You might say that the history of our postal system began when Benjamin Franklin, age 31, was appointed Postmaster of Philadelphia by the colonial British authorities in 1737. Not that there hadn’t been other embryonic attempts at mail service in the colonies.
But Franklin was already the very successful proprietor of a print business and publisher of a newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. His experience had taught him to be a meticulous record-keeper and a master of organization. So it’s hardly surprising that he shaped the Philadelphia mails into a swift and responsive enterprise.
He also used the mail to burnish his own reputation. He wasn’t paid much (a 10 percent commission on customers’ postage). But he had franking privileges (free postage), which benefited him enormously.
Able to mail his Gazette to readers at no cost, he dramatically boosted its circulation, making it one of the colonies’ most successful publications and him one of their most celebrated publishers.
He was also able to correspond free of charge with thought leaders in Europe, a kind of publicity that counted him among the world’s most admired Americans. And so, when, in 1753, the British Crown was searching for a postmaster to be in charge of all 13 colonies, the choice was inevitable.
Huge Improvements and Systematic Delivery
Franklin had vision, was a good systems analyst and trouble-shooter, and was not afraid of hard work. His first act was to travel extensively through the colonies to inspect postal routes and to find reliable postal clerks in the network’s towns and cities.
He created a communications system for post riders and by expanding their work schedule to include nights, he made it possible for someone to send a letter from Philadelphia to New York and receive a reply in just 24 hours. Eventually he established a regular schedule of “mailmen” speeding on horseback up and down post roads along the East Coast.
Franklin also developed other innovations reminiscent of the modern postal world. He established the first home delivery system in the colonies so that recipients didn’t have to wait in long lines to pick up their mail at a central spot.
He set up a dead-letter office to take care of undeliverable mail. And he recognized the need for a postal connection with geographic locales outside the colonies.
Small packet ships were engaged to carry mail swiftly to and from Canada and the West Indies, complementing the Crown’s transatlantic service from England. A reform of significant consequence was Franklin’s decree in 1758 that all newspapers would be delivered at a universal reduced rate.
This concept, imitated later during the American Revolution, would result in an almost fateful expansion of colonists’ access to information, particularly about what was going on in the rest of America and elsewhere in the world.
The U.S. Postal Service
By 1760, the colonial postal system had actually turned a profit. The British Crown couldn’t have been more delighted with Franklin… until, in January 1774, his increasing participation in the colonies’ resistance against British taxation and rule resulted in his dismissal.
Almost immediately a number of American settlers began setting up their own independent mail services. But the recently established Continental Congress wanted something more than a makeshift system.
In July 1775, they tapped Franklin to be the new Postmaster General. He was asked to hire staff and use his skills to set up a new complex of mail routes stretching from Falmouth, Massachusetts (now Portland, Maine) to Savannah, Georgia, with as many delivery points as he deemed appropriate.
Already familiar with the territory, Franklin was able to replicate the system he had built for the British in record time. And it was so successful at usurping the Crown’s business, the latter’s postal system was forced to shut down by Christmas of that same year.
Once independence was declared in July 1776, Franklin was obliged to abandon his creation to become ambassador to France. Nevertheless, the postal system he built continued to flourish.
Communications delivered by riders on horseback over primitive roads was the critical lifeline that allowed the colonies to successfully fight and survive the Revolutionary War. And after the country gained its independence, mail delivery became the new democracy’s connective tissue that united its people and lands.
Serving a Growing Nation
The postal service’s stated mission was (and is) to deliver the mail to all Americans. As the country grew and pushed west, that was not always easy. But the Postal Service managed to keep pace with the country’s expansion by adopting whatever innovations in transport presented themselves.
Initially the post roads were created and the post riders paid directly by the federal government. By 1789, there were some 2,400 miles of road connecting 75 small post offices serving almost 4 million individuals.
The Postal Service Act, signed by President George Washington in 1792 created what came to be called the Post Office Department, instead of just “Post Office.” President Andrew Jackson asked his Postmaster General to be a member of his Cabinet in 1829.This was made official in the Post Office Act of 1872, which made the Post Office Department a Cabinet position.
As main roads became better engineered, a new form of transport emerged — the stagecoach. This was a four-wheeled carriage drawn by four or six horses and designed to cover long distances as the horses were swapped out in stages along the way.
Because the roomier stagecoach could carry more mail than a horseback rider and packages as well, the government began contracting with private stagecoach lines in the late 1700s to help link Eastern communities with the expanding frontier.
At their peak popularity and utility in the 1850s, stagecoaches followed the Gold Rush of 1849, carrying mail along new overland routes all the way to California.
Meanwhile the steamboat was developing into a commercially viable form of transportation. If it could carry people, agricultural and industrial supplies, why not mail?
Indeed, in 1813 Congress authorized the U.S. Postal Service to contract with steamboat companies. At first, in a limited competition with coaches, steamboats carried the mail to and from towns along the East Coast and on the Mississippi River.
