In 1753 the delivery of letters by the penny post was first begun, and at the same time letters were regularly advertised. Letters from all the neighboring counties were sent to Philadelphia, and lay there until called for.
Our readers can form some idea of the mode of travelling between cities, when we state that Franklin improved on the old system by starting a mail from Philadelphia, to run three times a week in summer, to New York and Boston, and once a week in winter. To get an answer from Boston a Philadelphian had been obliged to wait six weeks. Franklin reduced the time to three. The rates of postage were also materially reduced. The rate across the ocean was fixed at one shilling, and, strange as it may seem, it has not changed since, although one hundred years have elapsed.
Most of the post-roads then were mere bridle-paths through forests. “Even,” says a writer, “between Amboy and Trenton, the very road along which Franklin the runaway apprentice had wearily trudged in the rain in 1723, had as late as 1775 a stake set up every two miles to keep the traveller from going astray.”
In 1765 Mrs. Franklin, writing to her husband, then in England, says, “The Southern mail has not come in, nor has the Virginia mail, for more than two months.” Little intercourse at that period. The name of Franklin in connection with science, and his being deputy postmaster-general, was not only a household word from Boston to Charleston, but was also extensively known in Europe. Only two American names were then familiar to the Old World,—Jonathan Edwards in the religious world, and Benjamin Franklin in the circle of science. Jonathan Edwards was born at Windsor, in the province of Connecticut, in 1703. He graduated at Yale College, and afterwards was a tutor in the establishment. He was ordained in the ministry in 1727. His chief works are a “Treatise on the Religious Affections,” “An Enquiry into the Notion of Freedom of Will,” “A Treatise on Original Sin,” “Religious Narratives,” &c.
In 1756 an attempt was made, instigated by some political enemies, to induce the postmaster-general to remove Franklin from office, as being a “factious and troublesome man.” As the cause assigned was so trifling, the postmaster-general sent his “deputy” a letter of reprimand, or rather one of gentle reproof. So the matter ended.