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America just turned 250 years old. But you know what just turned 251 years old? The post office. But before I take you into that story, I just want to remind you about History This Week Plus. No ads, bonus content, including the full interviews with our guests that you cannot hear anywhere else. Next week, we will be dropping our full interview from a few years back with Doris Kearns Goodwin, where she talks about her firsthand experience with President Lyndon Johnson in the White House. Sign up at HistoryThisWeekPodcast.com slash subscribe. That's HistoryThisWeekPodcast.com slash subscribe. Now, here is this week's episode. From the people who brought you It's the Dog Park comes...

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Coverage subject to policy terms. The History Channel, original podcast. History this week, July 26th, 1775. I'm Sally Helm. The Rebel headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Inside this stately Georgian mansion, major generals hole up in makeshift bedrooms and cooks playing pots and pans, trying to feed an army. The dining room, meanwhile, has been converted into a war room. And in it, a 43-year-old George Washington is set to conduct a very unassuming act of war. He pulls out a chair, sits down at a table, takes out a piece of paper, and starts to write. Washington has just arrived in Massachusetts, the brand new commander-in-chief of a rebel army, which, at this moment, in July of 1775, is losing. They're fresh off a defeat at Bunker Hill. The Redcoats now control the city of Boston, just across the river. But the colonists are actually feeling optimistic. Bunker Hill was a loss, but a close one. They are outfunded, outmanned, outgunned. But maybe they can win this thing. And what Washington doesn't know is that he's about to get a brand new military advantage. As he sits at that dining room table, he scratches down his orders for the day. In this case, instructions to build barracks that will keep people warm when winter eventually comes. And he sends them off to his troops. And this simple act, communicating by letter, it is actually an important, unheralded part of warfare. If you can't communicate, you just can't win. And luckily for George Washington, on this very day, the rebel Congress in Philadelphia is appointing a different general, a new postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin. Today, Benjamin Franklin revolutionizes the postal system. How did this founding father shape America's postal service? And how did that effort help the rebels win the war? More than 50 years earlier, 1723, a small boat rose into Pennsylvania's Market Street Wharf. The rowers look a little worse for wear, kind of rumbled, like they've slept on a riverbank,

which in fact they did. At the oars is a teenage boy.

He's 17 years old, really hadn't ever been out of Boston his entire life.

Steve Kokersberger is the historian for the United States Postal Service and former postmaster general for Philadelphia. This teenager disembarks and gives the owners of the boat a copper shilling. At first, they refuse his money, but he insists. Even though this means he now has just one Dutch dollar to his name. He walks down the street in dirty clothes, pockets stuffed with his extra shirts and stockings, in search of something to eat and a place to stay. His name? Benjamin Franklin. Franklin has risked everything to get to Philly. He's run away from Boston, his hometown, where he was indentured.

to an abusive half-brother. He catches a boat to New York that's torn to pieces in a squall. He almost drowns, then gets a fever, then walks 50 miles in the rain to catch a boat from Delaware, which gets lost, and which he has to help row. But he has finally made it to Philadelphia. He's here because he has a very specific career ambition. He wants to become a printer. He learned the trade from his half-brother, the one he's run away from, And he loves the work. As a printer, you're in charge of a printing press, setting type and putting ink on paper, books, newspapers, government documents, you name it. But you can also publish your own work. And Franklin has things to say, things to tell the world. His bet on Philadelphia pays off.

He finds work as a printer in Philadelphia, and he makes friends with some of the political leaders in the city. He buys his own printing press in Philadelphia, starts his own newspaper, and he publishes a book called Poor Richard's Almanac. This really makes his fortune, and it makes him sort of a celebrity, too.

His newspaper is called the Pennsylvania Gazette, and his almanac contains weather forecasts and such, like any good almanac. But it also contains some of the witty sayings you may associate with Franklin, like, early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. So maybe it's the early rising. Who knows? But less than a decade after he arrives bedraggled and penniless at Philadelphia's Wharf, Ben Franklin is well on his way to becoming a wealthy and famous man. But there is one little fly in the ointment.

The newspaper business in colonial America was really cutthroat.

Dan Piazza is the chief curator at the Postal Museum. And Ben Franklin's problem is, in fact, a postal problem.

So you had newspapers constantly trying to undermine one another to prevent their newspapers from circulating through the mail.

