In 1839, the directors of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad shared some significant news with their shareholders: they had decided to reject a proposal from the United States Post Office for additional mail service. The company was already under contract with the Post Office to carry the mails daily between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Under this contract executed in January 1838, the railroad received $27,500 per year for the service. But in 1839, the Post Office was now asking the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad to carry a second daily mail.
The railroad's directors explained to their shareholders in their 1839 annual report that they must refuse. In the report, they explained:
"The sum offered by the department for this service, however, has been deemed by the Directors wholly inadequate, as a compensation for the disarrangement of their present system of travel, and attendant risk and expense, and insufficient, therefore, to warrant an acceptance of the proposals, with a due regard to the interest of the Stockholders."
That phrase, "disarrangement of their present system of travel," gets to the heart of the matter. The railroad was not refusing to carry the mail altogether, but the disagreement concerned the Post Office's demand for an additional service and even more so, the schedules upon which that mail would travel.
Looking at the company's financial statements we can see why the directors were so reluctant to disrupt their existing schedule. For the preceding twelve months, Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore reported $296,796.74 in passenger receipts. Total receipts were $371,914.94. Passenger traffic therefore accounted for nearly 80 percent of the railroad's receipts. In comparison, the existing $27,500 mail contract was equivalent to about 7 percent of total receipts. Clearly, passenger travel was the railroad's primary source of revenue. From the directors' perspective, altering train schedules to accommodate the Post Office could interfere with the business making up most of the company's income. Their annual report explicitly framed the decision as one involving the interests of the company's stockholders.
The Post Office, however, viewed the situation very differently. Postmaster General Amos Kendall was directly involved in the negotiations. According to postal historian John L. Kay's account of the correspondence, Kendall wrote to the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad on July 12, 1839. The existing contract, dating from January 20, 1838, called for the railroad to carry the mail between Philadelphia and Baltimore for $27,500 annually. Kendall was now proposing two daily mails between the cities for that same $27,500.
The schedules were important. One mail was to leave Philadelphia during the afternoon, at approximately 3 or 4 o'clock. The other was to depart at night, around 1 A.M., after the arrival of the mail from New York. The railroad declined. On August 19, the company responded that it would carry the mail once daily each way for $30,000 per year. The second daily mail sought by Kendall was not included in that offer. This was more than a disagreement over how many bags of mail could be placed aboard a train. The Post Office was attempting to construct a coordinated national transportation network. A mail arriving from New York needed to connect with transportation leaving Philadelphia for Baltimore, which in turn connected with Washington and points farther south. The railroad, meanwhile, scheduled its trains principally around its paying passengers.
That conflict was explicitly recognized by Amos Kendall. In his annual report, he described railroad companies as preferring to operate at times that best accommodated travel on their roads and regarding the carriage of mail as secondary to passenger transportation. In reality, both sides were looking at the same railroad schedule from very different perspectives. For the railroad, the schedule needed to serve the passengers that generated the overwhelming majority of its revenue. But, for the Post Office, the railroad was becoming a critical link and a poorly timed train could leave mail sitting for hours waiting for the next connection.
Congress Complicated the Problem
Kendall's ability to solve the disagreement simply by offering the railroad more money was constrained by an act of Congress passed on January 25, 1839 The law, "An Act further to regulate the transportation of the mail upon railroads", provided that the Postmaster General could not pay a railroad company more than "three hundred dollars per mile per annum" for the transportation of "one or more daily mails."
Those last words mattered. The $300 maximum did not just apply separately to each daily mail. It was the maximum annual compensation per mile that could be paid whether the railroad carried one mail or multiple daily mails. The Philadelphia-to-Baltimore railroad was roughly 97 miles long. At $300 per mile, the statutory ceiling would have been somewhere around $29,000 annually. The company's existing $27,500 contract was therefore already close to the maximum Kendall was legally permitted to pay. According to Kay's account, the railroad wanted $30,000 even for one daily mail. Kendall wanted two daily mails. Congress had effectively told him that he could not pay more than roughly $29,100.
The Postmaster General was caught between the requirements of the national mail system, the business interests of the railroad and a compensation ceiling imposed by Congress.
