The Transatlantic Context

While the primary impetus for the Paris Postal Conference lay in the United States, its prehistory originated in Europe, and in particular, in France, Britain, and Bremen.

French postal policy posed, for Kasson, a particular challenge. To help cover the cost of mail delivery inside France without reducing the revenue that the French post office generated for the French treasury, French postal administrators charged extremely high rates, known as “transit fees,” on mail that originated outside France, and whose intended destination was outside France, but that passed through France en route to its recipient. Transit fees bore no relationship to the actual cost of transportation. That is, it cost much more to send a letter in a sealed mailbag across France from, say, the United States to Italy than to deliver a letter within France from Lille to Marseilles. Since France was a large country that was located in the middle of one of the world’s most economically advanced regions, the French post office generated a large surplus from its transit fees, which it used to keep postal rates within France low. French government administrators defended this cross-subsidy tenaciously as a laudable wealth transfer from the rich to the poor, and by the 1860s had enshrined it as a pillar of French postal policy.

For Kasson, France’s postal policy seemed hopelessly parochial not only because it was so obviously nation-centric, but also because it was predicated on a fiscal rationale for postal policy that American lawmakers had long rejected. The primary rationale for U.S. postal policy in 1863 was civic: to increase popular access to information on market trends, public affairs, and even personal matters, lawmakers permitted the U.S. Post Office Department to run a hefty annual deficit. In France, in contrast, as in much of the world, including Great Britain, the post office remained an important source of tax revenue.

While French postal policy held few charms for Kasson, British postal policy had more to recommend it. In 1840, Britain became the first country to lower dramatically its inland letter-postage rate to increase revenue, forestall private-sector rivals in the letter-delivery market, and expand popular access to the facilities for long-distance communication. “Penny postage,” as this innovation was known, emboldened postal enthusiasts in the United States to lobby for a similar reform. The comparable reform in the United States, which was enacted in 1845 and 1851, would be popularly known as “cheap postage” rather than “penny postage.”^{Footnote 13} Kasson fervently supported low and uniform postal rates and admired Britain’s innovativeness in leading the way.

Cheap postage and penny postage are sometimes regarded as more or less synonymous; in fact, they had quite different rationales. The primary rationale for penny postage in Great Britain was commercial. By lowering the basic letter rate in 1840, British postal administrators tried to match price to cost. In so doing, they shifted the rationale for British postal policy from revenue generation to commercial expansion. A lower rate, or so its proponents contended, would increase mail volume so substantially that it would facilitate trade. For this reason, the rationale for British inland postal policy in the period after 1840 is best characterized not as fiscal but as commercial.

The rationale for Britain’s overseas postal policy, in contrast, like France’s, remained fiscal: How much revenue could the postage on international mail generate for the state? In theory, the fiscal rationale for British overseas postal policy could be hard to justify. In explaining how postal rates for international mail ought to be computed, for example, the British delegate to the Paris Postal Conference, Frederic Hill, found himself trapped in a verbal tangle. The rates for “transit” and overseas conveyance, Hill explained, as well as “all other” postal charges, should be “as moderate as is consistent with the service being self-supporting and yielding a fair profit.”^{Footnote 14} Yet in practice, high transit fees remained a cornerstone of British postal policy.

In the United States, in contrast, the primary rationale for the “cheap postage” letter-rate reductions in 1845 and 1851 was neither fiscal nor commercial but civic. Contemporaries praised cheap postage not only, or even primarily, because it matched price with cost, the major rationale for postal rate reductions in Great Britain. Rather, they hailed rate reductions for facilitating the circulation of information useful for public affairs, market trends, and personal matters. Initially, the civic rationale for the low-cost circulation of information was confined to information on public affairs, a mandate dating back to the Post Office Act of 1792. In 1825, an administrative ruling briefly expanded this mandate to embrace information on market trends; following the Post Office Act of 1845, lawmakers extended it once again to information on personal matters, such as the health of a family member or the birth of a child.^{Footnote 15}

A second feature of British postal policy to make a deep impression on Kasson was the British government’s vigorous promotion of its merchant marine. To project its power overseas, the British government invested massively in what we might today call “communications infrastructure.” One means to this end was the establishment of a fleet of sailing ships—the post office packets—to carry the mail. Another was the awarding of generous government subsidies to the Cunard Company, a subsidy that hastened the emergence of the Cunarders’ oceangoing steamships as the dominant carrier of transatlantic mail.

