America’s First Direct Mail Campaign

"In 1835, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) took their campaign to a new level with what could be called the first use of a direct mail campaign."

Direct mail being in its infancy, they did not think to use a targeted list to a sympathetic audience, and were generally considered to have been early spammers.

"The administration’s hostility toward the AAS campaign (including federal postal officials’ refusal to chastise southern postmasters for their not delivering legal mail) and a series of state laws created to criminalize sending such “inflammatory” and “seditious” materials into southern states brought an end to the Society’s mail campaign."

It’s amazing how often “states‘ rights” comes up historically with regard to slavery and black civil rights, but almost never in any other context. It’s almost like it was just a convenient legal tool to protect white supremacy, and once it failed they’d break the law, up to and including murder and treason to protect it.

And after the war they used it again to bring it back and protect white supremacy from then until today.

People who argue for morally contemptible positions often couch them in process arguments, which they will then argue against when turned against them — such as when northern states, for example, didn’t want to return fugitive slaves.

Don’t let people change the subject when they want to argue for the continuation of a grotesque and immoral practice because of some abstract legal principle.

If the principle of “states‘ rights“ permits slavery and segregation and apartheid, then that’s a condemnation of the concept of states’ rights. Either it needs to be formulated in such a way that it doesn’t permit atrocities to continue, or it needs to be jettisoned.

> That night a group called the “Lynch Men” broke into the post office and stole those mail bags. The next night, the group led a “celebration” of almost 2,000 spectators in cheering the burning that mail

It would be amazing if the same could be done with today's junk mail.