wagons carrying
United States mail were not subject to a State toll tax imposed for use
of the Cumberland Road pursuant to a compact with the United
States.[1136] Half a century later it was availed of as one of the
grounds on which the national executive was conceded the right to enter
the national courts and demand an injunction against the authors of any
wide-spread disorder interfering with interstate commerce and the
transmission of the mails.[1137]

ANTI-SLAVERY AND THE MAILS

Prompted by the efforts of Northern anti-slavery elements to disseminate
their propaganda in the Southern States through the mails, President
Jackson, in his annual message to Congress in 1835, suggested "the
propriety of passing such a law as will prohibit, under severe
penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of
incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to
insurrection."[1138] In the Senate John C. Calhoun resisted this
recommendation, taking the position that it belonged to the States and
not to Congress to determine what is and what is not calculated to
disturb their security. He expressed the fear that if Congress might
determine what papers were incendiary, and as such prohibit their
circulation through the mail, it might also determine what were not
incendiary and enforce their circulation.[1139]

POWER TO PREVENT HARMFUL USE OF THE POSTAL FACILITIES

Some thirty years later Congress passed the first of a series of acts to
exclude from the mails publications designed to defraud the public or
corrupt its morals. In the pioneer case of Ex parte Jackson,[1140] the
Court sustained the exclusion of circulars relating to lotteries on the
general ground that "the right to designate what shall be carried
necessarily involves the right to determine what shall be
excluded."[1141] The leading fraud order case, decided in 1904, holds to
the same effect.[1142] Pointing out that it is "an indispensable adjunct
to a civil government," to supply postal facilities, the Court restated
its premise that the "legislative body in thus establishing a postal
service, may annex such conditions to it as it chooses."[1143] Later
cases appear to have qualified these sweeping declarations. In upholding
requirements that publishers of newspapers and periodicals seeking
second-class mailing privileges file complete information regarding
ownership, indebtedness and circulation and that all paid advertisements
in s