packet in the course of transmission may not be opened, read, copied or its contents disclosed, by any person, on any authority. It provides no exception. It does not permit opening on a warrant, on a judicial order, on the certificate of a minister, or in an emergency, and the drafting is explicit that no other statute is to be read as creating an exception unless it says so expressly, which none has.

It makes opening a criminal offence, and it makes it an offence for a public officer to procure or request it, which is the clause the select committee’s findings produced and which is aimed squarely at the people who had asked rather than at the clerks who had complied.

The Act was passed in the Reconstruction Parliament alongside the American Rights Act, and the two are frequently discussed together. They are not the same thing and the difference matters: the Rights Act bound the federal government and not the polities, whereas the Mails Act binds everybody, because the post is exclusively federal and a polity has no postal jurisdiction to be exempted from. It is one of the very few guarantees of the 1860s that reached every county in the Realm from the day it passed.

The inviolability of the mail

The rule

A letter in the Realm’s post cannot lawfully be opened by anybody.

Not by the Post Office. Not by the Royal American Constabulary. Not on the warrant of a judge, because no judge has power to issue one. Not by the Royal American Signals Directorate, whose statute is drafted around the Mails Act rather than through it. Not by a minister, not by the Cabinet, and not under the emergency powers, which do not touch it.

The rule applies to the packet in the course of transmission, which is the period from the moment it enters the Post Office’s custody to the moment it is delivered. Before and after, ordinary law applies: a letter on a desk may be seized under a warrant like anything else on the desk, and a prisoner’s correspondence may be read under the terms of the custody, which is why Brown’s prison letters were censored without the Mails Act being engaged. The protection attaches to the mail stream rather than to the paper.

What may be done instead

The Post Office may detain a packet. It may weigh it, X-ray it, pass it through detection equipment, refuse to carry it, return it to the sender, and in extremity destroy it unopened.

What it may not do is find out what it says. A suspicious packet is a packet that may be stopped and may be destroyed, and the Realm has settled on the position that a service which may destroy a letter it fears but may not read a letter it is curious about has the balance in approximately the right place.

The Signals Directorate, and the letter

The contrast with the Realm’s electronic surveillance is stark, is entirely deliberate on nobody’s part, and is one of the more discussed features of modern American public life.

The Royal American Signals Directorate, created after May Day in 2006, collects and analyses electronic communication at a scale that the Realm has argued about ever since and that the American Rights Consolidation Act 2008 brought inside a framework of warrants, courts and sunsets rather than prohibiting. Everything electronic is, in principle and subject to law, reachable.

Nothing in the post is reachable at all.

The result is that the Realm contains a communications channel that is slow, expensive, inconvenient, and absolutely private, and people who need the last of those use it. Lawyers use it. Journalists and their sources use it. People making complaints about public authorities use it, and so do people the authorities are interested in. The Post Office does not advertise this and does not need to.

Whether the gap is a triumph of the Realm’s constitutional practice or an accident of drafting from 1866 is argued both ways. What is agreed is that no government has been willing to close it, and the reason is that closing it would require Parliament to vote, in public, to permit the opening of letters, which no ministry has been able to imagine surviving.

What was never proposed

The most striking thing about the rule is what did not happen after 2006.

Four coordinated attacks killed more than two thousand people. The security settlement that followed created a signals directorate, extended surveillance, built watch lists and altered the relationship between the citizen and the state more than any measure since the Rights Act.

Nobody proposed an exception to the Mails Act. Not in Cabinet, not in the emergency legislation, not in the Commons, and not in the years of argument that followed. The Realm’s security review considered the mail as a vector, recommended detection measures, and did not raise the possibility of reading. It is the one thing the settlement left entirely alone, and postal officers regard that as the institution’s proudest fact.

Westward

The Pony Express

The Pony Express is the most famous thing the Realm’s postal history contains and it was not the Post Office.

It was a private relay of riders and stations, run under contract across the western distances before the telegraph and the railway closed them, and it operated for a little under two years. It was fast, it was extraordinarily expensive, it lost its backers a great deal of money, and it was obsolete within months of the wire reaching the far side.

