William and Mary Gaddard, Printers and Public Servants

Franklin was held throughout the colonies served in a measure to keep crit-
ical tongues silent, Goddard, either because he did not share in the general
admiration of one who was the friend of his personal enemies, or because
he was bolder than other disaffected publishers, came out in an attack upon
the system which caused some perturbation among the friends of the ab-
sentee Postmaster General. On March 31, 1774, a correspondent in Boston
wrote to Franklin enclosing papers in which were contained one of these
attacks on the Post Office, to which he added the following comment: "the
attack ... by all I can learn orriginated with Mr. Goddard, and he says is
adopted at the Southward. I can't yet learn what incouragement it meets
here, he has proposed a subscription to pay Riders to go from hence to
Hartford to receive the Mails and bring them to Boston, to be deliver'd to
such Post Masters as shall be chosen by the subscribers....."¹ From another
source one learns that theproposals had been kindly received in Boston, for
a month after this, Governor Franklin wrote to his father, lately dismissed
from his office of Postmaster General,² in the following words:

"Your Friends in Boston, as I am told, before they heard of your running any Risk of a
Dismission were encouraging Goddard in his new Post Office, which if successful must have
deprived you of your Salary as Postmr. Genl. even if you had not been deprived of your
office."³

In view of these revelations there remains less cause for astonishment
that Franklin should have passed over Goddard when, a year or so later,
he was filling the higher offices of the American postal system. It should be
said, however, that Goddard does not seem to have been instigated in his
attacks on the Post Office by any personal feeling against Franklin. In an
announcement, published in the Maryland Journal on July 16, 1774, he
referred indignantly to the treatment which had been accorded the former
Postmaster General, and asserted that the American people, "since the in-
famous Dismission of the worthy Dr. Franklin, and the hostile attack on
the Town and Port of Boston, are unalterably determined to support a new
constitutional Post Office on the ruins of one that hath for its Basis the
slavery of America."

It is probable that the newspaper attack oh the Post Office which has been
referred to as having been transmitted to Franklin by a Boston correspond-
ent on March 31, 1774, was the same in essentials as thatwhich appeared in
the Maryland Journal on July 2, 1774, wherein Goddard announced that,

¹ Franklin Papers, IV: 12, in American Philosophical Society: Tuthill Hubbart to B. F., March 31, 1774.
² Franklin's transmission to Massachusetts of the contents of letters to the British Ministry from certain Bos-
ton loyalists had been visited upon him by his dismissal from the office of postmaster general early in this year.
³ Franklin Papers, IV: 17, American Philosophical Society: William Franklin to B. F., May 3, 1774.

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