Volume 4, Chapter 11, The New Postal System
If the colonies were to fight a war of any length or seriousness against Great Britain,
they could obviously no longer rely upon the Crown's monopoly postal service for transmission
of their mail. When the final crisis began at the beginning of 1774 and Britain got word
of the Boston Tea Party, Benjamin Franklin, already in hot water, was swiftly removed
as the royally appointed Deputy Postmaster General for America. Franklin's unceremonious
removal reminded the Americans that the postal authorities were empowered to open letters
and block delivery of what they thought of as objectionable matter. In addition to the
According to the threat of the Royal Post to the freedom of the press, they began to
see that postal fees were equivalent to another tax levied on them without their consent.
Extension of the American boycott from British trade to the Royal Post was thought of first,
but it was soon seen that a boycott of a tight monopoly could only be self-defeating, for
then no mail would be carried.
The solution was set forth by the eminent radical printer William Goddard, publisher
of the Maryland Journal and the Pennsylvania Chronicle. In early February 1774, he proposed
an illegal, revolutionary, constitutional post, organized and financed by local private
sources operating at cost. The post would be built from the ground up, with local officers
In the spring of 1775, the illegal, privately organized and financed, constitutional post
had a chain of successful post offices from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Williamsburg,
Virginia, and the languishing Royal Post in New York and Boston was being forced to
discharge post writers for lack of work. When the Revolutionary War began, the New England
and New York Provincial Congresses removed the onus of illegality from the new postal
System.
But the Continental Congress took a little noted step from liberty back to centralized
statism in this vital area.
In doing this, Congress had been prodded by a committee headed by Franklin, who, since
his disgrace in England, had been forced to throw in his lot with the American cause.
A voluntary, efficient grassroots postal service had aided the revolution and replaced the
and the Royal Post. But at the end of July, Congress decided to nationalize the Constitutional
Post. It was also decided to expand the postal system southward to Savannah, Georgia, and
northward to Falmouth, Maine. Not fortuitously, Goddard, an ardent rebel and founder of the
The Constitutional Post was deposed and shunted aside in favor of the old opportunist Franklin,
who was chosen to be postmaster general of the New American Post, operated by a newly
created postal department. A colonies-wide governmental post, all too reminiscent of the
old centralized royal post, had now replaced the grassroots private postal system. In any
The event, under pressure of the growing American competition and its own increasing unpopularity,
and further handicapped by being prohibited by the Maryland Provincial Convention, the
The Royal Post closed its American doors in December 1775, never to return.