Its place in the Realm’s imagination is out of all proportion to its traffic, and the Post Office has made no attempt whatever to correct this. Riders appear on the stamps, on the recruiting material and on the sides of vehicles. The institution’s own historians point out, in the tone of people who have given up, that the Express carried a trivial quantity of mail at ruinous cost for nineteen months and that the ordinary contract coaches carried more in a week.

Rural free delivery

Until the end of the nineteenth century a farmer collected his mail. Free delivery ran in the towns and stopped at the edge of them, and everyone beyond had to travel to an office, which in much of the Realm meant a day.

Rural free delivery was introduced in the 1890s after a long campaign, was resisted on cost, and transformed the countryside more than any other single act of the federal government in that century.

Its second-order effects were larger than its first. A farm receiving a daily newspaper is a farm connected to national argument. A farm receiving mail-order catalogues buys from a continental market rather than from the one store within reach, which broke a great many local monopolies and made a great many people angry. And a route that a postal carrier had to drive every day was a route that had to be passable every day, so rural free delivery generated pressure for road improvement across the Realm at exactly the moment the motor vehicle arrived.

The Post Office did not build the roads. It made them politically unavoidable, which is the closest the Charter’s pairing of the post and the roads has ever come to meaning anything.

The wires

The telegraph attempt

The Post Office tried to take the telegraph and failed, which is the largest institutional defeat in its history.

The proposal, made in the 1870s in explicit imitation of the British nationalisation of 1870, was that the telegraph was a communications network of exactly the kind the Charter’s postal power contemplated, that private companies were charging what the traffic would bear in precisely the way Franklin’s doctrine forbade, and that the Realm’s remote districts were being served badly or not at all for the ordinary reason.

The argument was strong. It was defeated by a combination of the telegraph companies, who were wealthy and well represented, a Commons that had recently watched the Post Office’s conduct examined by a select committee over the mail openings and was not disposed to enlarge it, and a legal opinion holding that the postal power extended to the carriage of physical packets and not to electrical transmission.

The opinion was probably wrong and was never tested, because the ministry withdrew rather than lose a division.

What the failure cost

A great deal, and the Post Office has never stopped saying so.

The Realm’s telecommunications developed privately, on commercial terms, with the consequences that Franklin had predicted for the post and that the post had avoided: differential pricing, poor service to remote districts, and a network shaped by what paid rather than by what connected the Realm. Every subsequent argument about rural telephone service, rural broadband and the universal availability of electronic communication has been conducted in the shadow of the 1870s decision, and the Post Office’s institutional view, expressed with some satisfaction, is that the Realm has spent a century and a half solving by regulation a problem it could have solved by ownership.

The telephone

The Post Office did not take the telephone either, and after the telegraph defeat it did not try. The question was raised, the precedent was pointed at, and nobody pursued it.

Money and the counter

The Postal Savings Bank

The Postal Savings Bank was established in the nineteenth century and still operates, which distinguishes it from most of its foreign counterparts.

Its founding purpose was the ordinary one: to give ordinary people a safe place for small savings in a Realm where commercial banks were unwilling to hold small accounts, were concentrated in the cities, and periodically failed. A post office existed in every parish, was already trusted with letters, and was backed by the Realm.

It became the working population’s bank for the better part of a century and it acquired a second and larger significance in the former rebel polities. A Black family in a county where the local bank would not open an account for them could open one at the post office, because the post office was federal, and federal institutions could not refuse them. A great many of the institutions Black Virginia and its equivalents built between 1866 and 1890 began with money that had been accumulated in postal accounts because there was nowhere else to put it.

The Bank was pared back in the second half of the twentieth century as commercial banking became general, and proposals to close it have been made and defeated. It survives as a small, deliberately simple institution offering plain savings accounts at modest rates to about two million people, a disproportionate number of whom live in places where it is still the only deposit-taking institution within an hour’s drive.

Passports

The Realm issues passports through the Post Office, and has for as long as the modern passport has existed.

