July 26th Through Time: Franklin’s Postal Revolution & More Historic Firsts

On this day in 1775, the Second Continental Congress offered Benjamin Franklin a salary of one thousand dollars, plus three hundred and forty for a secretary. Yesterday we were talking about the very first effort to map the surface of the moon, a project of immense scale and imagination. Well, on July twenty-sixth, 1775, the project was just as ambitious, but it was about mapping a new kind of nation, not on parchment, but in post roads and mail routes. Franklin’s job title was Postmaster General, and the organization he was tasked to create would become the United States Postal Service. And looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight... it’s so clear that this wasn’t just about creating a department.

It was an act of war. It was a declaration of informational independence. You have to remember the context. Just a year earlier, in 1774, Franklin had been fired from his job as joint Postmaster General for the British Crown. Why? For being too sympathetic to the American colonies. The British understood that whoever controls the flow of information... controls the narrative. They controlled the official mail. So when the Second Continental Congress met, they knew that relying on the Crown's postal system to coordinate a revolution against the Crown was... well, it was a non-starter. They needed their own network. A secure, private channel to move letters between army commanders, to get dispatches to political representatives, to connect thirteen disparate colonies from Falmouth, Maine, all the way down to Savannah, Georgia.

So they hired the man the British had just fired. And Franklin, using the expertise he’d gained working for the enemy, immediately set to work building a faster, more efficient system. He established night mail delivery to speed things up. He streamlined accounting. He laid out routes that would become the arteries of a new country. And just twelve days later, on August seventh, they established the Postal Inspection Service—one of the oldest federal law enforcement agencies in the country. Its job was to protect the mail from theft and criminal misuse. From the VERY beginning, the security and sanctity of the mail was baked into the entire enterprise. This wasn't a side project.

This was the central nervous system of the revolution. Now, here is the part that, even now, I think we fail to fully appreciate. Here's the turn. We tend to look back at the founding of the Post Office and see it as... you know, a public utility. A quaint, necessary service for delivering letters and, eventually, packages. But if we look at it from ten, or even a hundred years in the future... what we'll say this moment actually was... was the creation of the first American social network. And its killer app wasn't personal letters. It was the newspaper. This becomes crystal clear with the Postal Service Act of 1792, signed by President George Washington. That act did something radical.

It made it incredibly cheap to mail newspapers. It essentially created a massive federal subsidy for the distribution of news. A letter might cost you a pretty penny, but a newspaper could travel a hundred miles for just a cent. Why? Because the founders understood something profound. A republic can't function without an informed citizenry. If you're going to have a government "of the people," the people need to know what the government is doing. They need to be able to debate ideas, to feel connected to a national conversation happening in places they'll never visit. The postal system wasn't just delivering mail. It was delivering a shared reality. It was a content distribution platform with an explicit civic mission.

It was designed to break down localism and build a truly national identity. When you think about it like that, it changes everything. The post office wasn't just a service. It was an argument. An argument that connection, information, and a shared set of facts were essential for self-governance. It was the physical infrastructure for the marketplace of ideas. And that mission continued for centuries. The Post Office adapted and evolved, embracing every new technology that came along. Steamboats, railroads, the telegraph, and eventually, automated sorting, the ZIP Code in 1963, and the online tracking we all take for granted today. It became this constant, reliable presence in American life.

Then came the twentieth century, and a major shift. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 turned the Post Office Department, a cabinet-level agency, into the United States Postal Service, an independent, self-financing entity. The idea was to make it more efficient, more like a business. And for a while, it worked. But then came the internet. And then came 2006. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 placed a truly crushing financial burden on the USPS. It required the agency to pre-fund seventy-five years' worth of its employees' retirement health benefits, and to do it in just ten years. No other government agency, and no private company, has a requirement like that.

It has been the primary driver of the financial shortfalls we hear about every single year. So when we see headlines about the Postal Service losing money, or when we hear debates about cutting Saturday delivery, or when we saw the immense pressure put on the system during the 2020 election... it’s easy to think of it as a simple business problem. An outdated service that can't compete in the digital age. But the retrospective view tells a different story. It tells us that the struggle of the Postal Service is not the story of a failing business. It's the story of our own indecision about what we want our national infrastructure to BE. Is it a business, meant to be profitable?

Or is it a service, with a civic mission that might transcend profit? The founders were not confused about this. For them, the answer was obvious. The purpose of the network was to create the nation. To bind it together with information and access. They subsidized it because they knew a republic was more important than a balance sheet. Looking back from the future, the debates we're having now about social media, about net neutrality, about the role of platforms in public discourse... they all look like echoes of this same fundamental question. What is the purpose of connection? Is it just for commerce and entertainment? Or is there a deeper, civic purpose that we have a responsibility to protect?

The USPS today still operates over forty thousand post offices. It employs half a million people. It delivers mail to over one hundred and forty-four million addresses, six days a week, no matter how remote. It’s a staggering achievement of logistics and commitment. The decision made on July twenty-sixth, 1775, wasn't just about creating a way to send letters. It was a bet. A bet on the idea that a connected people could govern themselves. The mail was never just about the mail. It was about the nation we were trying to become, and the one we are still deciding to be.