If the postmaster must select, under a heavy penalty, for a public bonfire, all papers bearing on slavery, why may he not be hereafter required to select, for the same fate, all papers hostile to Popery?
Tappan warns that if postmasters can be forced to burn anti-slavery papers, similar actions could target other dissenting views.
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You both know and feel that slavery has rendered labor disgraceful among you; and where this is the case, industry is necessarily discouraged.
Hence the insane efforts constantly made to expurgate the literature of the world of all recognition of the rights of black men.
The slaveholders form a powerful landed aristocracy, banded together for the preservation of their own privileges, and ever endeavoring, for obvious reasons, to identify their private interests with the public welfare.
In a community so unenlightened as yours, it is a matter of course, that the arts and sciences must languish, and the industry and enterprise of the country be oppressed by a general torpor.