Signed, Sealed & Delivered | America in Pursuit

What It Covers

The US Postal Service functioned as America's first information network, enabling revolutionary communication through underground committees of correspondence and later creating an informed electorate by subsidizing newspaper distribution to every citizen starting in 1792.

Key Questions Answered

• •Revolutionary Infrastructure: Benjamin Franklin established underground postal networks called committees of correspondence and the constitutional post before 1775, allowing patriots like Thomas Jefferson and Sam Adams to coordinate treason against British rule, forming the foundation of American government itself as an information system.
• •Subsidized Information Model: James Madison and Benjamin Rush created a Robin Hood postal scheme in 1792 charging high rates for business letter mail to subsidize cheap, uncensored newspaper delivery to all citizens, a radical departure from European governments that restricted public access to information and political news.
• •Transportation Development: The postal mandate to deliver newspapers across expanding western territories jump-started America's entire transportation industry by paying horseback riders and stagecoaches to create post roads connecting post offices, organizing the country's physical and social landscape around mail delivery infrastructure.
• •Educational Distribution System: Low postal rates for books and magazines created an informal secondary education system for agrarian America, enabling widespread distribution of publications like National Geographic and Ladies Home Journal that kept rural populations informed and educated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.