President Washington establishes U.S. mail service, Feb. 20, 1792
On this day in 1792, President George Washington signed legislation creating the U.S. Postal Service.
Before the American Revolution, letters were exchanged mainly via private couriers or through the help of friendly travelers. Some colonies set up “post offices” in taverns and shops where carriages or riders could pick up and drop off mail.
In 1707, the British government had established the position of postmaster general, although mail still moved largely through the hands of private individuals. In 1737, Benjamin Franklin at age 31 became postmaster general of the colonies for the Crown. He carried out his duties in England until he was fired as a subversive colonialist. Franklin then returned to America and created a comparable postal system.
The 1792 act reinforced the power of Congress to establish official mail routes. It specified that newspapers should be included in mail deliveries and made it illegal for postal officials to open mail. The cost of sending a letter over some 2,400 miles of postal routes ranged from 6 to 12 cents.
In 1829, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, William Barry of Kentucky became the first postmaster general to join the Cabinet. (Although his predecessor, John McLean of Ohio, began referring to the service as the Post Office Department, Congress did not specifically establish it as an executive department until 1872.) Under the Jackson administration, an Office of Instructions and Mail Depredations was also established as the department’s investigative branch. The head of that office, P.S. Loughborough, became the first chief postal inspector.
The advent of Rural Free Delivery in 1896, and the inauguration of a domestic parcel post service by Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock in 1913, increased the volume of mail shipped nationwide and motivated the development of more efficient postal transportation systems. Rural customers took advantage of low parcel post rates to order goods and products from businesses located in distant cities.
In 1970, at President Richard Nixon’s behest, Congress transformed the Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service as an independent entity within the executive branch.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads. In practice, this means the service holds a monopoly over the delivery of first-class residential mail, but not packages. Unlike, say, Amtrak, the service is not a government-owned corporation. As a government agency controlled by presidential employees, the service possesses sovereign immunity and remains empowered to negotiate postal treaties with other nations.
The U.S. Supreme Court has also upheld the service’s statutory monopoly on access to letter boxes against a First Amendment freedom of speech challenge. It remains illegal for anyone other than the employees and agents of the USPS to deliver mail pieces to letter boxes marked “U.S. Mail.”
SOURCE: “NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE,” BY DEVIN LEONARD (2016)