Congress and the Post Office    

The Confederation Congress, it must be emphasized, did not create the United States Post Office.  American revolutionaries did so spontaneously at the outset of the Revolutionary War in 1775, bypassing the expensive and insecure British colonial post.  By the time the Articles were drafted (1776) and ratified (1781), postal riders on horseback connected American-run post offices in all thirteen states.

The Articles of Confederation granted Congress limited and often vague powers, but were explicit in conferring authority over the Post Office.  “The United States, in Congress assembled,” read Article IX, “shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of . . . establishing and regulating post offices from one State to another throughout all the United States, and exacting such postage on the papers passing through the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of the said office.”

Thus it was that on June 30, 1785, Congress directed Postmaster General Ebenezer Hazard (whom Congress had elected in 1782) to “make enquiry, and report the best terms upon which contracts may be entered into, for the transportation of the several Mails, in the stage carriages on the different roads, where such stage carriages may be established."

With the coming of peace, however, stage lines resumed and even expanded service, especially in the Northeast.  The stagecoaches of the 1780’s were slow and uncomfortable by later standards, but they were drier and safer than riding your own horse, and one could carry at least a little bit of luggage.  Why not mail as well?  The coaches were slower than a solo horseback rider, but they had more capacity and were less vulnerable to robbery.

Hazard made the appropriate inquiries, but sent a discouraging reply to Congress in July 1785.  The demands of the stagecoach operators for fees were “exorbitant”, the mail would not be carried “more expeditiously than at present”, and the preference of stagecoaches for evening arrival would be “extremely inconvenient”.  And what about the post riders who would be thrown out of work?

Congress would have none of it.  On September 7, Congress directed Hazard to sign contracts for stage mail carriage from New Hampshire all the way to Georgia, even in Southern regions where service would need to be established from scratch.  Charles Pinckney of South Carolina later explained why—“(T)he intention of Congress in having the mail transported by stage carriages, was not only to render their conveyance more certain and secure, but by encouraging the establishment of stages to make the intercourse between the different parts of the Union less difficult and expensive than formerly.”  The Post Office, not for the last time, would subsidize improvement in American transportation.

In 1786, Hazard and Congress played the same game.  Hazard complained that stagecoaches were expensive and unreliable, and Congress told him to use them anyway.  And indeed, the switch to coaches had had one happy consequence.  Stagecoaches, with their greater capacity, were more willing than post riders to carry newspapers along with the mail—even for free.  News circulated in the early republic when newspapers were physically carried from one city to another, and the increase in circulation was a boon to an increasingly active press and a politically aware public.

Finally, in 1787, Hazard got his way.  He complained again that the demands of the stagecoach operators were “now to be still more encreased”, and Congress finally, by voice vote (October 15), allowed him to use either stage carriages or horses “as he may judge most expedient and beneficial”.  Hazard promptly restored post riders on the mail route between Boston and New York.

He then discovered the meaning of making “intercourse between the different parts of the Union less difficult and expensive”.  The primary stage operator between Boston and New York, unable to make a profit without the mail subsidy, suspended service.  And the post riders, with nought but their saddle bags, could not and would not carry newspapers for free. 

Stagecoach operators, passengers, and newspaper editors all erupted with fury.  The debate over the Constitution of the United States (COTUS), playing out at twelve separate ratification conventions, was at its height.  “What is the meaning of the new arrangement at the Post-Office which abridges the circulation of newspapers at this momentous crisis?”, one editor wrote.  Even George Washington chimed in from Mount Vernon: “It is extremely to be lamented, that a new arrangement in the Post Office, unfavorable to the circulation of intelligence, should have taken place at the instant when the momentous question of a general government was to come before the people.”

After the COTUS was ratified, the new Congress returned the mail to stagecoaches, and President Washington dismissed Hazard as Postmaster General.  Congress under the COTUS continued to use postal subsidies as a stimulus to new forms of transportation, following and widening the trail that the Confederation Congress had blazed.

Sources: Oliver W. Holmes, Shall Stagecoaches Carry the Mail? – A Debate of the Confederation Period, William and Mary Quarterly, October, 1963; Oliver W. Holmes and Peter T. Rohrbach,  Stagecoach East: Stagecoach Days in the East from the Colonial Period to the Civil War, 1983; Journals of the Continental Congress, Volumes 29 and 33.