The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 Part 2

[Footnote 1: _An Account of the Endeavors Used by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts_, pp. 16, 21, and 32; and Dalcho, _An Historical Account_, etc., pp. 104 et seq.]

Equally censorious of these neglectful masters was Reverend Thomas Bacon, the rector of the Parish Church in Talbot County, Maryland.

In 1749 he set forth his protest in four sermons on "the great and indispensable duty of all Christian masters to bring up their slaves in the knowledge and fear of G.o.d."[1] Contending that slaves should enjoy rights like those of servants in the household of the patriarchs, Bacon insisted that next to one's children and brethren by blood, one's servants, and especially one's slaves, stood in the nearest relation to him, and that in return for their drudgery the master owed it to his bondmen to have them enlightened. He believed that the reading and explaining of the Holy Scriptures should be made a stated duty. In the course of time the place of catechist in each family might be supplied out of the intelligent slaves by choosing such among them as were best taught to instruct the rest.[2] He was of the opinion, too, that were some of the slaves taught to read, were they sent to school for that purpose when young, were they given the New Testament and other good books to be read at night to their fellow-servants, such a course would vastly increase their knowledge of G.o.d and direct their minds to a serious thought of futurity.[3]

[Footnote 1: Meade, _Sermons of Thomas Bacon_, pp. 31 et seq.]

[Footnote 2: Meade, _Sermons of Thomas Bacon_, pp. 116 _et seq._]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid._, p. 118.]

With almost equal zeal did Bishops Williams and Butler plead the same cause.[1] They deplored the fact that because of their dark skins Negro slaves were treated as a species different from the rest of mankind. Denouncing the more cruel treatment of slaves as cattle, unfit for mental and moral improvement, these churchmen a.s.serted that the highest property possible to be acquired in servants could not cancel the obligation to take care of the religious instruction of those who "despicable as they are in the eyes of man are nevertheless the creatures of G.o.d."[2]

[Footnote 1: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed._, 1871, p. 363.]

[Footnote 2: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed_., 1871, p. 363.]

On account of these appeals made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a larger number of slaves of the English colonies were thereafter treated as human beings capable of mental, moral, and spiritual development. Some masters began to provide for the improvement of these unfortunates, not because they loved them, but because instruction would make them more useful to the community. A much more effective policy of Negro education was brought forward in 1741 by Bishop Secker.[1] He suggested the employment of young Negroes prudently chosen to teach their countrymen. To carry out such a plan he had already sent a missionary to Africa. Besides instructing Negroes at his post of duty, this apostle sent three African natives to England where they were educated for the work.[2] It was doubtless the sentiment of these leaders that caused Dr. Brearcroft to allude to this project in a discourse before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1741.[3]

[Footnote 1: Secker, _Works_, vol. v., p. 88.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., vol. vi., p. 467.]

[Footnote 3: _An Account of the Endeavors Used by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts_, p.6.]

This organization hit upon the plan of purchasing two Negroes named Harry and Andrew, and of qualifying them by thorough instruction in the principles of Christianity and the fundamentals of education, to serve as schoolmasters to their people. Under the direction of Rev.

Mr. Garden, the missionary who had directed the training of these young men, a building costing about three hundred and eight pounds was erected in Charleston, South Carolina. In the school which opened in this building in 1744 Harry and Andrew served as teachers.[1] In the beginning the school had about sixty young students, and had a very good daily attendance for a number of years. The directors of the inst.i.tution planned to send out annually between thirty and forty youths "well instructed in religion and capable of reading their Bibles to carry home and diffuse the same knowledge to their fellow slaves."[2] It is highly probable that after 1740 this school was attended only by free persons of color. Because the progress of Negro education had been rather rapid, South Carolina enacted that year a law prohibiting any person from teaching or causing a slave to be taught, or from employing or using a slave as a scribe in any manner of writing.

[Footnote 1: Meriwether, _Education in South Carolina_, p. 123; McCrady, _South Carolina_, etc., p. 246; Dalcho, _An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Carolina_, pp.

156, 157, 164.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., pp. 157 and 164.]

In 1764 the Charleston school was closed for reasons which it is difficult to determine. From one source we learn that one of the teachers died, and the other having turned out profligate, no instructors could be found to continue the work. It does not seem that the sentiment against the education of free Negroes had by that time become sufficiently strong to cause the school to be discontinued.[1]

It is evident, however, that with the a.s.sistance of influential persons of different communities the instruction of slaves continued in that colony. Writing about the middle of the eighteenth century, Eliza Lucas, a lady of South Carolina, who afterward married Justice Pinckney, mentions a parcel of little Negroes whom she had undertaken to teach to read.[2]

[Footnote 1: _An Account of the Endeavors Used by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts_, p. 15.]

[Footnote 2: Bourne, _Spain in America_, p. 241.]

