William and Mary Goddard, Printers and Public Servants

one, namely, her conduct for fourteen years of the local post office. The first
postmasterof Baltimore under the Constitutional Postoffice, afterits adop-
tion by Congress, was Mary K. Goddard, the sister of the founder of the sys-
tem. Throughout the Revolution and until the year 1789, she continued to
serve in this capacity, and that her service was given at an actual sacrifice of
her own interests appears from the words of the memorial¹ which she ad-
dressed to His Excellency, President Washington, when in that year a new
Postmaster General removed her from office because of his desire to appoint
in her place one who should be able actively to visit and superintend the
whole Southern Department of the postal system. Miss Goddard recited to
his Excellency the tale of her services during the difficult years of the enter-
prise. She told of the small receipts of the office, and as has been referred to
before, the necessity which she had been under of paying from her own purse
"hard money" for the employment of riders. She contested the practica-
bility of the plan whereby the office of local postmaster should be combined
with that of superintendent of a department, and in words wherein one feels,
rather than reads, a repressed resentment, she begged the President to over-
rule the decision of his Postmaster General. To her petition, a vain protest
after all, she subjoined a schedule showing the great increase in the business
of the Baltimore Post Office during the years of her incumbency.

After Mary Goddard's relinquishment of the printing and newspaper
business to her brother in 1784, and her removal from the post office in 1789,
there remained for her employment only the book store, the business of
which she conducted until the year 1802. It is doubtful if all of her enter-
prises together had sufficed to acquire for her more than a decent main-
tenance, but at the time of her death, in her eightieth year, on August 12,
1816, she was able to leave a small property to a colored woman who had
been the servant and companion of her later years.

One comes from a perusal of the facts of Mary Goddard's life with the
feeling that, in spite of her activity in public affairs, she had worked, lived
and died a lonely woman. An admirer lauded her as "a woman of extraor-
dinary judgment, energy, nerve and strong good sense." Her service to
Baltimore throughout the Revolution was of a high order, her patriotism
unquestioned. History abounds with anecdotes of colonial ladies who paid
fabulous sums to their hairdressers, of dames in silk and bombazine, of
daughters of the cavaliers moving gracefully through the minuet. Their gra-

¹ Papers of the Continental Congress, 78, v. 10,617-619. In Ms. Division Library of Congress. Miss Goddard's
first assumption of the Baltimore Post Office seems to have occurred on October 11, 1775, when under the head-
ing "Constitutional Post-Office," she announced in the Maryland Journal that two posts to the "eastward" and
southward set out from and arrived at her office each week.

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