[Footnote 3: Jones, Religious Instruction, p. 103.]
[Footnote 4: Jones, Religious Instruction, pp. 106, 217.]
Meeting the argument of those who feared the insubordination of Negroes, Jones thought that the gospel would do more for the obedience of slaves and the peace of the community than weapons of war. He asserted that the very effort of the masters to instruct their slaves created a strong bond of union between them and their masters.[1] History, he believed, showed that the direct way of exposing the slaves to acts of insubordination was to leave them in ignorance and superstition to the care of their own religion.[2] To disprove the falsity of the charge that literary instruction given in Neau's school in New York was the cause of a rising of slaves in 1709, he produced evidence that it was due to their opposition to becoming Christians. The rebellions in South Carolina from 1730 to 1739, he maintained, were fomented by the Spaniards in St. Augustine. The upheaval in New York in 1741 was not due to any plot resulting from the instruction of Negroes in religion, but rather to a delusion on the part of the whites. The rebellions in Camden in 1816 and in Charleston in 1822 were not exceptions to the rule. He conceded that the Southampton Insurrection in Virginia in 1831 originated under the color of religion. It was pointed out, however, that this very act itself was a proof that Negroes left to work out their own salvation, had fallen victims to "ignorant and misguided teachers" like Nat Turner. Such undesirable leaders, thought he, would never have had the opportunity to do mischief, if the masters had taken it upon themselves to instruct their slaves.[3] He asserted that no large number of slaves well instructed in the Christian religion and taken into the churches directed by white men had ever been found guilty of taking part in servile insurrections.[4]
[Footnote 1: Ibid., pp. 212, 274.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 215.]
[Footnote 3: Jones, Religious Instruction, etc., p. 212.]
[Footnote 4: Plumer, Thoughts, etc., p. 4.]
To meet the arguments of these reformers the slaveholders found among laymen and preachers able champions to defend the reactionary policy. Southerners who had not gone to the extreme in the prohibition of the instruction of Negroes felt more inclined to answer the critics of their radical neighbors. One of these defenders thought that the slaves should have some enlightenment but believed that the domestic element of the system of slavery in the Southern States afforded "adequate means" for the improvement, adapted to their condition and the circumstances of the country; and furnished "the natural, safe, and effectual means"[1] of the intellectual and moral elevation of the Negro race. Another speaking more explicitly, said that the fact that the Negro is such per se carried with it the "inference or the necessity that his education—the cultivation of his faculties, or the development of his intelligence, must be in harmony with itself." In other words, "his instruction must be an entirely different thing from the training of the Caucasian," in regard to whom "the term education had widely different significations." For this reason these defenders believed that instead of giving the Negro systematic instruction he should be placed in the best position possible for the development of his imitative powers—"to call into action that peculiar capacity for copying the habits, mental and moral, of the superior race."[2] They referred to the facts that slaves still had plantation prayers and preaching by numerous members of their own race, some of whom could read and write, that they were frequently favored by their masters with services expressly for their instruction, that Sabbath-schools had been established for the benefit of the young, and finally that slaves were received into the churches which permitted them to hear the same gospel and praise the same God.[3]
[Footnote 1: Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of
Slavery, pp. 228 et seq.]
[Footnote 2: Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro Slavery, p. 215.]