Yet, believing that slaves could not be enlightened without developing
in them a longing for liberty, not a few masters maintained that the
more brutish the bondmen the more pliant they become for purposes of
exploitation. It was this class of slaveholders that finally won the
majority of southerners to their way of thinking and determined that
Negroes should not be educated.
The history of the education of the ante-bellum Negroes, therefore,
falls into two periods. The first extends from the time of the
introduction of slavery to the climax of the insurrectionary movement
about 1835, when the majority of the people in this country answered
in the affirmative the question whether or not it was prudent to
educate their slaves. Then followed the second period, when the
industrial revolution changed slavery from a patriarchal to an
economic institution, and when intelligent Negroes, encouraged by
abolitionists, made so many attempts to organize servile insurrections
that the pendulum began to swing the other way. By this time most
southern white people reached the conclusion that it was impossible
to cultivate the minds of Negroes without arousing overmuch
self-assertion.
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