each slaves to read.
In 1742 Commissary Garden, of the English Society for Propagating the
Gospel, founded a negro school in Charleston, where slaves were taught
by slave teachers, these last being the society's property. Honest Elias
Neale, the society's catechist in New York, engaged in the same work
there, and afterward catechists were so employed in Philadelphia. That
organization did much to stir up the planters to teach their slaves the
rudiments of Christianity. [Footnote: Eggleston in Century, May, 1888.]
Now, all this was changed. The strictest laws were made to keep every
slave in the most abject ignorance, to prevent their congregating, and
to make it impossible for abolitionists or abolitionist literature or
influence to get at them.

[1816]

Inconvenient and perilous as slavery was, southern devotion to it for
many reasons strengthened rather than weakened. The masses did not
perceive the ruin the system was working, which, moreover, consisted
with great profits to vast numbers of influential men and to many
localities. Border States little by little gave up the hope of becoming
free, the old anti-slavery convictions of their best men faltering, and
the practical problem of emancipation, really difficult, being too
easily decided insoluble. More significant, owing to a variety of
circumstances, the abolition spirit itself greatly subsided early in the
present century. Completion of the emancipation process in the North was
assured by the action of New York in 1817, proclaiming a total end to
slavery there from July 4, 1827. The view that each State was absolute
sovereign over slavery within its own borders, responsibility for it and
its abuses there ending with the State's own citizens, was now
universally accepted. Success in securing the act of 1807, making the
slave trade illegal from January 1, 1808, and affixing to it heavy
penalties, lulled multitudes to sleep. This act, however, had effect
only gradually, and its beneficence was greatly lessened in that it left
confiscated negroes to the operation of the local law.

Such quietude was furthered through the formation of the American
Colonization Society in 1816, by easy philanthropists and statesmen,
North as well as South, who swore by the Constitution as admitting no
fundamental amendment, admired its three great compromises, loved all
brethren of the Union except agitators, and deprecated slavery and the
black race about equally; its mission negr