Abolitionist newspapers and literature played a critical role in changing public opinion in favor of emancipation, despite fierce resistance that included Congress's refusal to acknowledge thousands of anti-slavery petitions under the Gag Rule, the destruction of abolitionist presses by angry mobs, and the permitted destruction of abolitionist literature by federal postal officials in the slave-holding Southern states. After 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison of Boston published The Liberator, abolitionist literature spread rapidly across the North. In 1836 William Goodell began publishing The Friend of Man, the official newspaper of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society, in Oneida County, and in 1842 it merged with The Abolitionist of Cazenovia to form the liberty Press, published by Wesley Bailey from his office on Devereux Street in Utica. Before the Civil War, at least 9 antislavery newspapers, including 3 in Welsh, were published in Oneida County. Individual agents, the Erie Canal, railroads, and the telegraph helped literature published in Oneida County reach a large readership, while widespread black and white literacy allowed abolitionists to keep in touch with sympathizers nearby and across the North. In 1835, after the Utica Riot, a mob in Utica attacked the office of the anti-slavery Standard and Democrat, reflecting the same anti-abolitionist violence seen elsewhere. Education and literacy among African Americans were also advanced by Oneida County women, including Caroline Storum Loguen and earlier teachers such as Eunice Camp, Alida Marie Van Rensselaer, Mary E. Walker, and Sarah Malcolm, through schools for people of color begun in Utica in 1815 and continued by later efforts. Women were also deeply involved in the movement through the thousands of anti-slavery petitions signed by women in Oneida County.