Conceived in Liberty (120 page)

*
There is a single exception: the Card Money of Quebec. In 1685 the governing
intendant
of Quebec, Monsieur Meules, decided to augment his funds by dividing some playing cards into quarters, marking them with various denominations, and then issuing them to pay for wages and materials. Meules took the precaution of ordering the public to accept the cards (that is, legal tender); the cards were later redeemed with specie sent from France. Used repeatedly in Quebec, the money became playing tickets rather than playing cards.

**
For an explanation, see Murray N. Rothbard,
America’s Great Depression,
2d ed. (Los Angeles: Nash, 1972), pt. 1.

*
While the competing silver bank was backed by such wealthy Boston merchants as James Bowdoin, Samuel Welles, Joshua Winslow, and Andrew Oliver, the subscribers to and directors of the land bank included Samuel Adams, a wealthy Boston brewer; Peter Chardon, son-in-law of Colman and one of Boston’s wealthiest merchants; the wealthy Roxbury lawyer and landowner, Robert Auchmuty; George Leonard of Norton, a large iron manufacturer and one of the biggest landowners in New England; and Samuel Watts, a merchant who owned a third of the land in Chelsea. Throughout the towns of Massachusetts, large landowners and land speculators were conspicuous in the ranks of land-bank subscribers.

One of the most important domestic developments shared by the colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century was the emergence of more regular and effective channels for the sharing and dissemination of ideas. No newspapers had existed in seventeenth-century America, which had virtually no printing of any kind. Through that century Massachusetts was the only colony containing a press, and this was under tight censorship and government control. By the eighteenth century, printers had begun to spread throughout the colonies, and slowly a newspaper press emerged. Books and news still emanated mainly from England, but the colonies were slowly developing a press of their own.

Unfortunately, the press was long hobbled by tight government regulation, expressed first through prior licensing, then through the law of seditious libel and parliamentary privilege. Effective control of the press was also exercised through lucrative contracts for public printing, and by the valuable and ever necessary tie-in of the press with the royal postmasters, who had the power to exclude all papers but their own from the mails. Control through the important postal service was assured at the turn of the eighteenth century by the compulsory monopolization of the post in the hands of the Crown.

Postal service began in the early American colonies as freely competitive private enterprises of varying forms and types. Letters between neighboring villages were sent by special messengers, who were often Indians. For longer journeys, letters were carried by travelers or regular merchants. Letters to or from England were carried by private ship captains, who often hung a bag in the local coffeehouse to receive letters for shipment. The price was generally a penny for a single letter and two pence for a double letter or parcel.

Unfortunately, English precedent held out little hope for the unhampered development of a freely competitive postal service. In 1591 the Crown had issued a proclamation granting itself the monopoly of all foreign mail, and in 1609 the Crown’s proclamation extended its own monopoly to all mail foreign or domestic. The purpose of this postal monopoly was quite simple: to enable governmental officials to read the letters of private citizens in order to discover and suppress “treason” and “sedition.”

Thus, when the Privy Council decided in 1627 to allow merchants to operate an independent foreign post, the king’s principal secretary of state wrote sternly: “Your lordship best knoweth what account we shall be able to give in our places of that which passeth by letters in or out of the land, if every man may convey letters under the course of merchants to whom and what place he pleaseth... how unfit a time this is to give liberty to every man to write and send what he list....” And in 1657 when the Commonwealth Parliament continued the English governmental postal monopoly, the preamble of the act stated a major objective: “to discover and prevent many dangerous and bigoted designs, which have been and are daily contrived against the peace and welfare of this Commonwealth, the intelligence whereof cannot well be communicated, but by letter of script.”