The application is made at a designated office, of which there are several in every polity and at least one in every substantial town. A counter officer checks the applicant’s documents and identity, witnesses the application, and forwards it to the issuing authority, which decides. The postmaster does not issue the passport and has no discretion about it; what he does is verify that the person in front of him is who the papers say and that the papers are what they appear to be.

The arrangement exists because the Post Office is the only federal institution with a counter in every community, and it has the effect that the Realm’s identity documents are obtained from the same building as its stamps, by ordinary people, in an ordinary queue.

It was examined after May Day, since an identity-verification function distributed across several thousand lightly supervised counters is exactly the sort of thing a security review looks at. The review tightened the training, the record-keeping and the audit, and left the arrangement in place, on the reasoning that consolidating passport applications into a small number of secure centres would put them out of reach of the people least able to travel to one.

The rest of the counter

The counter also sells money orders, pays certain pensions and benefits in cash to people who want them that way, accepts a range of federal and polity forms, sells the licences that various authorities have found it convenient to sell there, and holds mail for collection.

The accumulation is untidy and was never designed. It happened because the Post Office was there, and the practical consequence is that for a substantial minority of the Realm’s population the post office is the place where a citizen meets the federal government, and the only one.

The air mail

Flying the mail

The Post Office flew the mail itself before it contracted the work out, which is the sequence most postal administrations followed and which matters here because of what came afterwards.

The early service was experimental, then routine, then extensive: a transcontinental route with lighted beacons across the mountain sections, aircraft the Post Office owned, and pilots the Post Office employed. The mortality was severe. Flying at night in the 1920s over terrain in weather with the instruments then available killed a great many of the men who did it, and the Post Office’s own service is the origin of the Realm’s institutional understanding that carrying the mail by air is a thing people die doing.

The service was handed to commercial contractors in the middle 1920s on the reasoning that the Post Office had proved the route and that the airlines could operate it more cheaply. The Realm’s entire airline industry was built on those contracts. Companies were founded to bid for them, their networks were laid out to serve them, and the passenger business began as a sideline on aircraft that were flying anyway.

The contracts

By the late 1920s the Realm’s domestic aviation was several dozen small operators flying mail under federal contract, most of them undercapitalised and many of them barely airlines. A mail contract was a guaranteed revenue stream and the aircraft were incidental to it, which is a description of an industry waiting for a scandal.

The scandal

In the early 1930s it emerged that the federal air mail contracts had been carved up between the large holding companies at a series of meetings from which the smaller operators had been excluded, with the knowledge and participation of the responsible minister.

The responsible minister was the Postmaster-General. The meetings were held on his authority, in his department, and the allocation of routes that emerged from them was substantially the allocation he then awarded. His defence, which was not frivolous, was that the industry was chaotic, undercapitalised and dangerous, that consolidation into a small number of financially solid operators was in the public interest, and that a competitive tender would have produced the cheapest bidders rather than the safest ones.

The chamber did not accept it. He resigned, was pursued through a select committee, and was prosecuted, and the proceedings established the details that made the affair unforgivable rather than merely questionable: that operators had been told not to bid, that the excluded had included some of the best-run small companies in the Realm, and that the minister had known perfectly well that what he was doing could not be defended in public, because he had said so in writing.

The Air Corps winter

The contracts were cancelled and the Royal American Air Corps was ordered to fly the mail in their place.

It was a catastrophe. The service flew through a winter it was not equipped for, with aircraft that had no instruments for the weather and pilots who had not been trained for it, over routes they did not know, on a schedule set by a government that had made a political decision and needed it to work.

Men were killed. The mail did not get through reliably and in some weeks did not get through at all. The government reversed itself within months, restored commercial contracts and legislated.

The dead

The Air Corps pilots who died that winter are the Post Office’s permanent reproach to itself, and the institution has never attempted to distribute the blame.

The sequence is not in dispute and the Post Office’s own histories set it out plainly. A Postmaster-General corrupted the contracts. The corruption was exposed. The government’s response was to order servicemen to do a job they had not been trained for, in aircraft unsuited to it, in the worst season, to prove a political point. The servicemen died. The contracts were then restored to commercial operators, which is what would have happened anyway had the government waited until spring.

