How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  The real importance of Franklin’s postal career would have far more to do with the creation of the future United States and its government than with the uniquely American post that would only emerge two years after his death. Like his experience as a colonial media mogul, running the fragile communications web that linked the fragmented colonial world had given him an unusually big picture of it, which had inevitably affected his views about its greater potential. Writing of the closely affiliated Iroquois tribes, Franklin wryly observed that “It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of their Interests.”

  The Plan of Union that Franklin boldly unveiled at the Albany Congress before the colonies’ major leaders, including Thomas Hutchinson, the future royal governor of Massachusetts, was an outline for an American quasi-government. He had not yet become the “first American” and was not proposing that the colonies should unite in declaring independence from Great Britain. Rather, he asserted that they should join together to deal with important external matters that concerned all of them, including trade as well as defense against the threat from the French and Indians to the west of their seaboard. According to his plan, each colony would elect its own representatives, rather than having them selected by the Crown. These delegates would regularly gather in an assembly, presided over by an executive chosen by Britain, to discuss and devise solutions for problems they shared. His wary peers listened, debated, and then, surprisingly, adopted a modified version of his plan for consideration by their colonial assemblies. These jealous provincial bodies recoiled from the idea of such a centralized authority, and the Crown from anything that smacked of colonial independence. Still, the right man had appeared at the right moment to present major politicians of the day with a new political vision.

  Franklin went on to serve the Crown for twenty more years, and one of his sons would remain a prominent loyalist. Nevertheless, in the winter following the Albany Congress, he spurned a proposal for a colonial union put forward by the Crown’s own Board of Trade on the grounds that it enabled Parliament to tax Americans without their consent—a violation of their rights as Englishmen—and without even allowing them to pick their own representatives, as his Plan of Union had. James Madison later cited Franklin’s correspondence with Massachusetts colonial governor William Shirley on this subject, observing that the prescient argument made in his letters “repelled with the greatest possible force” the Crown’s authority over America and did so “within the compass of a nut shell.”

  Just a month before the Albany Congress, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette had debuted America’s first political cartoon. The simple drawing showed a snake that had been cut up into pieces, signifying the colonies, and the caption read JOIN, OR DIE. The immediate reference reflected Franklin’s concern over the need for the English provinces to unite against the French in the looming colonial wars. On a subtler level, however, the sketch invited a provocative question: Why stop there? Within a generation, Franklin and the post would be at the center of a revolution.

  • • •

  AN APPRECIATION OF THE POST’S foundational role in the creation of the United States requires a little knowledge of the systems that preceded it. The term comes from positus, Latin for “position” or “station,” and a postal system carries information from one place to another, preferably with dispatch. (“Posthaste” first appeared as an instruction on the cover, or outside, of a letter but soon became a synonym for “hurry up!”) Mail is now one of many media, but for all but a recent sliver of history, it was the media. Letters were the only means of communicating over distance, and delivering them required reliable transportation. Boats could carry mail over water, but until the 1790s, when the optical telegraph relayed coded messages via towers, spaced ten to twenty miles apart, that were equipped with telescopes, a man on a horse was the fastest means of delivering information overland.

  Some four thousand years ago, Middle Eastern monarchs established the first postal systems, which were designed to transport official government communications. Herodotus famously praised the ambitious 1,600-mile-long system of the Persian emperor Darius I (r. 522−486 BCE), which used “post riders,” or mounted couriers, to carry communiqués etched on clay tablets: “It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed [italics added].” Centuries later, the network established by the Roman emperor Augustus (27 BCE−14 CE) was similarly reserved for officials, who often traveled in carts along with the mail on the post roads that also helped to spread imperial hegemony and civilization. Indeed, Rome’s post was called the cursus publicus, or “public road.”

  After Rome’s fall, communications links in the West were largely limited to kings, monks, and scholars until the thirteenth century, when European businessmen began to sponsor services that were commercial rather than governmental. (The word “mail” derives from Middle English maille, or “metal link,” for the woven-metal bags carried by the armed couriers of the Hanseatic League, an organization formed at that time to protect the business interests of member German towns and merchant communities.) By the sixteenth century, the German Thurn und Taxis dynasty had begun to expand on the Holy Roman Empire’s imperial system to create the first public post, which transported correspondence for paying customers as well as officials throughout much of Europe.

  Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish social philosopher and political economist, said that a post is “perhaps the only mercantile project which has been successfully managed by, I believe, every sort of government.” Like sound currency, decent civil service, and efficient transportation, a mail system gradually became a sine qua non of nationhood. By the early seventeenth century, France and England had opened the royal mails to their general populations—that is, to the segment able to pay the high postage. A century later, the combination of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, which encouraged the exchange of ideas in a so-called republic of letters, had induced other European nations to follow suit. These posts, however, were not public services in the modern sense of amenities provided by a government for its people’s good—usually because no profit-minded business would do so. These imperial systems were designed for official communications, producing revenue for the state, and, not least, espionage and surveillance.

