assuming missionaries. They came,
not emphasizing the observance of forms which required so much
development of the intellect, but laying stress upon the quickening
of man's conscience and the regeneration of his soul. In the States,
however, where the prohibitory laws were not so rigidly enforced,
the instruction received in various ways from workers of these
denominations often turned out to be more than religion without
letters.[2]

[Footnote 1: Matlack, _History of Methodism_, etc., p. 132; Benedict,
_History of the Baptists_, p. 212.]

[Footnote 2: Adams, _South-side View_, p. 59.]

The Presbyterians found it more difficult to yield on this point. For
decades they had been interested in the Negro race and had in 1818
reached the acme of antislavery sentiment.[1] Synod after synod
denounced the attitude of cruel masters toward their slaves and took
steps to do legally all they could to provide religious instruction
for the colored people.[2] When public sentiment and reactionary
legislation made the instruction of the Negroes of the South
impracticable the Presbyterians of New York and New Jersey were active
in devising schemes for the education of the colored people at points
in the North.[3] Then came the crisis of the prolonged abolition
agitation which kept the Presbyterian Church in an excited state from
1818 to 1830 and resulted in the recession of that denomination from
the position it had formerly taken against slavery.[4] Yielding to the
reactionaries in 1835, this noble sect which had established schools
for Negroes, trained ambitious colored men for usefulness, and
endeavored to fit them for the best civil and religious emoluments,
thereafter became divided. The southern connection lost much of its
interest in the dark race, and fell back on the policy of the verbal
instruction and memory training of the blacks that they might never
become thoroughly enlightened as to their condition.

[Footnote 1: Baird, _Collections_, etc., pp. 814-817.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 815.]

[Footnote 3: _Enormity of the Slave Trade_, etc. p. 67.]

[Footnote 4: Baird, _Collections_, etc., pp. 816, 817.]

Despite the fact that southern Methodists and Presbyterians generally
ceased to have much anti-slavery ardor, there continued still in
the western slave States and in the mountains of Virginia and North
Carolina, a goodly number of these churchmen, who suffered no
diminution of interest in the enlightenment of Negr