frain from agitating the church on
the subject.

The same spirit appeared in theological seminaries. The trustees of Lane
Seminary, near Cincinnati, Ohio, voted that students should not organize
or be members of anti-slavery societies or hold meetings or lecture or
speak on the subject. Whereupon the students left in a body, and many
of the professors withdrew and united with others in the founding of an
anti-slavery college at Oberlin.

A persistent attack was also directed against the use of the United
States mails for the distribution of anti-slavery literature. Mob
violence which involved the post-office began as early as 1830, when
printed copies of Miss Grimke's Appeal to the Christian Women of the
South were seized and burned in Charleston. In 1835 large quantities of
anti-slavery literature were removed from the Charleston office and
in the presence of the assembled citizens committed to the flames.
Postmasters on their own motion examined the mails and refused
to deliver any matter that they deemed incendiary. Amos Kendall,
Postmaster-General, was requested to issue an order authorizing such
conduct. He replied that he had no legal authority to issue such an
order. Yet he would not recommend the delivery of such papers. "We owe,"
said he, "an obligation to the laws, but a higher one to the communities
in which we live, and if the former be perverted to destroy the latter,
it is patriotism to disregard them. Entertaining these views, I cannot
sanction, and will not condemn, the step you have taken." This is an
early instance of the appeal to the "higher law" in the pro-slavery
controversy. The higher law was invoked against the freedom of the
press. The New York postmaster sought to dissuade the Anti-slavery
Society from the attempt to send its publications through the mails into
Southern States. In reply to a request for authorization to refuse to
accept such publications, the Postmaster-General replied: "I am
deterred from giving an order to exclude the whole series of abolition
publications from the Southern mails only by a want of legal power, and
if I were situated as you are, I would do as you have done."

Mr. Kendall's letters to the postmasters of Charleston and New York
were written in July and August, 1835. In December of the same year,
presumably with full knowledge that a member of his Cabinet was
encouraging violations of law in the interest of slavery, President
Jackson undertook to supply the n