29 lugl 1835 anni - 1835: Abolitionist Literature Removed from Post Office and Burned

Descrizione:

The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) launched a great postal campaign in 1835 to flood the South with abolitionist literature.

White supremacists responded by seizing and destroying the mail. One example of this was on July 29, 1835, in Charleston, South Carolina, when 3,000 people gathered in Post Office Square to destroy anti-slavery materials and burn three abolitionists in effigy.

Sometime after ten o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, July 29, 1835, a local vigilance society known as the Lynch Men assembled at the Exchange building in the heart of Charleston, South Carolina. The group proceeded to the post office, where with “coolness and deliberation” they entered by prying open one of its windows.

Passing over the large bags of mail containing ordinary letters and business transactions, the small band headed straight for a sack carefully separated from the rest in the postmaster’s office. The sack contained abolitionist newspapers and journals published by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) in New York; they had arrived in the regular mail packet earlier in the day. The burglars took the bag and left the post office undetected. The following evening, the Lynch Men publicly burned the fruits of their late night raid, along with effigies of three leading abolitionists, in a large bonfire on the parade grounds adjacent to the Citadel, Charleston’s military academy. A boisterous crowd of nearly two thousand, roughly one-seventh of the white population of the city, witnessed the spectacle.

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