[317] Though federal troops were used to crush Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831,[318] Jackson ordered them withdrawn immediately afterwards despite the petition of local citizens for them to remain for protection.[319] Jackson considered the issue too divisive to the nation and to the delicate alliances of the Democratic Party,[320] while sympathetic newspapers argued for excluding slavery from federal politics and keeping it at the state level.[321]
Jackson's view was challenged when the American Anti-Slavery Society formally agitated for abolition[322] by sending anti-slavery tracts through the postal system into the South in 1835.[320] Jackson condemned these agitators as "monsters"[323] who should atone with their lives[324] because they were attempting to destroy the Union by encouraging sectionalism.[325] The act provoked riots in Charleston, and pro-slavery Southerners demanded that the postal service ban distribution of the materials. To address the issue, Jackson authorized that the tracts could be sent only to subscribers, whose names could be made publicly accountable.[326] That December, Jackson called on Congress to prohibit the circulation through the South of "incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection".