Charleston assumed the right to prevent the circulation of such literature, and wrote to the postmaster at New York, Samuel L. Gouverneur, to stop its transmission. Gouverneur asked the Postmaster General for instructions. The Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, late of the Kitchen Cabinet, answered that the law had not vested any power in his department to exclude any species of newspapers or pamphlets from the mail, for such a power would be “fearfully dangerous;” but if any postmaster took the responsibility of stopping those “inflammatory papers,” he would “stand justified in that step before the country and all mankind.” His instructions to the postmaster at Charleston were of the same tenor. It was patriotism, he said, to disregard the law if its observance would produce a public danger. “Entertaining these views,” he added, “I cannot sanction, and will not condemn, the step you have taken.”
In August, 1835, the Anti-slavery Society of Massachusetts published an “Address to the Public” in which, in the most emphatic terms, it protested against the “calumny” that it circulated incendiary publications among the slaves, or had any desire to incite them to revolt. But the charge was nevertheless repeated and believed. The Southern mind had become so sensitive upon this subject that a mere declaration that all men were born free and equal was in some Slave States condemned as “incendiary.”
