Winifred Gallagher

The first U.S.

government was really an information and communications network.

I am a journalist.

My book is called How the Post Office Created America.

Winifred Gallagher started thinking about the role of the post office because... For 15 years, I more or less commuted between New York City and a little cowboy town in Wyoming.

And she said that taking that trip so often gave her... A lot of time to think about what linked one half of the country to the other half of the country.

And it was the post office.

Well, the post office was really woven into America's DNA by Benjamin Franklin.

He was, of course, a founding father, but also our first postmaster general.

His earlier experience of running the primitive mail system that linked the Great Britain's 13 colonies gave him the managerial skills, but much more important, it also convinced him that these

Thirteen very quarrelsome little fiefdoms would be far more powerful together than apart.

The Patriots' first concerted acts included the creation of underground communications networks that enabled them to conspire under the British radar.

The first was called the Committees of Correspondence and then the Constitutional Post.

These informal networks were the thing that linked Thomas Jefferson and Sam Adams and the other revolutionaries.

enable them to talk treason, but they were also not just the incubators of the new post office department, as it would be called, which was established in 1775, but of the United States government itself.

You could argue that the first U.S.

government was really an information and communications network.

It was the nervous system of the republic, the early republic.

And the same people who ran these communications networks ended up running the government.

Things changed a lot in 1792.