The Postal Service of the United States in Connection with the Local History of Buffalo | Page 4

Gov. Dongan says he will endeavor to establish a post-office in Connecticut and at Boston. Under date of August 27, 1684, Sir John Werden, the Duke's secretary, wrote to Gov. Dongan:
As for setting up post-houses along the coast from Carolina to Nova Scotia it seems a very reasonable thing, and you may offer the privilege thereof to any undertakers for ye space of 3 or 5 years, by way of farm; reserving wt part of ye profit you think fit to the Duke.
At least as early as January, 1690, there was what was called a public post between Boston and New York, and in 1691 there was a post of some kind from New York to Virginia, and from New York to Albany. This was during the war with the French, and these posts were probably established by the military authorities.
On the 4th of April, 1692, Thomas Neele, having obtained a patent to establish post-offices throughout the American colonies, appointed Andrew Hamilton (afterwards Governor of New Jersey), his deputy for all the plantations. Mr. Deputy Hamilton brought the subject before Gov. Fletcher and the New York Colonial Assembly in October following, and an Act was immediately passed "for encouraging a post-office."
In 1705 Lord Cornbury, the Governor of New York, informed the Lords of Trade of the passage by the New York Assembly of "an Act for enforcing and continuing a post-office," which he recommended His Majesty to confirm "as an act of necessity," without which the post to Boston and Philadelphia would be lost.
In 1710 the British Parliament passed an Act authorizing the British Postmaster-General "to keep one chief letter-office in New York and other chief letter-offices in each of His Majesty's Provinces or Colonies in America." Deputy Postmasters-General for North America were afterwards, and from time to time, appointed by the British Postmaster-General in England. Dr. Franklin was appointed to that office in 1755, and it is said that in 1760 he startled the people of the colonies by proposing to run a "stage waggon" from Boston to Philadelphia once a week, starting for each city on Monday morning and reaching the other by Saturday. In 1763 he spent five months in traveling through the Northern Colonies for the purpose of inspecting and improving the post-offices and the mail service. He went as far east as New Hampshire, and the whole extent of his five months' tour, in going and returning, was about sixteen hundred miles. He made such improvements in the service as to enable the citizens of Philadelphia to write to Boston and get replies in three weeks instead of six weeks, the time previously required.
In 1774 Dr. Franklin was removed from office; and on the 25th of December, 1775, the Secretary of the General Post-Office gave notice that, in consequence of the Provincial Congress of Maryland having passed a resolution that the Parliamentary post should not be permitted to travel on a pass through that province, and of the seizure of the mails at Baltimore and Philadelphia, the Deputy Postmaster-General was "obliged, for the present, to stop all the posts." It is supposed that this terminated the regular mail service in the old Thirteen Colonies, and that it was never resumed under British management.
Before this suspension of the Parliamentary posts, Mr. William Godard of Baltimore had proposed to establish "an American Post-office"; and in July, 1774, he announced that his proposals had been warmly and generously patronized by the friends of freedom, and that postmasters and riders were engaged. During the preceding six months he had visited several of the colonies in order to extend and perfect his arrangements, and there appears to have been a very general disposition to abandon the use of the British post and sustain that established by Mr. Godard. In May, 1775, Mr. Godard had thirty postmasters, but Mr. John Holt of New York City was the only one in this State. In that year partial arrangements for mail service in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts were made by the Provincial Congress of each of those Colonies.
The old Continental Congress first assembled in September, 1774; and on the 26th of July, 1775, it resolved "that a Postmaster-General should be appointed for the United Colonies who should hold his office at Philadelphia and be allowed a salary of $1,000 for himself and $340 for his secretary and comptroller; and that a line of posts should be appointed, under the direction of the Postmaster-General, from Falmouth, in New England, to Savannah, in Georgia." Dr. Franklin was then unanimously chosen Postmaster-General. The ledger in which he kept the accounts of his office is now in the Post-office Department. It is a half-bound book of rather more than foolscap size, and about three-fourths of an inch thick, and many of the entries are