For some years various circumstances had been arising which made it necessary that the post office in Great Britain and the colonies should be established on a footing different from that on which it then stood.
The legislative union between England and Scotland in 1707 called for a uniform postal service throughout Britain; but without additional legislation the postmaster general of England could not dispose of the revenues of the post office in Scotland.
The colonies were in their infancy when the English law of 1660 was enacted, and they were not mentioned in it at all. The only clause in that act which affected the colonies in any way was that which required all masters of ships who brought letters with them from beyond the seas, to deposit them at the nearest post office. There was no penalty attached to the disregard of this clause, and the attempt to induce the shipmasters to obey the law by paying them a penny for every letter they delivered in the English post office was pronounced by the auditors to be illegal, and there was a threat made that these payments would be disallowed in the accounts.
There were a number of other circumstances arising out of the growth of the kingdom and its colonial expansion, which compelled the postmaster general to take action in advance of legal authority. When the treasury, after the union of England and Scotland, learned that a new post office law was necessary, they determined to take advantage of the fact to serve their own purposes. The war of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1702, while ruinous to France, also seriously crippled England; and the treasury saw that the enactment of a new post office act might be utilized to increase the postal charges, and additional sums raised for carrying on and finishing the war.
In 1710, accordingly, a post office bill was presented to parliament.[37] It was passed by parliament; and this act was the first measure which dealt in a comprehensive way with the British post office.
Substantially it was the law of the post office for more than a century afterwards.
The effect of the new law on the colonial post office was profound.
Until 1710 the terms and conditions under which the post office in the colonies was operated, were matters of arrangement between Hamilton and the several legislatures. While the Neale patent enabled Hamilton to set up post offices in the colonies, the postal charges were fixed by the colonial legislatures at such rates as "the planters shall agree to give."
The Neale patent had been resumed by the crown in 1706, but not abrogated. Hence, until the new act came into force, the crown simply stood in the place of the patentees, and operated under the legislation agreed upon between Hamilton and the colonial governments. New York and Pennsylvania, as their short term acts expired, renewed them with the crown; and New Jersey, which established a postal system in 1709, fixed the rates of postage by act of the legislature, but placed the management of the service in the hands of the postmaster general.
The post office act of 1710 made it no longer necessary to consult the colonial legislatures as to the charges to be made for the conveyance and delivery of letters in North America. The supreme control of the postal system throughout the British dominions, beyond the sea, as well as at home, was vested in the postmaster general of England. The rates of payment were fixed by the act, and the mode in which the surplus revenues were to be disposed of was set forth in the same enactment.
In America, the general post offices at Boston, New York and Philadelphia, which stood quite independent of one another, were reduced to the rank of ordinary offices, and made parts of the system, the headquarters of which were placed by the act in New York.[38] The administration of the system, as reconstructed, was continued in the hands of John Hamilton.
As in all other parts of the British dominions, the rates of postage were sensibly increased.[39] Under the Neale patent, a letter from New York for Philadelphia cost fourpence-halfpenny. The act of Queen Anne raised the charge to ninepence, just double the former rate. A letter posted in Boston, and addressed to Philadelphia, which under the Neale patent cost for postage fifteen pence, cost twenty-one pence under the act of 1710. But these figures give no adequate idea of the magnitude of the postal charges as fixed by the act of Queen Anne.
An explanation of the system to which these rates applied will make the matter clearer. At the present time the postage on a letter passing anywhere within the British Empire, or from Canada to any part of the United States or Mexico, is two cents per ounce weight, whether the letter is addressed to the next town or to the farthermost post office in the Yukon.
In 1710, and indeed in Canada until 1851, the distance a letter was carried was an element which entered into the cost. It would have been thought no more proper to ignore the element of distance in fixing the postage on a letter than in fixing the charge for the conveyance of a parcel of goods. By the act of 1710 the postage on a single letter passing between two places sixty miles apart or less was fourpence; where the places were from sixty miles to one hundred miles apart the charge was sixpence.
Besides the distance, however, there was another factor which helped to determine the amount of the postage. This factor will appear from a description of the classes into which letters were divided.
Letters were single, double, and treble, and ounce. A single letter was one consisting of one sheet or piece of paper, weighing less than one ounce. If with this single sheet letter, a piece of paper was enclosed, no matter how small, the letter was called a double letter. The treble letter was a letter consisting of more than two sheets or pieces of paper, under the weight of an ounce.
Whatever the postage of a single letter might be, the postage on a double letter was equal to that of two such single letters; and that on a treble letter was three times that on a single letter. There were no envelopes in use at this period, and the sheet on which the letter was written was so folded that an unwritten portion came on the outside, and on this space the address was written.
The question will occur as to how the presence of enclosures could be detected among the folds of the larger single sheet. There were several means of detection born of ingenuity and experience. The approved method and the one long in service, was to hold every letter up to a lighted candle, and by some skilful manipulating, the taxable enclosures could be seen.
