The Postmaster-General, Mr. Amos Kendall, one of the shrewdest of politicians, though no great constitutional lawyer, answered the appeal from the postmaster at New York immediately. He instructed his subordinate that the executive power of the Government had no legal authority to exclude mail matter, as defined by {272} Congress, from the mails on account of the character of its contents, real or supposed. If Mr. Kendall had stopped with this he would have been entirely correct; but he went on to say that he would not direct the postmaster at New York to forward the Abolition documents or the postmaster at Charleston to deliver them, commended their assumption of the responsibility of withholding them from the addressees, and declared that the United States officials owed an obligation to the laws of the United States, but a higher one to the communities in which they lived. Mr. Kendall probably meant this part of his communication as the advice of one private citizen to another. Looked at in the most charitable light possible, however, it was unjustifiable and pernicious. It was nothing less than an encouragement to his subordinates to suspend the execution of the laws which they were appointed to execute and sworn to execute, when in their several opinions the welfare of the communities in which they might live should require it. This was nullification, not by a "State" convention, but by an individual United States officer. How the President, who had always so sternly denounced any attempt to prevent the execution of the laws, could approve this is difficult to understand. His indignation at the Abolitionists in persisting in what he considered an abuse of the freedom of the mails probably blinded him to the real significance of the matter. [Sidenote: Jackson on the use of the mails by the Abolitionists.] In his message of the following December, the President denounced the methods of the Abolitionists in sending their incendiary literature into the South as calculated and intended to excite a servile war with all its horrors, and recommended Congress to pass a law prohibiting, "under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, {273} through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection." Mr. Calhoun himself moved the reference of this part of the President's message to a select committee in the Senate. Mr. Calhoun was appointed the chairman of the committee, and on February 4th, 1836, he brought in a report and a bill. [Sidenote: Mr. Calhoun's report and bill on the subject.]