Neither Snow Nor Rain

by Devin Leonard

  1

  The Founding Father

  The placard above the door on Second Street in Philadelphia said “The Sign of the Bible.” That was how Benjamin Franklin knew he was in the right place on a cool Monday morning in October 1723. The 17-year-old Franklin was a newcomer to the city. He had arrived the previous day after fleeing Boston, where he had worked as an apprentice in a printing shop run by his older brother, James. Benjamin didn’t like taking orders from his sibling, nor did he appreciate it when James beat him for his insubordination. So Benjamin ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia, arriving by boat from Burlington, New Jersey. He had spent the night in a waterfront boardinghouse and had only a few coins left his pocket. Now Benjamin Franklin needed a job.

  This is what brought him to the doorstep of Andrew Bradford, Philadelphia’s most prominent printer. The Sign of the Bible was his shop. He published the American Weekly Mercury, Philadelphia’s first newspaper, and one that was circulated throughout the colonies. Bradford also operated a general store on the first floor of his Second Street house where customers could choose from whalebone, pickled sturgeon, silk clothing, and Spanish snuff, along with Bibles and other books that Bradford printed.

  Bradford welcomed Franklin and offered him breakfast. He had no work for his visitor at the moment but said there might be an open apprenticeship at another printing shop. Franklin was grateful for the advice and the free meal, but he wasn’t impressed with his host. Franklin would later write that he found Bradford “very illiterate.” He was even more contemptuous of the American Weekly Mercury, which he described as “a paltry thing, wretchedly managed, no way entertaining, and yet was profitable to him.” At the time, Franklin was a penniless, teenage runaway, but he thought he could do much better.

  After working as an apprentice for five years, Franklin opened his own printing shop in Philadelphia. He ran a general store on the premises that competed with Bradford’s, offering a more vast and eccentric selection, which, according to one of his biographers, included at various times soap, slates, pencils, ink, sealing wax, wafers, fountain pens, quills, inkhorns, chocolate, linseed oil, coffee, powdered mustard, compasses, scales, patent medicine, protractors, Rhode Island cheese and cod, white stockings, duck, barrels of mackerel, tea, saffron, spermaceti, and spectacles. In addition, Franklin acquired a paper called the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he transformed into a fierce competitor to the American Weekly Mercury.

  Franklin may have been brighter than Bradford, but his rival was no fool. Bradford printed speeches and proclamations for the Pennsylvania and Maryland assemblies and paper money for New Jersey, and also used his government connections to secure an appointment as the postmaster of Philadelphia. The job didn’t pay much; postmasters worked on commission, keeping 10 percent of the postage they collected from their customers. But publishers in colonial America eagerly accepted the position because it gave them a competitive advantage. As master of the local post, Bradford received a steady flow of free out-of-town newspapers, which provided him with material for the Weekly Mercury. It was common at the time for publishers to reprint entire articles from other papers without crediting them. The post office itself was a wellspring of news. People gathered there to gossip and trade information, furnishing more items for Bradford’s paper. Best of all, postmasters controlled the circulation of newspapers in their regions. Bradford sent the Weekly Mercury through the mail at no cost and prohibited his riders from carrying the Pennsylvania Gazette.

  How Franklin surmounted these obstacles and transformed the Gazette into the most widely read paper in the colonies is one of the most celebrated early American success stories. No one tells it with more wit and candor than Franklin himself in his autobiography. He put out a superior paper and ran his business more frugally than his competitor. He also understood that Bradford’s postal riders were often in need of extra funds, so Franklin bribed them to carry his paper.

  For Franklin, however, the final victory came when he pried the postmastership from his competitor’s hands. In 1737, the British government removed Bradford because he had neglected to submit his financial reports for three years in a row, and it named Franklin as his successor. “I accepted it readily,” Franklin wrote, “and found it of great advantage for, though the salary was small, it facilitated the correspondence that improved my newspaper, increased 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 paper declined proportionately.”

  At first, Franklin allowed Bradford to send the Weekly Mercury through the mail, but he wasn’t overly disappointed when the British told him to stop because Bradford hadn’t paid his debts to the government from his time as postmaster. “He suffered greatly from his neglect in due accounting,” Franklin wrote with evident satisfaction. “And I mention it as a lesson to those young men who may be employed in managing affairs for others, that they should always render accounts, and make remittances, with great clearness and punctuality.” Franklin, on the other hand, was such a fastidious bookkeeper that in addition to his duties in Philadelphia, the British named him the comptroller of the entire colonial postal system, which meant that he kept track of the finances of 13 American post offices stretching for more than 1,500 miles of dirt roads from Portsmouth, New Hampshire; to Charleston, South Carolina.

  In the years that followed, Franklin became famous for his experiments with electricity, his inventions, his political philosophizing, and his best-selling Poor Richard’s Almanack. He did so well as a publisher that he was able to retire in 1748 from the day-to-day operation of his business and become a gentleman of leisure. But even then, Franklin kept his postal position. The job didn’t require that much of his time, and it had its perks. As a postmaster, Franklin was entitled to “frank” letters, meaning he could send and receive them free—the term came from francus, the Latin word for free—enabling him to regularly exchange letters with intellectuals in Europe who publicized his achievements, thereby helping to make Franklin one of the world’s most admired Americans. He inscribed his mail with his personal franking symbol: “Free. B. Franklin.”

