Boston (MA) Liberator, "Slavery vs. The Post Office," October 15, 1858

           From the Pittsburgh Dispatch.

   SLAVERY VS. THE POST OFFICE.

   The Slaveholders of Worcester county, Md., at a recent meeting, recommended, among other expedients to check the stampede of slaves to Free States, that authority be given to postmasters to open all letters directed to free negroes or slaves, and whenever any thing suspicious is found in them, to place them in the hands of the proper authorities. 

   We do not intend to discuss the necessity of such a measure; it is possible that the security of property and the lives of slave owners may demand it. It is an extreme that tyrants, who control their subjects be fear rather than affection, resort to. It is a confession that the social state is radically unsound, and that, with all their pretensions concerning the system of slavery as the normal social condition, these men know and feel that it is the very opposite, and that, being a fiction of law, an artifice of those who tyrannize, it can only be sustained by a resort to such extraordinary powers as tyrants never hesitate to adopt. 

   It is worthy of notice that one after another the various branches of the Government are made subservient to the maintenance of slavery or its propagation. By special acts, the Legislative branch has been made its accessory––providing ways and means for the return of the fugitive to servitude; it has provided by the repeal of long standing compromises, for its introduction into domain declared by compact to be the heritage of freedom. The judicial branch, composed in its majority of men reared in contact with slavery, and inculcated with its virus, has construed the Constitution by later decisions, so as best to subserve the interests of slavery. It is notorious that the Executive branch has long been in the interest of the institution, and never more so than at this time. Concentrating its energies during the administration of Pierce, and so far during Mr. Buchanan's, it has labored, by direct influence and overt act, to accomplish in Kansas the establishment of slavery as a social feature, although the sentiment of an overwhelming majority was as well known to be against it two years ago as now. It has used the treasury and the army as auxiliaries in its infamous purpose––violated its solemn pledges, quarreled with its staunchest Northern friends, and divided and almost ruined a great party, simply to accomplish a sectional Southern purpose. 

   Now the postal and subordinate branches are to be called into requisition to keep those in bonds who seek by flight a liberty of which local law, in defiance of the immutable principles of human right, deprives them. Postmasters are to be made spies upon the actions of freemen as well as slaves. The privacy of the seal is to be broken, and the footsteps of free men dogged as those of a liberalist are tracked in Austria. 

   What are we to think of a state of society the securities of which depend upon the adoption of such violent measures? Is it the normal condition of man? It would be as rational to presume that the tree dwarfed artificially to the stature of a pot-house shrub found in the arbitrary use of ligaments and praning knives its natural condition. The defenders of the system, who ransack the Bible to convince men that slavery has received Divine sanction, may seek in formative elements of the social state the foundation of their accursed system, but the practical steps taken to underprop the institution overturn their theories, and scatter their social ethics to the winds. The action of the Marylanders is a confession that the securities of their social state must be maintained by measures violative of the conceded rights of man, because it is found in defiance of those rights and in perpetual conflict with their guarantees.