on of these degraded people
should be devised. It was difficult, however, to figure out exactly
how the teaching of religion to slaves could be made successful and at
the same time square with the prohibitory measures of the South. For
this reason many masters made no effort to find a way out of the
predicament. Others with a higher sense of duty brought forward a
scheme of oral instruction in Christian truth or of religion without
letters. The word instruction thereafter signified among the
southerners a procedure quite different from what the term meant in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Negroes were taught to
read and write that they might learn the truth for themselves.

Being aristocratic in its bearing, the Episcopal Church in the South
early receded from the position of cultivating the minds of the
colored people. As the richest slaveholders were Episcopalians, the
clergy of that denomination could hardly carry out a policy which
might prove prejudicial to the interests of their parishioners.
Moreover, in their propaganda there was then nothing which required
the training of Negroes to instruct themselves. As the qualifications
of Episcopal ministers were rather high even for the education of the
whites of that time, the blacks could not hope to be active churchmen.
This Church, therefore, soon limited its work among the Negroes of
the South to the mere verbal instruction of those who belonged to the
local parishes. Furthermore, because this Church was not exceedingly
militant, and certainly not missionary, it failed to grow rapidly. In
most parts it suffered from the rise of the more popular Methodists
and Baptists into the folds of which slaves followed their masters
during the eighteenth century.

The adjustment of the Methodist and Baptist churches in the South to
the new work among the darker people, however, was after the first
quarter of the nineteenth century practically easy. Each of these
denominations had once strenuously opposed slavery, the Methodists
holding out longer than the Baptists. But the particularizing force
of the institution soon became such that southern churches of these
connections withdrew most of their objections to the system and, of
course, did not find it difficult to abandon the idea of teaching
Negroes to read.[1] Moreover, only so far as it was necessary to
prepare men to preach and exhort was there an urgent need for literary
education among these plain and un