Charleston’s official terrestrial postal connection with the northern colonies commenced in the late summer of 1756. Prior to that time, the dirt path known as the King’s Highway terminated in Newbern, North Carolina. On 19 August 1756, however, South Carolina’s postmaster, Peter Timothy, announced the beginning of a fortnightly service using a rider who would carry the mail between Charleston and Wilmington, where it would connect with the northern mail carriers. All persons receiving mail or wishing to send letters could visit Timothy’s shop, where he also published the South-Carolina Gazette (see that paper, 12–19 August 1756).
Trans-Atlantic Packet Boats
One of the most important features of the British postal law of 1710, and its subsequent revisions, was the appropriation of money to fund a small fleet of packet boats. More than just a simple sail boat, the packet was a medium-sized, ocean-going vessel designed for speed and efficiency rather than for cargo. A packet boat might carry a few passengers and a bit of cargo, but its main purpose was to transport mail and other small “packets” or packages on a regular timetable. While a cargo ship might linger at port until her hull was full, however long that might take, a packet boat was expected to depart and arrive on a set schedule. In accordance with the 1710 postal law, the first government-sponsored packet boats provided a weekly service between the regional post offices in Dublin and Edinburgh with the central post office in London.
What about connecting the central post office in London with the regional postal headquarters in New York and the West Indies? In the first half of the eighteenth century, it appears that there wasn’t a sufficient volume of mail to induce the British postal system to appropriate money for a fleet of trans-Atlantic and inter-colony packet boats. Instead, the government relied on the customary practice of using private ship captains to carry mail bags from port to port. To encourage ship captains to participate in the system created by the 1710 postal act, the British government authorized colonial postmasters to pay ship captains one penny for every letter delivered to the official post office in the colony where they arrived. To ensure accountability, the law required ship captains to make a list of the letters they carried and to deliver said list to the local postmaster, who was also required to make a list of all incoming letters and the names of the persons to whom the letters were delivered. Eventually this duty would be executed by packet boat captains in coordination with colonial postmasters, but in the meantime, this public-private partnership endured for many decades.
In the autumn of 1755, the British government announced the beginning of an expanded trans-Atlantic packet boat service (see the London Gazette, 25 October 1755). Commencing in 1756, there were two fleets and two branches, one servicing the northern colonies in America, and another connecting Britain’s southernmost colonies. Each month, a northern packet boat departed Falmouth, England, and sailed directly to New York, carrying mail for all of his majesty’s colonies in North America. From the main post office in New York, mail was distributed to the post office in each colony by way of the post road, or King’s Highway. Because that highway didn’t yet extend to Charleston, however, this new and improved postal service had no impact on South Carolina. Meanwhile, the southern branch of the new packet service departed Falmouth monthly and delivered mail to Barbados, Antigua, Monserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, and Jamaica, before returning to Falmouth. In the mid-1750s, the two Carolinas and Georgia were simply too thinly populated to merit inclusion in the British government’s expanded packet boat service. While other colonies benefitted from improved mail transport, we continued to rely on the old practice of private ship captains carrying mail bags from port to port.
In 1763, immediately after the conclusion of our latest war with France and Spain, the British postal service began planning another expansion of its colonial packet boat service. The northern branch, sailing between Falmouth and New York, remained unchanged, but in 1764 the route of the southern branch was altered to include Charleston and Britain’s new possessions in Florida. This new service involved three 140-ton packet boats, each manned with eighteen hands (London Gazette, 28 January 1764). Two years later, in the spring of 1766, the British government added two 170-ton packet boats to this route to ensure that his majesty’s colonies overseas would enjoy a monthly mail service (see the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 3 June 1766).
As South Carolina’s economy and population boomed in the 1760s, so too did our volume of mail, and so we began to garner even more attention from crown officials back in England. In late 1768, the king’s Postmaster General initiated a new, monthly packet service that sailed directly between Falmouth and Charleston, carrying mail for the provinces of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida. Four vessels were assigned to this route, which commenced in early 1769: Swallow, Eagle, Earl of Sandwich, and Le DeSpencer (the last two ships named for John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, and Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le DeSpencer, who jointly held the office of His Majesty’s Postmaster General). The passage from Falmouth to Charleston took anywhere from six to nine weeks, but by dispatching one packet boat on a fixed date each month, the goal was to ensure that Charleston would receive the latest news from England at least once a month. Once the packet mail bags arrived in Charleston, the local postmaster would carefully inventory their contents, separate the mail destined for our neighboring colonies, and hand the appropriate sub-packets to post riders who then galloped to the north and to the south along the King’s Highway.
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