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Postal History in a Nutshell

The post has a long history. In ancient civilizations, the written word was a conqueror of space and time. "The pen and the sword worked together," wrote Harold Innis. "The written word signed, sealed and swiftly transmitted was essential to military power and the extension of government." The message signed, sealed and delivered was also an essential ingredient of raison d'État in the modern world of the sixteenth century, when Europe began to colonize North America. However, by this time other agencies of postal delivery had come to the fore and other purposes were also being served.

During the medieval era monasteries, universities and town corporations developed their own postal messenger systems. The Renaissance intellectuals of the fifteenth century developed long distance networks of correspondence through which ideas were exchanged and tested. Towards the close of the Middle Ages, merchants of the leading Italian trading cities – principally Venice and Genoa – devised a decentralized system of commercial control and information distribution. Merchants anxious to ensure the transmission of money and information, as well as of their goods, arranged to have information, including letters, circulated via a network of agents based in the various parts of the expanding world. Concurrent hosts of agents made up a human chain of communication that eventually encompassed South and North America. This was the backbone of a far-reaching informal postal system.

This human chain of communication, or informal postal system, was the basis of moving mail into and out of New France. A web of correspondence and message-carrying networks was spun up and down the St. Lawrence valley, across the continent into the Upper Country (the West), down to New Orleans and of course across the Atlantic via Louisbourg to the ocean ports on the coast of France. The British embellished the informal French system, but they innovated as well by introducing (in 1763) a formal postal authority or post office. After considerable agitation, this post office was taken over by the colonials of British North America circa 1850. It constituted the institutional ancestor of the Dominion of Canada Post Office, which saw the light of day in 1867 – the year of Confederation.

Following Confederation, the postal system became the paramount medium of communication for a society that was gravitating in the direction of mass literacy and mass media. The system, which extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, developed into a co-ordinated system of interregional distribution. The railway mail service was its heart, and it brought virtually every community, rural and urban, "on line". As the geography of the post expanded, so too did the sheer volume of mail. The challenge of moving mail between hundreds of thousands if not millions of troops based overseas and on the home front in Canada represented a formative exercise in mass mailing. On the civilian side, beginning early in the twentieth century, business was conducted on a grand scale through the mail. It still is today.

The system rested upon an army of postal personnel: railway mail clerks who sorted the mail as trains sped from one station to the next; airmail pilots and their crews, known as "black gangs", who flew mail into and out of the North; rural postmasters and postmistresses who served villagers and country people; and finally hundreds of sorting clerks and porters who worked behind the scenes in the big city post offices, veritable ancestors of the modern-day mail processing plants.

Through it all, the post has remained a privileged medium through which conversations of a personal nature can unfold. With the mail comes a shared feeling of trust and sometimes indignation. It brings the news that matters, a letter from home, a birthday wish or a Christmas gift. Historically, the post has been the best link – if not the only one – for hundreds of thousands of immigrants anxious to keep in touch with friends and family in their native land or with fellow members of their particular national or ethnocultural diaspora. For years, the post office has provided a window upon the world's postal village. It will continue to do so, long after the telephones stop ringing and the desktop computers click off one last time.

Dr. John Willis
Historian
Canadian Postal Museum

Postal History in a Nutshell

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