The first government meddling in the postal service in America came as early as 1639 in Massachusetts. At that time the government appointed Richard Fairbanks to be a receiver and deliverer of foreign letters for the price of one penny; no monopoly privilege was granted, and no one was prevented from using other postal intermediaries. The Dutch government in New Netherland went far beyond this when in 1657 it awarded itself a compulsory monopoly of receipt of foreign mail; anyone presuming to board a vessel first to obtain his own mail was fined thirty guilders. Ship captains were fined heavily for carrying letters for anyone except the government postal monopolist.

The first governmental postal service was established by Governor Lovelace in New York in 1673, primarily for carrying intergovernmental mail between New York and Boston, but the Dutch wars rendered this attempt abortive. Massachusetts and Connecticut established government posts in 1673 but only for governmental and not for private letters. In 1677 Massachusetts appointed John Hayward to carry private mail, and in 1680 Hayward was granted the monopoly of the postal business in the colony. Pennsylvania established a public but not monopoly post for private mail in 1683.

The specter of a single colonial monopoly was now beginning to loom on the horizon. Parliament had granted the revenues of the British post office to the Duke of York, and Governor Dongan of New York outlined in 1684 an ambitious scheme for a vast intercolonial system of post houses, a good part of the profit of which would also accrue to the Duke of York. The rates charged were to be three pence a letter, and more for letters carried over one hundred miles. This and similar plans, however, again proved abortive

None of these actions and restrictions had gone beyond one or two colonies. The true monopolization of the entire American postal service came in 1692, when the king granted a “patent” of monopoly privilege over all the American colonies for twenty-one years to Thomas Neal, a court favorite whom he designated as postmaster general. Neal’s agent in operating the post was Andrew Hamilton, who also served as governor of East New Jersey and who persuaded some colonial Assemblies to pass legislation enforcing the monopoly. Thus, a New York law of 1692 prohibited posts from competing with Hamilton’s, and prescribed postage rates ranging from four and one-half pence for nearby mail to twenty-four pence to more distant colonies. The enormous rise in postal rates from the days of free competition make clear how valuable the monopoly privilege was. Most of the colonies followed suit. The particularly free and independent colonies of Rhode Island and North Carolina, on the other hand, passed no enabling legislation at all.

Despite the enormous rise in rates, the postal monopoly suffered net losses, for the service was slow and inefficient—and undoubtedly Hamilton had priced himself out of the consumer market. But, typical of monopolists, his only suggested remedy was to raise the rates still further: from six pence to forty-two pence per letter. The U.S. postmaster general, however, incisively held that the proposed rates were much too high and that a greater revenue would be obtained by
lowering
rather than raising the rates, for then “the easy and cheap correspondency thus encouraged people to write letters.” He also charged that the colonial governments did not grant enough subsidies to the posts and were insisting on free and special-delivery transmissions of all governmental letters. On Neal’s death the patent of postal privilege fell partly to his creditor, Hamilton, and after Hamilton’s death in 1703, the latter’s creditors carried on the work.

In 1707, however, the Crown refused to consider renewing the grant and instead purchased the privilege back from the owners, for somewhat less than seventeen hundred pounds. The American postal service became from that point on a Crown monopoly. The Crown moved immediately to raise its postal rates. In the Act of 1711 it established a range of some four pence to six pence on local mail to one shilling six pence on letters to distant colonies. The act also appointed a royal postmaster general for the whole empire, with a deputy postmaster general stationed in New York to run the post for the English colonies on the American continent. The colonies proceeded to evade the postal monopoly and its charges more than ever before. Officially the bulk of the colonies accepted the imposition without protest, with the honorable exception of Virginia. Virginia pointed out that the establishment of postal rates by the Crown in effect constituted taxation, and a crucial point in Crown-colony relations was always that England could not impose taxation on the colonies without the consent of their Assemblies. The Virginia House of Burgesses therefore refused to grant any money for the post office and also passed laws crippling its operation. Virginia, however, was induced to join
the royal continental monopoly when its former governor Alexander Spotswood became deputy postmaster general in 1732. All in all, the Crown was no more able than Hamilton to make the postal service self-sufficient, and it continued to lose money.

