September 25, 2011
Remember a time before envelopes when you just folded the sheets of your letter, added a touch of sealing wax, and dropped it off at the post office? Remember when there were no stamps, and it was the person at the receiving end who paid the postage? Remember when the cost for mailing a letter depended on how far it was going, when there were even posts along the post roads to mark distances, and when it could take several weeks for a letter to go from Philadelphia to Boston? Remember when almost every post office was a "village post office" — a counter in a general store or tavern where some postal business could be conducted?
Ah, the good old days. The really good old days — the Post Office of the 18th century.
This is an important week in US postal history. It was on September 22, 1789, that the newly formed Federal Government established the Post Office and authorized the appointment of a postmaster general. A few days later, on September 26, the nation’s first postmaster general took office. And it wasn’t Ben Franklin. His name was Samuel Osgood.
Franklin is rightly known as the country’s first postmaster general, but that was before 1776 and the formation of the federal government. There had been a postal system in the country since colonial days, but it suffered from inefficiency and deficits, at least until Franklin came along. In his service to the English crown as postmaster general for over two decades, Frankln improved service and put the system in the black for the first time.
Despite his achievements, Franklin was dismissed from his post in 1774 because of his involvement with revolutionaries. A year later, the Continental Congress established the Post Office and appointed him the country’s first postmaster general. So we really have two "first" postmaster generals — Franklin before the Revolutionary War, and Osgood under the Constitution. How the Post Office ended up in the Constitution is another story.
During the Revolutionary War, military leaders and elected officials could see that a robust postal system was crucial to facilitating communication and coordinating their wartime efforts. Postal workers were even exempted from military service. In 1778, the Founding Fathers wrote into the Articles of Confederation a clause granting the United States Congress the “sole and exclusive right and power of . . . establishing and regulating post offices from one state to another, throughout all the United States.” The clause also empowered the post offices to charge postage “to defray the costs” of running the system.
Over the next few years, the value of the postal system to the young democracy became even more apparent. The Post Office truly was "binding the country together." The Post Office helped elected representatives and their constituents keep in contact, and through its distribution of newspapers, it enabled Americans to stay informed about political issues. Delivering newspapers was so important, in fact, that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson advocated reduced rates or even free delivery. Madison also believed that “by providing the citizenry with the means to monitor its elected representatives, the postal system could help to check the abuse of power” (Christopher Shaw, Preserving the People's Post Office).
In 1789, the “postal clause” of the U.S. Constitution — Article 1, section 8 — gave the Congress power over the Post Office. The passage states that the Congress “shall have the power . . . to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.” The clause was a subject of controversy from the very beginning, and three years later, when Congress debated the Post Office Act of 1792, it was about whether or not Congress could and should delegate to the postmaster general its power to establish post offices and post roads. The Senate wanted to give that role to the postmaster general, but the House said no, the Congress should retain its power.
August 28, 2011
“The Postal Service has been faced with critical financial problems in recent years.” In the last fiscal year, “Postal Service expens