And the best way to do that is to just run the mail yourself. to become the city postmaster. Today, it is hard to imagine having your life ruined by a postmaster. But at the time, it was almost like running the internet. You were in charge of the world's communications. Now, officially, postmasters at this time work for the crown. But local post offices are like their own little fiefdoms. Postmasters can send their own mail, or even newspapers, for free. And they can also refuse to distribute items, like, for example, pesky rival newspapers. And unfortunately for Franklin, Philadelphia's postmaster has a newspaper of his own. And he decides he doesn't want any competition. He will not circulate Franklin's Gazette.

Franklin, that didn't sit well with him.

Kokrisberger again. He tells us that Franklin, by this point, has friends in high places. And he leans on them to have the Philadelphia postmaster investigate it.

And they found some irregularities in the other postmaster's accounting.

Apparently, he had been pocketing some of the postal fees instead of turning them over to the Crown. And while this happened pretty much all the time, it was best not to get caught at it. So the postmaster is let go. And who should take his place but the man who went after him to begin with?

And Franklin is promoted to become Philadelphia's postmaster.

Franklin may have risen to this job as part of a printer's vendetta, but he really takes to it. Dan Piazza told us, Franklin sees all these ways that the postal system could be improved.

Franklin immediately does a few things as postmaster of Philadelphia.

He has ideas about how to make the system more efficient and more profitable. In the 1730s, the postal service in the colonies is run by the Crown. And it's sort of a money pit. There is a main post road that runs from South Carolina to Boston that allows the colonies to communicate. But it's rocky, rough and tumble. There are rivers to cross, disputes with the French, the Dutch, and the Native Americans. And that is just within the colonies. Plenty of mail has to make it across the ocean first.

Ships are captured by privateers. They're sunk. They're lost in storms. All the mail goes down with the ship and so forth.

And all this means that if you send a letter in the 1730s, you don't have a lot of confidence that it'll actually arrive. So you don't want to pay up front to send a letter. It's actually the recipient who pays the fee. if the thing arrives. But that system can cause problems, too.

Many recipients either don't want to pay, or they can't pay, or they don't want letters from that guy who they don't like, or they simply don't know that there's mail waiting for them at the post office. Many post offices had stacks of what are known as dead letters.

Dead letters. Undelivered mail just sitting there. And Franklin has the idea of advertising these dead letters in his newspaper so that people can come get them. That raises revenue. He's also very conscious of the fact that his predecessor was skimming money off the top. So he invents some new accounting forms that people have to fill out. And that catches the eye of the postmaster general of all of North America, who starts having everyone use these forms.

So Franklin's also got a side job now printing accounting forms for the post office.

Franklin is eventually promoted to run the post not just for Philadelphia, but for Pennsylvania, and then for all of the colonies. And there, Steve Kokesperger told us, he continues his efficiency campaign.

He did a survey of all the postal routes to make sure that they were laid out most efficiently. So going out in a wagon with an odometer to measure the distances, because the contractors were paid by the mile. So if you're not going by the most efficient route, you're wasting money. And Ben was not big on wasting money.

He has post writers travel day and night, making the service faster.

You were able to send a letter to New York and have it there the next day. Incredible, because can we do that today even, right?

He also instructs postmasters to mail all newspapers, not just their own, for a small fee. It's an early win for freedom of speech. The colonies are now able to communicate with each other quickly, share news. And that has a political impact. Over the course of many years, this helps them slowly build a mutual identity, not just as Virginians or New Yorkers, but as colonists. From the Crown's perspective, though, the most important thing is the money.

He made it profitable. He started having a surplus and sending that money back to Britain.

That puts Ben Franklin very much in the king's good books. Today, Franklin has a reputation as one of America's foremost revolutionaries. But that was not always the case.

We think of Franklin as a patriot and a revolutionary. He comes to this much, much later in life. He is a royal official holding a commission from the crown in British North America.

He builds such a good reputation in England that he actually moves there. He's lobbying on behalf of various colonies, but also the elite in England are asking him for information about what's going on over on the other side of the Atlantic. He has kind of a cushy life.

