industrial
education, most of them were of the opinion that ordinary training
in the fundamentals of useful knowledge and in the principles of
Christian religion, was sufficient to meet the needs of those
designated for freedom.

[Footnote 1: Meade, _Sermons of Thomas Bacon_, pp. 81-87.]

[Footnote 2: Porteus, _Works of_, vol. vi., p. 177; Warburton, _A
Sermon_, etc., pp. 25 and 27.]

On the other hand, most southerners who conceded the right of the
Negro to be educated did not openly aid the movement except with the
understanding that the enlightened ones should be taken from their
fellows and colonized in some remote part of the United States or
in their native land.[1] The idea of colonization, however, was not
confined to the southern slaveholders, for Thornton, Fothergill, and
Granville Sharp had long looked to Africa as the proper place for
enlightened people of color.[2] Feeling that it would be wrong to
expatriate them, Benezet and Branagan[3] advocated the colonization of
such Negroes on the public lands west of the Alleghanies. There was
some talk of giving slaves training in the elements of agriculture
and then dividing plantations among them to develop a small class of
tenants. Jefferson, a member of a committee appointed in 1779 by the
General Assembly of that commonwealth to revise its laws, reported a
plan providing for the instruction of its slaves in agriculture and
the handicrafts to prepare them for liberation and colonization under
the supervision of the home government until they could take care of
themselves.[4]

[Footnote 1: _Writings of James Monroe_, vol. iii., pp. 261, 266, 292,
295, 321, 322, 336, 338, 349, 351, 352, 353, 378.]

[Footnote 2: Brissot de Warville, _Travels_, vol. i., p. 262.]

[Footnote 3: _Tyrannical Libertymen_, pp. 10-11; Locke,
_Anti-slavery_, etc., pp. 31-32; Branagan, _Serious Remonstrance_, p.
18.]

[Footnote 4: Washington, _Works of Jefferson_, vol. iii., p. 296; vol.
iv., p. 291 and vol. viii., p. 380.]

Without resorting to the subterfuge of colonization, not a few
slaveholders were still wise enough to show why the improvement of the
Negroes should be neglected altogether. Vanquished by the logic of
Daniel Davis[1] and Benjamin Rush,[2] those who had theretofore
justified slavery on the ground that it gave the bondmen a chance to
be enlightened, fell back on the theory of African racial inferiority.
This they said was so well exhibited by the Negroes' lack