Money Orders and National Integration, 1864–95

Abstract

Chapter 6 traces the expansion of the postal money order system between the 1860s and 1890s, a service that allowed people to send small sums of money safely and cheaply through the mail. This chapter offers another counterpoint to assumptions about the inevitable tides of bureaucratization and national integration in the 19th-century West. First, unlike much of the US Post, the money order system was a centralized bureaucracy, managed by a career technocrat named Charles Macdonald. But Macdonald’s efficient management was predicated on limiting its spatial coverage to a relatively small number of western post offices. Second, money orders allowed westerners to conduct long-distance transactions that helped integrate them into a national consumer market. Mapping where the residents of one western town actually sent money orders during the 1890s reveals the unexpected pattern that despite an age of nationalizing forces, their remittances stayed largely within a regional orbit.