[Footnote 1:  Its constitution declared (1) that each state has exclusive right to regulate slavery within it; (2) that the society will endeavor to persuade Congress to stop the interstate slave trade, to abolish slavery in the territories and in the District of Columbia, and to admit no more slave states into the Union.]

%349.  Antislavery Documents shut out of the Mails.%—­Thus organized, the society went to work at once and flooded the South with newspapers, pamphlets, pictures, and handbills, all intended to arouse a sentiment for instant abolition or emancipation of slaves.  The South declared that these were inflammatory, insurrectionary, and likely to incite the slaves to revolt, and called on the North to suppress abolition societies and stop the spread of abolition papers.  To do such a thing by legal means was impossible; so an attempt was made to do it by illegal means.  In the Northern cities such as Philadelphia, Utica, Boston, Haverhill, mobs broke up meetings of abolitionists, and dragged the leaders about the streets.  In the South, the postmasters, as at Charleston, seized antislavery tracts and pamphlets going through the mails, and the people burned them.  In New York city such matter was taken from the mails and destroyed by the postmaster.  When these outrages were reported to Amos Kendall, the Postmaster-General, he approved of them; and when Congress met, Jackson asked for a law that would prohibit the circulation “in the Southern States, through the mails, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.”  From the legislatures of five Southern states came resolutions calling on the people of the North to suppress the abolitionists.[1] Congress and the legislatures of New York and Rhode Island responded; but the bills introduced did not pass.[2]

[Footnote 1:  South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Georgia.]

[Footnote 2:  James G. Birney and his Times, pp. 184-194.]

This attempt having failed, the mobs again took up the work, and began to smash and destroy the presses of antislavery newspapers.  One paper, twice treated in this manner in 1836, was the Philanthropist published at Cincinnati by James Gillespie Birney.  Another was the Observer, published at Alton by Elijah Lovejoy, who was murdered in defending his property.[1] The Pennsylvania Freeman was a third.

[Footnote 1:  Wilson’s Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol.  II., Chap. 27; James G. Birney and his Times, pp. 204-219, 241-255.]

%350.  The Gag Rule%.—­Not content with attacking the liberty of the press, the proslavery men attacked the right of petition.  The Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people ... to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”  Under this right the antislavery people had long been petitioning Congress to abolish slavery in the District