their
uncharitable attitude. During the first quarter of the nineteenth
century two effective forces were rapidly increasing the number of
reactionaries who by public opinion gradually prohibited the education
of the colored people in all places except certain urban communities
where progressive Negroes had been sufficiently enlightened to provide
their own school facilities. The first of these forces was the
worldwide industrial movement. It so revolutionized spinning and
weaving that the resulting increased demand for cotton fiber gave rise
to the plantation system of the South, which required a larger number
of slaves. Becoming too numerous to be considered as included in the
body politic as conceived by Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone,
the slaves were generally doomed to live without any enlightenment
whatever. Thereafter rich planters not only thought it unwise to
educate men thus destined to live on a plane with beasts, but
considered it more profitable to work a slave to death during seven
years and buy another in his stead than to teach and humanize him with
a view to increasing his efficiency.

The other force conducive to reaction was the circulation through
intelligent Negroes of antislavery accounts of the wrongs to colored
people and the well portrayed exploits of Toussaint L'Ouverture.
Furthermore, refugees from Haiti settled in Baltimore, Norfolk,
Charleston, and New Orleans, where they gave Negroes a first-hand
story of how black men of the West Indies had righted their wrongs. At
the same time certain abolitionists and not a few slaveholders were
praising, in the presence of slaves, the bloody methods of the
French Revolution. When this enlightenment became productive of
such disorders that slaveholders lived in eternal dread of servile
insurrection, Southern States adopted the thoroughly reactionary
policy of making the education of Negroes impossible.

The prohibitive legislation extended over a period of more than a
century, beginning with the act of South Carolina in 1740. But with
the exception of the action of this State and that of Georgia the
important measures which actually proscribed the teaching of Negroes
were enacted during the first four decades of the nineteenth century.
The States attacked the problem in various ways. Colored people beyond
a certain number were not allowed to assemble for social or religious
purposes, unless in the presence of certain "discreet" white men;
slaves