The History of the Post Office in British North America

by William Smith

It was still, it must be remembered, half a century before the time when the agitations which preceded the great reform bill of 1832 had familiarized the country with the distinction between virtual and actual representation. The British parliament was far from being, and indeed made no pretence of being a representative assembly in the sense in which the phrase is now used. The right to send members to parliament had for centuries been exercised by the electors of counties and certain ancient boroughs, and no enlargement of the representation was made from 1677 until 1832,[85] in spite of the great changes in population and industrial importance which had taken place in the course of time.

Great manufacturing towns such as Manchester and Leeds sent no members to represent them in parliament, while Old Sarum which did not contain a single house elected two members. To a people, who saw nothing in this state of things inconsistent with the theory of representative government, the colonial view would be quite incomprehensible.

The colonist on the other hand with his strict representation in town meetings and colonial assemblies, and without the historical aids to an understanding of the point of view of the home government, saw little of a truly representative character in the British system. But he did see, what the home government did not, that a body of distinct and separate interests had grown up in America of which parliament had a very inaccurate conception, and with which it was in no way qualified to deal.

The attitude of the colonists did not appear to the government to be quite free from insincerity. For half a century and more, the government declared, the colonists had been subject to taxes in the shape of post office charges imposed by the act of 1710, and they had never raised a question.

In the Newcastle correspondence, there is a paper, dated 1765, containing a discussion on the legality of a tax on the trade with the Spanish West Indies. In the course of the paper it is asserted that parliament, by the post office act of Queen Anne, imposed an internal tax on the colonies without their presuming to dispute the jurisdiction of parliament over them.

The disturbances in America which followed upon the attempts to enforce the stamp act surprised and alarmed the government, and a committee of parliament was appointed to consider what their future course would be. Franklin who, as the representative of several of the colonies, had been in London for a considerable time, was among the witnesses examined by the committee. His examination took a wide range, but the point of interest was the question as to what ground in principle the Americans stood upon in objecting to the stamp act, since they had accepted the post office act of 1710.

For Franklin this was a crucial question, as he had been not only administering the post office in America for twelve years past, but he did not conceal his satisfaction that by his management he had been able for several years to send substantial sums to Great Britain as profits from the institution.

Franklin answered the questions with much ingenuity. The money paid for the postage of a letter was not in the nature of a tax; it was merely a quantum meruit for a service done; no person was compellable to pay the money if he did not choose to receive the service. A man might still, as before the act, send his letter by a servant, a special messenger, or a friend, if he thought it safer and cheaper.

The answer would have been quite just, if the postmaster general of England had not held a monopoly of letter carrying in America. While a person is free to use or not to use a certain service, the charge for the service is not in the nature of a tax. If a person does not like the price demanded by the post office for its services, he may seek other means of having his letters carried. But the post office act does not leave a person free to employ other agencies for the conveyance of his letters. The monopoly has attached to it heavy penalties for its infringement.

It is true, as Franklin said, that the post office act leaves it open to a man to employ a servant, special messenger, or friend in the course of his travel, to carry his letters. But the mention of these agencies shows the absurdity of Franklin's contention. A merchant in New York having business to transact by letter with a customer in Boston or Philadelphia could not afford to pay the expenses of his messenger or servant unless the transaction were one of considerable magnitude. Nor could he await the chance of a friend's making a visit to either of these places. He might, if he were free to do so, have entrusted his letters to a coach driver who made a business of passing between New York and the other two towns, but the monopoly of the post office stood in his way, and the coachman would have made himself liable to a heavy fine.