| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. By David M. Henkin. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvi, 221 pp. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-226-32720-4.)

In 1854, Anthony Burns, a recaptured run away slave, spent four months in a Richmond, Virginia, jail cell. Burns surreptitiously obtained stationery and ink, and he managed to drop several letters out of his cell window. Six of those letters reached the local post office, where they began their journey to his Massachusetts lawyer, Richard Henry Dana. While Burns's story was a stirring example of courage and fortitude, David M. Henkin claims that there was "nothing extraordinary or fortuitous about his use of the post" (p. 2). Yet the faith that Burns placed in the mail, that his letters would reach his lawyer several hundred miles away, "signaled a remarkable cultural transformation" (ibid.). In 1820 most Americans did not participate in this first long-distance communications network; by 1870 nearly all did. Most Americans had come to expect that posted letters and newspapers would arrive quickly and reliably at their destinations.

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