Birth of the USPS
The US Postal Service can trace its origins to the Revolutionary War, when a mail system was created as an alternate to the royal mail, which the colonists disliked for its higher rates, which they regarded as an unfair tax. In 1775, the year that the war for independence began, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, above, as the first postmaster general. Franklin had experience at the job; he had been the deputy postmaster general of the colonial mail system.

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