The Cunarders carried the bulk of the overseas mail between Britain and America. Yet it was neither Britain, nor France, but the thriving city-state of Bremen, that established the first transatlantic bilateral postal convention with the United States. Bremen merchants were eager to expand U.S. trade, and German immigrants were flooding into the United States, giving Bremen a prominence in the Atlantic world that is often overlooked.^{Footnote 16}

The U.S.-Bremen postal convention was adopted in the summer of 1847. It facilitated the conveyance of the mail not only between the United States and Bremen, but also between the United States, Bremen, and the rest of Europe.^{Footnote 17} The catalyst for this agreement was the first sailing of the steamship Washington from New York City to Bremen earlier that year.

Steam-powered vessels were nothing new. In fact, steamboats had for several decades operated on rivers and coastal waterways. Ocean liners, as ocean-worthy steam-powered vessels would come to be known, in contrast, remained untested, and their construction posed a technical challenge. It was in part for this reason that promoters regarded government support as essential. The Washington was one of the first two steamships to be subsidized by Congress under an 1845 law that, for the first time, authorized the postmaster general to contract with a steamship line to compete with Cunard in the Atlantic trade. The steamship contract went to Edward Mills, a shipping-business neophyte, who underbid two more credible contenders: Edward K. Collins and Robert B. Forbes. Collins operated a successful fleet of Atlantic sailing packets; Forbes owned a large fleet of ships active in the China trade.

Mills promised more for less and he got the contract. Unfortunately for the Post Office Department, he proved unable to raise even a fraction of the capital that his contract obliged him to secure, and transferred his rights almost immediately to the Ocean Steam Navigation Company, a German-American joint venture with substantial financial backing from several German states and a wealthy group of Bremen merchants.^{Footnote 18} The Ocean Steam Navigation Company was the first steamship company to have obtained from the U.S. government a subsidy large enough to enable it to operate a regularly scheduled transatlantic service. Even so, it remained mostly a German affair. In recognition of its German backing, its principal European destination was neither Liverpool nor Southampton, but Bremerhaven, Bremen’s North Sea port.

Each of the two ships that the Ocean Steam Navigation Company built, the Washington and the Hermann, were constructed by Westervelt & MacKay in New York City, the same shipyard responsible for some of the country’s most celebrated clipper ships. These steamships proved to be a disappointment to the Post Office Department. Not only did they cost more than Mills had estimated, but their sailing times failed to outpace the Cunarders. The company stumbled along until 1857, when the North German Lloyd Company, founded in that year, took over its assets and made it part of its fleet. Its brief history, however, cast a shadow on U.S. postal policy that would inform positions that Kasson adopted in Paris in 1863.

The existence of the Ocean Steam Navigation Company helped provide the U.S. minister to Great Britain, George Bancroft, with the necessary leverage to negotiate in 1848 the first bilateral postal convention between the United States and Great Britain. This agreement was less favorable to the United States than the Bremen postal convention. Yet it was even more consequential, since Great Britain was a far more important trading partner. Had the U.S. government not backed its own steamship line, Bancroft might well have lacked the clout to obtain the concessions that he did.^{Footnote 19} The crux of the problem lay in the strikingly different rationales for mail delivery in the two countries. The British government regarded international postage as a tax, rather than a fee-for-service payment; as a consequence, government administrators expected postal patrons to pay British overseas postal rates even if the United States government subsidized its conveyance.^{Footnote 20} Had the United States lacked a credible steamship company, Bancroft might well have found himself obliged to accede to the British demands. Yet the United States did have a rival in the Ocean Steam Navigation Company and thus a modicum of leverage. Bancroft underscored the distinctively American civic rationale for postal policy in arguing for a rate reduction. Newcomers from Ireland and continental Europe were flooding the United States and in Bancroft’s view the U.S. government had an obligation to enable them to communicate with family and friends across the ocean. Bancroft’s “sole motive” in negotiating a postal treaty, as he declared in a public letter that he issued shortly before the treaty was ratified, was to promote the “comfort and interest of the commercial world”—independent of the potential fiscal consequences of the rate reduction for the United States treasury.^{Footnote 21}

