Mail was vital for colonists’ economic, political, and social interactions. Correspondence connected the colonists with people throughout the colonies and with family and officials in Great Britain, Europe, and other parts of the world. The colonial postal service encouraged the distribution of information, raw materials, and finished goods within the colonies and abroad. Mail meant that colonists were less isolated socially and culturally and had more immediate access to news and information. As the postal service expanded, roads were improved and extended into remote areas, and industries were built on these routes, contributing to local economies.
Senders often wrote messages on scraps of paper, which they folded, sealed with wax, and addressed with the recipient’s name and geographic location. Because postage stamps were not sold until the mid-19th century, recipients either paid for the mail that was sent to them (fees were based on the number of sheets and distance conveyed) or refused letters and packages. Such costs prevented many colonists from participating in the postal system. Enslaved African Americans were forbidden to write and lacked incomes to purchase paper and pens. Indentured servants also were mostly excluded from the postal system’s benefits, as were poorer settlers and residents on the isolated frontiers in the South and West.
The primary colonial postal patrons were prominent, educated white men living in urban areas who could afford writing supplies and postal fees; some affluent colonial women also sent and received mail. These postal customers had reasons to use the postal system, such as engaging in political and commercial professions. Newspapers and advertisements were circulated by the mail, and some nefarious individuals used the postal system to commit such crimes as mail fraud or even to threaten people. Colonial leaders recorded their philosophical thoughts and concerns in correspondence, which has been preserved in archives and annotated for scholarly use.
Initially, colonists depended on travelers and merchants to transport letters and packages by walking or driving stagecoaches on land or sailing vessels on rivers and canals. Native Americans occasionally acted as messengers, and mail to and from Britain relied on ships. Because the British traditionally used pubs as mail drops, the general court of Massachusetts selected Richard Fairbanks’s Boston tavern as the colonies’ first central postal site in 1639. Colonists could both receive and send mail from Fairbanks’s tavern. Inns served as additional postal sites, and surveyors designated post roads between the colonies, although delivery was often erratic, especially in remote regions where roads were often swampy.
King Charles II (1660-85) ordered Francis Lovelace and John Winthrop, the governors of New York and Connecticut, to initiate a mail route between New York and Boston to encourage colonists to correspond frequently. In January 1673 the first post rider traveled for three weeks on this assignment, and his duties included carrying mail, looking for military deserters and runaway slaves, helping fellow travelers, and identifying useful river crossings. After eight months this postal service was terminated.
The British Crown granted funds to create a postal service in 1691. New Jersey governor Andrew Hamilton served as the first colonial deputy postmaster general. By 1737 Alexander Spotswood served in that position and appointed Benjamin Franklin as postmaster for Philadelphia. Sixteen years later Franklin and William Hunter, the Williamsburg, Virginia, postmaster, were named as joint postmasters general of the colonies. Franklin inspected post offices, established regular postal schedules, and initiated surveys of postal roads to determine shorter routes and expand services. In an effort to achieve more efficient delivery, he ordered post riders to travel at night between Philadelphia and New York.
Franklin also created the position of surveyor, a predecessor to the later Postal Inspection Service. He made the postal system profitable for the British. Colonists, however, were distressed by expensive postal rates, which they viewed as unfair taxation and monopolistic; Franklin attempted to explain that postal fees paid for services that were unrelated to the Stamp Tax of 1765. Because of his pro-independence political views, however, the British Crown dismissed Franklin in 1774 despite his effective reforms and defense of postal costs. William Goddard created the Constitutional Post, a subscription postal system that colonial committees oversaw.
In July 1775 the Second Continental Congress established a Post Office Department and appointed Franklin as postmaster general. While many colonists sought independence from Great Britain, Franklin built the American postal service’s foundation, which has remained essentially unchanged in the centuries since. Many modern postage stamps depict colonial figures and events, such as Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean.
Further reading: Carl H. Scheele, A Short History of the Mail Service (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970).
—Elizabeth D. Schafer
World History