A memorial to them stands in the General Post Office in the capital. It is not in the public hall but in the courtyard behind it, where the mail vehicles come in, on the deliberate reasoning of the Postmaster-General who commissioned it that the people who ought to see it every day are the people who work there.

The legislation

The statute that followed forbade the holding companies from owning airlines, required the carriers to separate from their manufacturing and financial parents, and barred from any reconstituted company the executives who had attended the meetings. Airlines that wished to bid for mail were obliged to reorganise and in practice to rename, which is where several of the Realm’s present carriers get their names.

The Post Office’s own reforms were quieter and more durable. Contract awards were removed from the Postmaster-General’s personal discretion and placed with a board operating on published criteria with a right of appeal, and the department’s contracting was made subject to an audit the Commons could call for. The Postmaster-General kept the stamps and lost the contracts, which is a fair summary of what the Realm concluded about where his discretion could safely be exercised.

The buildings

The programme

The Realm’s post offices are the most recognisable civic buildings it has, because a very large number of them were built at once to a small number of designs.

The programme belongs to the reform state of the 1930s, when a government confronting mass unemployment and possessing a department that needed premises in every community built several thousand post offices in a decade. They are modest, solid, and consistent: brick or stone, a raised entrance, a public hall with a counter along one side, tall windows, and the Realm’s arms over the door.

They are among the most-loved public buildings in the country, largely because a person who does not much like government tends nonetheless to like the building where they collect a parcel, and their disposal when an office closes is a source of considerable local bitterness.

The murals

Many of them contain murals, commissioned under the same programme from artists who were themselves being employed for the purpose, and depicting the local subject: harvest, industry, a river, the founding of the town.

They are variable in quality and occasionally in judgement. A number of the murals commissioned in the 1930s depict the settlement of the West, and the Realm’s relationship with those particular paintings has become complicated in the way that relationship generally has. The Post Office’s policy, arrived at after argument, is that they are not removed and are interpreted: a panel is placed beside a mural that requires one, saying plainly what is depicted, who painted it, when, and what the Realm now understands about the scene.

The General Post Office

The General Post Office in New Westminster is the institution’s headquarters and one of the capital’s public buildings, a long classical block with a colonnade and a public hall of some grandeur, sitting off the Charter Axis among the departments.

Its most famous feature is an inscription along the frieze, adapted from Herodotus, about couriers whom neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

It is not the Post Office’s motto. The institution has no motto, has never adopted one, and did not choose that inscription for any doctrinal reason: it was selected by the building’s architect, from a translation he happened to admire, to fill a frieze. It has been quoted as the Post Office’s creed for a century by people who assume that a sentence carved on a building must be official, and the Post Office has stopped correcting them.

The workforce

Never segregated

The American Postal Service was never segregated.

This is the single most consequential fact about it in the Realm’s social history and it follows from a legal accident. The American Rights Act of 1866 bound the federal government and did not bind the polities, which is why the guarantees of the Second Founding were of so little use in a county courthouse and why the Realm’s exclusionary settlement was built entirely inside polity competence.

The Post Office is federal. Exclusively so, under the Charter, with no polity postal jurisdiction of any kind. The apparatus of separation that the former rebel polities constructed between 1877 and 1889 therefore could not touch it, not because anyone in those polities lacked the will but because they lacked the power. A polity could segregate its schools, its courts, its transport, its hospitals and its own employment. It could not segregate a federal counter.

What that produced

For most of a century the post office was, in a very large number of counties, the only unsegregated public building.

Black and white citizens queued at the same counter, in the same order, and were served by the same clerk, in towns where they could not sit in the same waiting room anywhere else. Black postal officers served white customers in polities whose own law would not have permitted it in any polity employment. Black postmasters were appointed, and held their offices, in places where a Black person could not sit on a jury.

None of this was designed. It is a by-product of the federal limit of 1866 happening, in this one instance, to point in the useful direction, and the Realm’s historians are careful to say so, because the same limit is why almost everything else failed.

