By late July 1775, the military conflict between American colonials and English troops that would come to be known as the American Revolution was fully underway. The April battles at Lexington and Concord had blossomed into a war on many fronts, including the even more substantial Massachusetts Battle of Bunker Hill, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys seizing New York’s Fort Ticonderoga, and George Washington being appointed Commander in Chief by the newly convened Second Continental Congress.
Amid the growing war, on July 26th, that same body voted to establish a national mail service, the U.S. postal system, with Ben Franklin as the first postmaster general.
That might seem like a profoundly mundane action to take during the fraught military battles and campaigns of an unfolding Revolution. But it represented an important way for the Continental Congress to amplify the emerging identity of a newly unified United States: It embodied a combination of individual and communal ideals that was at the heart of the American founding and that the USPS continues to exemplify today.