Eventually they even transported it to California via the Isthmus of Panama. Since there was not yet a Panama Canal, the mail was off-loaded on the Atlantic side of the isthmus, then transported to the Pacific side either by canoe or pack-animal, and re-boarded onto a waiting steamboat — a trip that took around three weeks.
For a period of about 18 months, there was a speedier alternative. The storied Pony Express was a private service that began operating between St. Joseph, Missouri and California in April 1860. These riders rode only those horses judged to be exceptionally fast, and they secured new horses at relay stations located every 10 to 15 miles.
The men covered an average of 75 to 100 miles a day, making the journey in about 10 days, or half the regular overland time. The service was discontinued in 1861 following completion of the transcontinental telegraph and, soon after, the transcontinental railroad.
More Modern Mail Delivery
Following the Civil War, the new efficiency of the railroad eclipsed most other postal modes for non-local delivery. From the 1860s to as recently as the 1970s, postal workers would sort and distribute the mail as the trains sped across the continent. By mid-20th century, the Railway Mail Service was carrying 93 percent of all non-local mail in the U.S., although, by 1977, it was destined to be replaced.
Today mail delivery is almost exclusively via motorized vehicle (supplemented in urban areas by postmen and women on foot) and air — both with a long and interesting history.
In an 1899 experiment in Buffalo, New York, an electric automobile took only 1½ hours to collect the mail from 40 mailboxes — less than half the time of a horse-and-wagon. Predictably, it wasn’t long before both electric and gas-powered cars were in the ascendancy.
With the advent of Rural Free Delivery in the early 1900s, even motorcycles, once they became commercially available, had their moment. They peaked in the 1920s, after which they succumbed to four-wheel automobiles and trucks that had more space to hold letters and packages.
By 1933, only two percent of city deliveries were still made by horse-drawn conveyances. And by the 1950s, with the growth of the suburbs, the area mail routes were completely motorized with Jeeps, trucks and specialized small vehicles known as “mailsters.”
Meanwhile, mail was also taking to the air. In fact, hauling letters was how the aviation industry got its start. In its early, experimental years, airmail pilots braved every kind of weather in flimsy, open-cockpit planes.
For a while, the Army operated the service as a way to train its fledgling aviators before sending them to fight in World War I. Scheduled, U.S. Postal Service-operated airmail delivery actually debuted in 1918 with civilian pilots and specially built planes.
Even Charles Lindbergh, celebrated for his non-stop transatlantic flight from Roosevelt Field (in in Westbury, Long Island, NY) to Paris in 1927, previously flew the mail. In those days, cross-country postal delivery took one day, 10 hours and 20 minutes compared to today’s six or seven hours.
Lastly was the 1942 Word War II innovation, Victory Mail or V-Mail, designed to lighten the physical load. Letters destined for our troops abroad had to be written on special lightweight “onionskin” stationery. Before it left the U.S., correspondence was opened and microfilmed.
The film was shipped overseas to military stations, where it was developed, printed and distributed to eager soldier recipients. Their responses underwent the same process in reverse. As of 1944, it was estimated that V-Mail had made some 4,964,286 pounds of cargo unnecessary.
A Founders’ Vision Vindicated
In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act which replaced the Post Office Department with an independent United States Postal Service in 1971.
It’s no secret that our postal service has often come under brutal criticism. On the other hand, we mostly take for granted all the things it has done… and does well.
Our early leaders understood that forging a nation required an efficient communications network. Indeed, creation of a postal service was the first — and for many citizens, the most consequential — function of their young government. In addition to personal communications, it allowed the founders to talk treason in secret.
By 1831, when the French author and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S., we lay claim to twice the number of post offices in Britain and five times the number in France.
He wrote of the unforgettable experience of hurtling at full gallop through the Michigan wilderness. The rough-hewn mail wagon would stop momentarily at what he called a “hut,” disgorge its packet of letters and newspapers, and speed on its way.
In this manner the Postal Service linked distant settlements and territories to the rest of the nation and the world.
Despite email and text-messaging, the U.S. Postal Service is still delivering critical personal, business and government mail and packages from and to far corners of the country. And “just as the founders anticipated, it has created a forward-looking, communication-oriented, idea- driven America.”
A version of this article was first published in the Blackwell’s Almanac, a quarterly journal of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. The Roosevelt Island Historical Society, founded in 1977 to recover, maintain and disseminate the record of Roosevelt Island’s heritage from colonial times to the present. Visit their website at www.rihs.us.
Illustrations, from above: The first US postage stamps, authorized by Congress March 3, 1847; Detail from the first national postal road map, created in 1796 by Assistant Postmaster General Abraham Bradley (see a full version here); The New York, NY, Post Office on Pine Street, Manhattan, constructed 1835; and an early postage stamp image of a train from 1869, the year the transcontinental railroad was completed (National Postal Museum).
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