William Goddard (U.S. patriot)

William Goddard (1740–1817) was an American patriot and printer born in New London, Connecticut who lived through the era of the American Revolution. Goddard served as an apprentice printer under James Parker and then in 1762 became an early American publisher who eventually founded several newspapers during his lifetime. His mother, father and sister were also involved with printing and publishing in the middle 18th century. For a short term Goddard was also a postmaster of Providence, Rhode Island. Later his newspaper partnership with Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia would play an important role in the development of Franklin's ideas for a postal system in the soon to be united colonies. Franklin was postmaster of Philadelphia from 1759 to 1775 when he was dismissed by the British Crown for exposing the letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Goddard's association with Franklin while he was serving as postmaster in Philadelphia played an important role when Franklin introduced many of the reforms and improvements needed in the colonial postal system in use then.

Goddard is renowned for his innovations for a postal system that came to be used for mail delivery between the various colonies prior to the advent of the American Revolution. Goddard's postal system came about as the result of a series of conflicts involving his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Chronicle, and the Crown Post, a postal administration and mail delivery system that was in use in the British colonies prior to the advent of American independence, under the authority of the British crown. As the idea of revolution began to surface throughout the colonies the British began manipulating the Crown Post (the colonial mail system) by blocking the mail and communications between the various colonies in an effort to prevent them from organizing with each other. The Crown also resorted to the delaying or destroying of newspapers and opening and reading private mail, a form of postal censorship that the British crown considered legal. Goddard's Pennsylvania Chronicle was sympathetic to the revolutionary ideas being put forth by Benjamin Franklin, and others, and so his publication was routinely criticized and under the constant scrutiny of the Crown Post authorities. Franklin had just fallen from grace with the British monarchy by exposing Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson with his own letters, showing him to be in collusion with British efforts to impose more laws and taxes on the colonies in America, and so his involvement with the Chronicle further prompted the Crown in their dealings with Goddard's newspaper. In their effort to see the Pennsylvania Chronicle delivered, Franklin and Goddard persevered and in the midst of British scrutiny would create a separate postal system that ultimately became the postal system in use in the United States today. With the colonies then in dire need of a postal system the committee of correspondence in Boston wrote to the committee in Salem in March 1774 suggesting that an independent postal system be set up, and introduced William Goddard as a more than qualified man for such an undertaking.

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