slave
communities. During this period of unusual proselyting among the
whites, these preachers could not minister to the needs of their own
race.[1] Besides, even when there was found a white clergyman who was
willing to labor among these lowly people, he often knew little about
the inner workings of their minds, and failing to enlighten their
understanding, left them the victims of sinful habits, incident to the
institution of slavery.

[Footnote 1: Jones, _Religious Instruction_, p. 175.]

To a civilized man the result was alarming. The Church as an
institution had ceased to be the means by which the Negroes of the
South could be enlightened. The Sabbath-schools in which so many
colored people there had learned to read and write had by 1834
restricted their work to oral instruction.[1] In places where the
blacks once had the privilege of getting an elementary education, only
an inconceivable fraction of them could rise above illiteracy. Most of
these were freedmen found in towns and cities. With the exception of
a few slaves who were allowed the benefits of religious instruction,
these despised beings were generally neglected and left to die
like heathen. In 1840 there were in the South only fifteen colored
Sabbath-schools, with an attendance of about 1459.

[Footnote 1: Goodell, _Slave Code_, p. 324.]

There had never been any regular daily instruction in Christian
truths, but after this period only a few masters allowed field hands
to attend family prayers. Some sections went beyond this point,
prohibiting by public sentiment any and all kinds of religious
instruction.[1] In South Carolina a formal remonstrance signed by over
300 planters and citizens was presented to a Methodist preacher chosen
by a conference of that State as a "cautious and discreet person"[2]
especially qualified to preach to slaves, and pledged to confine
himself to verbal instruction. In Falmouth, Virginia, several white
ladies began to meet on Sunday afternoons to teach Negro children the
principles of the Christian religion. They were unable to continue
their work a month before the local officials stopped them, although
these women openly avowed that they did not intend to teach reading
and writing.[3] Thus the development of the religious education of
the Negroes in certain parts of the South had been from literary
instruction as a means of imparting Christian truth to the policy
of oral indoctrination, and from this purely memory tea