He's living in London, and he's loving it. He's meeting with some of the greatest scientific minds, philosophers, and he's respected.

it. And all the while, he is still running the colonial postal system. You know, that's another

one of his inventions, telework. He's still doing the postmaster general job in America,

but he's doing it remotely. But while Franklin is working remotely to improve the post and advocate for the colony's interests in England, something is happening on the ground at home. A vibe shift. Frustrations with the British government are rising quickly. And Ben Franklin, the colony's man in London will be forced to choose a side.

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August 26th, 1765. Boston's North End. Governor Thomas Hutchinson is sitting down to dinner in his three-story mansion, along with his children, when his front door swings open and a man stumbles into the room. Out of breath, he tells Hutchinson, a mob is coming. Hutchinson has been waiting for this. He knows that Bostonians are increasingly angry at the colonial government. Just days ago, a mob threw stones through the windows at the home of Hutchinson's brother-in-law, who collects taxes for the crown. And now, they're coming for him. He tells his children to run and hide. Then he shuts up the house and runs out through the evening, across yards and gardens, to a neighbor's place. He watches as the mob breaks down his door with axes. They raid his cellars, get drunk on his wine. They tear up the books, break the furniture. By four o'clock in the morning, the house has been destroyed. The immediate impetus for this violence is a new British law that actually has to do with the mail. The Stamp Act.

The Stamp Act actually had nothing to do with postage stamps, which didn't exist yet.

No. But it relates to the mail because it is essentially a tax on paper. An official stamp appears on that paper to show that the tax has been paid. And this affects basically anything printed. Newspapers, magazines, calendars.

Legal documents would have to use this stamped paper. Even playing cards would have it stamped. So you can imagine what would happen if your industry was especially hit hard. The printers revolted.

The printers. Ben Franklin's people. They are some of the most affected by the Stamp Act. And the thing about printers is that they control the newspapers. And other information channels, too.

They have a soapbox. You know, they can spread their displeasure about this act. So the backlash against the Stamp Act was pretty swift and pretty severe. And it was not just rhetorical.

The ships carrying the stamped paper are attacked in the harbor. The agents who've been appointed in all the colonies to sell the paper are attacked. Their homes are attacked. Their families are attacked. Some of them are tarred and feathered.

The British government is shocked by this response. They've gone deep into debt to secure control of America. They've fought the Spanish and the French and the Native Americans. And they'd expected, ah, we levy a little tax on paper, get a little extra money from our colonies, no big deal. They should be grateful to us. We've kept them safe. They can pay a little for that protection. But that is not how it goes down. Ben Franklin is surprised by the backlash at first, too. But remember, he is a former printer. The more he hears about this, the more he understands why people are angry. The tax affects a lot of people, and they had no say in the matter. This is the first big instance of taxation without representation.

And Franklin just happens to arrive back in London at the height of the Stamp Act crisis and is called before Parliament and examined on what is the nature of this reaction? Why is there such a violent response to the Stamp Act in America?

And before Parliament, Ben Franklin calls for a repeal of the Stamp Act. He points out that it touches every corner of life in the colonies. Quote, we shall neither marry nor make our wills unless we pay such and such sums, and thus...

Thus, it is intended to extort our money from us.

He defends the colonies to the hilt.

Behind the scenes, he's a little more moderate. He tries to smooth things over, broker some kind of peace. He is a diplomat, after all. And Parliament does actually listen to him. They repeal the Stamp Act. But something has changed. From now on, whenever the British try to impose new taxes, the colonies resist. The Crown floods American cities with troops. Violence breaks out more and more frequently. And everything comes to a head when British soldiers kill five colonists at the Boston Massacre. Ben Franklin is still in London, but he is increasingly unable to keep a foot in both worlds. The colonists he represents are angrier and angrier at the British elite that he's surrounded by every day. He's still the Postmaster General, still working for the Crown. But then, something happens that will force him to pick a side. Someone, we actually still don't know who, slips Franklin a cache of letters. Franklin gets a hold of these letters. We don't

really know how, except that he doesn't get a hold of them through the postal system.

Yeah, he doesn't, like, steal them from the letter pile, even though he runs the post. It's more like someone leaks them to him. And these letters were written by Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the same one whose mansion had been destroyed by that mob. They are addressed to his friends back in England. And they are incendiary.

The Hutchinson letters showed what the British crown really thought about the colonies, that they don't really deserve the same level of autonomy or respect that the people living in America think they should have. It was quite a bombshell, I guess is a good way to put it.

