The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

satisfactory. Several further attempts to establish a royal mail service in Virginia in
the early eighteenth-century also failed. In 1732, former Governor Alexander
Spotswood became the deputy postmaster-general, but once again, Virginians
generally avoided involvement in the British-American postal system, keeping to
the old system and maintaining their ties back to London. Not until 1737 was the
first postal service established to connect the Northern colonies with Virginia, but
even then it was slow and arrived every two weeks at best. 36 In this expanded
intercolonial postal system, delivery of newspapers and letters was irregular. Deputy
postmasters had arbitrary franking rights: “Letter service was slow, expensive, and
erratic, and newspapers continued to be carried at the whim of the local deputy
[postmaster]. 37 The tobacco ships continued to be the fastest and most efficient
method of delivering news and information until after the middle of the century.
Readers of the newspapers were able to keep track of when letters or other
commodities arrived by reading the shipping notices. Typically placed just before
advertisements on the last pages of the newspapers were the announcements of
shipping, indicating what vessel had arrived or left port and what she was carrying.
The difficulty of transportation in that age is evident in one of the early Maryland
Gazettes: “Last Friday Capt. Mason, in the Brigantine Thomas and Sarah, from
Barbadoes, arrived in 30 Days, at the Mouth of our River, which was frozen so
hard, that he could not come into the Cove; however, he broke his Way thro’ the
Ice; (Which was Three or Four Inches Thick).” Captain Mason went on to report
the loss of another ship on the way to Virginia. Most of the shipping reports were
not so dramatic, but rather more specific about merchandise departing or arriving:
36 Fairfax Harrison, “The Colonial Post Office in Virginia.” William and Mary College
Quarterly Historical Magazine, 2 nd ser., vol. 4, no. 2. (April 1924), 73-92. William Smith, “The
Colonial Post-Office,” The American Historical Review, 21 (Jan. 1916) 2:258-275.
37 Jerald E. Brown, "It Facilitated Correspondence: The Post, Postmasters, and Newspaper
Publishing in Colonial America," Retrospection: The New England Graduate Review in American
History and American Studies 2, no. 1 (1989): 1-15.
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