Signed, Sealed & Delivered | America in Pursuit
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How did the U.S. postal service contribute to the American Revolution?
Hey, it's Rund. In this month's ThruLine Plus episode, our producers take us behind the scenes of making our episode on the first transatlantic cable. To listen to these insider bonus episodes every month, sign up for ThruLine Plus at plus.npr.org slash ThruLine.
This is America in Pursuit, a limited series from NPR and ThruLine. I'm Ramtin Arablui. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America that began 250 years ago this year. As we count down to July 4th, I've been thinking a lot about the fact that when the founders signed the Declaration of Independence, they were literally starting a new country from scratch. And it was a country based on ideas. Ideas that had to somehow be shared widely.
The first U.S. government was really an information and communications network.
This is Winifred Gallagher.
I am a journalist.
What role did Benjamin Franklin play in shaping the postal system?
My book is called How the Post Office Created America.
And like her book title implies, Winifred believes the Postal Service provided the technological infrastructure the American Revolution needed in order to succeed and then run a new democratic republic. We know that revolutions are often fueled by new technologies. Take the role Twitter played in organizing and connecting uprisings that took place a little over a decade ago in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria during this so-called Arab Spring. The American Revolution might have taken place centuries ago, and the post office might not seem anything like social media. But consider that back then, the post office gave people in the American colonies a new way of sharing information more easily across more places than they could ever before.
And it would become a lifeline connecting people, quietly at first, to ideas that would change the world. So today, me and Run bring you the story of how the U.S. Postal Service fueled a revolution and gave rise to the United States of America. That's coming up after a quick break.
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.
She spoke to us from that little cowboy town, Du Bois, Wyoming.
How did the post office facilitate communication among revolutionaries?
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.
Just a heads up, we talked to Winifred in the summer of 2020 at the start of the pandemic, so the audio quality may not be what you're used to hearing on this show.
Can you describe how the founders thought about the postal system and why it was such an important part of the nation from the beginning in terms of being able to connect different parts of the colonies that then became a country, a nation?
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.
What impact did the postal system have on the early American democracy?
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.
Wow. So it makes sense that it was super important to the founders, right? It was partly the reason why the country was able to be created, it sounds like.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
How did the U.S. postal service contribute to the American Revolution?
0:00–1:01
2
What role did Benjamin Franklin play in shaping the postal system?
1:01–2:34
3
How did the post office facilitate communication among revolutionaries?
2:34–3:57
4
What impact did the postal system have on the early American democracy?
3:57–4:51
5
How did the postal service create an informed electorate in America?
4:51–5:48
6
What were the economic implications of the postal service on American society?
5:48–7:48
7
Why is the history of the postal service relevant to Americans today?
7:48–10:51