The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time, it was the U.S. government’s largest and most important endeavor — indeed, it was the government for most citizens.
This was no conventional mail network but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen — a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers.
America’s uniquely democratic post office powerfully shaped its lively, argumentative culture of uncensored ideas and opinions and made it the world’s information and communications superpower with astonishing speed.
Winifred Gallagher presents this history of the post office in her book How the Post Office Created America: A History (Penguin Books, 2017) as America’s own story.
The mandate to deliver the mail — then “the media” — imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested parts of the continent and transformed a cultural wilderness into a social landscape of post roads and villages centered on post offices.
The post office department was the catalyst of the nation’s transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Still one of the country’s two major civilian employers, the post was the first to hire women, Black Americans, and other minorities for positions in public life.
The key to good communication is in the delivery – literally. Winifred Gallagher joins a recent America in Pursuit podcast (from the makers of Throughline), to help explain how the creation of the U.S. Postal Service transformed our political culture and helped start a revolution, one letter at a time.
You can listen to the podcast here.
Throughline is a historical podcast and radio program from American public radio network NPR, which aims to contextualize current events.
Read more about history of the Postal Service in New York State.
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