But it was not only enclosures to which the attention of the officials was directed. The postal charges were found so oppressive that several merchants who had letters to send to the same town used to write their several communications on the same sheet, which on reaching the person addressed was by him passed on to the others, whose letters were on the same sheet.
In the post office the practice was much condemned. As it was not specifically provided against in the act, it had to be tolerated until the act was amended; and thereafter when several letters were written on one paper, each was to be charged as a distinct letter. The letter inspectors then had to satisfy themselves that there was no more than one person's handwriting in the sheet, which was, of course, carefully sealed with wax.
The ounce letter needs no explanation. At present the ounce is the unit of weight for letters sent from Canada to every part of the civilized world. In this aspect it corresponds with the single letter of the pre-penny postage days. But the ounce letter of 1710 and of over a century afterwards was far removed from the single letter in the matter of postage.
In that respect the ounce letter was equal to four single letters, and was charged four times the rate of the single letter. Thus, while a single sheet weighing less than an ounce could pass between two neighbouring towns not over sixty miles apart for fourpence, if it tipped the ounce weight it was chargeable with sixteen pence.
The act of 1710 offered a problem to the paper makers. A sheet of paper had to be made stout enough to stand the handling of the post office without the protection of an envelope, and be yet so light as to allow the largest space possible within the ounce weight.
Under this system, in which distance, number of enclosures and weight were all factors, the charges for letters, such as are posted by thousands in our larger offices every day, were very high. An ounce letter, which at the present time costs but two cents to convey to the remotest post office in the North West of Canada, or to Southern Mexico, in 1710 cost three shillings to carry from New York to Philadelphia.
From New York to Boston, the postage on the same letter was four shillings. Between the outermost points of the North American postal system in 1710--Portsmouth, N.H., and Charlestown, N.C.--the postage for an ounce letter was ten shillings.
The act of Queen Anne's reign, so long the charter of the British postal system, also greatly increased the charges on letters passing between the mother country and the colonies. In place of the penny or twopence which satisfied the captains for the delivery in America of the letters which had been placed in the letter bags hung up in the London coffee houses, the postage on a single letter passing from London to New York became one shilling. If the letter weighed an ounce, the charge was four shillings.
Captains of vessels, moreover, were no longer at liberty to disregard the requirements of the post office that they should deliver their letters at the post office of the port of arrival. If they failed, they laid themselves open to a ruinous fine.
Remembering the resentment with which half a century later the Americans greeted every scheme, which could be construed into imposing a tax without their consent, one wonders how the post office act of 1710 was regarded in the colonies.
The question is interesting enough to warrant some inquiry. The legislative records have been searched carefully, and also, so far as they were available, the newspapers of the period. With one exception about to be mentioned, the only reference to the post office act which has been discovered is in the New Hampshire records. There it is stated that the act was read before the council on the 13th of September, 1711, and afterwards proclaimed by beat of drum in the presence of the council and of some members of the house of representatives.
The case in which the act came into question occurred in Virginia. This colony had no post office in 1710, nor for a considerable period afterwards; and it was the attempt to put the post office in operation in 1717 which led to the protest and the countervailing action.
Virginia seems to have had no desire to be included in the American postal system. In 1699 Hamilton reported on the proposition of extending the system southward to Virginia.[40] The extension would cost 500; and Hamilton declared that the desire for communicating with the northern colonies was so slight that he did not believe there would be one hundred letters a year exchanged between Virginia and Maryland and the other colonies. Practically all the correspondence of the two colonies was with Great Britain and other countries in Europe.
In the autumn of 1717, steps were taken to establish a post office in the two colonies, and to connect them with the other colonies.
Postmasters were appointed in each colony. Couriers carried the mails into several of the more populous counties; and a fortnightly service was established between Williamsburg and Philadelphia. This was quite satisfactory, until the people began to read the placards which they observed affixed to every post office wall, directing that all letters, not expressly excepted by the act of parliament, should be delivered to the local postmasters. Here was matter for thought.
A glance at the tariff showed that the charge made by the post office on a letter from England was one shilling for a single letter. The letters from England were the only letters the people of Virginia cared anything about, and they were accustomed to pay only a penny as postage for them.
There was some little trouble, and perhaps a slight risk attending the safe delivery of letters by the existing arrangement. Virginians were, however, used to it, and had no great fault to find. It might be that if they could have received their letters at the post office for the same charge as they paid for receiving them direct from the ship captains, they would have preferred going to the post office.
But the difference in convenience between the two places of receipt was not worth the difference between one penny and one shilling; and indeed it looked uncommonly as if the government were using this means to tax them elevenpence on every letter they received.
The people, on realizing the condition of things, made a great clamour.[41] Parliament, they declared, could levy no tax on them but with the consent of the assembly; and besides that, their letters were all exempted from the monopoly of the postmaster general because they nearly all, in some way or other, related to trade.
