Many
southerners braved the terrors of public opinion and taught their
Negroes to read the Scriptures. To this extent General Coxe of
Fluvanna County, Virginia, taught about one hundred of his adult
slaves.[2] While serving as a professor of the Military Institute
at Lexington, Stonewall Jackson taught a class of Negroes in a
Sunday-school.[3]
[Footnote 1: Orr, "An Address on the Need of Education in the South,
1879."]
[Footnote 2: This statement is made by several of General Coxe's
slaves who are still living.]
[Footnote 3: _School Journal_, vol. lxxx., p. 332.]
Further interest in the cause was shown by the Evangelical Society
of the Synods of North Carolina and Virginia in 1834.[1] Later
Presbyterians of Alabama and Georgia urged masters to enlighten their
slaves.[2] The attitude of many mountaineers of Kentucky was well set
forth in the address of the Synod of 1836, proposing a plan for the
instruction and emancipation of the slaves.[3] They complained that
throughout the land, so far as they could learn, there was but one
school in which slaves could be taught during the week. The light
of three or four Sabbath-schools was seen "glittering through the
darkness" of the black population of the whole State.
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