[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 the benefit of the young, and finally that slaves were received into the churches which permitted them to hear the same gospel and praise the same God.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, pp. 228 et seq.]

[Footnote 2:  Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro Slavery, p. 215.]

[Footnote 3:  Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy of Slavery, p. 228.]

Seeing even in the policy of religious instruction nothing but danger to the position of the slave States, certain southerners opposed it under all circumstances.  Some masters feared that verbal instruction would increase the desire of slaves to learn.  Such teaching might develop into a progressive system of improvement, which, without any special effort in that direction, would follow in the natural order of things.[1] Timorous persons believed that slaves thus favored would neglect their duties and embrace seasons of religious worship for originating and executing plans for insubordination and villainy.  They thought, too, that missionaries from the free States would thereby be afforded an opportunity to come South and inculcate doctrines subversive of the interests and safety of that section.[2] It would then be only a matter of time before the movement would receive such an impetus that it would dissolve the relations of society as then constituted and revolutionize the civil institutions of the South.