Return to Sender

BRIAN BALOGH: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh. And I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER ONUF: Hey, there, Brian.

BRIAN BALOGH: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED AYERS: Hello, gentlemen. We’re going to begin today in the summer of 1835, in Charleston, South Carolina’s post office. The postmaster, a man named Albert Huger, had a problem. He watched as large sacks of strange mail streamed into his office. Columbia University historian Richard John says that Huger was witnessing the first direct mail campaign in US history.

RICHARD JOHN: Abolitionists based in New York City, American Anti-Slavery Society, hit upon a scheme flooding the South with newspapers, advocating the immediate abolition of slavery.

ED AYERS: The abolitionists aimed to put the moral argument against slavery right under white Southerners’ noses. But when slaveholders caught wind of the campaign, they were outraged. They also feared it was the first step to fomenting a slave rebellion, which brings us to the Charleston post master’s predicament.

RICHARD JOHN: He says to himself, oh, my gosh, if I permit these tracts to be distributed, this might threaten everything in the mail. That is to say this might encourage a mob to assail the mail en route to the Charleston office or en route to other offices. So he sees it as sort of a poison.

ED AYERS: Huger marked the bags suspicious and threw them in the corner of the post office. Maybe he thought he’d deal with the problem the next day. Or maybe he knew those bags wouldn’t be there for a long.

RICHARD JOHN: On Wednesday, July 29, 1835, at some point between 10:00 and 11:00 in the evening, a small group of men, identified as the Lynch Men, broke into the post office in Charleston, South Carolina, by forcing open a window with a crowbar.

ED AYERS: The Lynch mobs stole the bags of abolitionist tracts.

RICHARD JOHN: The following night, the Lynch Men burned these tracts, along with effigies of three of the leading abolitionists, in a spectacular bonfire, watched by a loud and enthusiastic crowd of 2,000, which was around 1/7 of the entire white population of the city.

ED AYERS: The bonfire solved Huger’s problem. But it created one for the federal government. The Postmaster General, a man named Amos Kendall, knew the government couldn’t censor newspapers streaming in from the North. But many local governments in the South had laws criminalizing abolitionist messages.

So with President Andrew Jackson’s backing, the Postmaster General circulated a letter saying that local law in the South trumped the national law. The nation’s first mass mailing, soon turned into the first mass censorship of the US Mail.

RICHARD JOHN: This made it easy for the Southern state governments to enforce a sort of Berlin Wall around the states to prevent information from entering their territory that would be threatening.

ED AYERS: The censorship stood for 25 years until the Civil War. While that was a blow for abolitionists, the act of censorship itself represented a long-term win. You see, in the early 1830s, slavery wasn’t a national political issue. But after this event in Charleston, growing numbers of Northerners were outraged by the effort to silence abolitionist voices.

RICHARD JOHN: And once it became commonly believed that the federal government was threatening civil liberties in its attempt to protect the interests of Southern slaveholders, to many thousands, millions of Americans who had no particular interest in the slavery issue one way or the other, the abolitionist issue could much more easily be re-envisioned as a defense a fundamental American values.

PETER ONUF: Americans have long cherish their constitutional right to free speech. But the nation has repeatedly bumped up against the limits of that speech.