oes. In the States
of Kentucky and Tennessee friends of the race were often left free to
instruct them as they wished. Many of the people who settled those
States came from the Scotch-Irish stock of the Appalachian Mountains,
where early in the nineteenth century the blacks were in some cases
treated as equals of the whites.[1]

[Footnote 2: _Fourth Annual Report of the American Antislavery
Society_, New York, 1837, P. 31; _The New England Antislavery
Almanac_, 1841, p. 31; and _The African Repository_, vol. xxxii., p.
16.]

The Quakers, and many Catholics, however, were as effective as the
mountaineers in elevating Negroes. They had for centuries labored
to promote religion and education among their colored brethren. So
earnest were these sects in working for the uplift of the Negro race
that the reactionary movement failed to swerve them from their course.
When the other churches adopted the policy of mere verbal training,
the Quakers and Catholics adhered to their idea that the Negroes
should be educated to grasp the meaning of the Christian religion just
as they had been during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1]
This favorable situation did not mean so much, however, since with the
exception of the Catholics in Maryland and Louisiana and the Quakers
in Pennsylvania, not many members of these sects lived in communities
of a large colored population. Furthermore, they were denied access to
the Negroes in most southern communities, even when they volunteered
to work as missionaries among the colored people.[2]

[Footnote 1: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed_., 1871, pp.
217-221.]

[Footnote 2: In several Southern States special laws were enacted to
prevent the influx of such Christian workers.]

How difficult it was for these churchmen to carry out their policy
of religion without letters may be best observed by viewing the
conditions then obtaining. In most Southern States in which Negro
preachers could not be deterred from their mission by public
sentiment, they were prohibited by law from exhorting their fellows.
The ground for such action was usually said to be incompetency and
liability to abuse their office and influence to the injury of the
laws and peace of the country. The elimination of the Christian
teachers of the Negro race, and the prevention of the immigration of
workers from the Northern States rendered the blacks helpless
and dependent upon a few benevolent white ministers of the