How transatlantic postage rates worked in the 1850s

Transatlantic postage rates 1850s: the price was fixed, for the first time, by a formal treaty between Britain and the United States [1]. From February 1849, a half ounce letter crossing the Atlantic cost 24 cents in America or 1 shilling in Britain and Ireland, and the sender could choose to pay that charge in full or leave it for the person receiving the letter [1]. Before that agreement came into force, no single price existed at all.

Before the treaty: a letter with no fixed price

For most of the 1840s, a letter travelling between Ireland and the United States crossed a gap in the postal law of both countries. Britain and America had no reciprocal arrangement, so a post office on one side of the Atlantic had no obligation to honour a charge collected on the other. A sender in Ireland could pay the packet fee that put a letter aboard a mail steamer, but that payment covered only the British leg of the journey [3].

Whatever it cost to carry the letter onward once it landed, whether by ship captain’s gratuity or American inland postage, still had to be settled by whoever collected it at the far end. This system dated back to an Act of Queen Anne in 1711, which let the British Post Office reclaim from a letter’s recipient the penny a ship’s master was owed for bringing mail ashore, on top of whatever domestic postage still applied [3]. Nothing about it had been designed with steam packets or mass emigration in mind, and by the 1840s it was straining under both.

The cost of posting a letter out of Ireland in 1847, the year emigration from the west reached its worst point, therefore depended on which office handled it and how far it still had to travel once it reached American soil. Historians of the period describe the years before 1848 as something close to a postal standoff between the two governments, each setting its own transatlantic charges without reference to the other [1]. A fixed, predictable price was still two years away.

None of this uncertainty stopped families from writing. It simply meant that a letter crossing the Atlantic in 1847 carried a cost neither its sender nor its reader could fully predict in advance, on top of everything else that year already asked of them.

Transatlantic postage rates 1850s: after the 1848 treaty

The United States and Britain signed a postal convention on 14 December 1848, and it took effect in February 1849 [1] [2]. For the first time, a single rate applied to a simple letter crossing the Atlantic in either direction: 24 cents from the American side, 1 shilling from the British and Irish side, for anything up to half an ounce. One widely cited breakdown of that 24 cent charge splits it into roughly 5 cents for American inland carriage, 16 cents for the sea crossing itself, and 3 cents for the British inland leg [4], though the exact split varied by route and by year as the treaty was amended.

What mattered to an ordinary sender was simpler: a letter could now be prepaid all the way to its destination in a single transaction, with no further charge expected from the person who opened it. That had not been possible before. The treaty did not, however, make prepayment compulsory, and unpaid letters continued to cross the Atlantic under the new agreement, with the postage collected on delivery instead [4].

Prepaid versus unpaid postage in Victorian Britain and Ireland

Because prepayment stayed optional, a sender weighing whether to pay in advance was making a real choice, not a formality. Paying at the post office meant the recipient owed nothing and the letter would not be held up for payment on arrival. Leaving it unpaid meant the sender kept the coin in their own pocket a little longer, at the cost of shifting that decision, and the risk of a refused or delayed letter, onto the family at the other end.

The choice did not end at the coast. A letter landing in Boston or New York still had to travel on to wherever its reader actually lived, under the ordinary domestic postage of the United States, and that charge had its own history through the decade. An Act of Congress on 3 March 1845 set a single letter’s inland rate at 5 cents up to 300 miles and 10 cents beyond that, effective from 1 July 1845 [1]. A further Act on 3 March 1851 cut the rate again, to 3 cents for a prepaid letter travelling up to 3,000 miles, with a higher charge for one left unpaid [1]. Two decisions, transatlantic and domestic, therefore stacked on top of each other for any letter making the full journey from an Irish townland to an American address inland from the port.

Stamps themselves were only just becoming part of this picture. The United States issued its first national postage stamps in 1847, a 5 cent and a 10 cent design, though using them was not yet compulsory and comparatively few were seen outside the larger cities in their first years of use [1]. In Britain and Ireland, adhesive stamps had been in general use since 1840, following the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post, but a stamp only ever paid the domestic or, later, the treaty rate. It never signified anything Irish about the letter it franked.

