"Red Mail"; not in OED

[George Thompson]

        NEW FINANCIAL EXPEDIENT -- RED MAIL -- THREATENED MURDER.
        [Alexander Stewart, confectioner, Greenwich street and Chambers street, receives a letter demanding $1000, to be left at the Post Office, in Box 161, or the writer will shoot Stewart and kill himself; officer Baker has Stewart put a package of "patent candy paper" in the box; the Post Office is staked out; a young man is arrested, but he proves to be a clerk of the company that rents the box (long dialog between him and the cop); others have received similar letters; it's believed that the writer is known]
        NY Herald, April 1, 1843, p. 2, col. 3

Is this a coinage of the editor?

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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