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Istituto di studi storici postali “Aldo Cecchi” onlus Atti del Convegno internazionale Proceedings of the International Congress STORIA POSTALE. SGUARDI MULTIDISCIPLINARI, SGUARDI DIACRONICI POSTAL HISTORY: MULTIDISCIPLINARY AND DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVES Prato, 13-15 giugno 2019 / 13-15 June 2019 a cura di Bruno Crevato-Selvaggi e Raffaella Gerola Quaderni di storia postale 35 Prato 2020 Quaderni di storia postale n. 35 Copertina: WWS di Laura Mangiavacchi Fotografia in copertina: Lars Nissen, da Pixabay © 2020 Istituto di studi storici postali “Aldo Cecchi” onlus, Prato ISBN 978-88-85658-29-5 Richard R. John JOHN BULL, UNCLE SAM, TRANSATLANTIC STEAMSHIPS, AND THE MAIL Richard R. John, Columbia University, New York City, USA, [email protected] Titolo. John Bull, lo zio Sam, i vapori transatlantici e la posta. Keywords. Transatlantic steamships. Cunard Line. Collins Line. Mail subsidies. Parole chiave. Vapori transatlantici. Cunard Line. Collins Line. Sovvenzioni postali. Abstract Historical writing on North Atlantic postal communications in the mid-nineteenth century has mostly focused on the gradual ascendancy of the Halifax-based Cunard Steamship Company, which completed its first transatlantic postal voyage in 1840. Largely overlooked in this literature is the long and often ideologically charged debate in the United States over the propriety of subsidizing postal transportation outside of the country’s territorial boundaries. A pivotal event in this debate was the 1849 confrontation in the U.S. Senate between Ohio Democrat William Allen and Connecticut Democrat John Niles. Allen opposed postal subsidies: in his view, the U.S. government should subsidize the circulation of information on public affairs, but not commercial correspondence. Niles, a former postmaster general, supported subsidies as a necessary adjunct to trade. To buttress his point, Allen ventured a remarkably expansive historical comparison between ancient Greece, where the absence of a postal system made representative government impos- sible, and the modern United States, where the postal system undergirded democratic politics. This debate effectively ended in 1851, when the U.S. Congress rejected its longstanding commitment to balancing postal revenue and postal expenditures, a victory for Niles. 194 RICHARD R. JOHN While forgotten today, this debate – and the comparable debate in the British Parlia- ment over mail subsidies – is significant for at least two reasons. First, it marked an early chapter in the still-evolving debate over the role of national governments in what we would today call global information policy; and, second, it spawned a remarkably enduring visual iconography that popularized the figures of John Bull and Uncle Sam. Riassunto I testi storici sulle comunicazioni postali nel Nord Atlantico attorno alla metà del XIX secolo si sono focalizzati soprattutto sulla crescente influenza della Cunard Ste- amship Company, di Halifax, che compì il primo viaggio postale transatlantico nel 1840. Quel che è stato decisamente sottovalutato nella letteratura specialistica è il dibattito, durato anni e spesso carico di valori ideologici, che vi fu negli Stati Uniti sull’opportunità di sovvenzionare il trasporto postale al di fuori dei confini territo- riali del paese. L’evento clou di questo dibattito fu il confronto avvenuto nel 1849 nel Senato statunitense tra due senatori democratici: William Allen, dell’Ohio, e John Niles, del Connecticut. Allen era contrario ai sussidi postali. Secondo lui il governo statunitense avrebbe dovuto sovvenzionare la circolazione delle informazioni negli affari pubblici ma non la corrispondenza commerciale. Al contrario Niles, ex direttore generale delle poste, appoggiava le sovvenzioni ritenendole un necessario complemento al commer- cio. A sostegno della sua teoria, Allen fece un confronto storico molto ampio tra la Grecia antica, in cui l’assenza di un sistema postale rendeva impossibile il governo rappresentativo, e gli Stati Uniti, in cui il sistema postale era alla base della politica democratica. Il dibattito terminò con la vittoria di Niles solo nel 1851, quando il Congresso decise dopo anni di non proseguire più con la compensazione tra entrate e uscite postali. Un dibattito ormai dimenticato ma, analogamente a quanto successo nel parlamento britannico a proposito delle sovvenzioni postali, significativo per almeno due motivi. Per prima cosa, contribuì a iniziare il dibattito sul ruolo dei governi nazionali in quella che oggi chiameremmo politica globale di informazione; in secondo luogo, diede origine a un’iconografia che durò a lungo e che rese popolari le figure di John Bull e dello zio Sam. In an age in which the oceangoing steamship was the sine qua non of speed, the North Atlantic sea lanes witnessed an epic contest between the British empire and the American republic. Victory became a matter not only of national pride but also of commercial supremacy and military prowess. John Bull, Uncle Sam, Transatlantic Steamships and the Mail 195 The principal actors in this morality play were neither admirals nor statesmen, but