Law That Slaves Could Not Be Taught to Read and Write

Literacy and Religious Instruction

From the earliest days of the Virginia colony, at that place was a strong connection between the literacy of slaves and religion. Many slaveholders and clergymen believed it was their duty to convert enslaved African Americans to Christianity and sometimes used the hope of such conversions equally a justification for slavery. Religious didactics, however, oftentimes involved catechism, thus requiring some degree of literacy among potential converts. This was complicated by common-law norms that equated Christian baptism and liberty. In 1656, for case, a Virginia courtroom awarded freedom to the enslaved woman Elizabeth Key—the daughter of an enslaved woman and a gratis white begetter—subsequently she proved that she had been baptized. Slaveholders who considered pedagogy their slaves to read the Bible may have been discouraged from doing and then by such a ruling. Two laws changed that, however. In 1662, the General Assembly continued a person's enslavement or freedom to "the status of the mother," and in 1667 the assembly removed baptism as an artery to freedom. Co-ordinate to lawmakers, "masters" were at present complimentary to "more advisedly effort the propagation of christianity."

By 1680 their efforts might have produced an unanticipated consequence in that some slaves, in add-on to learning how to read, had also taught themselves how to write. That may explain why that year, the House of Burgesses declared information technology unlawful "for whatever negro … to goe or depart from his principal'south ground without a certificate from his master, mistress or overseer." That is to say, in the absence of proper written consent, slaves could be taken upwards equally runaways and could receive "twenty lashes on the bare back well layd on, and soe sent habitation to his said master, mistris or overseer."

In 1660, Virginia'south population of 27,020 included just 950 blacks, enslaved or free, and according to Morgan Godwyn, few of them received religious instruction in spite of changes to the police. Godwyn was an Anglican minister who served outset in Virginia and then in Barbados between 1665 and 1680. Upon his return to England, he published the pamphlet Negro's and Indians Abet , which observed that many African Americans were "rather fond and desirous of being made Christians." He argued that, in spite of their masters' apprehensions, greater zeal should exist taken in the instruction of slaves. "Being myself fully persuaded," he wrote, "God will assuredly make good his Hope to the World, of causing his Gospel to be published … I do here tender to the Public this Plea both for the Christianizing of our Negro's and other Heathen in those Plantations."

By "Christianizing," Godwyn meant educational activity slaves to read. As early as the 1660s, reading had become a fundamental part of catechizing new parishioners in England. "Equally shortly as memorizing was going well," the historian Ian Light-green has explained, "the focus was shifted to comprehension." Increasingly, "we observe catechetical authors either associating literacy with learning a canon or bold that those using a course would already be literate." And with that "thorow cognition of [Christian] Principles," Godwyn declared, slaves could likewise realize their primary purpose in life, "namely to glorifie and serve God."

Alphabetic character to Bishop Edmund Gibson

In 1723, an anonymous letter was written to the new bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, by ane or more than slaves in Virginia. The letter is dated Baronial 4 at the beginning and September 8 at the end, and employs both the first-person singular and first-person plural. "Wee darer nott Subscribe any mans name to this," the letter of the alphabet reads, "for feare of our masters for if they knew that wee have Sent habitation to your honor wee Should goo neare to Swing upon the gallas tree." How the certificate was transported to London is unknown. The letter pleads with the bishop to "Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg" and also requests that slaves in Virginia be educated. In particular, the writers request that "our childarn may be broatt up in the way of the Christian faith." They not only inquire to be taught to recite the Lord's Prayer, the creed, and the Ten Commandments but likewise that their children exist sent "to Scool and Larnd to Reed through the Bybell."

Gibson was a member of the Order for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded by the Reverend Dr. Thomas Bray in 1701 and charged with ministering abroad, especially to slaves and Native Americans. Not long after taking role, the bishop distributed a seventeen-question "Paper of Enquiries" to the Anglican clergy in North America. He asked virtually the size of congregations, how services were conducted, and—perhaps influenced by the Virginia letter, which he had just received—whether "at that place are any Infidels, bond or gratuitous, within your Parish; and what means are used for their conversion?"