The consequences were large. The Post Office became one of the principal routes into the secure middle class for Black Americans, offering a federal wage, a pension, a union, promotion on examination, and a job available in every county in the Realm. A great deal of the professional and civic leadership of Black America in the first half of the twentieth century was one generation removed from a postal wage, and the institution’s own workforce was, and remains, substantially more diverse than the Realm’s other large employers.

It was not a paradise. Individual postmasters discriminated, promotion boards were slow, the best routes and the daytime shifts went where they generally went, and the Realm’s inquiries into all of this found what such inquiries find. The distinction is between an institution with prejudiced people in it and an institution that operated a policy of separation, and the Post Office was the first and never the second.

The union

The postal union is among the strongest in the Realm and has been for a century.

Its strength comes from the ordinary sources, being a large workforce concentrated in identifiable workplaces performing a service that stops visibly when they stop, and from one unusual one: postal workers are employees of a Crown corporation rather than civil servants, so they may lawfully strike, which most of the federal workforce may not.

It is affiliated to the Labour and Social Democratic Party through the industrial wing, retains close relations with the cooperative societies of the Left and Solidarity Bloc, and is one of the few institutions in the Realm with organised membership in every county of every polity, which makes its political weight considerably greater than its numbers.

The strike that charges nothing

The Realm’s postal strike takes a form that exists nowhere else and that the union invented.

The postal workers do not stop delivering. They stop charging.

In a national dispute the service operates normally in every respect that a member of the public can see. Letters are collected, sorted and delivered on the ordinary schedule. What ceases is revenue: counters do not take money, franking is not collected, accounts are not rendered, and mail is carried whether or not it bears postage.

The logic is exact and is the reason the tactic has never been effectively answered. An ordinary strike in a public service punishes the public in order to pressure the employer, which in a service the public loves is a bad trade and one the union learned the hard way in the nineteenth century. The Post Office loses money by design and is funded by a parliamentary vote, so withholding its revenue does not inconvenience a single citizen and lands entirely on the Treasury, which is also the employer. The union withholds the one thing the employer wants and continues to provide the one thing the public wants, and the public, being neither delayed nor charged, is generally delighted.

Ministries have found no satisfactory response. Legislating against it means legislating to compel a public service to charge people, which is a difficult speech to make. Disciplining workers who are performing their duties in full and merely declining to collect money is legally awkward and politically suicidal. The Realm has therefore settled into a pattern in which a national postal dispute is resolved reasonably quickly, on terms reasonably favourable to the union, and the public’s experience of it is a fortnight of free postage.

It is the most popular industrial action in the Realm’s history and it is regarded within the labour movement as the single cleverest thing any American union has ever done.

On 26 October 2028 the union called a national strike of all counter and delivery staff over the annual pay award, which it said was below the rise in the cost of living, and the strike took the customary form: delivery continued, and nothing was charged for it. Lord Whitlock’s government said that the Post Office, as a Crown corporation, must settle with its own workers. The union replied that the Post Office is also a department of state, and that a government cannot be a bystander to its own department. Each side was describing one half of the institution’s double status, and neither conceded the other’s.

Mechanisation

Sorting machinery arrived in the 1960s alongside the postal codes, and the argument it produced was settled by negotiation rather than by conflict.

The union’s position was that mechanisation was inevitable, that resisting it would fail, and that the price of cooperation was that no member would be dismissed for it. The corporation’s position was that it needed the machines and could afford the price because its workforce turned over fast enough to absorb the reduction through natural wastage over about a decade.

The agreement that resulted, which provided for retraining, redeployment and no compulsory redundancy in exchange for full cooperation with the machinery, is studied in the Realm’s industrial relations schools as the model settlement of the period. It was helped considerably by the fact that a corporation whose deficit is voted annually has less incentive to extract the last penny than a company answering to shareholders.

Postal codes

The postal code was introduced in the 1960s to make the machinery work: five digits, the first identifying the region and the remainder narrowing to the delivery office.