Foreigners agreed. The high rates that governments charged on international mail troubled cosmopolitan-minded public figures in many countries and led to the formation in Great Britain of the International Postage Association in 1851. The International Postage Association received a major impetus from the Crystal Palace Exhibition, a landmark international trade fair that highlighted the achievements of British commerce and industry. Backers included the English banker Lord Ashburton, the Scottish geologist Sir Roderick Marchison, the French mathematician and economist Baron Charles Dupin, and the Prussian statistician Georg von Viebahn.^{Footnote 22}

Had circumstances been different, the organizers of the International Postage Association might have spearheaded a movement to convene an international meeting of postal administrators that would have predated the Paris Postal Conference of 1863. Yet its membership soon divided on several issues that blocked it from being an effective voice for change. For certain British postal reformers, it remained unclear if their goal was a global reduction in postal rates or merely a reduction in postal rates between Great Britain and its colonies.^{Footnote 23} A further constraint was the assumption of postal reformers not only in Great Britain but also in France, that international postal rates should be high enough to generate a substantial surplus for the national treasury. The ubiquity of this presumption outside the United States, or so concluded an assembly of British notables convened by Lord Ashburton during the Crystal Palace Exhibition, helped to explain why the United States should take the lead in lobbying for a “system of cheap ocean-postage”: the U.S. government, unlike the governments of Great Britain and France, did not regard postage as a form of taxation.^{Footnote 24}

The beneficial consequences for postal patrons of the American civic rationale for postal policy were well known to statesman not only in Britain but also in the United States. “Our security for the preservation of our popular institutions”—declared the textile manufacturer-turned-U.S. minister to Great Britain Abbott Lawrence in 1852, in a letter to the U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster—“rests upon the enlightenment of the people and the extension of knowledge.” And to hasten this “enlightenment,” cheap postage held a key: “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 [Great Britain], a corresponding advantage would be gained.”^{Footnote 25} An analogous conviction would help inspire Kasson’s mission to Paris.

Toward the Paris Postal Conference

The civic rationale for American postal policy was but one of several factors that helped explain the willingness of the United States to take the lead in 1863. Another was military exigency. President Abraham Lincoln and his top advisors were understandably concerned that the British or French government might encourage the construction of Confederate naval vessels in their shipyards.^{Footnote 26} A catalyst was the diplomatic firestorm that followed the capture at sea in November 1861 by a U.S. naval officer acting on his own authority of two Confederate diplomats on the British mail packet, the “Trent.” The diplomats were at the time en route, respectively, to assignments in London and Paris. By taking the lead in the organizing an international conference on a topic that was seemingly distinct from the conflict raging at home, the Lincoln administration subtly signaled to the world that it remained the only legitimate power even in those sections of its territory that in 1863 were not under its direct control.

The stranglehold of the United States over the North Atlantic sea-lanes exasperated the many British and French merchants with long-standing commercial ties to merchants in seaports under Confederate control. From their point of view, Kasson’s endorsement of international standards to facilitate the circulation of information across national borders rang hollow. Much more immediate was the commercial warfare that the U.S. navy was waging to block the circulation of money and information between the Confederacy and Europe. Countless letters were lost when U.S. navy vessels sank Confederate blockade runners, while many others remained marooned in the dead-letter offices in New York City and Washington, D.C., since the U.S. Post Office refused to deliver them to the South.^{Footnote 27} Many contained large remittances that could not be redeemed, a major impediment to commerce. In New Orleans alone, according to France’s foreign minister to the United States, between $6 and $8 million in remittances had been held back and awaited safe passage to Europe.^{Footnote 28}

The ostensible justification for U.S. leadership in convening the postal conference was fiscal. Like the British postal reformer Rowland Hill, Kasson intuitively grasped the elemental fact that, if he wished to rally support for postal reform, it was expedient to contend that it would improve the government’s balance sheet. To settle accounts with European postal administrations, the United States government shipped a considerable quantity of gold overseas. In 1863, the U.S. Post Office Department was running a deficit of $7 million, much of which went to Europe to balance accounts.^{Footnote 29} International postal reform could help staunch the outflow of gold.

