[1] In South Carolina a formal remonstrance signed by over
300 planters and citizens was presented to a Methodist preacher chosen
by a conference of that State as a "cautious and discreet person"[2]
especially qualified to preach to slaves, and pledged to confine
himself to verbal instruction. In Falmouth, Virginia, several white
ladies began to meet on Sunday afternoons to teach Negro children the
principles of the Christian religion. They were unable to continue
their work a month before the local officials stopped them, although
these women openly avowed that they did not intend to teach reading
and writing.[3] Thus the development of the religious education of
the Negroes in certain parts of the South had been from literary
instruction as a means of imparting Christian truth to the policy
of oral indoctrination, and from this purely memory teaching to no
education at all.
[Footnote 1: The cause of this drastic policy was not so much race
hatred as the fear that any kind of instruction might cause the
Negroes to assert themselves.]
[Footnote 2: Olmsted, _Back Country_, pp. 105, 108.]
[Footnote 3: Conway, _Testimonies Concerning Slavery_, p.
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