The Realm adopted a numeric code rather than the alphanumeric systems used elsewhere, on advice that digits were faster to read by machine and easier to remember. The campaign to teach the public to use them was enormous, lasted years, involved a cartoon character that people of a certain age still remember with irritation, and worked.

The ballot

Voting by post

The Realm votes by post, universally and by right.

Any elector may have a ballot sent to them and return it through the mail, without giving a reason, for any election at any level. A very large proportion of the electorate does. The arrangement grew from provisions for servicemen, sailors, the sick and the remote, and expanded until the exceptions had swallowed the rule.

What inviolability is doing

The consequence is that the Inviolability of the Mails Act is not merely a privacy statute but a substantial part of the Realm’s electoral law.

A ballot travelling through the post is a packet in the course of transmission. It cannot be opened, by anybody, on any authority, and the criminal offence created in the 1860s to punish the reading of political correspondence applies with exactness to the reading of a vote.

The Realm regards this as one of the happier accidents of its constitutional history. A statute passed because officers had been reading their opponents’ letters during a civil war turns out, a century and a half later, to be the guarantee that secures the secrecy of the ballot in transit, and it does so more completely than most countries’ electoral legislation manages, because it admits of no exception at all.

The postal strike form matters here too. Because a strike does not stop delivery, no postal dispute has ever affected an election, and the union has been explicit that none ever will, which is a commitment it has never had to be held to and which has done a great deal for its standing.

May Day and after

The suspension

On 1 May 2006 the Post Office suspended.

Four coordinated attacks struck the Province of New York in a single morning, one of them at an airport, and a substantial part of the Realm’s mail moves by air on scheduled and dedicated services. Air movements stopped. Sorting in the affected districts stopped. Collections were suspended nationally within hours, on a decision taken by the corporation rather than by any minister, on the reasoning that nobody yet knew what the pattern was and that the mail is a distribution network reaching every address in the Realm.

It was the first national suspension in the institution’s history. It lasted days rather than weeks, and the resumption was staged, and the Post Office’s own review afterwards concluded that the suspension had been right, had gone on slightly too long, and had been communicated badly.

What was never proposed

Nothing followed.

The Realm’s security settlement after May Day was extensive and is still argued about. It created the Signals Directorate, extended surveillance, built watch lists, and altered the relationship between the citizen and the state more than anything since 1866. It was also, by deliberate national decision, an invisible settlement, conducted through background screening and record-matching rather than through visible barriers, because the Realm concluded that a country which visibly fortifies itself against its own citizens has conceded what the attack could not otherwise take.

No exception to the Inviolability of the Mails Act was proposed. Not in the emergency legislation, not in Cabinet, not by any member in the Commons, and not in the security review, which considered the mail as a vector for attack, recommended detection measures, and did not raise the question of reading.

The Post Office regards this as the most important thing that has ever not happened to it.

Screening without reading

What the review recommended, and what was implemented, is detection rather than inspection.

Mail passes through X-ray and density screening at the sorting centres, along with detection equipment for explosive and biological material. A packet that fails is detained, isolated and, if necessary, destroyed. It is not opened, and if the Constabulary want to know what is inside a suspicious packet they have precisely the same options as the Post Office does, which is to say they may destroy it and may not read it.

The screening is invisible to the public, which is the settlement’s whole method. A citizen posting a letter experiences exactly what a citizen posting a letter in 2005 experienced, and the difference is entirely in the machinery it passes through afterwards.

The modern service

The decline of the letter

Letter volumes in the Realm peaked around the turn of the century and have fallen steeply since, in the way they have fallen everywhere, for the reasons they have fallen everywhere.

The correspondence that sustained the service for two centuries has gone: the personal letter first, then the bill, the statement, the invoice, the notice, the cheque, the greeting. What remains of first-class mail is a mixture of the legally required, the commercially unwanted and the sentimentally chosen, and none of the three is growing.

Parcels

Parcels are the answer, and the Post Office carries them and competes.

The rise of ordering goods for delivery has produced a volume of parcel traffic that offsets a substantial part of the letter decline, and the Post Office holds a strong position in it for a reason its competitors cannot replicate: it already goes to every address in the Realm every day, at one price, by statutory obligation.

