Star route frauds

Special postal routes, designated on lists by three stars for “certainty, celerity, and security,” were mostly in the West and depended on horses for transportation. Marauders, topography, and climate made them difficult and dangerous. In 1878 there were 9,225 star routes (some handling only three letters a week), for which $5.9 million was appropriated. Between 1878 and 1880, Second Assistant Postmaster General Thomas J. Brady and his accomplices furnished sham petitions requesting that service be expedited on 93 of these routes. Improved service jumped annual operating costs from $762,858 to $2,723,464 and required a deficiency appropriation that aroused the suspicions of CONGRESS and President RuTHERLORD B. Hayes, but the Post Office Department claimed that increased service was needed and the money was appropriated. Hayes, however, insisted that no new star route liabilities be incurred without a review by himself.

In 1881, less than two months after Hayes left office, President James Abram Garfield’s postmaster general, Thomas L. James, exposed the star route frauds and revealed them as the source of some of the money that had financed Garfield’s election. Stephen W. Dorsey, the secretary of the Republican National Committee, through his connection with Brady, was able to engineer Garfield’s crucial victory in Indiana with star route money. Dorsey’s brother, his brother-in-law, and a former partner controlled 24 contracts that had been worth $55,246 but were increased to $501,072. A small part of the increase went for additional service; the rest was put to private and political use. Dorsey later made the preposterous claim that he had spent $400,000 in Indiana, but the Republicans were well funded in that state.

Garfield’s assassination interrupted the investigation of the frauds, but the Chester Alan Arthur administration persisted and eventually brought Brady and Dorsey to trial. After protracted litigation both were acquitted.

Further reading: Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Allan Peskin, Garfield: A Biography (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1978).