In 1721, James Franklin, a cantankerous Boston printer, became the publisher of the New-England Courant, which featured more domestic political news than its predecessors and even critiques of the Massachusetts authorities, who would later imprison the outspoken journalist for his antiauthoritarian views. In 1717, he had indentured his twelve-year-old brother, Benjamin, a voracious reader who had dreamed of becoming a sailor. The apprentice learned to set type, peddle papers, and compose essays. As he later recalled, he had to write his popular, sarcastic “Silence Dogood” letters on the sly: “But being still a boy, and suspecting that my brother would object to printing any thing of mine in his paper, if he knew it to be mine, I contrived to disguise my hand, and writing an anonymous paper I put it at night under the door of the printing house.”
At seventeen, Franklin staged his first act of rebellion by fleeing Puritan Boston and the irascible James, who had beaten him. He settled in Quaker Philadelphia, the broad-minded “City of Brotherly Love,” which was the colonies’ unofficial capital and postal center, and soon attracted the attention of Sir William Keith, then governor of Pennsylvania. The grandee urged Franklin to start his own printing business and even offered to supply letters of credit so he could buy the necessary equipment in London. The penniless Franklin traveled to England, only to find that no such letters had preceded him, and he never forgot the British official’s betrayal and broken promises. Stranded abroad, he had to work for months to earn his passage back home.
Franklin went on to open his own print shop on Philadelphia’s bustling Market Street and prosper. (One notable client was George Whitefield, a celebrity evangelist of the era’s “Great Awakening” Protestant revival, whose sermons the deist published despite his own beliefs, because the tracts both sought to improve the public’s morals and turned a nice profit.) In 1737, Britain recognized the enterprising printer’s merits by appointing him Philadelphia’s postmaster, and in 1753, he was promoted to the important position of joint postmaster general for all the North American colonies.
Franklin’s service in the Crown’s colonial post exemplifies his flair for doing well while doing good. Many colonial printers, particularly those who also published newspapers, were eager to serve as postmasters, less for the position’s modest financial rewards than for its perquisites. The job put them on the inside track for lucrative official printing jobs and also gave them privileged access to both the news and its circulation. Their valuable franking privilege enabled them to send their newspapers to one another through the mail for free, and articles recycled from these “exchange papers” helped to pad their broadsheets’ profitable ads and notices for little trouble or expense. Moreover, once the costly, top-priority letters and government documents had been locked in the portmanteau, as the secure official mailbag was called, postmasters selected which newspapers could also travel with the post, though informally, in saddlebags, and pending the courier’s approval as to bulk. This was an easy decision for postmaster-printers who were eager to increase the circulation of their own publications, and at no cost.
No one was more assiduous in exploiting a postmaster-publisher’s privileges than Franklin. His print shop–post office became the locus for the latest news and gossip, which he published, along with his own trenchant commentaries, and circulated for free. The Crown position’s remuneration per se was small, he wrote, but the job “facilitated the correspondence that improv’d my newspaper, increas’d the number demanded, as well as the advertisements to be inserted, so that it came to afford me a considerable income. My old competitor’s newspaper declin’d proportionably.”
It was not a coincidence that Postmaster General Franklin waited until 1758, after he had made his fortune, to order that all the newspapers the post riders agreed to carry could travel in the mail for the same uniformly low rate. This egalitarian change encouraged the fledgling field of journalism, made it more competitive, and motivated ambitious publishers to expand their readership by offering, along with the still dominant foreign news, a less provincial, more broadly American perspective that transcended colonial boundaries. Few newspapers traveled all the way from Boston to Baltimore, but by the early 1760s, the New-York Mercury could claim readers in Connecticut, New Jersey, and even Rhode Island as well as its home colony.
As their intertwined postal, transportation, and publishing systems increasingly enabled colonists to share information that went beyond Anglocentric or purely parochial interests, they could not fail to draw sharper distinctions between Great Britain and America. Whether the issue was trade or taxation, agriculture or education, it gradually seemed more practical for a Bostonian to discuss it with a New Yorker or a Philadelphian than with a Londoner.
A change in the use of Boston’s elegant Old State House offers a bricks-and-mortar illustration of the colonists’ gradual shift from a European to an American identity. The building was constructed in 1713 to be the seat of the Massachusetts Assembly and nerve center of the northern colonies, and its main entry, spectacularly adorned by Great Britain’s royal lion and unicorn, faces east, to the Atlantic and the mother country. The western, inland façade is not nearly as grand. Instead of looking toward mighty Britannia, this entry opened onto the Boston Post Road and the wild territory that sprawled west to the Appalachian Mountains and beyond. As the colonies moved into closer relations with one another, however, the reports that passed through this door began to eclipse Europe’s news in importance. By the 1760s, the Old State House was the incubator of the independence movement, and its modest western door to the American interior was its main entry.
