n communities of that section to feel
that they were about to be overrun by undesirable persons who could
not be easily assimilated. The subsequent anti-abolition riots in the
North made it difficult for friends of the Negroes to raise funds to
educate them. Free persons of color were not allowed to open schools
in some places, teachers of Negroes were driven from their stations,
and colored schoolhouses were burned.

Ashamed to play the role of a Christian clergy guarding silence on the
indispensable duty of saving the souls of the colored people, certain
of the most influential southern ministers hit upon the scheme of
teaching illiterate Negroes the principles of Christianity by memory
training or the teaching of religion without letters. This the clergy
were wont to call religious instruction. The word instruction,
however, as used in various documents, is rather confusing. Before the
reactionary period all instruction of the colored people included the
teaching of the rudiments of education as a means to convey Christian
thought. But with the exception of a few Christians the southerners
thereafter used the word instruction to signify the mere memorizing of
principles from the most simplified books. The sections of the South
in which the word instruction was not used in this restricted sense
were mainly the settlements of Quakers and Catholics who, in defiance
of the law, persisted in teaching Negroes to read and write. Yet it
was not uncommon to find others who, after having unsuccessfully used
their influence against the enactment of these reactionary laws,
boldly defied them by instructing the Negroes of their communities.
Often opponents to this custom winked at it as an indulgence to the
clerical profession. Many Scotch-Irish of the Appalachian Mountains
and liberal Methodists and Baptists of the Western slave States did
not materially change their attitude toward the enlightenment of the
colored people during the reactionary period. The Negroes among
these people continued to study books and hear religious instruction
conveyed to maturing minds.

Yet little as seemed this enlightenment by means of verbal
instruction, some slaveholders became sufficiently inhuman to object
to it on the grounds that the teaching of religion would lead to the
teaching of letters. In fact, by 1835 certain parts of the South
reached the third stage in the development of the education of the
Negroes. At first they were taught the