Postal

 1754 – 1792: Postal ops in SCⁱ

i 1754 – 1792: Postal ops in SC

In seventeenth century America, before the creation of a postal system, if you wanted to send a letter to a nearby friend or to a distant relative across the ocean, you had a choice of two different types of services. The first choice I’ll call a “closed network” (for lack of a better term—I haven’t found any historical literature that examines this topic). A “closed network” is a series of contacts that are known and familiar to both the sender and the recipient. If you wanted to send a letter to your mother who lived several miles down the road, for example, you might entrust the letter to a sibling, a spouse, a friend, a servant, or (in early South Carolina) a slave. If your correspondent lived some greater distance away, say, in New York or London, you might ask a friend or relative, who happened to be going in that direction, to personally deliver your letter. In such cases, your letter traveled free of charge and stayed within a series of familiar hands. Alternatively, if you needed to send a letter, but didn’t have a friend heading in the right direction, you would use what we might call an “open network,” which involved your letter passing through a series of hands who were unknown to you before it reached its destination. Someone had to pay for this service, of course, either at the front end of the transaction, or at the end of the network, where your letter was received, or both. This informal network of people carrying letters for strangers in return for a small fee, eventually coalesced into what we now call the postal system.

The Public House and Post Office:

In the earliest days of American colonies, “public houses” such as taverns or coffee houses were the information hubs of every community. In a port town like Charleston, information about the outside world arrived by way of ships from distant lands. While on shore, ship captains would frequently use local taverns as their business offices. By bringing stories, gossip, and, later, newspapers to their favorite watering hole, ship captains helped taverns attract customers who wanted to hear the latest information from abroad and to discuss business and politics with their peers. More importantly, ship captains would also place mail bags in taverns and offer to carry letters to their next ports-of-call. If a ship captain happened to be carrying a letter for you, sent by distant correspondent, it was your responsibility to pay the captain for his trouble. This was the scene at hundreds of taverns across the Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the bigger cities, the tavern scene was even more specialized. On Birchin Lane, in the heart of London, for example, there was a business called the Carolina Coffee House. From the earliest days of Carolina in the 1670s into the early 1800s, the Carolina Coffee House was the place to meet ship captains headed to or just arrived from Charleston. If you wanted the hear the latest news about Carolina or had letters to send to family or friends there, you went to the Carolina Coffee House.

By 1754, Post office being run out of Peter Timothy's print shop.

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.

Postal ops generallyⁱ

iPostal Operations of the British Government

The English government dabbled with establishing a national postal system in the early 1600s, but it wasn’t until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 that the concept of “Royal Mail” began to take root in a legal sense. Their early system encompassed only the country of England, but here in North America, our various provincial governments began imitating the English model. By the end of the seventeenth century, each of the American colonies had an officially-designated letter depot, or post office, but there was no official inter-colony service until a bit later.

The earliest English settlements in New England commenced in the 1620s, and within a few decades there was a system of rudimentary roads, or at least riding paths, connecting the various northern colonies. In 1673, the governors of both New York and Pennsylvania created post offices to facilitate a monthly mail service along a road stretching from Boston, Massachusetts, to Annapolis, Maryland. Because this road, really more of a horse path, was maintained with government funds, it became known as “the King’s highway.” Along this public highway, men riding on horseback carried mail bags from one end of the road to the other, stopping at towns along the way to pick up and deposit mail. It wasn’t until more than a century later, years after the American Revolution, that the volume of mail increased to the point that it needed to be carried by wagons or coaches.

Following the creation of the North American post office in New York, in conformity to the postal law of 1710, the big challenge for the North American postmaster was to improve the existing New England post road and connect it to Virginia. The southern colonies of Virginia and the Carolinas had smaller populations than those up north, however, and our people were scattered among rural plantations instead of clustered in towns like in New England. The idea of connecting the King’s Highway to Charleston was part of the government’s plan, but it remained a low priority for many years. From the perspective of government officials back in London and merchants in Charleston, South Carolina was more closely aligned with the Caribbean sphere of communication and trade.

In 1753 after the death of Elliot Benger, the Postmaster General, Franklin was appointed Postmaster General of America, a post he shared with William Hunter. During his employment he toured all the northern colonies to survey post roads and post offices establishing more efficient routes. He traveled a total of 1,600 miles. In order to improve delivery time he had riders carry mail during night and day.

Although Franklin did not invent it, he designed an odometer and attached it to the front wheel of the letter carriage, the odometer measured the number of revolutions of the wheel. Each revolution was counted by dials and by the end of the trip the mailman would know the distance traveled by multiplying the number of revolutions by the circumference of the wheel. That way Franklin determined which routes were the quickest. He determined postal rates based on distance and weight and were standardized for all colonies.  He also mandated the delivery of newspapers for a small fee. His improvements turned the American Post Offices profitable for the first time.

Franklin remained Postmaster General until 1774. After the Hutchinson Affair Franklin was judged too sympathetic to the colonies and was dismissed from his post.

Mail Packet Boats from 1710 – 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).