So now Franklin has to decide what to do. Should he ignore the letters, cover them up, or should he show them to the revolutionaries in the colonies? He decides to kind of try and have it both ways. He shares the letters with some of the revolutionaries back in Boston. He feels they have a right to know that Britain is thinking of sending more troops, of cracking down in this repressive way. But he tells the patriots not to print them or make copies. Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, that little idea of Franklin's does not work out. The patriots decide, yeah, people need to see this. And in June of 1773, John Adams publishes the letters in the Boston Gazette. The scandal catches fire on both sides of the Atlantic. The colonists are furious that Hutchinson is talking about them this way. He actually flees the colonies. And the Brits are furious that the letters were leaked. Though they are not sure precisely who to be angry at.

No one knew that Franklin was responsible for those letters.

The accusations are flying. One guy accuses another guy of being the leaker. and they're on the point of a duel.

Franklin didn't want bloodshed on his hands, so he came forward and said, these were not private letters. These were written by the governor to another government official. These were part of the public record.

The crown does not buy it. And Franklin is called before the Privy Council, a powerful group of advisors to the king.

He stood there for over an hour as they just insulted him and berated him.

Then this is followed very shortly thereafter by his being unceremoniously fired from his job as postmaster general, which he's held for decades.

Franklin has poured 40 years of his life into the postal service. He's transformed it. He's used it to make money for the king. And just like that, he's out.

And so this public humiliation of him before the Privy Council, this firing of him, all combined, really, to turn his politics and radicalize him.

The Crown fires Benjamin Franklin mere weeks after the Boston Tea Party. And by the time he arrives back in America in 1775...

He is on the road to being a revolutionary.

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1775. more than 50 years after franklin first arrived in philadelphia he is back at that same work

stepping off a ship and into a new chapter so the first thing he finds out when he gets off the ship in philadelphia is that war has broken out lexington and concord happened just two weeks before so somewhere while he was in the middle of the ocean the war broke out that's the first news he gets. The second news he gets is, by the way, there's going to be a rebel Congress meeting here

in Philadelphia next week, and you've already been elected to it. This rebel Congress wants to draw from Franklin's experience as an international diplomat, politico, and statesman. And he is in. In June, the Congress establishes an army and puts George Washington in charge.

And so that's all good. They have a general, but now how to communicate with the general. Their Congress is in Philadelphia. The Army's in Boston, or in Cambridge, right outside of Boston. You can't run a war if you can't communicate.

Communication had already been a major issue for the revolutionaries for years.

That your mail may be opened is a well-known fact.

That is Lynn Heidelbaugh, curator at the National Postal Museum. She said, remember, the crown runs the mail. Ben Franklin was in charge, but he answered to them. And all this time, officials have also been reading that mail if they want to. Which makes plotting a revolution that much more difficult.

Some people do ciphers to code their letters and so forth. But since surveillance is baked into the postal systems of these imperial governments, It's something that a revolutionary is going to have to find their way around.

So starting around 1772, extra-legal communication networks started popping up. Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty formed committees of correspondence.

That's local networks of folks who are exchanging information outside the post, informing each other of news and really trying to become organized.

But these networks were mostly small and local at first. Things really kicked off when a man named William Goddard entered the picture.

Goddard was a radical.

He was a newspaper man. But the loyalists running the Post didn't like his politics. So they suppressed his paper. William Goddard was not going to take this lying down.

He had a short fuse.

He decided to hire his own writers to carry his paper. A postal system just for him.

And then he thinks some more. He says, well, you know, what if they carried more than just the newspapers? What if they actually carry the letters?

The more Goddard thought about it, the better this idea seemed. The rebels needed a communication network of their own. One where the postage didn't go to the king. Where anti-crown viewpoints wouldn't be suppressed. And even more importantly, one where you could be sure your letters wouldn't be opened by some snooping official. So he got to work.

He taps into his network of other printers and radicals in the Committees of Correspondence and the Sons of Liberty and says, I'm going to start this postal service outside the Crown's control. It'll be completely safe and secure. And he starts building up support for that idea.

He hired post-writers, often disgruntled former employees of the Crown. He made them swear an oath to keep the mail secure. And in 1774, his network took off. He called it the Constitutional Post.

It's kind of a swipe at the Crown. He says their post is unconstitutional because it's illegal taxation.

