The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
How a postmaster general from CT shaped a legacy
In 1802, the U.S. Congress passed an act mandating that only a “free white person” could be employed as a postal worker.
That act was the result of a letter warning of slave uprisings led by mail carriers, sent to Congress by Gideon Granger, Jr., the nation’s fourth-ever postmaster general and a Connecticut native.
“Connecticut gave the United States one of the most talented and in some
ways one of the most problematic postmaster generals we've had in history,” said Connecticut state historian Walter Woodward.
Granger, from Suffield, Conn., was one of the longest, if not the longestserving postmaster general in the nation’s history. Before that he had been a state legislator. His son, Francis, followed in his footsteps and became postmaster general a few years later.
He had been appointed as postmaster by Thomas Jefferson in 1801, taking office the following year. Though the postmaster general did leave a complex legacy, Woodward said he is perhaps best known for a letter he sent to Congress early in his tenure.
“We cannot be too cautious,” Granger’s letter said. “Plans and conspiracies have already been concerted by [slaves] more than once, to rise in arms, and subjugate their masters … The most active and intelligent [slaves] are employed as post riders … By traveling from day to day, and hourly mixing with people … they will acquire information. They will learn that a man’s rights do not depend on his color. They will, in time, become teachers to their brethren … One able man among them, perceiving the value of this machine, might lay a plan which would be communicated by your post riders from town to town and produce a general and united operation against you.”
Response to Haiti
Woodward explained that “since the colonial times, enslaved African Americans and free African Americans had been used to transfer messages from place to place so they had a fairly long tradition at the time he took office, of helping to deliver communications.”
About a decade before Granger took office, slaves in what would become Haiti had successfully rebelled. By 1802, there was some concern that the French, now under Napoleon’s rule, would attempt to reimpose a system of slavery and, again, there was armed conflict in the island nation.
Granger’s letter, sent to to Sen. James Jackson of Georgia, chairman of the Committee of the Senate on the Post Office Establishment, specifically references “the scenes which St. Domingo has exhibited to the world.”
“The civil unrest continued for a long time, certainly into the time Granger took office,” Woodward said. “And many of the supporters of Jefferson were also Southern slaveholders. And they lived based on the experience of Haiti, one of the things they lived in kind of constant anxiety over was the possibility of a coordinated uprising of enslaved people in America.”
Congress listened. Later that year, an act was passed proclaiming that “After the first day of November next, no other than a free white person shall be employed in carrying the mail of the United States, on any of the post-roads, either as a postrider or driver of a carriage carrying the mail.”
That prohibition against Black postal workers stood for nearly 60 years, until the American Civil War.
Political expediency
Granger was, unlike many Connecticut politicians of his day, a Jeffersonian Republican.
“He was one of those Connecticans who felt that there had been a group in power in Connecticut for way too long and they needed to transfer power and open up the vote and do a number of other things,” Woodward said. “So, in the elections of 1796 and 1800, Granger wrote letters and published essays in support of Jefferson and Jeffersonian policies.”
That earned his appointment to the position of postmaster general, and it kept him “sensitive” to the perspectives of southern slave owners.
“Granger, in trying to be sensitive to those concerns by the white Southerners, overturned that idea of having Black mail carriers and, in fact, he changed the law saying that no Black could carry the mail — he convinced Congress to deny Blacks the right to be mail carriers,” Woodward said.
Granger was also responsible for expanding postal service to the new territories obtained after the Louisiana Purchase, perhaps setting the precedent that the mail should be accessible even to the “last mile,” the most remote homesteads in the United States.
“That was a huge transformation in the country,” Woodward said. “I think it was really a kind of a progressive move. Granger’s success is that he pulled it off. … Sub-contracting out rural routes actually made getting that last letter to the last outpost possible because a federal, completely centralized, postal service couldn't have done that kind of stuff.”
Though this made some sense from a political sense — most of the new western states leaned toward Jeffersonian politics — Woodward said it was also a positive development for the country as a whole.
“It was a good idea to develop mail communications between the core and the periphery of the United States, whatever your politics were. We are a new nation, and we're trying to create a cohesive, unified country,” he said. “So, it was a good move. It just turned out that the politics of that move favored the party of which Granger was a member.”
That was not the only time a move by Granger had managed to benefit both his own political ambitions and the nation at large.
He was also responsible for reducing the cost to mail newspapers, which Woodward said was “very important if you're advocating a political position to your base,” though it’s also “very useful for the country” to make sure “that people in distant places can get the latest news.”
Slaves and a legacy of racism Woodward said he didn’t know if Granger himself had owned slaves.
“I will tell you, by the early 1800s the number of slaves in Connecticut was quite low but, you know, that means nothing when it comes to this guy,” he said. “Whether he was a slave owner or not, one of the things that is true about Connecticut is that Connecticut had a kind of deeply embedded racism.”
Though Granger’s policies on white-only postal workers lasted until the Civil War, it took a while for things to change significantly.
According to official U.S. Postal Service history, it took then-Vice President Teddy Roosevelt’s “square deal” initiative to set a policy of fairness in federal appointments in 1902, exactly 100 years after Granger sent his letter to Congress.
Sixty years later, the U.S. Post Office was the largest single employer of African Americans in the country, though the vast majority of Black employees held lower-level positions. By the end of the 20th century, African Americans made up about 21 percent of the postal workforce, filling about 14 percent of top postal management positions.
Today, according to Pew Research, 23 percent of postal service employees are Black, 11 percent are Hispanic and 7 percent are Asian.
When asked if he thought that diversity in the postal service would have happened sooner, had it not been for Granger, Woodward said, “no, that’s not true.”
“The federal government had its own deeply embedded racism,” he said. “America was a deeply racist country for a long, long, long time.”