In May 1835 the American Anti-Slavery Society tried to "sow the good seed of abolition thoroughly over the whole country" by putting its new steam-driven presses into overdrive and flooding the mails with antislavery newspapers and pamphlets calling for the immediate emancipation of all enslaved African Americans. But Southerners were in no mood to accept what they considered this new threat to their way of life. Mobs plundered packets of pamphlets and copies of the society's newspaper, The Liberator, from the Charleston post office and burned them in the public square. Other cities in the South followed suit. Several Southern legislatures placed bounties on Northern abolitionists, and violence against abolitionists broke out even in the North, where many considered abolitionism a threat to national unity. In October 1835 a mob in Boston seized William Lloyd Garrison (editor of The Liberator) and proceeded to drag...