  The job profoundly influenced Franklin’s political thinking. He began to think of the colonies not as individual provinces but as parts of a potential nation bound together by shared institutions like the post office. But for this vision to become a reality, the fledgling postal service needed to be improved. The mail arrived once a week in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston in the summer and every other week in the winter if the weather permitted. The roads were especially bad in the South, making delivery even less predictable there.

  In 1751, Franklin learned that Elliott Benger, the crown’s deputy postmaster and the official in charge of the colonies, was ill and might die. Franklin began surreptitiously campaigning for his job. He wrote to a friend in London, asking him to lobby British postal officials on his behalf and gave him permission to spend up to £300 on any necessary greasing of palms. Franklin asked him to be discreet: “I would only add that, as I have respect for Mr. Benger, I should be glad the application were so managed as to not give him any offense if he should recover.”

  Benger held on for two more years, but when he finally died, Franklin got his job. Much to his dismay, he had to share the appointment and its £600 annual salary with William Hunter, another printer-postmaster from Virginia. However, the amiable Hunter generally deferred to Franklin so the arrangement worked well. Now Franklin had his chance to reconceive the colonial post. In doing so, he would lay the foundation for a system that would become the largest hard-copy delivery service the world has ever known.

  Almost as soon as the written word appeared, people began sending mail. Archaeologists have determined that by 1900 BC, the ancient Assyrians had established one of the first postal services. Merchants used it to exchange messages written in cuneiform on tablets sealed in clay envelopes, and they trusted it enough t
o send each other currency. “I provided your agents with three minas of silver for the purchase of lead,” one businessman wrote to another. “Now, if you are still my brother, let me have my money by courier.”

  Typically, however, ancient rulers didn’t allow commoners to use their postal services. They reserved the post for their own use as a tool for controlling their subjects and consolidating their power. Two centuries later, the Egyptian pharaohs created a network of postal routes traveled by horsemen who carried messages written in hieroglyphs on papyrus to their princes and military leaders. Only the most highly born Egyptians could send mail through the official post. Merchants had to use slaves to deliver their messages.

  King Darius of Persia, who reigned from c. 521 to 486 BC, presided over perhaps the most celebrated ancient postal system and used it to extend his power throughout the Middle East and into Asia. The king copied his orders onto wax-covered tablets using a metal stylus and entrusted them to his postmen, who were legendary for their efficiency. “Nothing mortal travels so fast as these Persian messengers,” marveled the Greek historian Herodotus. “These men will not be hindered from accomplishing at their best speed the distance which they have to do, either by snow, or rain, or heat, or by darkness of night. The first rider delivers his dispatch to the second, and the second passes it to the third; and so it is borne from hand to hand along the whole line, like the light of the torch-race.”

  Do these lines sound familiar? They are nearly identical to those carved in stone above the entrance of the monumental James A. Farley Post Office in New York City designed by McKim, Mead & White and opened in 1914. William Mitchell Kendall, one of the firm’s architects, read Greek for pleasure in his off-hours and selected a modified translation by Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer to adorn the building: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Many have assumed that this is the motto of the U.S. Postal Service, but the USPS doesn’t have one. It was just the world’s largest postal service nodding respectfully to one of its most illustrious forbears.

  The Romans improved on the Persian system after the founding of their empire in 27 BC, creating an imperial post that delivered letters written on papyrus and animal skins all the way from Britain to Constantinople on the empire’s paved roads. The Roman couriers, easily identified by the emblems on their bronze shields, traveled in chariots, helping themselves to food and horses in the towns along the way. They also acted as the emperor’s spies, fingering subversives and undesirables. Their targets, many of them early Christians, were sentenced to hard labor in post houses, cleaning the stables and performing other undesirable tasks. An early pope endured such punishment.

  The demand for mail slackened in Europe after barbarians invaded Rome in AD 410. The Dark Ages, a time of almost universal illiteracy, engulfed the continent. Kings and queens couldn’t read and bragged about it, but Catholic monks kept both the written word and mail delivery from vanishing entirely. They exchanged letters through foot posts, using messengers who strolled, or ran if necessary, from monastery to monastery with sacks of mail over their shoulders. And in the Middle East and China, where the written word flourished and paper was first used as a medium of correspondence, it was a golden age of mail delivery.

  The Muslim caliphs established mail routes linking their cities, and in the ninth century, officials published the first written postal manual documenting how letters flowed through their system. “My throne rests on four pillars—a blameless judge, an energetic chief of police, an honest minister of finance, and a faithful postmaster who gives me reliable information on everything,” said Caliph Abu Jafar Mansur, rule of the Arabian Empire in the eighth century. And when Marco Polo visited China in the late thirteenth century, he was amazed by Emperor Kublai Khan’s far-reaching postal service. The Chinese post riders carried Kublai Khan’s proclamations and the state newspaper, the Imperial Gazette, on the nation’s highways, stopping to rest and change horses at relay stations so elegantly furnished, it was said, that a prince would feel comfortable staying in one.

