What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“The Public are hereby informed, that the Constitutional Post, goes three times a week between this city and Philadelphia.”

It was yet another advertisement for the Constitutional Post, this time in the October 21, 1775, edition of the Constitutional Gazette, a newspaper printed by John Anderson in New York.  William Goddard, himself a printer, first envisioned the Constitutional Post as an alternative to the imperial postal system in 1773.  The Second Continental Congress adopted a modified version of Goddard’s plan in the summer of 1775 following the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord.  By then, some local branches of the Constitutional Post had already been established.  Under the direction of Benjamin Franklin, selected as Postmaster General even though Goddard desired the position, the system approved by the Second Continental Congress added new branches and integrated those already in operation to create a network for disseminating information in letters and newspapers from New England to Georgia.

In the fall of 1775, advertisements promoting the Constitutional Post proliferated in American newspapers, especially in those published in the Mid Atlantic.  On October 11, Mary Katharine Goddard, printer of the Maryland Journal in Baltimore, postmaster in that town, and sister of William Goddard, inserted a notice about the schedule for the “CONSTITUTIONAL POST-OFFICE.”  Two days later, Richard Bache, the postmaster in Philadelphia (and son-in-law of Benjamin Franklin), published a more extensive advertisement in Story and Humphreys’s Pennsylvania Mercury.  A little over a week later, Anderson inserted an unsigned notice about the Constitutional Post in the Constitutional Gazette, the newspaper he established in support of the American cause at the beginning of August.   The placement of the notice does not reveal whether Anderson considered it news like the items that appeared immediately above it or an advertisement like his own for “American made DRUMS” immediately below it and the paid notices that appeared on the next page.  For Anderson, that may have been a distinction without a difference.  What mattered was letting the public know that the Constitutional Post dispatched riders to and from Philadelphia three times a week and the system reached “as far as New-Hampshire” in the north and “as far as Savanna, in Georgia,” to the south.