Future postmaster generals would joke that that Franklin set a bad example for them by dispensing jobs within the colonial post office to many of his relatives. His illegitimate son, William, replaced him as Philadelphia’s postmaster. A year later, Franklin promoted William to comptroller of the colonial post and gave the city postmastership to one of his wife Deborah’s relatives. Franklin found jobs in other towns for two of his brothers, a nephew, and two more of Deborah’s family members. Richard Bache, his daughter Sally’s fiancé, pleaded for a postal position, but Franklin refused him at first, believing Bache to be a fortune hunter. Eventually even Bache was hired after marrying into the family.
Despite his weakness for hiring family members, Franklin vastly improved the system. He had little choice if he wanted to get paid. The crown promised Franklin and William Hunter, his fellow deputy, that they could split an annual salary of £600, the equivalent of $182,000 today. But the money was not guaranteed; the two men would have to take it from the colonial post’s profits, if there ever were any. It had lost money ever since the days of Thomas Neale.
So, even before their appointments officially went into effect in 1753, Franklin and Hunter embarked on an inspection tour, spending much of the next year visiting post offices and surveying postal routes from Maine to Virginia. They came up with better routes, avoiding river crossings where surly ferrymen impeded the progress of their riders. As a result, the system’s users enjoyed faster delivery. They cut the time it took for a letter to travel from Philadelphia to New York to day and a half. Where once it had taken six weeks for a Philadelphian to send a letter to a Bostonian and receive a response, now the circular exchange took only three weeks. Already, Franklin was drawing Americans more closely together through the post.
Franklin created the Dead Letter Office in Philadelphia, which became a repository for unclaimed messages. He started a penny post in Philadelphia, enabling residents to receive their mail at home for an extra penny if they didn’t want to journey to the post office to pick it up themselves. Franklin encouraged his postmasters to circulate all sorts of newspapers. The European posts didn’t do that, but Franklin was fashioning a distinctly American one,
Somebody had to pay for these improvements. Franklin and Hunter borrowed £900 to cover their costs, but their investment paid off. In 1760, the colonial post generated its first surplus, and the two deputy postmasters were able to collect their salaries. Franklin thought it would do even better if he lowered postage rates, which he believed would spur people to send more mail. The crown reduced the rates for longer distances but kept the local rates in place.
Franklin now spent most of his time in England, where he lobbied the British government on behalf of the Pennsylvania assembly, trying to win it more control over the state’s affairs. He left the daily operations of the colonial postal service to a protégé, James Parker, another publisher turned postmaster. But Franklin stayed in close touch with Parker and kept track of the postal service’s finances. The British government didn’t seem to have a problem with the long-distance arrangement, reappointing Franklin and Hunter to their positions and praising their stewardship.
Hunter died in 1761 just months after receiving his salary. Franklin wrote fondly of his late partner, saying that they had worked in “perfect harmony,” but he longed to run the colonial post by himself and pocket the full £600. Instead, the crown named John Foxcroft, another Virginian, to be his partner. The diplomatic Franklin made the best of it, returning to America and traveling with him from Maine to Virginia, looking for new ways to improve the system. They decided to have riders carry mail at night as well as by day, which meant that a Philadelphian could send a letter to Boston and receive a reply in six days. Philadelphians could send a letter to New York and get a response in 24 hours. When the British took control of Canada in 1763 at the end of French and Indian War, Franklin and Foxcroft supervised the creation of a postal road from Albany, New York, to Montreal.
Then Franklin returned to London, where he stayed for another ten years, representing a growing number of state assemblies in their increasingly tense dealings with Parliament. Even then, Franklin still audited the financial statements of the colonial post and handled complaints. American postmasters requested a shipment of bugles, certain that their riders would collect more letters if they could announce their arrival with the blast of a shiny horn. Franklin took up the matter with the British authorities, but the Royal Mail said the Americans should buy their own bugles.
As the relationship between England and the colonies deteriorated, Franklin feared he would lose his position. Lord Sandwich, the crown’s postmaster general, disapproved of Franklin’s pro-American sympathies and asked how Franklin could run the colonial post when he spent all his time in England. Franklin responded that there were plenty of Americans in London with similar appointments who rarely went home. “It is the practice in many other instances to allow the non-residence of American officers who spend their salaries here, provided care is taken that the business be done by a deputy or otherwise,” Franklin wrote to his son William.
Franklin had given up his publishing business long ago and needed his postal income more than ever. “If I should lose the post office, which among the many changes here, is far from being unlikely, we should be reduced to our rents and interest of money for subsistence, which will by no means afford the chargeable housekeeping and entertainments we have been used to,” Franklin wrote to his wife. “For my own part, I live here as frugally as possible not to be destitute of the comforts of life, making no dinners for anybody, and contenting myself with a single dish when I dine at home and yet such is the dearness of living here in every article, that my expenses amaze me.”