The Virginians were putting an unwarrantably broad interpretation on an exemption, which appears in all post office acts, in favour of letters relating to goods which the letters accompany on the vessel. It has always been the practice to allow shipmasters, carrying a consignment of goods, to deliver the invoice to the consignee with the goods, in order that the transaction might be completed with convenience.
It would not be practicable, however, to confine this exemption to invoices accompanying goods, as this would require a knowledge of the contents of letters, which could not be obtained without an intolerable inquisition. Consequently, it has been customary to allow all letters accompanying consignments of goods to be delivered with the goods, without asking whether they relate to the goods or not. But the scope of the exemption is clearly defined, and has never been allowed to include ordinary business letters, not accompanied by goods.
The Virginians, however, were not content to leave their case to the precarious chances of a legal or constitutional argument. They set about neutralizing the post office act by an effective counter measure. A bill was submitted to the legislature which, while it acknowledged the authority of the post office act, imposed on postmasters giving effect to it certain conditions which it was impossible to fulfil, and attached extravagant penalties for the infraction of those conditions. The postmasters were to be fined 5 for every letter which they demanded from aboard a ship--letters of a character which the British statute exempted from the postmaster general's exclusive privilege.
Now every ship's letter bag would contain probably many letters relating to goods aboard the ship, as well as many which were in no way so related. But how was the postmaster to tell the letters accompanying goods from those which did not? Even if the ship's captain assisted to the best of his ability, which was more than doubtful, there would be many letters about which the postmaster could not be certain, and with a 5 penalty for every mistake, his position was not an enviable one.
Another clause in the bill of the legislature of Virginia contained a schedule of hours for every courier. The terms of the schedule were so exacting that compliance with it was impossible. The penalty attached to every failure to observe the hours set forth, was twenty shillings for each letter delayed.[42] As the governor pointed out, the difficulties of travel during the winter season, owing to the number of great rivers to be passed, would subject the postmasters to the risk of a fine for every letter they accepted for transmission at that period of the year.
The bill of 1718, when sent up for the governor's assent, was promptly vetoed; but on the other hand, the intention of the deputy postmaster general to establish a post office in Virginia was not pressed. It was not until 1732, when the governor had relinquished his office, and had himself been appointed deputy postmaster general, that Virginia was included in the postal system of North America.
Even after that date the post office in Virginia was on a somewhat irregular footing, at least in regard to the conveyance of the mails. In a gazetteer published in 1749,[43] it is stated that while regular trips are made by mail courier from Portsmouth to Philadelphia, southward to Williamsburg the courier's movements were uncertain, as he did not set out until there were sufficient letters posted for the south, to guarantee his wages from the postage on them. There was a post office at this period as far south as Charlestown, but the post carriage for that office was still more uncertain.
With the exception of the Virginian contretemps, the period from 1710 until after the middle of the eighteenth century was one of quiescence.
Deputy postmaster general succeeded deputy postmaster general; and the annals of their administrations carry little that is interesting. After the retirement of Hamilton in 1721, a change was made in the relations between the deputy postmaster general and the general post office, by which the post office in London was relieved of all expense in connection with the maintenance of the North American postal system.
Hamilton had a salary of 200 a year. But the profits from the post office did not quite cover that amount, as on his withdrawal, there was due to him 355 arrears of salary. In recommending the claim to the treasury, the postmaster general stated that the post office in America had been put on such a footing that if it produced no profit, it would no longer be a charge on the revenue.[44]
The facilities given to the public were not increased during that period. Indeed, in 1714, they were diminished, as the courier's trips between Boston and Philadelphia, which in 1693 were performed weekly throughout the year, were reduced to fortnightly during the winter months, and they remained at that frequency until 1753.
It is obvious that the post office was not used by the public any more than was absolutely necessary, and that every means was taken to evade the regulations designed to preserve the postmaster general's monopoly.
Thomas Hancock, in a letter written in 1740, to Governor Talcott of Connecticut, told him that he saved the colony from forty shillings to three pounds every year, through the interest he had with the captains of the London ships, who delivered the letters to him instead of handing them over to the post office.[45]
The line of undistinguished representatives of the British post office in America came to an end in 1753, when Benjamin Franklin was made deputy postmaster general, jointly with William Hunter of Virginia.
Franklin, besides being a man of eminent practical ability, brought to his task a large experience in post office affairs. He had been postmaster of Philadelphia for fifteen years prior to his appointment to the deputyship; and for some time before had acted as post office controller, his duty being to visit and instruct the postmasters throughout the country.
At the time Franklin and Hunter entered upon their office they found little to encourage them. The couriers who conveyed the mails were much slower than most other travellers on the same roads. It took six weeks to make the trip from Philadelphia to Boston and back, and during the three winter months, the trips were made only once a fortnight.