Abolitionist Pamphlet Campaign

Abolitionist Pamphlet Campaign In the summer of 1835 the growing abolitionist movement attempted to influence public opinion in the slave states by mailing thousands of anti-slavery pamphlets to addresses in the South. The material inflamed southerners, who broke into post offices, seized bags of mail containing the pamphlets, and made a spectacle of burning the pamphlets in the streets as mobs cheered. The interference with the postal system created a crisis at the federal level. And the battle over use of the mails  illuminated how the issue of slavery was splitting the nation decades before the Civil War. In the North, calls to censor the mails were naturally seen as a violation of Constitutional rights. In the slave states of the South, the literature produced by the American Anti-Slavery Society was viewed as a dire threat to southern society. On a practical level, the local postmaster in Charleston, South Carolina, requested guidance from the postmaster general in Washington, who essentially dodged the issue. After a spasm of demonstrations in the South, in which effigies representing abolitionist leaders were burned as anti-slavery pamphlets were thrown into bonfires, the battleground moved on to the halls of Congress. President Andrew Jackson  even mentioned the mailing of the pamphlets in his annual message to Congress (the forerunner of the State of the Union Address). Jackson advocated suppressing the literature by having federal authorities censor the mails. Yet his approach was challenged by an eternal rival, Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who advocated for local censorship of federal mail. In the end, the campaign of the abolitionists to mail pamphlets southward was essentially abandoned as being impractical. So the immediate issue of censoring the mails died out. And the abolitionists  changed tactics and began to concentrate on sending petitions to Congress to advocate for the end of slavery. Strategy of the Pamphlet Campaign The idea of mailing thousands of anti-slavery pamphlets into the slave states began to take hold in the early 1830s. The abolitionists couldnt send human agents to preach against slavery, as they would be risking their lives. And, thanks for the financial backing of the Tappan brothers, wealthy New York City merchants who had become devoted to the abolitionist cause, the most modern printing technology was made available to spread the message. The material produced, which included pamphlets and broadsides (large sheets designed to be passed around or hung as posters), tended to have woodcut illustrations depicting the horrors of slavery. The material may look crude to modern eyes, but in the 1830s it would have been considered fairly professional printed material. And the illustrations were particularly inflammatory to southerners. As slaves tended to be illiterate (as was generally mandated by law), the existence of printed material showing slaves being whipped and beaten was seen as particularly inflammatory. Southerners claimed the printed material from the American Anti-Slavery Society was intended to provoke slave uprisings. And knowing the abolitionists had the funding and personnel to turn out printed material of substantial quality was disturbing to pro-slavery Americans. End of the Campaign The controversy over censoring the mails essentially ended the pamphlet campaign. Legislation to open and search the mails failed in Congress, but local postmasters, with the tacit approval of their superiors in the federal government, still suppressed the pamphlets. Ultimately, the American Anti-Slavery Society came to realize that a point had been made. And the movement began to concentrate on other initiatives, most prominently the campaign to create strong anti-slavery action in the House of Representatives. The pamphlet campaign, within about a year, was essentially abandoned.