point. Before the Department handed out a ruling, a public meeting was held and a resolution unanimously adopted that all incendiary newspapers held at Charleston should be burned and that the mails in the State should be searched and every attempt be made to suppress inflammatory newspapers, and suggested the propriety of passing a law that would prohibit under severe penalties the circulation in Southern States of news- papers which tended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.
President Jackson, in his Inaugural Message, advocated the right of Federal supervision of newspapers. This recommenda- tion by President Jackson was referred by the Senate to a com- mittee of which the chairman was John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina. Speaking for the committee, Calhoun reported on Feb- ruary 14, 1826, that it was not up to Congress to decide when newspapers were incendiary, for they might also decide they were not, and thus laden the mails of the South with papers advocating abolition. He insisted that it belonged to the Southern States and not to Congress to determine what news- papers should circulate in that section. He also proposed that it should not be lawful for any postmaster in any State or Territory of the United States knowingly to deliver to any person any newspaper touching the subject of slavery. Cal- houn 's recommendations were put in a bill which was ordered to a third reading in the Senate by a vote of 18 to 16, but it failed to pass.
STATISTICAL
The Postal Department requested The Globe to publish the fol- lowing information doubtless to be paid for at regular rates
about the newspapers and periodicals published in the United States, July 1, 1839:
Maine .............................................. 41
New Hampshire ..... ................................. 26
Vermont ............................................ 31
Massachusetts (at Boston, 65) ......................... 124
Rhode Island ........................................ 14
Connecticut .......................................... 31
New York (at New York City, 71) ..................... 274
New Jersey ................................
