A 19th Century Data Goldmine for Legal Scholars

Nineteenth century empirical legal studies, certainly those with an economic, social, political or historical element, are unlikely to be wholly satisfactory to the lawyers, scholars or academics who conduct such work. Necessary data is frequently unavailable, imprecise, excessively aggregated, not uniform across space and time, and collected by unprofessional or at least procedurally inconsistent agents. We have discovered and begun to use a little known gold mine of data, uniform across the United States, recorded every two years and, in some cases, available for other developed nations. We have been reporting the existence of this treasure trove and conducting sample studies using it, and have presented our findings at meetings conducted by the Smithsonian Institution, the American Economic Association, the Canadian Economic Association and other scholarly gatherings. Legal scholars who believe in the importance of hard numbers describing economic, social and even political information will be interested in our collected material and studies. The data gold mine consists of several separate deposits. The first is the U.S. Official Register (OR), a rare set of documents. The Library of Congress has a complete set and there may be enough surviving volumes scattered around the country in research libraries and specialists' collections to create a few more sets. The Official Register was first published in 1816, then biannually in odd-numbered years, the title changed several times, and responsibility for publication moved between several government agencies. Recorded in the OR is data describing the birthplace, name, occupation and then current workplace of every person receiving a salary-type payment from the U.S. Federal Government. Most importantly, postmasters' salaries in the OR were a direct function of the amount of business in each individual post office. Thus this salary data provides an excellent proxy for local business activity every two years for every town and village in the United States and territories.The second important data source is the annual reports of the Postmaster General (AR), along with similar materials from other countries, Canada in particular. In a previous essay, we showed how the AR's data on postal money orders flowing into and out of former Confederate States versus the Union States flows in Post Civil War America can be used to measure the rate at which the nation recovered to a healthier "balance of interstate payments" between 1865 and 1890. Constitutional experts might find such information useful in tracing the impact of the post-Civil-war amendments. Since AR data is broken down by states, and available annually, we claim the AR-derived “business cycle” data is better than the competition’s.Postmaster cash books are a third data source. The OR and AR are national in scope, report at the micro level, adhere to a uniform standard and appear annually (AR) or biannually (OR). Cash books are valuable and interesting, but “opportunistic”, rare, and not national. The Post Office Department issued ledger type cash books to postmasters. In these, the postmaster kept records of the number and value of each individual money order sold and cashed at his post office. Some books also required the listing of the post office at which a money order sold was to be cashed. The actual books were not intended to be kept after the required monthly or quarterly reports that were submitted to the Post Office Department. Thus, they were usually destroyed so existing copies are rare and so do not provide a national view of money order business. However, those that do exist provide extremely detailed data on the day to day activity at individual post offices. Ledgers that detail the destination of issued money orders will reveal not only seasonal patterns in monetary flow, but whether the value of the issued money orders was a function of local or otherwise special changes in the legal, constitutional or juridical environment of the postal district.Up until now, this potential gold mine of economic, social, political and historical information has been unavailable to the scholarly community, due to the rarity of the documents themselves, the format of the reporting and, most of all, the absence of any fully searchable digitized version of the material. Moreover, no focused, professional effort has been devoted to bring the data to life. We are correcting that with the use of optical character recognition and other procedures. Our project will discuss these data sources in detail, present some small studies of our own, and assist other scholars who may have an interest in the use of this unique information to advance empirical legal studies.