POST-OFFICE IN THE COLONIES.
The postal service in the Colonies was on a small scale. Authentic incidents show its beginnings. The Government of New York in 1672 established a post to go monthly from New York to Boston, advertising “those that bee dispos’d to send letters, lett them bring them to the Secretary’s office, where, in a lockt box, they shall bee preserved till the messenger calls for them. All persons paying the post before the bagg be seal’d up.”[39] Thirty years later this monthly post was fortnightly.[40] In Virginia the postal service was more simple. The Colonial law of 1657 required every planter to provide a messenger for the conveyance of dispatches, as they arrived, to the next plantation, and so forward, on pain of forfeiting a hogshead of tobacco for each default.[41] Until after 1704 there was no regular post further East than Boston, or further West than Philadelphia. In that year Lord Cornbury, writing to Government at home, says:—
“If I have any letters to send to Virginia, or to Maryland, I must either send an express, who is often retarded for want of boats to cross those great rivers they must go over, or else for want of horses, or else I must send them by some passengers who are going thither. The least I have known any express take to go from hence to Virginia has been three weeks.”[42]
Shortly afterward stage-coaches were established between Boston and New York, and between Boston and Philadelphia; but no post-office was established in Virginia until 1732; nor did any postal revenue accrue to Great Britain from the Colonies until 1753, when Benjamin Franklin became Postmaster-General for the Colonies.[43]
The same genius which ruled in philosophy and in politics was not wanting in this sphere of duty. The office was remodelled, and the sphere of its operations extended. But the efforts of Franklin in this department became tributary to the revenues of the mother country. On his removal, in 1774, he was able to say, “Before I was displaced by a freak of the ministers we had brought it to yield three times as much clear revenue to the Crown as the Post-Office of Ireland. Since that imprudent transaction they have received from it—not one farthing.”[44] Revenue! always revenue! Even Franklin shows no sign of ascending to the true idea of a post-office. The Revolution was now at hand, when the Crown ceased to receive revenue from any source in the United States. But in separating from the mother country the Post-Office was left unchanged in character. It was an undeveloped agency, with receipts always above expenses.