Post Office and the Press

The United States Post Office had an important role in suppressing antislavery material in slave states before the Civil War. Newspapers and books, such as the New York Tribune and Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), were not always distributed in southern states.The Chicago Press and Tribune, which supported the Republican party, was one of many northern papers that published specific examples. One article from January 1860 is particularly interesting since it described an incident in Delaware, a slave state. The Millord News and Advertiser had complained that their local “Postmaster [had] refused to distribute” the paper. While “[it was] a journal of moderate free State sentiments,” the Chicago Tribune explained that that paper “in no respect…countenance any other than legal and constitutional measures for the gradual removal of slavery from its own State.” Yet apparently even that stance was enough for a ban. When “our boasted free government [was]… in the hands of” Democrats, the Tribune concluded that it was “not less a despotism than the most absolute government of Europe.”