Last time, we stood at Moore’s Creek Bridge and listened to Old Mother Covington speak. In three violent minutes, a Loyalist rising collapsed and Governor Josiah Martin’s promise of ten thousand men dissolved into smoke and swamp water.

But that battle was only half the story.

Three thousand miles away, in Cork, Ireland, the British Empire was assembling the force that was supposed to make Moore’s Creek irrelevant. Seven regiments. Artillery. Royal confidence. This was the hammer meant to fall in coordination with that uprising and split the colonies in half. On paper, it looked elegant. Cheap victory. Minimal commitment. Maximum effect.

Instead, Cork became a lesson in delay, delusion, and the dangers of believing your own optimism.

Recruiting faltered. Ships were scarce. Deadlines slipped from December to January to February. When the fleet finally sailed, it ran straight into the wrath of the Atlantic. Storms scattered the convoy. Transports sank. Soldiers drowned before they ever saw America.

This episode is the other side of Moore’s Creek. The British side. The paper army. The missed signals. The pride that refused to turn back.

Old Mother Covington did not win the war that morning.

But Cork made sure Britain never had the chance.

We tend to remember the American Revolution as a clean fight. Patriots in homespun. Redcoats in formation. Muskets cracking across open fields.

But that is not how it felt in North Carolina in 1776.

Before there was Saratoga. Before there was Yorktown. Before Jefferson put ink to parchment and accused the king of stirring up “domestic insurrections among us,” there was a swamp. A narrow bridge. And neighbors marching against neighbors.

Royal Governor Josiah Martin believed he could crush the rebellion from the inside. Ten thousand loyalists would rise. Seven thousand British troops would land. The Carolinas would fall. The Revolution would choke before it ever reached full flame.

Instead, in the cold darkness before dawn on February 27, 1776, Highland Scots charged across a greased bridge shouting “King George and broadswords!” What followed lasted three minutes.

Three minutes that shattered a royal strategy. Three minutes that hardened a colony. Three minutes that pushed North Carolina to become the first to authorize independence.

This is the story of Moore’s Creek Bridge.

This is the story behind the grievance.

And this is why Old Mother Covington still echoes in the dark.

Before there was a telegraph wire humming across the plains, before railroads stitched steel across the continent, before the internet convinced us that information travels at the speed of light, there was a rider on a muddy road with a leather satchel and a republic in his saddlebag.

In this episode, we are talking about the Postal Act of 1792.

It sounds bureaucratic. It sounds dry. It sounds like something best left to archivists and footnotes. But here is the truth. This law built the nervous system of the United States. It answered a question that haunted the Founders after the Revolution: how do you keep a large republic from drifting apart?

Washington signed it. Madison believed in it. Franklin helped lay the groundwork for it. And Congress embedded within it a bold idea that still shapes us today. Information should circulate freely. News should be affordable. Private correspondence should be protected. The government should connect its people, not spy on them.

This was not about delivering parcels. It was about delivering democracy.

So settle in. We are going to follow the post roads from Maine to Georgia, out to the frontier, and into the beating heart of a young nation trying to hold itself together.