  By the time Europe’s powers got around to providing public postal service, at least to the well-off, some of the requisite bureaucracy and infrastructure, such as roads and shipping routes, was already in place. The New World was a tabula rasa, and even mighty Great Britain struggled to impose a rudimentary postal template on its North American territory. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, this primitive communications chain had helped the colonists to develop an identity that had less to do with Great Britain, whose citizens they were, than with America, where they had now lived for generations.

  • • •

  COLONIAL AMERICA’S FIRST POSTMASTER—then, as afterward, a prestigious position—was Richard Fairbanks, a respected Bostonian appointed in 1639. He also had a monopoly on selling alcohol in the city, and following English custom, his tavern near the great port’s bustling Long Wharf became the colonies’ first post office. Fairbanks presided over a minimal mail service, however, that was narrowly designated for “all letters which are brought from beyond the seas, or are to be sent thither.”

  As this transatlantic emphasis suggests, the Crown’s North American post was not designed fo
r communications among average colonists. Government officials had the franking privilege—a valuable perquisite that enabled them to use the mail gratis. Otherwise, the service was meant to produce revenue for the king, and its high fees limited its use to the very wealthy and to businessmen and lawyers who had no other way to conduct their affairs or transfer money over distance. Common folk communicated informally through written or, more often, spoken messages sent via obliging friends, shipmasters and other travelers, servants, and Indian runners, such as the man cited by John Endicott, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in a letter to John Winthrop, a wealthy lawyer: “Your kinde lines I receaved by Mascanomet.”

  Few colonists could afford to use the Crown post, but its mere presence was another proof that they belonged to a widely dispersed community that the historian Ian Steele calls the “English Atlantic.” For generations they understood themselves not as Americans but as members of a sprawling commonwealth whose capital was London. They regarded the vast gray ocean less as an obstacle than as a bridge to Great Britain and considered it far more important, and less fearsome, than the vast inland wilds. They had little interest in neighboring colonies, which they considered rivals, and looked to transatlantic trading ships and mail packet boats to bring much of what they considered most valuable: exciting newcomers, the latest consumer goods, and especially news from the distant center of their universe. When a ship from abroad arrived at Boston’s Long Wharf, the city’s male elite gathered to share their letters and news from Europe in the rarefied precinct of their “merchants’ exchange.” The hoi polloi gleaned the tidings secondhand, then headed to a nearby taproom or coffeehouse to discuss the latest goings-on.

  Geography as well as an Anglocentric worldview greatly restricted colonial communications. Even the simplest postal network requires some sort of transportation system, but such was the difficulty of simply getting from point A to point B, especially overland, that it was easier for residents of Massachusetts and the Carolinas to sail to Great Britain than to visit each other. Whenever possible, colonists and their communiqués floated to their destinations on the boats and rafts that plied the rivers and the convoluted coast. Otherwise, they traveled by foot or horseback along trails unfit for wheeled vehicles that had been blazed by game animals and the Indians who hunted them. In a vicious circle, the awful roads hampered intercolonial communications, which further developed the provinces’ sense of isolation and autonomy, only worsening the chances of unified transportation and postal networks. Pennsylvania’s enterprising governor William Penn established a local mail service based in Philadelphia, and Virginia’s planters devised a “tobacco post” that imposed a fine of a hogshead of the lucrative leaves for neglecting to pass the mail along to the next-door neighbors, usually via enslaved servants. Such systems were extremely limited, however, and the colonies had no centralized network that could transport mail across their borders.

  Great Britain’s gradual, modest improvements to the colonial post were primarily motivated by the need to inspire some political esprit de corps among her quarrelsome children, whose culture clashes threatened her struggle with France over control of North America. In 1650, the Crown optimistically ordered its provincial governors to start building a “King’s Highway” between Boston and Charleston, South Carolina. In 1673, Francis Lovelace, the governor of New York, responded to King Charles II’s wish that his American subjects “enter into a close correspondency with each other” by establishing a monthly mail route on the Boston Post Road, as the highway between New York City and Boston would be called; this service was interrupted just six months later, however, when the Dutch briefly retook the large territory along the Hudson and lower Delaware Rivers that they called New Netherland. In 1691, Britain finally recognized that the lack of an intercolonial postal system greatly hindered trade and authorized a centralized network that linked New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania on a weekly basis. Thomas Neale, a favored courtier who never even visited America, received a monopoly to run the system for his own profit, but it was a financial failure, and in 1707, the Crown assumed control.