Packet mail contracts that carried the Atlantic mail

None of these rates meant much without ships to carry the mail on a fixed schedule, and that schedule was itself the product of a government contract, not open competition. In 1839 the British Admiralty accepted Samuel Cunard’s tender for a transatlantic mail service, offering £55,000 a year, later raised to £81,000, to run steamers between Liverpool, Halifax and Boston on a set timetable [3] [5]. The first ship under that contract, the Britannia, sailed from Liverpool on 4 July 1840, and Cunard’s line held the British transatlantic mail contract for decades afterward [5]. The Post Office kept that arrangement in place until 1867, when responsibility for the contract finally passed back to open bidding [5].

The United States answered with a subsidy of its own. Congress authorised an annual mail contract worth roughly $385,000 in 1847, intended to put an American line on the same footing as Cunard, and Edward Collins won the bidding to run it [5]. His first ship, the Atlantic, sailed from New York to Liverpool on 27 April 1850, opening years of direct rivalry between the two lines for both the mail contract and the passenger trade [5]. That rivalry did not last the decade. The Collins Line’s costs outran its subsidy, and by 1858 the company had ceased operating altogether, leaving Cunard as the dominant carrier of the mail this article describes [5].

A letter’s postage, in other words, bought passage on one of a small number of government subsidised steamers, not a slot on whatever vessel happened to be sailing, and which line still existed to carry it could change within a few years.

How Irish letters entered the transatlantic system

Ireland had no separate postal administration by the time any of this took effect. The office of Postmaster General of Ireland had been merged into the General Post Office in London back in 1831, ending 47 years of an independent Irish post office and folding Irish mail into the same rates, regulations and stamp issues used across the rest of the United Kingdom [5]. A letter posted in Mayo or Galway therefore travelled under exactly the same transatlantic postage rules described above, carried first through the ordinary British mail network before it ever reached a packet ship. There was no Irish postage stamp of the period, and none of the stamps in use anywhere in Ireland before 1922 were issued specifically for Ireland. The only accurate claim about where such a letter began its journey is that it was posted from Ireland.

The route a letter took across the Irish Sea before it ever reached a transatlantic packet changed during this decade too. Liverpool had been the main port handling mail to and from Kingstown since 1839, but once the Chester and Holyhead railway opened in 1848 the Post Office began shifting that traffic back to the shorter Holyhead crossing [6]. A ten year contract for the Holyhead to Kingstown mail run went out to tender in 1849 and was awarded to the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, whose service began in 1850 [6]. A letter posted in the west of Ireland in the late 1840s, in other words, might have travelled to its Atlantic packet ship by one route, and a letter posted only a few years later by another, before either ever reached open water.

What historians cannot know

The surviving record is uneven. Postal accounts from the period tracked totals of prepaid and unpaid letters moving through a given office, not the circumstances of any one sender, so it is not possible to say with certainty how often a particular family chose to prepay rather than leave a letter unpaid. Surviving covers, the actual envelopes with their postmarks and rate markings intact, are the only direct evidence of how a specific letter was charged, and they survive disproportionately from correspondents whose papers were kept for other reasons, often more prosperous households than the emigrant families who wrote and received the bulk of this mail.

What a specific letter from a specific townland cost its sender in a specific year, absent a surviving marked envelope, is usually a matter of applying the known rate table rather than reading it off any single document. Reading the postmarks and rate markings on a letter that has survived is still the closest anyone gets to answering that question directly.

The wider record of what emigrant families paid to stay in touch across the Atlantic sits alongside the history of Irish postmarks and stamps and the practical cost of the crossing that so often came before the first letter home was ever written. A closer look at a real Irish postmark shows how these rates and markings actually appeared on paper.

Sources and further reading

1. Smithsonian National Postal Museum, “Transatlantic Mail” (Overseas Mail exhibition) and “1851-1861 Issues” (About U.S. Stamps: The Classic Period, 1847-1893), Smithsonian Institution.
2. United States Philatelic Classics Society, “The Foreign Mails.”
3. TPO & Seapost Society, “Cunard Packet History” and “Ship Letters” reference pages.
4. Postal History Sunday (Rob Faux), “To and Fro” and “How Do You Rate?” essays on Anglo-American postal rates.
5. Wikipedia, “Cunard Line,” “Collins Line,” “Postmasters General of Ireland” and “Irish Postal Union” entries, cross checked against the specialist postal history sources above.
6. Hoole History and Heritage Society, “Mails to Ireland,” and the University of Liverpool’s early steamships collection, “Post Office Packet Steamers.”