US POSTAL HISTORY BLOG

Printer, inventor, and one of the best-loved figures of the Revolutionary War period, Dr. Benjamin Franklin was a founding father AND the future ‘father’ of the U.S. postal system.  Even before the states were united, Franklin was named postmaster of the American colonies, as much for his reputation for frugality as his interest in mail.

Franklin was known as a penny-pincher when it came to running the mail system, but he was not above using his status to send his own mail for free.  Frugal Franklin treated himself to what was known at the time as a “franking privilege.” 

Franking privileges—the ability to send mail with a signature rather than with postage—date back to the seventeenth-century English House of Commons. America’s Continental Congress adopted the practice in 1775 and voted it into law in 1789.  It was intended to improve the flow of information across a vast nation.

To send his missives on their way, all Franklin had to do was sign his name on an envelope and write the word “free.”  No fuss…no muss…and no pesky stamp either!  And so the term ‘Franklin Privilege’ was coined.

The Internal Colonial Postal Union carried official and commercial mail until around the 1740s. Then ‘war drums’ of liberty began to sound in the distance.  In 1774, Benjamin Franklin who had been appointed joint Postmaster General with William Hunter, was dismissed from his position in because of his revolutionary activities. But when the British turned him out, the Continental Congress took him in.  Franklin was named Postmaster General for the newly formed United Colonies Post.

In 1693, the first notice of an ‘official’ postal service for the colonies was issued and the first colonial post office was born.   The General Court of Massachusetts mandated that Richard Fairbanks’ tavern in Boston was the designated repository of mail brought from or sent overseas.  It was not unusual to use an existing business as a mail drop.  In England and other international locations, it was common to use coffee houses and taverns as makeshift post offices.

One aspect of United States stamp collecting is earliest documented use (EDU), a branch related to first-day cover collecting.  The American Philatelic Society and other stamp experts certify EDUs.  They are recorded systematically by the Scott Publishing Company. EDU certification can give a cover a premium value of up to $500 over the price of uncertified covers from the same period.

The Franklin Privilege was primarily extended to government officials.  Additionally, every newspaper publisher could send one paper postage-free to every other newspaper in the country.

As might be expected, the franking privilege was hotly contested and was abused by the very people who had voted it into law.  In one famous story, a senator is believed to have attached his frank to his horse’s bridle and sent the animal back to Pittsburgh.

In 1869, the postmaster-general, whose department was running a large deficit, recommended that Congress and federal agencies switch to postage stamps. It was ultimately abolished.

When stocks of a certain stamp ran out, postmasters sometimes resorted to cutting higher denominated stamps in half, vertically or diagonally, thus obtaining two “stamps” each representing half of the original monetary value, or “face” value, of the uncut stamp. The general public could only resort to this practice if authorized by the local postal authorities and for a limited period only.

The most famous bisected Black Jack stamps are known as “stage cents” bi-sects, and occurred after the Civil War when Southerners would cut 2-Cent stamps vertically in half between the “O” and “S” of the word “POSTAGE” at the top of the stamp. The result was that the wording that was left on the right-hand portion of the stamp would say “STAGE CENTS” – subtly referring to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by the actor John Wilkes Booth. If anyone had any questions, the creator of the bi-sect would simply tell him that he was only intending to use the left-half portion of the stamp, which read “U.S.PO TWO”; and footnoted it saying that he was truly sympathetic towards the causes of the poor and The Union.

Bisects only have philatical value when the cut halves are still affixed on the postal item showing the postmarks and originating from a recognised historical event.