[Footnote 4:  Tower, Slavery Unmasked; Dabney, Journal of a Tour through the U.S. and Canada, p. 185; Niles Register, vol. lxxii., p. 322; and Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 631.]

[Footnote 5:  Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 603.]

[Footnote 6:  Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 629.]

[Footnote 7:  Ibid., p. 620.]

Many of these opportunities were made possible by the desire to teach slaves religion.  In fact the instruction of Negroes after the enactment of prohibitory laws resembled somewhat the teaching of religion with letters during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Thousands of Negroes like Edward Patterson and Nat Turner learned to read and write in Sabbath-schools.  White men who diffused such information ran the gauntlet of mobs, but like a Baptist preacher of South Carolina who was threatened with expulsion from his church, if he did not desist, they worked on and overcame the local prejudice.  When preachers themselves dared not undertake this task it was often done by their children, whose benevolent work was winked at as an indulgence to the clerical profession.  This charity, however, was not restricted to the narrow circle of the clergy.  Believing with churchmen that the Bible is the revelation of God, many laymen contended that no man should be restrained from knowing his Maker directly.[1] Negroes, therefore, almost worshiped the Bible, and their anxiety to read it was their greatest incentive to learn.  Many southerners braved the terrors of public opinion and taught their Negroes to read the Scriptures.  To this extent General Coxe of Fluvanna County, Virginia, taught about one hundred of his adult slaves.[2] While serving as a professor of the Military Institute at Lexington, Stonewall Jackson taught a class of Negroes in a Sunday-school.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Orr, “An Address on the Need of Education in the South, 1879.”]

[Footnote 2:  This statement is made by several of General Coxe’s slaves who are still living.]

[Footnote 3:  School Journal, vol. lxxx., p. 332.]

Further interest in the cause was shown by the Evangelical Society of the Synods of North Carolina and Virginia in 1834.[1] Later Presbyterians of Alabama and Georgia urged masters to enlighten their slaves.[2] The attitude of many mountaineers of Kentucky was well set forth in the address of the Synod of 1836, proposing a plan for the instruction and emancipation of the slaves.[3] They complained that throughout the land, so far as they could learn, there was but one school in which slaves could be taught during the week.  The light of three or four Sabbath-schools was seen “glittering through the darkness” of the black population of the whole State.  Here and there one found a family where humanity impelled the master, mistress, or children, to the laborious task of private instruction.  In consequence of these undesirable conditions the Synod recommended that “slaves be instructed in the common elementary branches of education."[4]