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FOR MOST OF COLONIAL HISTORY, Britain had been too preoccupied with its own internal affairs to pay much attention to its distant American subjects. More than a century of this benign neglect, compounded by the inherent complexities of transatlantic communications, had fostered the colonists’ strong streak of self-reliance. John Smith, a founder of the Jamestown colony in 1607, had yoked the values of industry and liberty early on, writing sternly: “You must obey this now for a Law, that he that will not work shall not eat” and also “Let all men have as much freedom in reason as may be,” because “the very name of servitude will breed much ill blood, and become odious to God and man.” Anne Bradstreet, his contemporary in Massachusetts, was no less hardworking and independent-minded. America’s first published poet and woman writer, as well as the mother of eight children, ridiculed the critics who condemned her for daring to assert her views in print:
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits;
A Poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on Female wits.
By the time Franklin addressed the Albany Congress in 1754, his countrymen were a confident people who no longer lived in their grandfathers’ America. They had made significant progress in the gargantuan task of creating a modern civilization in the wilderness. Their inland transportation, though still poor, had improved, and their excellent sailing ships roamed the seas to Europe, the West Indies, South America, Africa, and Asia. Skilled artists and artisans were turning their cities into capitals of culture and fashion as well as politics and commerce. Wealthy Americans took the Grand Tour of the Continent, and at home they enjoyed imported delights, from elegant Georgian architecture to tea and its paraphernalia. Most important, the colonies were producing the homegrown intellectuals who would create the American Enlightenment. Franklin and the much younger philosopher-statesmen, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Rush, were determined to bring the Age of Reason’s lofty principles down to earth and put them into practice. This desire was rooted in the robust conviction, shared by America’s Protestant divines and France’s philosophes alike, of the individual’s right—indeed, obligation—to know, think, and do for oneself, which European governments still regarded as a wild idea.
Fo
r a long time, Britain and her increasingly self-sufficient colonial subjects had mostly avoided conflicts over just who was in charge of what on American soil. In the 1750s, however, Franklin’s postal improvements and the Crown’s fast, light mail packet boats, which began regular service between England and the colonies, increased the king’s ability to supervise his feisty children. Then, in 1765, an activist Parliament seriously perturbed the relationship by passing the Stamp Act, which levied a new tax on the colonists that was meant to defray the cost of maintaining ten thousand British troops to defend the Appalachian frontier. The law’s name derived from the fact that the tax often took the form of so-called revenue stamps that had to be affixed to the pages of newspapers and legal and commercial documents, including licenses, wills, and even playing cards; specially embossed paper was also used for the purpose. Britain added insult to the economic injury by passing the law without the colonial legislatures’ approval, which violated the Englishmen’s constitutional rights. When the colonists furiously objected, the Crown made things worse by maintaining that it had long taxed them without discussion or complaint by charging them for mail service.
Americans had long chafed at the high cost of postage, which even Postmaster General Franklin had initially tried to rationalize as a fee for a service. Now Britain itself invited them to consider it as taxation without representation—a form of tyranny, as the rallying cry first voiced in Virginia nearly fifty years before had put it. That same year, angry delegates from nine colonies followed the precedent set by the Albany Congress and met in New York City to participate in the so-called Stamp Act Congress. These representatives soon found that they had much more in common than this latest grievance and began to develop a broader, more unified political consciousness.
The fracas over the hated Stamp Act was also a personal turning point for Franklin. Since 1757, he had been a mostly absentee postmaster general while also working in London as a lobbyist for several colonies, and the bon vivant had relished life abroad. In addition to his official duties, he conducted scientific experiments and tinkered with inventions, including a more efficient chimney damper and a glass “armonica.” He met David Hume and Adam Smith and was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and St. Andrews universities, after which he was customarily addressed as “Dr. Franklin.” As much as he loved London’s social and intellectual tumult, however, he had grown increasingly disenchanted with Britain’s corrupt politics and egregious socioeconomic inequities. He had initially opposed the Stamp Act and fought successfully for its repeal a year after it was passed, but for him as well as the “Sons of Liberty,” a colonial group of nascent rebels riled by the hated tax, Parliament’s ameliorative gesture was too little, too late. Asked if the Crown should send military forces to suppress colonial dissent, he said, “They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”
The visionary apologist for an American union, initially within the British Empire, now saw no alternative to true independence. In 1772, Franklin forwarded to some Massachusetts firebrands letters that had been written by Thomas Hutchinson, the colony’s governor, in which he advocated “an abridgment of what are called English liberties” in America. Scandal ensued on both sides of the Atlantic when the letters were published, although for different reasons. The mischievous Franklin had already been known to tweak his postmaster’s frank from “Free. B. Franklin” to “B. Free Franklin,” and in 1774, he was heaped with official opprobrium and fired from his Crown position. In 1775, he sailed for Philadelphia just as the battles of Lexington and Concord signaled the beginning of hostilities, and he was soon appointed the Pennsylvania Assembly’s delegate to the Second Continental Congress. Despite his age—Franklin was seventy, George Washington forty-four, and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson only in their thirties—he became one of the founders’ most radical voices for American independence.