That obligation, long regarded as the burden that made the institution unprofitable, turns out to be a decisive commercial asset in a parcel market. The private carriers are cheaper in the dense corridors and cannot economically serve the rest, so a considerable share of their traffic is handed to the Post Office for final delivery, and the Realm’s parcel market therefore consists of several competitors who all, beyond a certain radius, become the Post Office.

The Post Office competes rather than merely accommodating them, running its own tracked services, and the relationship with the private carriers is accordingly a mixture of contract and rivalry that both sides describe as complicated.

Closures

Post offices have closed, and it is a live grievance.

The closures have fallen where such things fall: rural counties, small towns, poor urban districts, the mountain and desert West, and communities in the Indigenous nations. The corporation’s case is the ordinary one about volumes and costs. The objection is that an office is not a shop, that the building is frequently the only federal presence in a county, that it is where passports and pensions are obtained by people who cannot easily travel, and that closing it removes the Realm from a place rather than merely removing a service.

The politics are not partisan and that is what makes them difficult. Members from rural constituencies in all six parties oppose closures in their own seats and are not much interested in the aggregate arithmetic, and successive Postmasters-General have discovered that a closure programme announced in the spring is a closure programme abandoned by the autumn.

The current position is a moratorium of the sort the Realm arrives at when it cannot decide: closures are not proceeding, the offices concerned are not viable, nothing has been resolved, and the subsidy absorbs it.

Privatisation

Privatisation has never been seriously proposed, and the Realm regards the idea as politically unthinkable.

The reasons are Franklin’s and are constitutional rather than sentimental. A privatised post would have to be paid to serve the addresses that cannot pay for themselves, which means a subsidy contract, which means the Realm would be purchasing from a private company the thing it currently owns. It would also mean placing the carriage of the Realm’s letters, and its ballots, and its passport applications, in the hands of a body that Parliament does not control and the Mails Act would have to be redrafted to bind.

Foreign examples are cited in the Realm’s debates, generally as warnings.

The politics

No party attacks the Post Office, which is unusual for an institution that loses money every year.

The Left and Solidarity Bloc and the Labour and Social Democratic Party defend it as public infrastructure and as an employer. The Liberal Federal Democrats defend it as honest administration and are its most persistent critics on efficiency, which is not the same as opposition. Alliance 90 / Green Realm support it as a trust and are interested in its vehicle fleet. Alternative for the Realm draws heavily on rural constituencies and campaigns against closures.

And the Conservative and Crown Union, which spent the nineteenth century objecting to the departmental half, now defends the institution entire. Its members represent a great many rural seats, its doctrine holds that the Union is the condition of liberty rather than a means to it, and a service that binds a continental Realm together at one price is not a difficult thing for that party to support once it has stopped arguing about the Cabinet seat.

Culture

The postman is a stock figure of American life and an unusually affectionate one: the person who comes to the door every day, knows the street, and is not selling anything.

The Realm’s writers have used the post steadily, generally as an image of connection across distance, and its films have used the rural carrier and the sorting office night shift more than is strictly warranted by either. The Pony Express rider is a fixture of the Western, in defiance of the historical record. The phrase about neither snow nor rain is quoted constantly and is not a motto. Children are still taught to write letters in school, and the Post Office supplies the materials.

The institution’s standing in public affection is high and has been consistently measured as higher than that of any other federal body, which postal officers attribute to the fact that the Post Office is the only part of the Realm’s government that turns up at a citizen’s house every day and gives them something.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Benjamin Franklin: who founded it in the first ministry and fixed its doctrine
• The Charter of Union of the American Colonies: which gives Parliament the post
• The American Rights Act: whose federal limit is why the Post Office was never segregated
• The American Civil War: during which the mail was opened, and after which it could never be again
• John Brown: postmaster, and later the subject of the Realm’s only contested stamp
• The May Day Bombings of 2006: after which the mail was the one thing the settlement left alone
• American Airlines: built, like the rest of the industry, on federal mail contracts
• Orbit Airlines: founded on an air mail contract out of Seattle