manner. He
tolerates no religion on his estate but that of the Church. He
baptizes all the children, and teaches them the Catechism. All,
without exception, attend the Church service, and the chanting is
creditably performed by them, in the opinion of their owner.
Ninety of them are communicants, marriages are celebrated
according to the Church ritual, and the state of morals is
satisfactory. Twenty infants had been baptized by the bishop just
before his departure from home, and he had left his whole estate,
his keys, &c., in the sole charge of one of his slaves, without
the slightest apprehension of loss or damage. In judging of the
position of this Christian prelate as a slave-owner, the English
reader must bear in mind that, by the laws of Louisiana,
emancipation has been rendered all but impracticable, and, that
if practicable, it would not necessarily be, in all cases, an act
of mercy or of justice."--_The Western World Revisited_, by the
Rev. Henry Caswall, M.A., author of _America and the American
Church_, etc. Oxford, John Henry Parker, 1854. See _Journeys and
Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom_, by Frederick Law Olmsted,
Vol. II, pp. 212-213.

OLMSTED'S OBSERVATIONS IN LOUISIANA IN 1860

With regard to the religious instruction of slaves, widely
different practices of course prevail. There are some
slaveholders, like Bishop Polk of Louisiana, who oblige, and many
others who encourage, their slaves to engage in religious
exercises, furnishing them certain conveniences for the purpose.
Among the wealthier slave owners, however, and in all those parts
of the country where the enslaved portion of the population
outnumbers the whites, there is generally a visible, and often an
avowed distrust of the effect of religious exercises upon slaves,
and even the preaching of white clergymen to them is permitted by
many with reluctance. The prevailing impression among us, with
regard to the important influence of slavery in promoting the
spread of religion among the blacks, is an erroneous one in my
opinion. I have heard northern clergymen speak as if they
supposed a regular daily instruction of slaves in the truths of
Christianity to be general. So far is this from being the case,
that although family prayers were held in several of the fifty