Adhesive Stamps and Three-Cent Letters.

Mail delivery was not a service taken lightly in the mid nineteenth century. There were few mechanical devices to assist in mail handling, and the postal system was in an early stage of development. Local postmasters did much of the work as they saw fit, including canceling stamps so they could not be reused. Until the early 1850s, this process was done by the postmaster in writing or with a hand stamp he designed himself. A key development in the history of mail delivery was the introduction in 1842 of the adhesive postage stamp and envelopes with printed postage, which allowed people to affix stamps themselves or use postpaid envelopes. When postal workers were freed from some of the fee-collection duties, they could spend more of their time sorting mail for distribution. Even so, until 1855 letters could...