Abolitionists weaponized mass-print technology to flood the nation with antislavery tracts

Evidence

At the annual meeting of the AASS in May 1835, members resolved to use new technologies to spread their gospel to potential abolitionist converts. They relied on the mass printing machinery of stereotyped plates, on cheap rag paper, on steam presses, and on new railroads and an efficient postal service to overwhelm the nation with 20,000 to 50,000 copies a week of abolitionist tracts. The aim: “to awaken the conscience of the nation to the evils of slavery.” Slaveholders had no clue what was coming. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 470

Categorization

• SHARE: The tactical detail — steam presses, cheap rag paper, railroads and the postal service delivering 20-50k tracts weekly — is a great tidbit for someone interested in media history or information diffusion.
• BMF: The tactic of overwhelming a country with cheap mass-printed propaganda via infrastructure evokes the propaganda-machine sequences in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’ — the state’s use of media technology to saturate minds, only inverted in purpose (abolitionist gospel vs. OneState’s slogans).