While the initial justification for this conference had been fiscal, its urgency grew out of a much wider range of issues that were unrelated to postal accounting. Since the Crystal Palace Exhibit in 1851, the volume of international mail had expanded dramatically. As a result, postal administrators found it increasingly difficult to avoid expensive mistakes in rating letters and routing the mail. The mounting challenge caused by the rapid increase in mail volume obliged postal administrators to pay more attention to transborder issues. Earlier initiatives, such as the campaign by the International Postage Association’s secretary Don Manuel de Ysasi to organize an international postal conference in Paris in 1855, had failed due to widespread indifference. The association badly needed an infusion of new blood, reported one bemused observer in 1852, since it defied reason to assume that it could forever be sustained, as it was as present, by the “clique” that had organized the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition: “Until they get a large admixture of non-Exhibition members, their meetings will always bear that informal colloquial character which characterizes a reunion of old soldiers, which of itself renders them unsuited to newspaper report, and deprives them of the pomp and dignity which surround a meeting of the Commissioners of Sewers.”^{Footnote 30}

No prominent postal administrator played a role in organizing the International Postage Association. As a consequence, it was unsurprising that, following Ysasi’s unexpected death on the eve of the 1855 Paris meeting—Ysasi had been a passenger on the ill-fated U.S. government-subsidized mail steamer, the S.S. Arctic, which sank in the North Atlantic—the group disbanded.^{Footnote 31} By 1862, in contrast, most postal administrators in the countries that sat astride the Atlantic sea-lanes had realized that something had to be done. Ironically, the promulgation of international postal protocols would be the work of nationally based postal administrators. Over half of the fifteen delegations in attendance at the Paris conference—including those from the United States, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands—were headed up by postal administrators, or, in the case of the United States, a former postal administrator, since Kasson had recently won election to Congress. The others were headed up by diplomats, with the exception of the delegation from the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), which was represented by the peripatetic British political economist John Bowring.

A final impetus for the 1863 conference lay in the elusive realm of ideals. The “cheap postage” movement in the United States and the “penny postage” movement in Great Britain had popularized the notion that low and uniform postage promoted the public good. Kasson was determined to show how the benefits of postal reform could be realized not only in one country, but also across national boundaries. To this end, Kasson hoped to establish an international consensus to lower international postal rates, increase their uniformity, and simplify transnational postal accounting.^{Footnote 32} Like Elihu Burritt, the stalwart American-born proponent of “ocean penny postage,” Kasson was inspired by the idealism of the many merchants, ministers, and peace activists who had become persuaded of the nineteenth-century variant of the digital-age mantra that “information wants to be free.”^{Footnote 33}

Devising International Standards

In his quest to eliminate the barriers impeding the international circulation of information, Kasson often found himself allied with the delegates from Italy, Switzerland, and Prussia, and in opposition to the delegates from Great Britain and France. Though the British and French differed on many points, they shared a propensity, which Kasson found exasperating, to subordinate the collective good to parochial concerns. The delegates from both countries, Kasson fumed in the remarkably candid personal journal that he kept during the conference, displayed a “pertinacious disposition” to challenge the application of “every acknowledged postal principle” that conflicted with their country’s “financial interests” or where the “preponderance of benefit” from the universal adoption of this principle would favor a “foreign nation.”^{Footnote 34} Both defended high transit fees; the British also hoped to retain high postage rates on overseas mail transported in British steamships. “Self-interest,” Kasson confided in his journal, “stands evidently at both the gates of Europe.”^{Footnote 35}

The French found the retention of high transit fees so fiscally important that Kasson conceded that it might well be necessary to make “some allowance” for the “warmth of her delegates upon this point.”^{Footnote 36} In Kasson’s view, transit fees should never exceed the postage charged for transporting “domestic” mail, eliminating the principle, which was particularly important in France, that the revenue generated by transit fees subsidize cheap postage inside the country.^{Footnote 37} Yet when the issue of transit fees came up for discussion, the French delegate, Édouard Vandal, who also chaired the conference, left the room, informing his colleagues that his superiors had prohibited him from so much as participating in the discussion of such a sensitive topic.^{Footnote 38}

