[Footnote 1:  Jones, Religious Instruction, p. 175.]

To a civilized man the result was alarming.  The Church as an institution had ceased to be the means by which the Negroes of the South could be enlightened.  The Sabbath-schools in which so many colored people there had learned to read and write had by 1834 restricted their work to oral instruction.[1] In places where the blacks once had the privilege of getting an elementary education, only an inconceivable fraction of them could rise above illiteracy.  Most of these were freedmen found in towns and cities.  With the exception of a few slaves who were allowed the benefits of religious instruction, these despised beings were generally neglected and left to die like heathen.  In 1840 there were in the South only fifteen colored Sabbath-schools, with an attendance of about 1459.

[Footnote 1:  Goodell, Slave Code, p. 324.]

There had never been any regular daily instruction in Christian truths, but after this period only a few masters allowed field hands to attend family prayers.  Some sections went beyond this point, prohibiting by public sentiment any and all kinds of religious instruction.[1] In South Carolina a formal remonstrance signed by over 300 planters and citizens was presented to a Methodist preacher chosen by a conference of that State as a “cautious and discreet person"[2] especially qualified to preach to slaves, and pledged to confine himself to verbal instruction.  In Falmouth, Virginia, several white ladies began to meet on Sunday afternoons to teach Negro children the principles of the Christian religion.  They were unable to continue their work a month before the local officials stopped them, although these women openly avowed that they did not intend to teach reading and writing.[3] Thus the development of the religious education of the Negroes in certain parts of the South had been from literary instruction as a means of imparting Christian truth to the policy of oral indoctrination, and from this purely memory teaching to no education at all.

[Footnote 1:  The cause of this drastic policy was not so much race hatred as the fear that any kind of instruction might cause the Negroes to assert themselves.]

[Footnote 2:  Olmsted, Back Country, pp. 105, 108.]

[Footnote 3:  Conway, Testimonies Concerning Slavery, p. 5.]

Thereafter the chief privilege allowed the slaves was to congregate for evening prayers conducted by themselves under the surveillance of a number of “discreet persons.”  The leader chosen to conduct the services, would in some cases read a passage from the Scriptures and “line a hymn,” which the slaves took up in their turn and sang in a tune of their own suitable to the meter.  In case they had present no one who could read, or the law forbade such an exercise, some exhorter among the slaves would be given an opportunity to address the people, basing his remarks as far as his intelligence allowed him on some memorized portion of the Bible.  The rest of the evening would be devoted to individual prayers and the singing of favorite hymns, developed largely from the experience of slaves, who while bearing their burdens in the heat of the day had learned to sing away their troubles.