Quote:
Originally Posted by Radar
I get my mail at my house. In order for the postal service to deliver mail to my house, a road must be built. This means that all roads are post roads because they all lead to some address.
As far as the original intent of the founders, they intended for people to get their mail. A postal road back then was a road to connect post offices so mail could be delivered between them. Since then, the postal service has changed a bit, and delivers to a lot more places. It's up to the fed to make sure there's a road everywhere that mail is delivered. |
Let's work from Answers.com since the Wikipedia entry lacks one crucial aspect of post roads. (Once the W is not so slow, I may improve the entry.)
http://www.answers.com/topic/post-roads
Mail routes between New York and Boston took shape in the late seventeenth century. These roads traced routes that became great highways and are still known as the post roads. The Continental Congress began creating post roads during the revolutionary war.
Okay, fine, but why use the term "post roads" and not just simply "roads"?
To designate a highway as a post road gave the government the monopoly of carrying mail over it; on other roads, anybody might carry the mail.
Huh! So that's the original understanding of the term, when the C was written:
Post roads provide a monopoly on mail on those roads to the Feds. That was the understood meaning all along, and during the 1800s they began converting regular roads to "post roads". These were and remain roads that the Feds did not build and did not maintain. But they became "post roads". And even the rivers:
Steamboat captains also carried letters and collected the fees for them, until in 1823 all navigable waters were declared to be post roads, which checked the practice.
Day-um! And that was what they did during the period you say was "free". Gawrsh!
Private letter-carrying companies after 1842 did much house-to-house mail business in the larger cities; but the postmaster general circumvented them in 1860 by declaring all the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to be post roads.
Through your interpretation you've just prevented all private mail delivery. Nice goin', genius.