shipping companies. Each invested heavily in steam-pow- ered vessels designed to cross the Atlantic on a regular schedule; each trad- ed on their reputations as national champions; and each relied on generous government support. Though the mail made up a relatively small part of the steamship’s freight, its conveyance was a major rationale for the annual stipends upon which each company relied. The British entrant in this contest was the British and North American Royal Mail Steam-Packet Company, an unwieldly name that was often shortened to the Cunard Line, in honor of its founder, Samuel Cunard. For the United States, the national champion was the United States Mail Steamship Company, better known as the Collins Line, after its chief pro- moter, Edward K. Collins. The Cunard steamship Britannia completed its first transatlantic voyage in 1840, journeying from Liverpool to Boston via Halifax in a mere 13 days; the Collins’s Atlantic made its grand debut a decade later. Cunard faced one challenge at the outset that Collins escaped. Col- lins’s home port in the United States was New York City; Cunard’s, in contrast, was the more northerly port of Boston. In the winter of 1844, Boston’s harbor froze over, immobilizing the Britannia. Fearful of a loom- ing public relations disaster, Boston merchants raised a purse to clear a seven-mile-long channel so that the Britannia could reach the open sea. 1. Merchants Protect Boston’s Reputation as an All-Weather Port by Freeing the Cu- nard’s Britannia from its Ice-Bound Harbor (Digital Commonwealth, Boston, Mas- sachusetts). 196 RICHARD R. JOHN The contest between Cunard and Collins engaged a gaggle of lawmakers, lobbyists, and journalists, and has spawned a large secondary literature. 1 Largely unremarked in these popular accounts is a circumstance that would have been obvious at the time, namely, its ideological dimension. 2 The contest mattered to contemporaries in ways that reveal much about the two countries governmental institutions and civic ideals. In the United Kingdom, the public debate centered on naval supremacy; in the United States, on the relative importance of territorial consolidation and overseas expansion. The North Atlantic sea lanes in the mid-nineteenth century were then, as they remain today, one of the busiest trade routes in the world. In the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, a fleet of sailing ships linked the United Kingdom and the United States in a communications circuit anchored by Liverpool and New York City. This circuit stretched from Britain’s manufacturing heartland to the cotton ports of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. Among the ships in this circuit were the sailing packets that the British post office had run across the Atlantic since the colonial era on a more-or-less regular schedule. (The name «packet» was derived from the packets of mail that they carried. 3) The postal packets ceased operation in 1823, having been supplanted by a 1 DAVID BUDLONG TYLER, Steam Conquers the Atlantic, New York, D. Appleton-Century, 1939, chaps. 9-15; FRANCIS E. HYDE, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 1840-1973: A History of Shipping and Financial Management, London, Macmillan, 1975, chap. 2; JOHN A. BUTLER, Atlantic Kingdom: America’s Contest with Cunard in The Age of Sail and Steam, Washing- ton D.C., Brassey’s, 2001, chaps. 5-6; STEPHEN FOX, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships, New York, HarperCollins, 2003, pt. 2; WILLIAM M. FOWLER, JR., Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins, and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic, New York, Bloomsbury, 2017. For an annotated edition of several of the most revealing mid-nineteenth-century American steamship pamphlets, as well as a checklist of the most widely circulated nineteenth-century steamship-related postal pamphlets to have been published in the United States, see RICHARD R. JOHN, ed., The American Postal Network, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2012, vol. 2, pp. vii-102. 2 PETER A. SHULMAN, Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), chap. 1. Missing from the legislative debate over the Cunard-Collins rivalry was a fact that, had it been publicly revealed, would have as- tonished lawmakers in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Shortly after Collins entered the North Atlantic market, he entered into a secret cartel agreement with Cunard to sta- bilize the market. EDWARD W. SLOAN, Collins versus Cunard: The Realities of a North Atlantic Steamship Rivalry, 1850-1858, «International Journal of Maritime History», 4 (June 1992), pp. 83-100. 3 DANIEL WALKER HOWE, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815- 1848, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 120. John Bull, Uncle Sam, Transatlantic Steamships and the Mail 197 commercial line of sailing packets run out of New York City. The commercial packets were faster and more reliable and quickly became the favored carrier for mercantile correspondence, which was, in this period, by far the most important category of mail.

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