Congress cuts the cord to London's mail: Franklin named postmaster general
Before the Revolution, colonial mail mostly traveled one direction: back to counting houses and government offices in London. By 1775, Philadelphia had become the information hub of colonies at war with the Crown, and news, laws, and military orders needed to move fast between them. On July 26, the Second Continental Congress created a continental postal system and appointed Benjamin Franklin the first Postmaster General, with orders to run a line of posts from Falmouth, New England, to Savannah, Georgia. It gave the colonies a working mail system before they had a country to run it in.
This was the federal government's first working department, built before independence was even declared. Franklin's postal system helped circulate the news, laws, and military orders that a nation at war needed to coordinate, and the low-cost newspaper rate Congress later wrote into law helped seed a national press that leaned on cheap, fast distribution.
QWhy was Franklin already the obvious pick to run the job?
Franklin had spent years working the same trade for the other side. He served as a royal deputy postmaster for the colonies under the imperial system before Britain removed him from the post in 1774, after his role surfaced in leaking a set of private letters written by Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson. Congress put him in charge of rebuilding, under new management, the very network the Crown had just fired him from. Few men alive understood the colonial mail routes better than he did.
QWho actually pushed Congress to create a postal system?
Not diplomats or generals, but newspapermen. Colonial printers had spent years frustrated by an imperial post that made distributing papers slow and costly, and by 1774 and 1775 they organized to build an alternative, recruiting merchants and the emerging political leadership to their cause. Their goal was blunt and commercial: reach subscribers cheaply and trade news between papers in different colonies. The postal system that resulted was, in its origin, a press infrastructure project as much as a government one.
QHow far did Franklin's original mail route actually run?
Congress's resolution established a continental postal system running the length of the thirteen colonies, appointing Franklin as postmaster general to organize it. That span covered roughly the full length of the thirteen colonies, end to end along the Atlantic seaboard, a striking ambition for a service built with stagecoaches, riders, and no existing infrastructure to lean on. The resolution also fixed Franklin's salary directly and gave him authority to appoint his own deputies.
