e permitted to read the
Bible. "It is in vain," added he, "to say there is danger in it. The
best slaves of the State are those who can and do read the Scriptures.
Again, who is it that teaches your slaves to read? It is generally
done by the children of the owners. Who would tolerate an indictment
against his son or daughter for teaching a slave to read? Such laws
look to me as rather cowardly."[2] This attorney was almost of
the opinion of many others who believed that the argument that to
Christianize and educate the colored people of a slave commonwealth
had a tendency to elevate them above their masters and to destroy the
"legitimate distinctions" of the community, could be admitted only
where the people themselves were degraded.

[Footnote 1: DeBow, _The Industrial Resources of the Southern and
Western States_, vol. ii., p. 269.]

[Footnote 2: DeBow, _The Industrial Resources of the Southern and
Western States_, vol. ii., p. 279.]

After these laws had been passed, American slavery extended not
as that of the ancients, only to the body, but also to the mind.
Education was thereafter regarded as positively inconsistent with the
institution. The precaution taken to prevent the dissemination of
information was declared indispensable to the system. The situation in
many parts of the South was just as Berry portrayed it in the Virginia
House of Delegates in 1832. He said: "We have as far as possible
closed every avenue by which light may enter their [the slaves']
minds. If we could extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work
would be completed; they would then be on a level with the beasts of
the field and we should be safe! I am not certain that we would not
do it, if we could find out the process, and that on the plea of
necessity."[1]

[Footnote 1: Coffin, _Slave Insurrections_, p. 23; and Goodell, _Slave
Code_, p. 323.]

It had then come to pass that in the South, where once were found
a considerable number of intelligent Negroes, they had become
exceedingly scarce or disappeared from certain sections altogether. On
plantations of hundreds of slaves it was common to discover that
not one of them had the mere rudiments of education. In some large
districts it was considered almost a phenomenon to find a Negro who
could read the Bible or sign his name.[1]

[Footnote 1:_Ibid._, pp. 323-324.]

The reactionary tendency was in no sense confined to the Southern
States. Laws were passed in the North to pre