The obstreperousness of the British delegate, Frederic Hill, was, in certain respects, even more unsettling. Early on in the conference, Hill privately told Kasson that he wanted Britain and the United States to have “as much concurrence in our action as possible.”^{Footnote 39} On the face of it, this seemed like a good plan. The “penny postage” scheme that Great Britain had enacted in 1840 was well known around the world, a particular point of pride for Hill, not only because Hill himself was a British postal administrator but also because its prime mover, Rowland Hill, was Hill’s brother. Even so, Frederic Hill displayed what Kasson regarded as an infuriating solicitude for retaining high transit fees for mail transported overland inside Great Britain as well as overseas by the Cunarders. Government steamship subsidies, in Kasson’s view, had been instituted “more in the interest of commerce” than the mail, and thus should not be paid for by postal patrons.^{Footnote 40}

The retention of onerous transit fees for steamship service troubled Kasson not only because they were unrelated to the actual cost of transporting the mail, but also because they varied from steamship company to steamship company, complicating the task of establishing a uniform rate. The high cost and complexity of transatlantic postage had bedeviled American postal patrons for many years. Kasson was determined to exert whatever leverage he could to establish an international consensus that would facilitate the negotiation of bilateral treaties that would lower rates and ensure their uniformity. No issue was of more pressing concern to the American merchants with whom Kasson had met in Paris before the conference, or the journalists who followed its proceedings in the United States.^{Footnote 41} The delegates should not get bogged down in the “fog of European differences,” complained one Philadelphia editor, when the “main object” was establishing low and uniform transatlantic rates: “They may make what arrangements they deem fit as to the crossing of national boundaries in Europe, but we have great interest in establishing a better system of communication with them in general.”^{Footnote 42}

Kasson’s frustration with Hill was exacerbated by his weak bargaining position. The British government in 1863 subsidized the mighty Cunaders; the U.S. government, in contrast, had by then left the subsidy business altogether. The differential investment of the British and the Americans in oceangoing mail steamships greatly troubled Kasson, since he regarded steamship subsidies not only as a bargaining chip but also as a catalyst for economic development. It was his “earnest opinion,” or so Kasson informed New Zealand postal administrator Crosbie Ward, that the subsidization of a line of “mail and commercial” steamships on the Pacific Ocean was indispensable to the future commercial expansion of the United States. “I believe,” Kasson elaborated, that a “connected system of such communication” from San Francisco, via the Sandwich Islands, to Japan and China, and from Panama southward to Australia and New Zealand was a “necessity” that the United States must “soon appreciate” as “alone capable of making our country the financial and commercial centre of the world.”^{Footnote 43}

The high expectations with which Kasson had invested cheap postage helps to explain his exasperation at Frederic Hill’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to back down from the radical proposal that Hill himself had made to limit transit rates to one half the “interior” rates on the same route, a proposal that had been approved by a subcommittee on which both Hill and Kasson served.^{Footnote 44} Though Hill publicly supported a “liberal” agenda, Kasson recognized that Hill retained many misgivings about the “more liberal resolutions” to which the delegates had agreed, and predicted that, as the head of the foreign desk at the British post office—which, among other things, put him in charge of steamship policy—Hill would oppose them if they conflicted with “English usage.” Indeed, Kasson feared that this criticism might “even apply to his [Hill’s] connection with the transit resolution, which was his own proposition.”^{Footnote 45}

For Kasson, the transit fee issue was intimately connected to other, less contentious matters. Prominent among them was the establishment of an international standard for the weight of a single letter; the articulation of uniform accounting protocols for mail that crossed multiple national boundaries; and the adoption in the United States of the metric system, a reform that Kasson hoped the postal conference would promote. Yet the transit issue remained key. The best way to ensure that one nation would not beggar its neighbor by insisting on outrageously high transit fees, in Kasson’s view, was to peg transit fees to domestic postal rates. If this principle were adopted, then postal patrons in foreign countries would obtain a “certain kind of protection” from extortionate charges since they would have the benefit of “whatever responsibility existed” with regard to the “like charges” that the government assessed on “its own subjects or citizens.”^{Footnote 46}

Kasson’s linkage of transit fees with domestic postal rates illustrated the interdependence of international postal standard-setting bodies and national postal administrations. To increase popular access to the mail, national governments lowered their internal postal rates. Having done so, and unless they wished to countermand the protocols agreed upon in Paris, they had no choice but to peg domestic postal rates to the transit fees that they charged on mail that traveled through their territory en route to its final destination.

