er, that this very act itself was
a proof that Negroes left to work out their own salvation, had fallen
victims to "ignorant and misguided teachers" like Nat Turner. Such
undesirable leaders, thought he, would never have had the opportunity
to do mischief, if the masters had taken it upon themselves to
instruct their slaves.[3] He asserted that no large number of slaves
well instructed in the Christian religion and taken into the churches
directed by white men had ever been found guilty of taking part in
servile insurrections.[4]

[Footnote 1: _Ibid_., pp. 212, 274.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., p. 215.]

[Footnote 3: Jones, _Religious Instruction_, etc., p. 212.]

[Footnote 4: Plumer, _Thoughts_, etc., p. 4.]

To meet the arguments of these reformers the slaveholders found among
laymen and preachers able champions to defend the reactionary policy.
Southerners who had not gone to the extreme in the prohibition of the
instruction of Negroes felt more inclined to answer the critics of
their radical neighbors. One of these defenders thought that the
slaves should have some enlightenment but believed that the domestic
element of the system of slavery in the Southern States afforded
"adequate means" for the improvement, adapted to their condition and
the circumstances of the country; and furnished "the natural, safe,
and effectual means"[1] of the intellectual and moral elevation of the
Negro race. Another speaking more explicitly, said that the fact
that the Negro is such per se carried with it the "inference or the
necessity that his education--the cultivation of his faculties, or the
development of his intelligence, must be in harmony with itself." In
other words, "his instruction must be an entirely different thing from
the training of the Caucasian," in regard to whom "the term education
had widely different significations." For this reason these defenders
believed that instead of giving the Negro systematic instruction he
should be placed in the best position possible for the development of
his imitative powers--"to call into action that peculiar capacity for
copying the habits, mental and moral, of the superior race."[2] They
referred to the facts that slaves still had plantation prayers and
preaching by numerous members of their own race, some of whom could
read and write, that they were frequently favored by their masters
with services expressly for their instruction, that Sabbath-schools
had been established for th