It does seem as if this incident should have taught Mr. Calhoun the fallacy of his logic in insisting upon the power of the Senate to refuse to receive a petition. Here was a case in which his doctrine of parliamentary procedure had absolutely broken down, according to his own acknowledgment. Mr. Strange, of North Carolina, committed the folly of objecting to the reception of the petition, and moving that the question of reception, and with it the petition, be laid on the table. The motion was defeated by a vote of twenty-six to twelve. The memorial was received and the debate upon it was in order. The Southerners were helpless, and had not Mr. Swift himself come to their rescue, no man can say what would have happened. Mr. Swift moved that the papers from the Vermont legislature be laid upon the table, without being printed. They had accomplished their immediate purpose, and it was wise as well as patriotic to let them rest in dignity and honor.
| The Abolition documents and the United States mails. |
The Abolitionists were more successful in their attempt to use the United States mails for the distribution of their literature throughout the South. During the course of the year 1835, it became known that their opinions and doctrines were being disseminated by this means. The Southerners considered these opinions to be incendiary and dangerous to the peace and safety of their communities and their firesides. They thought that they had the legal right to prevent the delivery of such mail matter in their respective communities. They did not wait, however, to deal with the subject through legal forms. On the night of July 29th, 1835, a mob of respectables broke into the post-office at Charleston, S. C., in search of Abolition documents. They found a sack full of them, took it away with them, and publicly burned its contents. On August 4th following, a meeting of the citizens took place, at which a committee of public safety was elected, which should, in understanding with the postmaster, determine what mail matter should not be delivered by him to the addressees. The postmaster apparently acquiesced in this arrangement, but he wrote, upon his own responsibility, a letter to the postmaster of New York City, whence the Abolition pamphlets had come, requesting him not to forward any more such documents. The postmaster at New York endeavored to induce the Abolitionists not to put any more of their literature into the mails until he could receive instructions from the Postmaster-General at Washington in regard to the question; and when the Abolitionists repelled his request, he refused to forward their documents, pending his conference with the Postmaster-General.
| The Postmaster-General's ruling in regard to the Abolition documents in the mails. |
The Postmaster-General, Mr. Amos Kendall, one of the shrewdest of politicians, though no great constitutional lawyer, answered the appeal from the postmaster at New York immediately. He instructed his subordinate that the executive power of the Government had no legal authority to exclude mail matter, as defined by Congress, from the mails on account of the character of its contents, real or supposed. If Mr. Kendall had stopped with this he would have been entirely correct; but he went on to say that he would not direct the postmaster at New York to forward the Abolition documents or the postmaster at Charleston to deliver them, commended their assumption of the responsibility of withholding them from the addressees, and declared that the United States officials owed an obligation to the laws of the United States, but a higher one to the communities in which they lived. Mr. Kendall probably meant this part of his communication as the advice of one private citizen to another. Looked at in the most charitable light possible, however, it was unjustifiable and pernicious. It was nothing less than an encouragement to his subordinates to suspend the execution of the laws which they were appointed to execute and sworn to execute, when in their several opinions the welfare of the communities in which they might live should require it. This was nullification, not by a "State" convention, but by an individual United States officer. How the President, who had always so sternly denounced any attempt to prevent the execution of the laws, could approve this is difficult to understand. His indignation at the Abolitionists in persisting in what he considered an abuse of the freedom of the mails probably blinded him to the real significance of the matter.
| Jackson on the use of the mails by the Abolitionists. |
In his message of the following December, the President denounced the methods of the Abolitionists in sending their incendiary literature into the South as calculated and intended to excite a servile war with all its horrors, and recommended Congress to pass a law prohibiting, "under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection."