PETER: These days it can be hard not to feel a little sorry for the post office. Congress sets up rules for how it has to spend money, but it's the post office that takes the heat when your letter takes two weeks to arrive. The poor post office.
ED: But two centuries ago the post office seemed very powerful indeed. Before email, before phones, before telegraphs, the post office seemed to be everywhere. And in the 1830s something happened that made the post office seem way too powerful to some people. It all began with the abolitionists in the north.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: Abolitionism isn't a big deal in the 1830s, at least when the 1830s start.
BRIAN: This is Jennifer Mercieca, she's a professor of communications at Texas A&M University.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: In other words, if you're someone who's against slavery, you're kind of lukewarm, you're not really acting on the fact that you're against slavery.
BRIAN: Mercieca says that around 1835, northern abolitionists really stepped up their game.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: The American Anti Slavery Society decides that really what they want to do is get their message into the south. And so, they draw up a list of 200,000 slave holders, and they send their newspapers into the south. I really think that they thought that if they sent slave holders this information about slavery is bad, that the slave holders would recognize common sense and change their mind.
ED: As you might imagine, that's not what happened. Slave holders did not change their minds about slavery, but they did start to question the role of the post office in their communities.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: This is right around the time that the steam press is invented. And so, if you can imagine being a kind of gentleman, where the pace of life is really slow, and all of a sudden, this technology that had seemed benign, right, the post office and newspapers, becomes a weapon. They thought that they were trying to ferment slave revolt. And nothing made southern slave holders more fearful than having a slave revolt.
ED: The situation reached a crisis point in South Carolina. Over the last five years Charleston had been a cockpit of controversy over the role of the federal government and the future of slavery.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: And so, when the newspapers arrived in Charleston, that was the place where they had the most dramatic impact.
RICHARD JOHN: The Charleston postmaster, Alfred Huger, he says to himself, "Oh my Gosh."
BRIAN: This is Richard John, a historian at Columbia University and an expert on everything postal.
RICHARD JOHN: If I permit these tracks to be distributed, this might encourage a mob to assail the mail en route. So the Charleston postmaster marks the abolitionist tracks suspicious, and puts them in the corner of the post office, a rather large and impressive building still standing today.
BRIAN: Richard John talks about the abolitionist mail crisis of 1835 in his book called, "Spreading the News". We asked Richard to read a portion from his description of what happened next.
RICHARD JOHN: On Wednesday, July 29, 1835, at some point between 10 and 11 in the evening, a small group of men identified as the lynch men, broke into the post office in Charleston, South Carolina, by forcing open a window with a crow bar. These men extracted from the post office sacks marked suspicious containing abolitionist tracts. The following night, the lynch men burned these tracts along with effigies of three of the leading abolitionists in a spectacular bonfire watched by a loud and enthusiastic crowd of 2,000, which was around 1/7 of the entire white population of the city.
ED: News of this mob traveled fast from one post office to the next. That's when the Federal Government stepped in through the US Postmaster General Amos Kendall. Kendall was loyal to Andrew Jackson, and Andrew Jackson is loyal to the southerners.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: Amos Kendall as the postmaster gets involved. He writes a letter that's circulated through all the newspapers that essentially says, "Look, I have no legal authority to say that you can't circulate these newspapers through the post office, but I believe that local law is more important than National law." And if National law is being perverted and he believed that it was being perverted, then local law should be more important. And he calls that patriotism.
ED: Amos Kendall essentially directs local postmasters to do as they see fit. So most of them stop circulation of the abolitionist tracts. This marks a real setback for the abolitionist movement. But the lasting damage was to the post office.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: People were using this communication technology to bring up a topic of conversation that no one in the south wanted anyone to ever discuss. It made them suspicious of the pst office and of the Federal Government.
ED: That's Jennifer Mercieca. We also heard a minute ago from Richard John. You can read more about the great mail crisis of 1835 at BackStoryradio.org.