Unflattering stories about Franklin appeared in the English press. He was sure that his enemies were planting them to force him to resign as deputy postmaster, but he refused to give them satisfaction. “In this they are not likely to succeed, I being deficient in that Christian Virtue of Resignation,” Franklin wrote to his sister, Jane. “If they would have my Office, they must take it. I have heard of some great Man whose Rule it was, with regard to Offices, never to ask for them, and never to refuse them; to which I have always added, in my own Practice, never to resign them.”
However, Franklin’s loyalty to his fellow Americans was too strong. He fought the Stamp Act, a tax on colonial newspapers and legal documents that had nothing to do with the colonial post. He sealed his fate in 1772 when he shared letters written by Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, with a friend who leaked them to the Boston Gazette. In his private correspondence, Hutchinson mocked his subjects and called for the British to send more troops to Massachusetts to punish the more radical ones. The Massachusetts assembly called for Hutchinson’s resignation. Franklin confessed to his role in making the letters public, and he was removed from the colonial post.
Franklin was furious. As far as he was concerned, he had transformed the colonial post from a money-losing operation to a steady source of income for the crown, and this was the thanks he received? Now that he had been dismissed, Franklin warned that Americans could expect British postal officials to routinely open and read their letters just as they did with their subjects at home. “How safe the correspondence of your Assembly committees along the continent will be through the hands of such officers may be worth consideration,” he wrote, “especially as the post office act of Parliament allows a postmaster to open letters.”
Franklin’s removal reverberated in the colonies. The insurgent Sons of Liberty accosted postal riders and relieved them of their pouches. William Goddard, a virulently anti-British newspaper publisher, took the postal rebellion further. He had been forced to set up his own private delivery network to distribute his paper, the Pennsylvania Chronicle, because it was too incendiary for the official mail. Now Goddard converted it into the Constitutional Post, a competing service that picked up and delivered mail at 3
0 of its own post offices between Virginia and New Hampshire. He persuaded state assemblies to adopt his operation, promoting it as “the New American Post Office.” Tired of the British-controlled colonial post, the states embraced the Constitutional Post. “The people never liked the institution,” wrote one of Goddard’s supporters, “and only acquiesced in it out of their unbounded affection for the person [Franklin] that held the office and who had taken infinite pains to render it convenient.”
The Revolutionary War began on April 19, 1775 with the battles of Lexington and Concord, and the following month, the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia to discuss the creation of an American state. The delegates drew up a plan to convert the Constitutional Post into the official American post office and selected Franklin to be its postmaster general at a salary of $1,000 a year or the equivalent of $30,000 today; Franklin donated the money to wounded American soldiers. His son-in-law Richard Bache became his comptroller, and Goddard accepted an appointment as surveyor of postal roads. On Christmas Day, the British disbanded the old colonial post, and Franklin presided over North America’s primary communications channel, headquartered in Philadelphia and reaching from Falmouth, Maine; to Savannah, Georgia. Now, when Franklin franked his mail, he mischievously replaced his familiar “Free, B. Franklin” with the most appropriate “B. free Franklin.”
On July 4, 1776, America’s founding fathers declared independence from Great Britain. This made Franklin the new nation’s first postmaster general. That fall, however, he departed for France to serve as America’s ambassador to the court of King Louis XVI. Franklin arranged for his son-in-law to succeed him as postmaster general, much to the disappointment of Goddard, who thought he was the father of the American postal service and deserved the job more. After all, what had Richard Bache done to deserve such an honor, other than marrying Franklin’s daughter? For his part, Bache blamed Goddard when there was a breakdown in mail delivery between Congress and General George Washington. “As he had frequently threatened to resign his office, I thought this was a proper time to do it,” Bache wrote. Goddard departed and bore a grudge against the Franklin family until his death.
In France, Benjamin Franklin became a celebrity, sporting a fur cap in the streets of Paris and cultivating an image for himself as a wise frontiersman, even though he had always been a city dweller. But what was happening with the post office back home in America troubled him. In 1782, the Continental Congress removed Bache as postmaster general, replacing him with Ebenezer Hazard, the former postmaster of New York. Franklin was still annoyed about this when he returned to Philadelphia after the war ended in 1785. As the father of the American post office, he felt that the department was still his and that his son-in-law and chosen successor was entitled to the top job.
The loss of his beloved frank mail privileges exacerbated the insult. Franklin complained that even the British hadn’t treated him so shabbily. “When the English ministry formerly thought fit to deprive me of the office,” he wrote, “they left me, however, the privilege of receiving and sending my letters free of postage, which is the usage when the postmaster is not displaced for misconduct in the office, but in America, I have ever since had postage demanded of me, which since my return from France, has amounted to above fifty pounds, much of it occasioned by my having acted as a minster there.”
Franklin was now an elderly man. Still, at the age of 81, he went to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. He was the oldest delegate and dozed through many of the debates, but his presence elevated the historic event. “The most single-minded politicians could never long forget that there was a philosopher among them, incomparably able, when he chose, to speak with large wisdom, the pleasantest humor, and a happy grace,” his biographer Carl Van Doren writes. The resulting document gave Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads, but it didn’t say anything more about the mail.
