Post Office Born: Franklin Leads America's Mail

Benjamin Franklin, already seventy years old and the most famous American alive, took charge of a postal system that had to deliver mail across a thousand miles of contested territory during a shooting war. The Continental Congress appointed him Postmaster General on July 26, 1775, three months after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, tasking him with building a communications network that could hold thirteen fractious colonies together while they fought for independence. Franklin knew the postal system intimately. He had served as co-deputy postmaster general for the British colonial mail since 1753, reorganizing routes, establishing regular schedules, and making the system profitable for the first time. The Crown fired him in 1774 for sympathizing with colonial grievances, an act that freed him to design the same system for the other side. The new Constitutional Post, as it became known, established a route running from Falmouth, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, with post riders carrying letters between towns at regular intervals. Franklin set standard rates, appointed local postmasters, and crucially ensured that newspapers could be mailed cheaply, recognizing that a free press depended on affordable distribution. He served only fifteen months before departing for France as ambassador, but the system he designed endured. The postal service became the connective tissue of the new nation. By the 1790s, the Post Office was the largest single employer in the federal government and the primary means by which citizens interacted with their national government. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America in the 1830s, marveled at how postal routes penetrated even the most remote frontier settlements, creating a shared sense of national identity that other countries lacked. Franklin's postal system made self-governance practical by ensuring that information could travel faster than rumor, binding a geographically vast country through the simple act of delivering the mail.