ne occasion they appealed to the world
in behalf of the oppressed race, which the hostile laws had removed
from humanizing influences, reduced to the plane of beasts, and made
to die in heathenism.

[Footnote 1: Jay,_An Inquiry_, etc., p. 26; Johns Hopkins University
Studies, Series xvi., p. 319; and _Proceedings of the New York State
Colonization Society_, 1831, p. 6.]

In reply to the abolitionists the protagonists of the reactionaries
said that but for the "intrusive and intriguing interference of
pragmatical fanatics"[1] such precautionary enactments would never
have been necessary. There was some truth in this statement; for
in certain districts these measures operated not to prevent the
aristocratic people of the South from enlightening the Negroes, but to
keep away from them what they considered undesirable instructors.
The southerners regarded the abolitionists as foes in the field,
industriously scattering the seeds of insurrection which could then
be prevented only by blocking every avenue through which they could
operate upon the minds of the slaves. A writer of this period
expressed it thus: "It became necessary to check or turn aside the
stream which instead of flowing healthfully upon the Negro is
polluted and poisoned by the abolitionists and rendered the source
of discontent and excitement."[2] He believed that education thus
perverted would become equally dangerous to the master and the slave,
and that while fanaticism continued its war upon the South the
measures of necessary precaution and defense had to be continued. He
asserted, however, that education would not only unfit the Negro for
his station in life and prepare him for insurrection, but would prove
wholly impracticable in the performance of the duties of a laborer.[3]
The South has not yet learned that an educated man is a better laborer
than an ignorant one.

[Footnote 1: Hodgkin, _An Inquiry into the Merits of the Am. Col.
Soc_., p. 31; and _The South Vindicated from the Treason and
Fanaticism of the Abolitionists_, p. 68.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., p. 69.]

[Footnote 3: _The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of
the Abolitionists_, p. 69.]

CHAPTER VIII

RELIGION WITHOUT LETTERS

Stung by the effective charge of the abolitionists that the
reactionary legislation of the South consigned the Negroes to
heathenism, slaveholders considering themselves Christians, felt that
some semblance of the religious instructi