In 1790, Franklin passed away in his Philadelphia home. He achieved much as an inventor, a writer, a philosopher, and an architect of a new American nation. He was surely proud of the postal service he had nurtured too. It operated 75 post offices and transported 265,545 letters on 1,875 miles of post roads extending in an unbroken line along the Atlantic coast. There was also a western artery: a post road from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Waves of settlers were venturing deeper into the American interior in search of cheap land and economic opportunity. Would the General Post Office, as it was now known, follow these pioneers?
George Washington, the Revolutionary War general who was elected America’s first president in 1789, believed that the United States needed a far-reaching post office, and needed it immediately. Washington owned 50,000 acres of land in western Virginia and Maryland As he rode through his property, it troubled him to discover how tenuously the settlers there were connected to the new nation. Washington feared they would fall under the sway of the Spanish, who controlled the territories beyond the Mississippi River, or the English, who still held Canada. “The Western settlers (I speak now from my own observation) stand as it were upon a pivot,” Washington wrote. “The touch of a feather, would turn them any way.”
Washington was convinced that a strong central government would keep the young nation from fraying. He wanted to create an American university where people from around the country could study and share ideas. He wanted to create a standing military in which Americans could serve together. He also asked Congress to pass legislation creating a strong post office. Like Franklin, Washington wanted the postal service to be a force that promoted enlightenment, circulating newspapers and political documents that would guard the public from tyrants and demagogues spreading misinformation.
Not everybody shared Washington’s vision. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and his supporters feared that the president was constructing a massive federal system that would be as oppressive as European monarchies. The postal service continued to operate under temporary legislation, but Congress didn’t create a lasting operation until 1792. The debate showed how conflicted Americans remained about the nature of the federal government.
In the House of Representatives, some members predicted that the post office would be a dangerous force, spying on the public like the French and British posts and meddling in politics. “It is easy to see what hand could be made of the post offices, if ever they are under the direction of an improper person,” argued Alexander White, a congressman from Virginia. “At the time of a general election, for instance, how easy would it be for this man to dictate to particular towns and villages, ‘If you do not send such a man to Congress, you should have no post office; but if you elect my friend, you should have a post office and the roads should run agreeably to your wishes.’” Others feared that the postmaster general and his deputies would knock down buildings if they stood in the way of prospective postal roads and would abolish tolls and turnpikes and build new ferry landings beside existing ones that had been operating for decades, putting them out of business. To prevent that, Congress retained the power to select the locations of post offices and postal roads, rather than granting it to the postmaster general. Anyone who opened mail outside the Dead Letter Office would be fined $100, and mail robbers could expect the death penalty.
There was another emotional debate about how much the Post Office should charge for delivering newspapers. Elbridge Gerry, a congressman from Massachusetts, thought that newspapers were so important to the well-being of the young nation that they should be carried for no charge. “Wherever information is freely circulated, there slavery cannot exist,” Gerry argued. “Or if it does, it will vanish as soon as information has been generally diffused.” The majority of his colleagues disagreed, saying the Post Office needed to charge something to defray its delivery costs. In the end, Congress set a nominal rate of one cent for newspapers traveling less than 100 miles and one and a half cents for those going farther.
The cheap newspaper rates meant th
at the General Post Office needed to charge much more for letters if it was going to break even. It set a six-cent rate for a letter sent less than 30 miles, and the rates rose steadily after that, reaching 25 cents for letters traveling more than 450 miles. The rates doubled if a sender used two sheets of paper and tripled if he used three. To make sure that citizens didn’t try to circumvent the system and send messages more cheaply through private carriers, a persistent problem in Franklin’s time, Congress mandated that nobody but government postal workers and the riders and stagecoach drivers they hired could transport letters. Anybody who set up a competing “foot or horse post” would be severely fined.
Six cents was a lot of money at a time when the average daily wage for an American was 50 cents. Like Franklin, most people in the federal government did not want to pay those prices. So Congress permitted a long list of officials to frank their mail, including the president, the vice president, members of the House and Senate, the secretary of state, the secretary of war, the secretary of the treasury, and the postmaster general himself, of course. The list would grow over the years to include ex–presidents and ex–vice presidents and their spouses as well.
Washington signed the landmark postal act in February 1792. Within a few years, the General Post Office was delivering mail in new states like Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Settlers on the western frontier inundated Congress with petitions pleading for post offices so they, too, could receive mail. By the turn of the century, there were 903 post offices and 20,817 miles of post roads in the United States, a phenomenal increase in less than a decade.
The post offices’ rapid growth did little to mollify lawmakers who still feared the government was creating a leviathan in the General Post Office. Vice President Thomas Jefferson lamented to his ally James Madison in 1798 that the federal government had the right to “go to cutting down mountains” if they impeded mail routes. Jefferson warned that politicians would fill the General Post Office with their supporters. “I view it as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a boundless abyss of public money,” he wrote to Madison. “You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues, but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a scene of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State; and they will always get most who are meanest.”
Neither Snow Nor Rain Page 3