The work of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was also effective in communities of the North in which the established Church of England had some standing. In 1751 Reverend Hugh Neill, once a Presbyterian minister of New Jersey, became a missionary of this organization to the Negroes of Pennsylvania. He worked among them fifteen years. Dr. Smith, Provost of the College of Philadelphia, devoted a part of his time to the work, and at the death of Neill in 1766 enlisted as a regular missionary of the Society.[1] It seems, however, that prior to the eighteenth century not much had been done to enlighten the slaves of that colony, although free persons of color had been instructed. Rev. Mr. Wayman, another missionary to Pennsylvania about the middle of the eighteenth century, a.s.serted that "neither" was "there anywhere care taken for the instruction of Negro slaves," the duty to whom he had "pressed upon masters with little effect."[2]

[Footnote 1: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed._, 1871, p. 362.]

[Footnote 2: Wickersham, _History of Education in Pennsylvania_, p.

248.]

To meet this need the Society set the example of maintaining catechetical lectures for Negroes in St. Peter's and Christ Church of Philadelphia, during the inc.u.mbency of Dr. Jennings from 1742 to 1762.

William Sturgeon, a student of Yale, selected to do this work, was sent to London for ordination and placed in charge in 1747.[1] In this position Rev. Mr. Sturgeon remained nineteen years, rendering such satisfactory services in the teaching of Negroes that he deserves to be recorded as one of the first benefactors of the Negro race.

[Footnote 1: _Ibid_., p. 241.]

Antedating this movement in Pennsylvania were the efforts of Reverend Dr. Thomas Bray. In 1696 he was sent to Maryland by the Bishop of London on an ecclesiastical mission to do what he could toward the conversion of adult Negroes and the education of their children.[1]

Bray's most influential supporter was M. D'Alone, the private secretary of King William. D'Alone gave for the maintenance of the cause a fund, the proceeds of which were first used for the employment of colored catechists, and later for the support of the Thomas Bray Mission after the catechists had failed to give satisfaction. At the death of this missionary the task was taken up by certain followers of the good man, known as the "a.s.sociates of Doctor Bray."[2] They extended their work beyond the confines of Maryland. In 1760 two schools for the education of Negroes were maintained in Philadelphia by these benefactors. It was the aid obtained from the Dr. Bray fund that enabled the abolitionists to establish in that city a permanent school which continued for almost a hundred years.[3] About the close of the French and Indian War, Rev. Mr. Stewart, a missionary in North Carolina, found there a school for the education of Indians and free Negroes, conducted by Dr. Bray's a.s.sociates. The example of these men appealing to him as a wise policy, he directed to it the attention of the clergy at home.[4]

[Footnote 1: _Ibid_., p. 252; Smyth, _Works of Franklin_, vol. iv., p.

23; and vol. v., p. 431.]

[Footnote 2: Smyth, _Works of Franklin_, vol. v., p. 431.]

[Footnote 3: Wickersham, _History of Education in Pennsylvania_, p.

249.]

[Footnote 4: Ba.s.sett, _Slavery and Servitude in North Carolina_, Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. xv., p. 226.]

Not many slaves were found among the Puritans, but the number sufficed to bring the question of their instruction before these colonists almost as prominently as we have observed it was brought in the case of the members of the Established Church of England. Despite the fact that the Puritans developed from the Calvinists, believers in the doctrine of election which swept away all cla.s.s distinction, this sect did not, like the Quakers, attack slavery as an inst.i.tution. Yet if the Quakers were the first of the Protestants to protest against the buying and selling of souls, New England divines were among the first to devote attention to the mental, moral, and spiritual development of Negroes.[1] In 1675 John Eliot objected to the Indian slave trade, not because of the social degradation, but for the reason that he desired that his countrymen "should follow Christ his Designe in this matter to promote the free pa.s.sage of Religion" among them. He further said: "For to sell Souls for Money seemeth to me to be dangerous Merchandise, to sell away from all Means of Grace whom Christ hath provided Means of Grace for you is the Way for us to be active in destroying their Souls when they are highly obliged to seek their Conversion and Salvation." Eliot bore it grievously that the souls of the slaves were "exposed by their Masters to a destroying Ignorance meerly for the Fear of thereby losing the Benefit of their Va.s.salage."[2]

[Footnote 1: _Pennsylvania Magazine of History_, vol. xiii., p. 265.]

[Footnote 2: Locke, _Anti-slavery Before 1808_, p. 15; Mather, _Life of John Eliot_, p. 14; _New Plymouth Colony Records_, vol. x., p.

452.]

