For this untenable position the slave States were so severely criticized by southern and northern friends of the colored people that the ministers of that section had to construct a more progressive policy.  Yet whatever might be the arguments of the critics of the South to prove that the enlightenment of Negroes was not a danger, it was clear after the Southampton insurrection in 1831 that two factors in Negro education would for some time continue generally eliminated.  These were reading matter and colored preachers.

Prominent among the southerners who endeavored to readjust their policy of enlightening the black population, were Bishop William Meade,[1] Bishop William Capers,[2] and Rev. C.C.  Jones.[3] Bishop Meade was a native of Virginia, long noted for its large element of benevolent slaveholders who never lost interest in their Negroes.  He was fortunate in finishing his education at Princeton, so productive then of leaders who fought the institution of slavery.[4] Immediately after his ordination in the Protestant Episcopal Church, Bishop Meade assumed the role of a reformer.  He took up the cause of the colored people, devoting no little of his time to them when he was in Alexandria and Frederick in 1813 and 1814.[5] He began by preaching to the Negroes on fifteen plantations, meeting them twice a day, and in one year reported the baptism of forty-eight colored children.[6] Early a champion of the colonization of the Negroes, he was sent on a successful mission to Georgia in 1818 to secure the release of certain recaptured Africans who were about to be sold.  Going and returning from the South he was active in establishing auxiliaries of the American Colonization Society.  He helped to extend its sphere also into the Middle States and New-England.[7]

[Footnote 1:  Goodloe, Southern Platform, pp. 64-65.]

[Footnote 2:  Wightman, Life of Bishop William Capers, p. 294.]

[Footnote 3:  Jones, Religious Instruction, Introductory Chapter.]

[Footnote 4:  Goodloe, Southern Platform, p. 64.]

[Footnote 5:  Ibid., p. 65.]

[Footnote 6:  Ibid., p. 66.]

[Footnote 7:  Niles Register, vol. xvi., pp. 165-166.]

Bishop Meade was a representative of certain of his fellow-churchmen who were passing through the transitory stage from the position of advocating the thorough education of Negroes to that of recommending mere verbal instruction.  Agreeing at first with Rev. Thomas Bacon, Bishop Meade favored the literary training of Negroes, and advocated the extermination of slavery.[1] Later in life he failed to urge his followers to emancipate their slaves, and did not entreat his congregation to teach them to read.  He was then committed to the policy of only lessening their burden as much as possible without doing anything to destroy the institution.  Thereafter he advocated the education and emancipation of the slaves only in connection with the scheme of colonization, to which he looked for a solution of these problems.[2]