“I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard!”–William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator
In the early 1830s, the country was still three decades away from a civil war, the idea of state’s rights were paramount in the national consciousness, and conversations about slavery were surprisingly uncommon. Even in the North, the raw goods used in industry had to come from somewhere, and many were content to ignore such unsavory conversations. Arthur and Lewis Tappan, however, were not.
Brothers, businessmen, and abolitionists, the pair were the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). While there were a variety of abolitionist organizations in the North, AASS differed in their radical for-the-time beliefs. They were uncommonly welcoming of women, believed slavery was a fundamental evil, and saw themselves as having a moral and spiritual obligation to lead the fight against it. The religious component of their worldview gave the AASS a unique fervor and dedication to their cause; it would not be an understatement to say they viewed themselves as modern-day apostles, acting on the will of God.
In 1835, they would be provided with an unlikely opportunity to further their cause, and in doing so would change the national conversation about slavery forever. AASS had a unique understanding of the power of public opinion, and in the 1830s postage rates had decreased sharply. Arthur and Lewis decided to capitalize on the opportunity, and use the low prices to conduct a sweeping mail campaign, flooding the South with abolitionist literature, including states in which such writing was outlawed. A mail campaign would accomplish all three of the organization’s goals: spread awareness of the evil of slavery, attract funding and support in the North, and bring shame upon southern slave-owners. With the help of their friend and comrade William Lloyd Garrison, the founder of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and a core member of the New York Chapter of AASS, the brothers used the postal service to send over 100,000 pieces of literature across the south. While previous abolitionist movements and campaigns were isolated by state lines, AASS used the postal service to achieve a truly national scope. The writing would cause outrage, hysteria, and even incite violence, but it would also lead to a fundamental shift in how comfortable the public, both Northern and Southern, would become in trying to solve the problem of slavery.
As ambitious as the AASS was, they could not have predicted the scale of the response to their campaign. In July 1835, thousands of AASS letters arrived in Charleston, South Carolina. Before long, over 3,000 slave-owning men had broken into the post office and burned the bulk of the literature, as well as effigies depicting the Tappan brothers and William Lloyd Garrison. There was a great fear that this literature could inspire enslaved people to rebel, and many southern communities responded by forming “vigilance committees” that searched neighborhoods for abolitionists.
In cities across the south, town halls, public forums, and newspaper editorials blazed with anger against what many Southerners viewed as an attack on their culture abetted by the national postal service. The southern defense for slavery was that it was a “domestic” issue, to be settled by each state respectively. To have this literature spread by a public, national institution such as the postal service, was particularly offensive. While the federal government prohibited tampering with mail, the postmaster general himself wrote to President Andrew Jackson about wanting to interfere with the distribution of AASS literature, Jackson agreed.
The South was not the only region to be shocked and inflamed by the AASS mail campaign. The North was, perhaps surprisingly, also against the contents of the literature. Many Northern cities responded by saying that although they disagreed with slavery as an institution, they also disagreed with the measures AASS had taken to spread their message. Much of the North embodied an attitude that was anti-slavery, but also very much anti-abolition.
It would be another 30 years before the Tappan brothers and William Lloyd Garrison would see the abolition of slavery. But their campaign unquestionably accomplished one thing: it brought slavery to the forefront of public discourse. What had once been an issue the South didn’t even have to question, let alone defend, now seemed in jeopardy. For the North, slavery had been seen largely as irrelevant, now it was being discussed by those with a wide range of opinions. While AASS beliefs were far too radical to be widely accepted in 1830, their ideas, and their specific use of the postal service to spread them, pushed the needle in the direction of a more tolerant view of abolition. Perhaps most telling, is the fact that before AASS’ mail campaign, there were 200 registered abolitionist groups in the US, a year later, there were 527. It was one crucial moment in a chain of events that led to that fateful day in 1865, when the abolition of slavery became not a wild dream, but a reality.
To Learn More Visit:
“American Anti-Slavery Society” Encyclopaedia Britannica, July 20 1998
“July 29, 1835: Abolitionist Literature Removed from Post Office and Burned” Zinn Education Project.
Pope, Nancy, “America’s First Direct Mail Campaign” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, July 29 2010