The linkage Kasson envisioned between domestic and international postal rates would take over a decade to institutionalize. In the meantime, U.S. postal administrators found themselves at the mercy of Great Britain and France. To solve this problem, Kasson worked with the Belgian and Prussian delegates to reroute the large volume of mail currently being sent to and from the multitudes of Germans and Scandinavians who had emigrated to the United States. If postal administrators in Europe sent the “social correspondence” of the Germans and the Scandinavians on the Bremen- and Hamburg-based mail Atlantic steamers, rather than on the Cunarders, it would significantly lower its cost, since the German steamship lines charged a mere 10 cents per letter, far less than Cunard. True, the mail would cross the Atlantic more slowly on a German steamer. For this reason, time-sensitive merchants were likely to stick with the faster, more expensive Cunarders. For the vast majority of postal patrons, however, speed was of “much less importance” than the cost of conveyance.^{Footnote 47}

Kasson’s expansive interpretation of the civic rationale for postal communications won him the plaudits of several conference delegates. In contrast to the postal systems of the “great majority of countries,” or so the Swiss delegate admiringly observed, the U.S. postal system was not expected to generate a surplus for its government. As a consequence, as the French delegate Édouard Vandal perceptively declared, its policy was “exceptional.” Limiting the transit rate to one-half the inland rate was an “immense step forward”; even so, Vandal reassured his French colleagues, the lower transit rate was still high enough to ensure the French treasury a “handsome profit.”^{Footnote 48}

While the 1863 conference did not resolve all of the issues troubling Kasson, it proved remarkably successful at establishing protocols that, in the next few years, would be institutionalized in bilateral postal treaties between most of the world’s most commercially advanced nations. All in all, the delegates agreed to thirty-one “rules,” as the protocols were termed in the English-language transcription of the conference proceedings that the U.S. postmaster general printed in his 1864 annual report. These protocols divided the mail into six “classes,” established uniform procedures for postal accounting, designated a common standard of measurement (the “metrical decimal system”), and specified a maximum weight for a single international letter (15 grams). Conveniently for Great Britain and the United States, which remained on the rival avoirdupois (16 ounces to a pound) measurement system, this weight maximum was basically identical to one-half an ounce, minimizing any potential disruption.

Among Kasson’s greatest achievements was the inclusion in the conference proceedings of a strongly worded clause that derided high transit fees as an “insurmountable obstacle” to establishing an “international system of correspondence” on conditions “advantageous to the public.” Henceforth, the delegates agreed, transit fees on foreign letters should “never” exceed one-half the rate of that on inland postage.^{Footnote 49} Kasson’s achievement was all the more impressive given the fact that the United States had no fleet of government-subsidized steamships to use as a bargaining chip: ideas rather than interests carried the day.

To reduce Kasson’s achievement to a mere list of proposals, however, obscures their true character. In international postal negotiations, the United States enjoyed the moral high ground by virtue of the expansiveness of its civic rationale for postal policy. The distinctiveness of this rationale was obvious to every well-informed student of postal affairs. Yet it was Kasson who transformed it into protocols that would eventually be embraced by an international standard-setting body. “Let us not forget, gentlemen,” Kasson declared, in a brief speech that he delivered on the final day of the conference, “the extent of the interests involved in some degree in our enterprise”:

By internationalizing the civic rationale for U.S. postal policy, Kasson gave the Paris conference a mandate that was far more ambitious than the sum of its parts.

The biggest disappointment of the conference for Kasson, as well as his colleagues in the like-minded Italian and Swiss delegations, was the failure to eliminate route-based rate differentials, an outcome that was probably due to backroom maneuvering by Frederic Hill. Even here, however, the delegates took a major step toward their elimination, by stipulating that, whenever “intermediate charges” rendered it “practicable,” the rates on international correspondence should be uniform, independent of the routes over which the mail might be conveyed.^{Footnote 51} In the years to come, the protocols Kasson helped devise in Paris would become institutionalized in postal policy, first in bilateral treaties, and eventually in multilateral accords.