  A witty journal kept by sharp-eyed “Madam” Sarah Kemble Knight, an important chronicler of colonial society in the early eighteenth century and America’s first postal historian, suggests the obstacles that traveling conditions still posed to mail delivery, even on the Boston Post Road. Marked only by axe notches hacked into trees, this dubious “highway” had first consisted of old Indian paths that were frequently broken by mountains and rivers. Over time, towns along the route had grudgingly widened, straightened, and minimally upgraded their own sections of the road. Certain adjacent taverns, inns, and print shops became post offices and informal community centers, and their proprietors, postmasters.

  In 1704, the thirty-nine-year-old Knight—a merry widow who worked as a kind of colonial paralegal, speculated in real estate, and was once indicted for selling liquor to Indians—set off from her native Boston for New York City. She had no choice but to do the 268-mile business trip on horseback, as the rough highway could not accommodate carriages. She frequently rode in the company of a Crown post rider who, according to Governor Lovelace’s original job description, was to be “a stout fellow, active and indefatigable, and sworne as to his fidelity.” In addition to carrying the mail about twenty-five miles per day, these doughty couriers were expected to guide travelers, watch out for runaway indentured servants and slaves, and avoid confrontations with hostile tribes. Just seven months before Knight set out, Indians attacked the English settlement at Deerfield, Massachusetts, killed fifty-six colonists, and captured more than one hundred prisoners.

  Knight’s observations about the roads—“very bad, Incumbered with Rocks and mountainous passages, which were very disagreeable to my tired carcass”—are the more noteworthy for occurring in the colonies’ most populous, settled region on their best approximation of an interstate. On a typical day of traveling with the post, she choked down a dismal meal in an inn on the route (“what cabbage I swallowed serv’d me for a Cudd the whole day after”), then followed the mail courier to a roaring river. There being no bridge, he dutifully “got a Ladd and Cannoo” to ferry her across, then raced off toward his next relay stop some fourteen miles away. Knight forded another raging stream, then struggled to catch up with the post rider, who had left her to make her own way on the dark, narrow trail that passed for the road. She spent a sleepless night at another inn, disturbed by the “Clamor of some of the Town topers in [the] next Room,” then set out again with the courier at about 4:00 a.m. Transporting the mail from Boston to New York City required seven such long, bone-rattling days on horseback in all weather, although Knight took breaks that spread the ordeal over two weeks. Considering the conditions, it’s not surprising that even in clement weather, a letter sent from Boston took at least a month to arrive in Virginia.

  As Knight’s complaints about noisy topers “tyed by the Lipps to a pewter engine” suggest, the multitasking post offices where Americans of high and low degree sent and picked up their mail before the distant advent of letter boxes and home delivery were lively social hubs. The proprietor-postmasters of these taverns and businesses passed along juicy tidbits from the mailbag to their customers, who in turn were expected to read aloud from their own letters and publications. Many could oblige in what was already a surprisingly literate society, particularly in the New England colonies and among men, largely because of the dominant Protestant culture’s stress on Bible reading.

  The Massachusetts General School Law of 1647, wonderfully known as the “Old Deluder Satan Law,” made the case for education on moral grounds:

  It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures . . . It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such childre
n as shall resort to him to write and read. . . . And it is further ordered, that when any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families or householders, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university.

  Such laws meant that many colonists for whom letters were a rarity could at least share whatever newspapers and pamphlets (leaflets containing timely essays) that circulated with the mail at the postmasters’ discretion.

  The Crown’s post was expensive, slow, erratic, and limited in scope. Many colonists also resented the fact that what revenue it produced went back to Britain, and some, notably Virginians, even tried to equate postage with taxation. Nevertheless, this rudimentary network and the social and physical development it spurred gradually helped civilize a wilderness and push thirteen quarrelsome provinces toward developing a new, independent-minded, egalitarian culture more American than British.

  • • •

  THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LINK between the post and publishing in shaping a distinctive American mentality, personified by Franklin, is hard to overstate. Britain initially forbade the publication of domestic newspapers on the prescient grounds that they could incite sedition. As time went on, however, the publication of shipping news, public notices, and the advertising essential to commerce became practical necessities. In 1690, Benjamin Harris, a Boston printer who published the works of influential Puritan minister Cotton Mather, announced that he would offer Publick Occurrences, both Forreign and Domestick, on a monthly basis, “or if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener.” The authorities almost immediately shut down his news sheet, however, because Harris had had the temerity to refer to the Mohawks, who were the Crown’s ambivalent allies, as “miserable Savages.” Then, in 1704, John Campbell, not coincidentally also Boston’s postmaster, received the government’s imprimatur for his Boston News-Letter, the colonies’ first real paper, which had perhaps three hundred readers. The popular two-page weekly covered news from the English Atlantic world and within the colonies, as well as sermons, believe-it-or-not yarns, poetry, obituaries, accounts of natural wonders and grisly crimes, and, in 1718, a riveting report of the killing of the pirate Blackbeard, word of which had already circulated by mouth.