Despite the fact that southern Methodists and Presbyterians generally ceased to have much anti-slavery ardor, there continued still in the western slave States and in the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina, a goodly number of these churchmen, who suffered no diminution of interest in the enlightenment of Negroes.  In the States of Kentucky and Tennessee friends of the race were often left free to instruct them as they wished.  Many of the people who settled those States came from the Scotch-Irish stock of the Appalachian Mountains, where early in the nineteenth century the blacks were in some cases treated as equals of the whites.[1]

[Footnote 2:  Fourth Annual Report of the American Antislavery Society, New York, 1837, P. 31; The New England Antislavery Almanac, 1841, p. 31; and The African Repository, vol. xxxii., p. 16.]

The Quakers, and many Catholics, however, were as effective as the mountaineers in elevating Negroes.  They had for centuries labored to promote religion and education among their colored brethren.  So earnest were these sects in working for the uplift of the Negro race that the reactionary movement failed to swerve them from their course.  When the other churches adopted the policy of mere verbal training, the Quakers and Catholics adhered to their idea that the Negroes should be educated to grasp the meaning of the Christian religion just as they had been during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] This favorable situation did not mean so much, however, since with the exception of the Catholics in Maryland and Louisiana and the Quakers in Pennsylvania, not many members of these sects lived in communities of a large colored population.  Furthermore, they were denied access to the Negroes in most southern communities, even when they volunteered to work as missionaries among the colored people.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, pp. 217-221.]

[Footnote 2:  In several Southern States special laws were enacted to prevent the influx of such Christian workers.]

How difficult it was for these churchmen to carry out their policy of religion without letters may be best observed by viewing the conditions then obtaining.  In most Southern States in which Negro preachers could not be deterred from their mission by public sentiment, they were prohibited by law from exhorting their fellows.  The ground for such action was usually said to be incompetency and liability to abuse their office and influence to the injury of the laws and peace of the country.  The elimination of the Christian teachers of the Negro race, and the prevention of the immigration of workers from the Northern States rendered the blacks helpless and dependent upon a few benevolent white ministers of the 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.