A Liberal Tradition

The Paris Postal Conference received respectful, if often cursory, attention in the British and American press. Its delegates seem to have arrived at a “good understanding of the principles of postal reciprocity,” declared one British postal administrator in 1864, and “good will doubtless be the result.” The “Postal Congress” was a “Peace Congress” of the “most efficient kind,” the administrator added, “and in every sense of the term.”^{Footnote 52} The American press emphasized Kasson’s “liberal” vision of international communications, a characterization that Kasson himself embraced.^{Footnote 53} Particularly admirable, in the opinion of the Washington, D.C.–based National Intelligencer, had been Kasson’s determination to follow up the achievements of the conference with the negotiation of bilateral postal treaties with several countries, including Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. In so doing, he had given “practical effect” to the “liberal movements initiated at the International Conference.”^{Footnote 54}

The civic rationale for American postal policy that Kasson invoked in 1863 had been for several decades a subject of frequent discussion by the small yet dedicated cadre of American journalists who had made a special study of postal policy. Foremost among them was Joshua Leavitt, a Congregationalist-minister-turned-newspaper editor who had long written on postal topics for the Independent, an influential religious newspaper based in New York City. Leavitt had followed postal affairs closely since the 1840s, when he had lobbied lawmakers to emulate Rowland Hill’s experiment with penny postage. Frustrated by the refusal of Congress in 1845 to reduce the basic inland letter rate to 1 cent—the basic inland letter rate would be reduced to 5 and 10 cents in 1845, depending on distance, and to a flat 3 cents for most of the United States in 1851—Leavitt repeatedly lectured the public on the distinctiveness of the U.S. government’s civic mandate to circulate information over long distances at low cost. The “language of the Constitution,” Leavitt pontificated in 1862, enshrined the presumption that information—and, in particular, the information contained in newspapers—should be circulated at the lowest practicable rates. In this way, it helped ensure that the postal system would remain a “great enginery of governmental wisdom and beneficence” conducted for the “public good” to promote the “widest diffusion of intelligence.”^{Footnote 55}

Leavitt had no doubt that “intelligence” embraced not only newspapers, but also personal correspondence, which, by an analogous logic, should also be circulated at the lowest possible rate. Should Congress reduce the inland letter rate to 1 cent, Leavitt predicted, this would massively increase the circulation of inland letters through the postal system, enabling the United States to equal Great Britain in mail volume, a benchmark that Leavitt regarded as proof that the republican United States could match its monarchical parent.^{Footnote 56} The post office, Leavitt declared in an essay on Anglo-American commercial solidarity that he successfully entered in 1868 in a prize competition administered by free-trade–oriented English Cobden Club, was “beyond a question, the most perfect piece of governmental machinery that was ever invented,” and the establishment of cheap ocean postage between Britain and America would be likely, if “continued for a generation,” to “render a bloody war between the two nations unimaginable.”^{Footnote 57}

Yet even committed postal visionaries such as Leavitt were long reluctant to wholeheartedly endorse cheap ocean postage. In this regard, as in his quixotic endorsement of the metric system, Kasson’s position was unusually advanced. Unlike the stalwart cheap-postage champion Elihu Burritt, Leavitt would not editorialize in favor of cheap ocean postage in the Independent until after the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant in March 1869. And unlike Kasson, Leavitt would remain far more committed to lowering domestic postal rates than to lowering the transit fees on mail sent from country to country.

Legacies

In the end it would not be a national government, but an international organization that institutionalized the protocols regulating overseas mail that brought cheap postage to the world. This organization owed a major debt to the linkage by an American postal administrator-turned-lawmaker of national prerogatives and international standard-setting. Kasson had not intended the 1863 Paris Postal Conference to lead directly to an international postal organization, and it did not. The “idea” of the United States in calling for the meeting, or so Kasson explained in a public statement that he gave during its opening day, was not to “bind” the countries who had sent delegates, but, rather, “simply to examine a certain number of questions, whose solution would facilitate the negotiation of postal treaties.”^{Footnote 58} It would take eleven years before delegates met in Berne, Switzerland, to establish the General Postal Union (GPU), the international standard-setting body that, following its transmogrification into the Universal Postal Union (1878), would finally establish the binding international postal protocols that have rendered bilateral postal treaties obsolete.^{Footnote 59}