The royal postmasters soon found a peculiarly unfortunate way to use their posts to enrich their personal coffers. The law made no provision for admission of newspapers to the mails, and so the various postmasters adopted the custom of publishing their own newspapers, circulating them in the mails, and prohibiting the post riders from delivering any competing papers. The effect on freedom of the press may well be imagined. Not that the
content
of the press was free anyway. Indeed, the first newspaper in America, the
Boston Public Occurrences,
had been issued by Benjamin Harris in 1690 and was suppressed by the governor and Council after the first issue for being critical of the war being prosecuted against France. The excuse was that the paper was unlicensed and therefore illegal.
*

The first continuous newspaper in the colonies was the
Boston News-Letter,
a weekly founded in 1704 by Boston postmaster John Campbell. Campbell’s paper, which kept carefully away from political criticism, was warmly approved and assisted by the Massachusetts authorities, by whom it was licensed despite the ending of press licensing in the mother country in 1695. Campbell asked for and obtained several governmental subventions for his
News-Letter;
his editorial policies were in keeping with this cozy relationship. When the tyrannical and widely hated ex-governor Joseph Dudley died in 1720, the
News-Letter
wildly exalted the deceased as “the glory of [his country]; early its darling, always its ornament, and in his age its crown.” It was not until 1758, upon orders of Benjamin Franklin, deputy postmaster general for the colonies, that the repressive system of prohibiting the mails to the postmasters’ competitors was ended, and the post was ordered to accept all newspapers at a uniform rate.

John Campbell’s toadying weekly remained the sole newspaper in the colonies until about 1720, around which year two new papers were opened in Boston. One was the
Boston Gazette,
begun by Campbell’s successor as postmaster and continued in turn by each succeeding postal officer. Campbell’s old
News-Letter,
however, continued to be as fawning as the official organ of the royal postmaster. On the other hand, the other new Boston newspaper, the
New England Courant,
begun by Benjamin Franklin’s older brother James, was a hard-hitting, critical, and unlicensed publication. The Franklins soon lined up the
Courant
with the lower house against tyrannical intrusions by the governor and the Council. The
Courant
could remain unlicensed because in the spring of 1721 Governor Shute had urged the legislature to pass a law for
censorship through licensing of the press. The Council had approved it but the lower house had quickly rejected the bill

James Franklin directed much of his withering fire against the venerable despot, the Reverend Increase Mather. After Mather’s standard invocation of the judgment of God failed to deter Franklin even a little, the old minister warned the public against the “wicked paper” edited by “children of the old serpent.” Mather wistfully recalled that in the old days “the civil government would have taken an effectual course to suppress such a cursed libel, which, if be not done, I am afraid that some awful judgment will come upon this land, and the wrath of God will arise, and there will be no remedy.” But this time Mather faced a foe who hit back as effectively as he received. It must have been liberating indeed for the Massachusetts citizenry merely to read in the
Courant
that Mather was a “reverend scribbler” who “quarrels with his neighbors because they do not look and think just as he would have them.”

The Assembly’s rejection of licensing did not mean, however, that the lower house was at all libertarian. Indeed the house’s main reason for rejection was fear of aggrandizing executive power over the press at its own expense. Thus when James Franklin criticized the government for laxity in pursuit of pirates in the summer of 1722, both houses censored Franklin and summarily imprisoned him for a month on the simple order of the Speaker.

The Assembly continued to refuse to pass a press-licensing bill, but in early 1723, the
Courant
again angered the government. Both houses of the General Court then censored the paper and ordered the prohibition of Franklin’s further publishing of the
Courant.
Franklin continued to publish the paper without a license and courageously continued to attack the government. The Council tried to arrest him for contempt, but Franklin cleverly managed to evade the legislative order by naming his younger brother Benjamin publisher of the paper, and the grand jury failed to indict.