Goddard's Constitutional Post became the rebels' go-to. The Crown's postal system, it was compromised. And all of a sudden, the rebels had a new tactical advantage. Private communication. And the Brits were not happy about it.

The Crown is taking notice. They're talking about, how can we put a stop to this Goddard and his friends?

Now, war has actually broken out. And the post is increasingly drawn into the fray.

What easier way to get intelligence on your enemy than stealing a sack?

of their mail. Both sides surveil letters and publish embarrassing ones in newspapers as propaganda. And post-writers are attacked.

The post-writers could be arrested, held in jail, and worst case, they could be hanged as spies. So,

the new rebel Congress sees just how critical this communication system is to their cause. And they want to formalize it.

On the 26th of July, they agreed to this proposal to create a network of posts from Savannah to Maine. They said there should be a postmaster general in charge of it, and they elect Benjamin Franklin unanimously because who else is more qualified? Forty years in the Postal Service, I guess he knows how to do it.

Ben Franklin has his job back, except he is running a postal service for the rebels now. Goddard is appointed his number three, which he is a little miffed about. After all, this was his idea. But together, they create a postal network for a new nation. It will eventually become the United States Postal Service. But for now, there is still a war to win. And running the post in wartime is no easy job. The few existing post roads are hot commodities. ones that the Brits and the colonists both try to control.

The British take most of New Jersey, and those post offices are put out of commission. The post road that went from Philadelphia to New York through New Jersey, no longer viable. You can't send post writers through there.

Franklin's new post has to adapt, create new routes.

So, yeah, it's a struggle. It's very much a struggle. And paying the post writers is a real struggle because Congress has no money. Inflation's out of control.

But all of this has been a problem for the Crown's Postal Service, too. They've been bleeding money. Plus, their postal riders keep getting ambushed by rebels.

Things are really at a boiling point for the post office in May of 1775. The British Postmaster in New York closes the office because there had been so many interceptions of the mail that had stopped post riders between Boston and New York that main artery that he said it's just untenable to run this anymore.

And so when the Constitutional Post becomes official and popular, things only get worse. Patriots abandon the Crown Post in droves. The Brits lose an important source of intel and a whole lot of money. And then finally, on Christmas Day 1775, it happens.

There's an announcement that the Inland Post is discontinued.

The Crown Post shudders. But the Constitutional Post lives on, carrying military messages and administrative messages between government officials and carrying letters from, say, a colonist in Georgia to a colonist in Maine. They are not yet members of the same nation, but they soon will be. Benjamin Franklin only remains rebel postmaster for a year or so.

Franklin is asked by Congress to go on this secret mission. He said, the only way we're going to have any chance of winning this war is to get the French to help us. We need our best guy over there, so send Franklin so he's no longer running the post office.

No teleworking this time. And it's in Europe that Franklin really secures his reputation as one of the founding fathers. He helps convince the French to support the revolution, which helps turn the tide of the war. And his legacy as postmaster falls into obscurity. But in that role, he also helped win the war. The post stays central to the action.

It's a struggle for the duration of the war, really. It's, you know, the British attack here. But the network that Franklin and Goddard had built was so resilient that you could lose one node in that network and you could just work around it. You know, losing one post office did not cripple the network. And I have to contrast that with what the British were dealing with. Their communications were nowhere near as efficient as ours.

This communication advantage really does help the Patriots win. And as the fledgling nation begins to establish itself, the Postal Service remains a vital part of it. Leaders like George Washington and James Madison see the Post Office as essential to democracy itself. This is how voters would stay informed and how the new country would continue to develop

a sense of shared identity. The post is even codified in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8. And in 1847, when the U.S. makes its very first postal stamps, they pay tribute to two men. On one stamp, George Washington. And the other?

The other one had Benjamin Franklin on it.

Thanks for listening to History This Week, a BackPocket Studios production in partnership with The History Channel. To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com. And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at historythisweekathistory.com. Special thanks to our guests, USPS historians Steve Kokersberger and Postal Museum curators Dan Piazza and Lynn Heidelbaugh. Dan and Lynn's new book for the Postal Museum, Routes to a New Nation, will be out in October and is currently available for pre-order. This episode was produced by Katherine Isaac. It was sound designed and mixed by Tyler Morissette and was also produced by me, Sally Helm. For Backpocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein. From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler. Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week.