In May 1835, the American Antislavery Society announced its intention to “sow the good seed of abolition thoroughly over the whole country.” Lewis Tappan, prominent evangelical abolitionist from New York and member of the society's executive committee, devised the plan to flood the nation with antislavery pamphlets, kerchiefs, medals, and even blue wrappers around chocolate. The names of 20,000 Southerners appeared on Tappan's mailing list. Targeting the South, suggested the antislavery newspaper Emancipator, would force Southerners to show “their real views and feelings.”

These words proved prophetic. On July 29, 1835, the steam packet Columbia arrived in Charleston from New York with thousands of antislavery tracts in its hold. No sooner had the boat arrived than a group of angry citizens snatched these mail bags from the post office. The next evening 3,000 Charlestonians gathered at the Parade Ground and watched as this antislavery literature, along with effigies of Tappan and two other leading abolitionists, was burned. The bonfires that night in the summer of 1835 provided unmistakable evidence of the “real views and feelings” of the South. The abolitionist crusade to end slavery would be met by swift and stiff resistance by the slaveholding states.

By confronting the South with an assault on the morality of slavery, the postal campaign of 1835 created a political crisis that drew Southern ministers into sectional politics. Their first important confrontation with Northern abolitionists prefigured the ways in which religion would help shape antebellum Southern distinctiveness.