At the time Virginia had 50-4 parishes; responses from twenty-viii take survived. They suggest that simply a modest number of slaves received an educational activity; that most who did were born in America; that their pedagogy was connected to religious conversion; and that reading was an essential part of that educational activity. Indeed, extant birth and baptism records suggest that slaves mastered reading before receiving the rite of baptism.

"Nosotros've no infidels, that are free," reported Henry Collins, the rector of Saint Peter'south Parish, in New Kent County, "merely a nifty many Negro-bondslaves; some of which are suffered by the corresponding Masters to be baptized … merely others are not." The parson'due south observation matches the historical tape. During the 1720s, only xv percent of the 283 slaves whose births had been recorded by Saint Peter's were subsequently baptized. George Robertson, the rector of Bristol Parish in James City Canton, expressed like sentiments. "Some masters instruct Slaves at dwelling or bring them to baptism," he wrote, "but not many." In his parish, no more than 7 per centum of enslaved infants were baptized during the 1720s.

Other clerics reported some success in providing religious pedagogy. William Black, the rector of Accomako Parish, on the Eastern Shore, wrote that since his arrival in 1709 he had baptized about 200 slaves. William LeNeve, the rector of James City Parish, told the bishop that he had "examined and improved several Negroes natives of Virginia" and that he hoped to "plant that seed amidst them, west[hi]ch will produce a blessed Harvest." Francis Fontaine, the rector of York-Hampton Parish, was more precise, reporting, "I know of no Infidels in my Parish except Slaves. I exhort their Master to send them to me to exist instructed. And in Order to their Conversion I have set up a role every Saturday in the afternoon and Catechize them at my Glebe house." John Cargill, the rector of Southwark Parish, in Surry Canton, mentioned a school for Indians in his parish. "As to ye Negro slaves in that location," he wrote, "some of their Masters on whom I do prevail to have ye baptized: I taught, just not many."

In a public reply to the letters he had received, Gibson encouraged "the Schoolmasters in several Parishes, parts of whose Business organization it is to instruct Youth in the Principles of Christianity … [carry] on this Work … on the Lord's Day, when both they and the Negroes are almost at Liberty."

Slave Advertisements

In addition to church records, runaway slave advertisements provide prove that some slaves learned to read and write. Between 1736 and 1776, approximately i,000 fugitive-slave notices appeared in the Virginia Gazette, published in Williamsburg. Of that number, 55 runaways, or more than 5 percent, were described as literate. In the first three years of the paper's publication, 44 slaves were reported as having stolen themselves away. None, yet, was reported equally literate. But in the following decade, ane of 33 was identified as educated. By the 1750s that number grew. Around the same time the colony'due south slave population most doubled, 3 of 72 runaways were noted as beingness literate. In the 1760s, 16 out of 233 runaways, or 6.viii percent, had learned to read and write. By the time the colony declared independence, 35 of 648 runaways, or 5.4 percentage, had achieved literacy.

Amid that number was Isaac Bee, who fled from the Mecklenburg County manor of Lewis Burwell in July 1774. A fellow member of the Business firm of Burgesses, Burwell placed an advert in the September 8 issue of the Virginia Gazette calling for the return of "a probable Mulatto Lad named ISAAC BEE." He described Bee as eighteen to nineteen years sometime and the son of a "Freeman" and therefore someone who "thinks he has a Right to his Freedom." Burwell worried that Bee would pass as a freeman and noted that "he can read, merely I practise not know that he can write; however, he may easily get some One to forge a Laissez passer for him."

Although the percentage of fugitives who both appeared in advertisements and were literate was small, the percent of literate fugitives who could both read and write was loftier: 62 percent. Thus, while Burwell was not certain as to whether Bee had learned to write, he had skilful reason to believe that other enslaved people had learned and would help create a pass allowing him to travel freely.