The former postmaster general returned to a seething revolutionary milieu in which a new, underground postal system was evolving into the backbone of a new government. Many colonists had already been boycotting the Crown’s mail or bribing its couriers to carry their letters separately for a cheaper, if illegal, fee. (The latter practice was so common that Hugh Finlay, a British postal surveyor, wrote: “Were any Deputy Post Master to do his duty, and make a stir in such matter, he would draw on himself the odium of his neighbours and be mark’d as the friend of Slavery and oppression and a declar’d enemy to America.”) Thousands of patriots, including Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and Jefferson, had joined so-called committees of correspondence in order to exchange information and ideas about the growing political crisis, and they had good reason to fear using the Crown’s post. Like France, England intercepted mail and searched it for seditious content; indeed, surveillance had been one of Henry VIII’s motivations for establishing a state-run post in the first place. Even previously neutral colonists were outraged by Britain’s interference with their letters and newspaper delivery, which heightened their sense of estrangement and determination to enjoy the free exchange of ideas, no matter how controversial—a radical principle intrinsic to both the post and the government about to emerge.
The patriots desperately needed their own secure, independent communications network so that they could talk treason and circulate the latest news without fear of arrest. In 1774, William Goddard, a temperamental but gifted Baltimore publisher-postmaster fed up with the Crown post’s efforts to obstruct his patriotic newspapers’ circulation, created the independent “Constitutional Post,” which was quickly adopted by the committees of correspondence, financed by subscriptions, and managed by a group that nominated postmasters and set routes and rates. (Its couriers included Paul Revere, a talented silversmith and engraver later celebrated in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s stirring if inaccurate poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.”) When running the system became a full-time job, Mary Katherine Goddard, William’s capable older sister, assumed his duties in Baltimore, later becoming America’s first woman postmaster in her own right.
The patriotic circles that supported the committees of correspondence and the Constitutional Post became the incubators for the new government that would wage the revolution and create the United States. These rebel groups increasingly ignored the local British authorities and ran their own public affairs, including the elections of the delegates to the Continental Congress, convened in Philadelphia in 1774. That same year, William Goddard asked the assembly to officially adopt his independent post, warning that otherwise “letters are liable to be stopped & opened by ministerial mandates, & their Contents construed into treasonable Conspiracies; and News Papers, those necessary and important vehicles, especially in Times of public Danger, may be rendered of little avail for want of Circulation.” At first, the delegates were too distracted by the battles at Lexington and Concord to take action. Finally, however, they saw that the war’s outcome would depend on a secure network that could both sustain popular support and allow communications between politicians and the military. On July 26, 1775, the Continental Congress voted to transform the short-lived but crucial Constitutional Post into the Post Office Department of the United States—a nation rooted in a communications network that promoted the free exchange of ideas.
The effort and cost of operating the post was a tremendous burden, especially during the war, yet the founders considered its importance so obvious that their entire authorization for the department was just two sentences long. Congressional delegates and military officers received the franking privilege, which encouraged them to write the many letters that have been a tremendous boon to historians. Franklin was appointed postmaster general and empowered to hire a secretary, a comptroller—he chose Richard Bache, his son-in-law and mediocre successor—and the necessary deputies. Goddard was chagrined when he, who had created the system and influenced the much older Franklin’s thinking about postal matters, was passed over for the top job. However, he agreed to serve as the department’s first “riding
surveyor,” or inspector, charged with making sure that service was reliable and secure. By Christmas 1775, the Crown’s mail, long starved for business, shut down for good.
On July 4, 1776, the founders signed the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. (The Smithsonian National Postal Museum, in Washington, D.C., owns the only existing piece of mail from that day: a dated “cover,” or a folded letter’s addressed outermost surface, sent via the Constitutional Post, that’s addressed to John Hancock, a delegate to the Continental Congress and signer of the declaration.) Franklin sailed to France as the new nation’s ambassador and secured the alliance that was essential to America’s victory in 1783. He returned home to sign the Constitution in 1787, and when he died three years later, at the age of eighty-four, his status was second only to George Washington’s.
As John Adams later wrote of the first American, “His name was familiar to government and people, to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind.” His gravestone read only “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin, 1790,” but one of Poor Richard’s aphorisms would have been a suitably earthy epitaph:
How the Post Office Created America Page 3
