(signature) H. B. Stowe
Teaching the Slave to Read.
Much has been discussed and written, both at the North and South, concerning the policy and propriety of permitting those in bondage to gain the rudiments of a common education.
Many who conscientiously (for having lived among them, I do believe that there are "conscientious" slave-owners) hold their laborers in servitude, believe that the experiment might be successfully tried. Indeed, it is often tried on plantations, even in States where the law enforces strict penalties against it. They believe that the slaves, if permitted to learn to read, would be more moral, faithful and obedient; and they cannot reconcile it with their sense of duty to keep from them the perusal of the Bible.
The majority, however, think differently; and the majority will always make the laws. They believe that there is a talismanic power in even the alphabet of knowledge, to arouse in the bondsman powers which they would crush for ever. They believe that one truth leads on to another, and that the mind, once aroused to inquiry, will never rest until it has found out its native independence of man's dominion. They point triumphantly, in proof of the policy of their system, to the "spoiled slave," as they term many of those in whose training the opposite course has been pursued. More trouble, vexation, and insubordination, they confidently allege, has been caused by permitting slaves to learn to read, than by any other indulgence.
It may be so; it is certain that, in many instances, masters have failed to win the gratitude to which they thought themselves justly entitled, for their kindness and care. They have found their servants growing discontented and idle, where they hoped to make them docile and happy. Searching for the cause of this, they perhaps turn upon the course of training they have followed, and accuse it of being opposed to the best interests of the slave. Could such reasoners but look upon the matter in its true perspective, they would cease to wonder that "good" should, in their view, "work out evil." Learning and Slavery can never compromise; they are as the antagonistic poles of the magnet.
In the first place, Slavery blunts the mind, and renders it, in its early years, unsusceptible to those impressions which are generally so lasting, when made upon youthful minds. Many who have tried to educate colored children, have been led to accuse the race of natural inferiority in its capacity to gain knowledge. We have no right to draw that inference from the few attempts which have been made on a part of the race whose mental faculties have, through many generations, been crippled by disuse.