Further interest in the work was manifested by Cotton Mather. He showed his liberality in his professions published in 1693 in a set of _Rules for the Society of Negroes_, intended to present the claims of the despised race to the benefits of religious instruction.[1] Mather believed that servants were in a sense like one's children, and that their masters should train and furnish them with Bibles and other religious books for which they should be given time to read. He maintained that servants should be admitted to the religious exercises of the family and was willing to employ such of them as were competent to teach his children lessons of piety. Coming directly to the issue of the day, Mather deplored the fact that the several plantations which lived upon the labor of their Negroes were guilty of the "prodigious Wickedness of deriding, neglecting, and opposing all due Means of bringing the poor Negroes unto G.o.d." He hoped that the masters, of whom G.o.d would one day require the souls of slaves committed to their care, would see to it that like Abraham they have catechised servants. They were not to imagine that the "Almighty G.o.d made so many thousands reasonable Creatures for nothing but only to serve the l.u.s.ts of Epicures, or the Gains of Mammonists."[2]

[Footnote 1: Locke, _Anti-slavery_, etc., p. 15.]

[Footnote 2: Meade, _Sermons of Thomas Bacon_, p. 137 _et seq_.]

The sentiment of the clergy of this epoch was more directly expressed by Richard Baxter, the noted Nonconformist, in his "Directions to Masters in Foreign Plantations," incorporated as rules into the _Christian Directory_.[1] Baxter believed in natural liberty and the equality of man, and justified slavery only on the ground of "necessitated consent" or captivity in lawful war. For these reasons he felt that they that buy slaves and "use them as Beasts for their meer Commodity, and betray, or destroy or neglect their Souls are fitter to be called incarnate Devils than Christians, though they be no Christians whom they so abuse."[2] His aim here, however, is not to abolish the inst.i.tution of slavery but to enlighten the Africans and bring them into the Church.[3] Exactly what effect Baxter had on this movement cannot be accurately figured out. The fact, however, that his creed was extensively adhered to by the Protestant colonists among whom his works were widely read, leads us to think that he influenced some masters to change their att.i.tude toward their slaves.

[Footnote 1: Baxter, _Practical Works_, vol. i., p. 438.]

[Footnote 2: Baxter, _Practical Works_, vol. i., p. 438-40.]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid_., p. 440.]

The next Puritan of prominence who enlisted among the helpers of the African slaves was Chief Justice Sewall, of Ma.s.sachusetts. In 1701 he stirred his section by publis.h.i.+ng his _Selling of Joseph_, a distinctly anti-slavery pamphlet, based on the natural and inalienable right of every man to be free.[1] The appearance of this publication marked an epoch in the history of the Negroes. It was the first direct attack on slavery in New England. The Puritan clergy had formerly winked at the continuation of the inst.i.tution, provided the masters were willing to give the slaves religious instruction. In the _Selling of Joseph_ Sewall had little to say about their mental and moral improvement, but in the _Athenian Oracle_, which expressed his sentiments so well that he had it republished in 1705,[2] he met more directly the problem of elevating the Negro race. Taking up this question, Sewall said: "There's yet less doubt that those who are of Age to answer for themselves would soon learn the Principles of our Faith, and might be taught the Obligation of the Vow they made in Baptism, and there's little Doubt but Abraham instructed his Heathen Servants who were of Age to learn, the Nature of Circ.u.mcision before he circ.u.mcised them; nor can we conclude much less from G.o.d's own n.o.ble Testimony of him, 'I know him that he will command his Children and his Household, and they shall keep the Way of the Lord.'"[3]

Sewall believed that the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves should be promoted to encourage Negroes to become Christians. He could not understand how any Christian could hinder or discourage them from learning the principles of the Christian religion and embracing the faith.

[Footnote 1: Moore, _Notes on Slavery in Ma.s.sachusetts_, p. 91.]

[Footnote 2: Moore, _Notes on Slavery in Ma.s.sachusetts_, p. 92; Locke, _Anti-slavery_, etc., p. 31.]

[Footnote 3: Moore, _Notes on Slavery_, etc., p. 91; _The Athenian Oracle_, vol. ii., pp. 460 _et seq_.]

This interest shown in the Negro race was in no sense general among the Puritans of that day. Many of their sect could not favor such proselyting,[1] which, according to their system of government, would have meant the extension to the slaves of social and political privileges. It was not until the French provided that masters should take their slaves to church and have them indoctrinated in the Catholic faith, that the proposition was seriously considered by many of the Puritans. They, like the Anglicans, felt sufficient compunction of conscience to take steps to Christianize the slaves, lest the Catholics, whom they had derided as undesirable churchmen, should put the Protestants to shame.[2] The publication of the Code Noir probably influenced the instructions sent out from England to his Majesty's governors requiring them "with the a.s.sistance of our council to find out the best means to facilitate and encourage the conversion of Negroes and Indians to the Christian Religion." Everly subsequently mentions in his diary the pa.s.sing of a resolution by the Council Board at Windsor or Whitehall, recommending that the blacks in plantations be baptized, and meting out severe censure to those who opposed this policy.[3]

[Footnote 1: Moore, _Notes on Slavery_, etc., p. 79.]

[Footnote 2: This good example of the Catholics was in later years often referred to by Bishop Porteus. _Works of Bishop Porteus_, vol.