The Dispute Reaches the President
By December, the railroad mail problem had reached President Martin Van Buren. In his Third Annual Message to Congress on December 2, 1839, Van Buren reported that difficulties had arisen in negotiating mail transportation contracts with railroad companies. His wording closely reflected the dispute that had unfolded during the year. The problem, Van Buren explained, was not merely whether railroads would carry the mail. It was whether the Post Office could get them to carry it when the Post Office needed it carried. In his address to Congress, he explained that the statutory maximum was insufficient to induce some railroad companies to transport the mails "at such hours as are required for the accommodation of the public." Van Buren reminded Congress that “it is indispensable that the Post-Office Department shall be enabled to control the hours at which the mails shall be carried over railroads".
The Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore dispute brings this problem to life. The railroad had a rational financial reason for arranging its trains around passenger traffic. Nearly four-fifths of its receipts came from passengers. Its directors explicitly told shareholders that the Post Office's proposal would "disarrange their present system of travel."
Congress had limited the Postmaster General's ability to resolve the conflict through negotiation by imposing the $300-per-mile ceiling. Van Buren was therefore putting the problem back before Congress. He was not asking Congress simply to force the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad to accept Kendall's offer. Nor was he simply asking Congress to give the railroad whatever it demanded. He was telling Congress that the federal government needed a way to control the schedules upon which the nation's mail traveled. If the $300 statutory maximum prevented the Post Office from obtaining the service it needed, Congress should reconsider the compensation. If railroad companies made unreasonable demands because the government depended upon their lines, Congress needed to address that problem as well.
In 1839, the federal government was discovering that putting the mail on the railroad was relatively simple, but getting the railroad to run when the mail needed to move was another matter entirely.
In his 1839, State of the Union Address, Martin Van Buren described the problem to Congress this way:
Some difficulties have arisen in relation to contracts for the transportation of the mails by railroad and steamboat companies. It appears that the maximum of compensation provided by Congress for the transportation of the mails upon railroads is not sufficient to induce some of the companies to convey them at such hours as are required for the accommodation of the public. It is one of the most important duties of the General Government to provide and maintain for the use of the people of the States the best practicable mail establishment. To arrive at that end it is indispensable that the Post-Office Department shall be enabled to control the hours at which the mails shall be carried over railroads, as it now does over all other roads. Should serious inconveniences arise from the inadequacy of the compensation now provided by law, or from unreasonable demands by any of the railroad companies, the subject is of such general importance as to require the prompt attention of Congress.In relation to steamboat lines, the most efficient remedy is obvious and has been suggested by the Postmaster-General. The War and Navy Departments already employ steamboats in their service; and although it is by no means desirable that the Government should undertake the transportation of passengers or freight as a business, there can be no reasonable objection to running boats, temporarily, whenever it may be necessary to put down attempts at extortion, to be discontinued as soon as reasonable contracts can be obtained.The suggestions of the Postmaster-General relative to the inadequacy of the legal allowance to witnesses in cases of prosecutions for mail depredations merit your serious consideration. The safety of the mails requires that such prosecutions shall be efficient, and justice to the citizen whose time is required to be given to the public demands not only that his expenses shall be paid, but that he shall receive a reasonable compensation.
References
Van Buren, Martin. “Third Annual Message.” The American Presidency Project, 2 Dec. 1839, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/third-annual-message-4.
Kay, John L. “The First Trunk Line.” La Posta, vol. 14, no. 3, 1983. La Posta Publications. La Posta PDF. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.
Kendall, Amos. Report of the Postmaster General. 30 Nov. 1839. Senate Executive Document No. 2, 26th Congress, 1st Session, U.S. Congressional Serial Set 354, pp. 613–622.
Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Rail Road Company. Annual Report of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad Company. United States Book and Job Office, 1839. Internet Archive. Digitized copy via Wikimedia Commons. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.
United States, Congress. “An Act Further to Regulate the Transportation of the Mail upon Railroads.” United States Statutes at Large, vol. 5, 25 Jan. 1839, p. 314. Transcription of the statute. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.
Illustration
Bartlett, W. H., artist. Viaduct on Baltimore and Washington Railroad. Engraved by H. Adlard, 1838. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Library of Congress catalog record and image. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026
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