colored people included the teaching of the rudiments of education as a means to convey Christian thought.  But with the exception of a few Christians the southerners thereafter used the word instruction to signify the mere memorizing of principles from the most simplified books.  The sections of the South in which the word instruction was not used in this restricted sense were mainly the settlements of Quakers and Catholics who, in defiance of the law, persisted in teaching Negroes to read and write.  Yet it was not uncommon to find others who, after having unsuccessfully used their influence against the enactment of these reactionary laws, boldly defied them by instructing the Negroes of their communities.  Often opponents to this custom winked at it as an indulgence to the clerical profession.  Many Scotch-Irish of the Appalachian Mountains and liberal Methodists and Baptists of the Western slave States did not materially change their attitude toward the enlightenment of the colored people during the reactionary period.  The Negroes among these people continued to study books and hear religious instruction conveyed to maturing minds.

Yet little as seemed this enlightenment by means of verbal instruction, some slaveholders became sufficiently inhuman to object to it on the grounds that the teaching of religion would lead to the teaching of letters.  In fact, by 1835 certain parts of the South reached the third stage in the development of the education of the Negroes.  At first they were taught the common branches to enable them to understand the principles of Christianity; next the colored people as an enlightened class became such a menace to southern institutions that it was deemed unwise to allow them any instruction beyond that of memory training; and finally, when it was discovered that many ambitious blacks were still learning to stir up their fellows, it was decreed that they should not receive any instruction at all.  Reduced thus to the plane of beasts, where they remained for generations, Negroes developed bad traits which since their emancipation have been removed only with great difficulty.

Dark as the future of the Negro students seemed, all hope was not yet gone.  Certain white men in every southern community made it possible for many of them to learn in spite of opposition.  Slaveholders were not long in discovering that a thorough execution of the law was impossible when Negroes were following practically all the higher pursuits of labor in the South.  Masters who had children known to be teaching slaves protected their benevolent sons and daughters from the rigors of the law.  Preachers, on finding out that the effort at verbal education could not convey Christian truths to an undeveloped mind, overcame the opposition in their localities and taught the colored people as before.  Negroes themselves, regarding learning as forbidden fruit, stole away to secret places at night to study under the direction of friends.