“The income of this department is liable to be affected by the fluctuations of the business of the country. It is increased or depressed in proportion to the increase or depression of that business.”
Mr. Wickliffe also took another sensible view of the department: he says, “Besides this cause of fluctuation in its income, other causes of a reduction, more or less in every year, may be found in the increased facilities which the travel upon railroads and steamboats furnishes for the transmission of letters and newspapers by private conveyance; secondly, in the great extension, to say nothing of the abuse, of the FRANKING PRIVILEGE; thirdly, in the recent establishment of what are called private expenses upon the great mail-routes of the United States; fourthly, in the frauds practised upon the department in evading by various devices the payment of the postage imposed by law.”
CAVE JOHNSON.—Born January 11, 1793, in Robertson county, Tennessee. His opportunities for education were limited, but made available to the greatest extent. In his youth he acted as deputy-clerk of the county, his father being clerk. He was thence led to the study of the law. In 1813 he was appointed deputy-quartermaster in a brigade of militia commanded by his father, and marched into the Creek nation under General Jackson. He continued in this service until the close of the Creek War in 1814. In 1816 he was admitted to the bar; in 1817 he was elected by the legislature one of the attorneys-general of the State, which office he held until elected a member of Congress in 1829. He was re-elected in 1831, 1833, and 1835, defeated in 1837, again elected in 1839, 1841, and 1843. Appointed postmaster-general March 5, 1845. In 1849 he served for a few months as one of the circuit judges of Tennessee, and in 1853 was appointed by the Governor and Senate as President of the Bank of Tennessee, at Nashville.
JACOB COLLAMER.—Born at Troy, New York, about 1792, and removed in childhood to Burlington, Vermont, with his father; graduated at the State University at that place in 1810; served during the year 1812 a frontier campaign as a lieutenant in the service of the United States; admitted to the bar in 1813; practised law for twenty years, serving frequently in the State legislature. In 1833 he was elected an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the State, from which position he voluntarily retired in 1842. In the course of that period he was also a member of a convention held to revise the Constitution of the State. In 1843, elected to Congress to fill a vacancy, and re-elected for a full term in 1844, and again in 1846. Appointed postmaster-general March 7, 1849,—thus forming one of the Cabinet of President Taylor. He resigned in 1850, with the rest of the Cabinet, on the death of the President, and was soon afterwards reappointed on the Supreme bench of his State, which office he held until 1854, when he was elected a Senator in Congress from Vermont for six years from 1855; and in 1861 he was re-elected for the term ending in 1867, serving as chairman of the Committee on Post-Offices and Post-Roads, also that on the Library, and as a member of several other important committees. He received the degree of LL.D. from the University of Vermont and from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.