  Once the Dark Ages ended, postal systems sprang up again in Europe. By 1297, the University of Paris had created one so that teachers and students could stay in touch with their families in distant parts of the continent. Knightly orders delivered letters to their armored members. Butchers who traveled throughout the northern part of the continent bore messages along with their meats. In London, foreign business owners, referred to as “strangers,” transported mail over the oceans between London and seaports in other lands. This system was known appropriately as the Strangers’ Post.

  At the end of the fifteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire named Francis von Taxis of the Thurn and Taxis family as its first imperial postmaster. Francis and his relatives established a network of post houses from Vienna to the Netherlands. Their horn-blowing riders wore a strip of badger skin to identify themselves. At first, the Thurn and Taxis post handled only imperial correspondence, but when the empire complained about the system’s cost, Francis persuaded his overlords to let him open it up to the commoners so their fees would cover its costs.

  Other European posts went through similar transformations. In 1516, King Henry VIII of England called for the creation of his country’s first national mail delivery service with postal stations “in all places most expedient.” It would be called “the King’s Posts,” and Henry and his successors treated it as such. No letters traveled on Britain’s postal roads without their approval and they probably knew the contents of every message. In England, as in other European countries, it was customary for postal officials to unseal mail and have a look.

  In 1635, King Charles I of England opened the Royal Mail to the public. It charged by the number of sheets used and the distance traveled. It cost twopence to send a single sheet of paper within an 80-mile radius. The price was twice that for a “double letter” and three times as much for a “triple letter,” and the charge rose if a letter traveled out of the first postal zone into another. The senders rarely paid for postage; it was the recipients who had to reach for their purses when they collected their mail at the post office. The Royal Mail didn’t used stamps; clerks just jotted the fee on the outside of the letter. It was an expensive and cumbersome system, but the Royal Mail generated a surplus for the British government, which it used to help finance its military adventures around the world. As English citizens began to colonize the New World, the British hoped to make more money by starting a postal service there.

  It wouldn’t happen right away. Only a few thousand settlers lived on the eastern shore of the Atlantic coast in the early seventeenth century, and they were primarily interested in hearing from their friends and relatives in Europe. They entrusted their letters to the ship captains who crossed the ocean and received a penny a letter. The captains left pouches in taverns and coffeehouses in which letters could be deposited. People riffled through the same bags to see if any messages had arrived for them. The British government formalized the system in 1639, designating a tavern owned by Richard Fairbanks as the first colonial post office.

  As their numbers increased, colonists needed to communicate with each other and created posts inland. In 1673, New York’s governor Francis Lovelace established a monthly post between New York and Boston on a trail known as “the King’s Highway.” Today, it is part of U.S. Route 1. The same year, William Penn, the governor of Pennsylvania, established a post in his region connecting Philadelphia with cities in Delaware and Maryland. In the south, plantation owners set up their own system, using slaves to relay letters from plantation to plantation. If one of these planters failed to keep the mail moving, he forfeited a hogshead of tobacco.

  In 1692, King William III awarded Thomas Neale an exclusive contract to establish a privately operated postal system throughout the colonies. Neale was an odd choice for such a venture. He was a swindler and a carouser who ingratiate
d himself with the royal family by staging the nightly games of chance for the king and his courtiers. He never set foot in the colonies himself, letting New Jersey governor Andrew Hamilton run it for him.

  Hamilton quickly discovered that it wouldn’t be easy. In a dispute that foreshadowed future hostilities between the crown and its American subjects, Virginia and Maryland refused to participate, saying it was unfair for the king to make his colonial subjects pay Neale for mail delivery when they could do it themselves. The Neale post ultimately failed, and its namesake died heavily in debt in 1699. After that, the crown assumed control of the system and forced the colonies to go along. In 1729, its users could expect weekly mail delivery at 13 American post offices, the largest of which could be found in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

  That was progress, but the colonial post was still primitive compared with those in Europe. Riders carried mail on dirt paths through wilderness where there were more wolves and bears than people. Ferrymen made them wait for hours while they filled their boats with other customers before taking the couriers across rivers. Mail carriers didn’t make much money and supplemented their incomes by running errands for people. In one instance, a rider in New England brought a herd of oxen to a farmer, which must have meant some of his letters didn’t arrive on time. Native Americans sometimes attacked colonial postmen; at other times, indigenous people competed with them. The “savages” knew the territory better than their white counterparts and provided faster service.

  Early colonial postmasters endured their own hardships. They typically ran their post offices out of their homes and had to live with customers showing up at all hours seeking mail. Their patrons kept charge accounts, and it could take a while for them to pay up. One indignant New Jersey postmaster took out an advertisement in a local paper, demanding overdue postage from customers, some of whom hadn’t paid him in nearly four years: “This is to give notice that all persons in town and country that are indebted to Andrew Hay, postmaster at Perth Amboy, for postage of letters, to pay the same or they may expect trouble.”