The various little clusters of this scanty and widely separated population were almost entirely out of touch one with another. Inhabitants were scattered through those far-flung stretches called the United States, but they were not a people. Scarcely any communication existed between them; while such a thing as mail service was unknown to all but a comparatively few thousands. It required six days and sometimes nine to carry mail between Boston and New York. As late as 1794 a letter of Jefferson, then in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Madison at Philadelphia, reached the latter nine days after it was sent; and another letter between the same correspondents was eight days on the journey.[811]
Yet this was unusually expeditious. One month later, on January 26, 1795, Madison wrote Jefferson that "I have received your favor of Decṛ 28, but [not] till three weeks after the date of it."[812] Summer, when the post-riders made better time, seemed not greatly to increase the dispatch of mail; for it took more than a month for a letter posted in New York in that season of the year to reach an accessible Virginia county seat.[813] Letters from Richmond, Virginia, to New York often did not arrive until two months after they were sent.[814] But better time was frequently made and a letter between these points was, commonly, hurried through in a month.[815]
Many weeks would go by before one could send a letter from an interior town in Pennsylvania. "This Uniontown is the most obscure spot on the face of the globe.... I have been here seven or eight weeks without one opportunity of writing to the land of the living," complains a disgusted visitor.[816] A letter posted by Rufus King in Boston, February 6, 1788, to Madison in New York was received February 15;[817] and although anxiously awaiting news, Madison had not, on February 11, heard that Massachusetts had ratified the Constitution, although that momentous event had occurred five days before.[818] New York first learned of that historic action eight days after it was taken.[819] But for the snail-like slowness of the post, the Constitution would certainly have been defeated in the Virginia Convention of 1788.[820]
Transatlantic mail service was far more expeditious considering the distance; a letter from Jay in London reached Wolcott at Philadelphia in less than eight weeks.[821] But it sometimes required five months to carry mail across the ocean;[822] even this was very much faster than one could travel by land in America. Four weeks from Cowes, England, to Lynnhaven Bay, Virginia, was a record-breaking voyage.[823]
Such letters as went through the post-offices were opened by the postmasters as a matter of course, if these officials imagined that the missives contained information, or especially if they revealed the secret or familiar correspondence of well-known public men.[824] "By passing through the post-office they [letters] should become known to all" men, Washington cautioned Lafayette in 1788.[825] In 1791, the first year of the Post-Office under our present Government, there were only eighty-nine post-offices in the entire country.[826] "As late as 1791 there were only six post-offices in New Jersey and none south of Trenton."[827]
Yet letters were the principal means by which accounts of what was happening in one part of the country were made known to the people who lived in other sections; and this personal correspondence was by far the most trustworthy source of information, although tinctured as it naturally was by the prejudice of the writer and often nothing but report of mere rumor.
Newspapers were few in number and scanty in news. When the Constitution was adopted, not many regularly issued newspapers were printed in the whole country. Most of these were published in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and in two or three of the other larger towns. Only ten papers were printed in Connecticut, one of the best informed and best served of all the States, and of these several soon expired;[828] in Ridgefield, with twelve hundred inhabitants, there were but four newspaper subscribers.[829] In 1784, Virginia had only one newspaper, published at Richmond twice a week.[830]
These papers carried scarcely any news and the little they published was often weeks and sometimes months old, and as uncertain as it was stale. "It is but seldom that I have an opportunity of peeping into a newspaper," wrote "Agricola" to the Salem (Massachusetts) "Gazette," September 13, 1791, "and when it happens it is commonly a stale one of 2 or 3 weeks back; but I lately met with your fresh Gazette of August 30th—may be I shan't see another for months to come."[831] "Newspaper paragraphs, unsupported by other testimony, are often contradictory and bewildering," wrote Washington of so big, important, and exciting news as the progress of Shays's Rebellion.[832] On the same day Washington complained to General Knox that he was "bewildered with those vague and contradictory reports which are presented in the newspapers."[833]
But what this pygmy press lacked in information it made up in personal abuse. Denunciation of public men was the rule, scandal the fashion. Even the mild and patient Franklin was driven to bitter though witty protest. He called the press "The Supremest Court of Judicature," which "may judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy, not only private individuals, but public bodies, &c. with or without inquiry or hearing, at the court's discretion." This "Spanish Court of Inquisition," asserts Franklin, works "in the dark" and so rapidly that "an honest, good Citizen may find himself suddenly and unexpectedly accus'd, and in the same Morning judg'd and condemn'd, and sentence pronounced against him, that he is a Rogue and a Villian."
"The liberty of the press," writes Franklin, operates on citizens "somewhat like the Liberty of the Press that Felons have, by the Common Law of England, before Conviction, that is, to be press'd to death or hanged." "Any Man," says he, "who can procure Pen, Ink, and Paper, with a Press, and a huge pair of Blacking Balls, may commissionate himself" as a court over everybody else, and nobody has any redress. "For, if you make the least complaint of the judge's [editor's] conduct, he daubs his blacking balls in your face wherever he meets you, and, besides tearing your private character to flitters marks you out for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press." Franklin declared that the press of that day was supported by human depravity.