The 1863 Paris Postal Conference was but one of a series of events that led to the founding of the UPU, and with it, international standards for circulating letters, newspapers, and, eventually, parcels. Yet it is worth remembering for at least two reasons that had nothing to do with UPU genealogy. Most obviously, it thrust the United States onto the world stage at an unusually precarious moment in its history. In the summer of 1863, the future of the republic remained to be decided on the battlefield and the possibility that one or more European powers might establish diplomatic relations with the Confederacy could not be discounted. Though there is remarkably little direct evidence linking Kasson with the Lincoln administration’s diplomatic strategy, he could not have been unaware of the extent to which the very fact that the U.S. government had convened an international meeting in the heart of Europe in the midst of a devastating civil war reminded the great powers that the United States was a player on the world stage and that the Confederacy was not.

The power that the United States projected at the postal conference had little to do with its commercial prowess. The U.S. government in 1863 no longer commanded its own fleet of mail steamers, as, for example, it had in 1848: U.S.-backed transatlantic mail steamship service had been suspended during the war. It was, similarly, unrelated to its military muscle. The United States was so weak militarily that the Lincoln administration found it impossible to retain two Confederate diplomats whom a U.S. naval commander, acting on his own authority, had captured on a British mail steamship in international waters. Though the Confederate diplomats had been trying to obtain British and French recognition for the Confederacy, the Lincoln administration found itself stymied not only by hostile international public opinion, but also by the very real possibility that, had it refused to give the Confederate diplomats up, it might well have provoked war with Great Britain, then the leading naval power in the world.

The power that the United States projected, rather, lay in the realm of ideas, or what a present-day political theorist might call “soft power.” The primary rationale for the 1863 Paris Postal Conference, Kasson declared, in his closing remarks, had been to remove “obstacles to uniformity, simplicity, and cheapness in international postal intercourse,” and, to an extent that was greater than their “fears” had permitted them to anticipate, its delegates had drafted protocols for international postal arrangements that had done much to “remove them.”^{Footnote 60}

The capacious civic rationale for postal policy that Kasson championed in his address to his fellow delegates distinguished the United States from the Confederacy, whose Constitution specifically forbade postal subsidies and mandated that all postal expenses be paid for out of general revenue.^{Footnote 61} In addition, it identified the United States with a mission more elevated than self-preservation, less controversial than popular self-government, and more plausible than abolition. By advocating the establishment of international postal protocols, Kasson projected outward a compelling civic ideal. Just as the American West ought to be free from slavery, as Kasson had posited in the 1860 Republican Party platform; so, too, international communications should be liberated from the parochialism of nation-centric postal policies that inhibited commerce and mutual understanding. Here, as in so many other realms, national prerogatives and international standard-setting went hand in hand.^{Footnote 62}

The legacy of postal policy is easily forgotten. For example, it has for some time been a commonplace to trace back the genealogy of present-day digital communications networks not to the mail, but instead to the electric telegraph. In its baldest formulation, journalists proclaim the electric telegraph the “Victorian Internet.”^{Footnote 63} In fact, however, this analogy is flawed for at least two reasons. First, it was the mail, and not the electric telegraph, that enabled ordinary people to transmit messages around the world at high speeds and on a regular schedule at an extremely low cost. Electric telegraph rates remained far too high to be practical for international communications.^{Footnote 64} Second, the impetus for this innovation lay not in Victorian Great Britain, but in the republican United States.

“Cheap postage” lacks moral resonance today. Even so, in the Atlantic world of 1863 it remained a phrase to conjure with, and helps to explain why, at such a seemingly unpropitious moment in its history, the United States took the lead in hastening the promulgation of international standards in a realm that was seemingly so far removed from the pressing needs of the day. Nineteenth-century liberalism differed in many ways from its twentieth-century stepchild. Yet it was no less infused with a fervent faith in the utopian proposition that collective experiments in social engineering could remake the world. Politics have artifacts.^{Footnote 65} Like the Atlantic cable—or the mail steamship—cheap postage was not only or even primarily a technical advance. Rather, it was a cultural expression of a compelling civic ideal.