Bray Schools in Virginia

Isaac Bee and a relative handful of other slaves in Virginia were educated in Bray schools. The Associates of Dr. Bray was a philanthropic grouping founded in 1724 past the Anglican clergyman Thomas Bray, who had already established the Society for Promoting Christian Noesis in 1699 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Strange Parts (SPG) in 1701. In keeping with the prophet Isaiah'south injunction to "seek ye out the volume of the Lord, and read," the Assembly established schools in Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia that provided enslaved people Christian education through biblical literacy. As in Bray's other groups, reading represented a central aspect of the Assembly' mission and was seen as an musical instrument of reform.

The school in Williamsburg operated at diverse locations from 1760 to 1774. It employed a single instructor and was overseen by a number of people, including successive presidents of the College of William and Mary. A similar school opened in Fredericksburg in 1765 and was run by the merchant Fielding Lewis. It closed during the wintertime of 1769–1770 due to depression enrollment and hostility from local slaveholders. All the Bray schools in America had closed past 1776.

Bee, then endemic by John Blair, a member of the governor's Council, was enrolled at the Williamsburg schoolhouse in December 1764. The extant roster indicates that he began attending the school at age seven. Nether the guidance of the teacher Anne Wager, he and his sister Clara learned the Campaigner's Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the catechism. Initially their lessons involved recitation and memorization. As they progressed, they learned "the true Spelling of Words" and how to pronounce "& read distinctly." The Assembly believed that slaveholders had a Christian obligation to provide reading teaching, especially to those who had been born in the colony.

Equally many every bit 400 mostly urban slaves and a few gratis blacks in and around Williamsburg were educated at the Bray school. They attended in classes of between 20 and 30, with their numbers fairly evenly divided between boys and girls. Perhaps equally few equally twoscore or 50 students attended the Fredericksburg school. Equally a letter from a Virginia chaplain to the Associates revealed, African-born slaves were non considered to be good candidates for biblical literacy because they were idea to be too unfamiliar with Western languages.

In add-on to the Fredericksburg and Williamsburg schools, a number of unofficial Bray schools operated in the colony. Well-nigh were run by churchwardens who usually likewise served equally the schoolmasters. Two of these schools used slaves every bit schoolmasters. Adam Dickie, the government minister of Drysdale Parish in King and Queen County, taught several slaves, some of whom he trusted to teach others. In 1732, the parson boasted that he had fourteen slaves in his congregation who "could respond for themselves and repeat the Canon very distinctly." Two years later, he circulated SPG books to those slaves "he thought most diligent and desirous to read." Jonathan Boucher, a minister in Hanover Parish, King George Canton, also employed slaves as teachers. I "employed the services of a literate Negro slave," he explained, "who lived nearby to teach his fellow brethren how to read." When he relocated to Caroline County in 1764, Boucher continued the practice. "The Method I accept," he wrote in a letter to the Associates, "I hope They will think is non misapplying information technology, I mostly find out an sometime Negro … able to read, to whom I give Books, with an Injunction to Them to instruct such & such Slaves in their corresponding Neighbourhoods."

Fear of Slave Literacy

While many white Virginians believed that literacy was necessary for the religious conversion of slaves, they also feared the consequences of such an education. For ane, a slave's ability to read and write contradicted one of the ideological foundations of slavery—the idea that Africans and African Americans were intellectually and morally inferior and, therefore, in need of guidance by white men. For some other, the pedagogy of slaves risked exposing them to ideas of homo equality that circulated during the American Revolution. Virginia slaveholders worried that their slaves, armed with such ideas, might rebel.

Those concerns were not unfounded. During the spring and summer of 1800 dozens of enslaved men in and effectually Richmond concocted a plan to kill their masters and other white people, seize Governor James Monroe, and fire Richmond. Gabriel's Conspiracy, every bit the plot came to be known, was betrayed at the last moment and its participants seized. Twenty-6 slaves were hanged and viii more sold out of state. Testimony at the trials suggests that a number of slaves, including Gabriel, George Smith, and Sam Byrd Jr., could read and write. They forged passes in order to travel from plantation to plantation, kept lists of the names of conspirators, and planned to sew a flag bearing the words "death or liberty."

Literacy allowed enslaved men and women a express ability to move about and provided them some admission to written ideas. In addition, skilled slaves were often hired out, enhancing their exposure to a diverseness of people and perhaps giving them greater admission to notions of freedom and liberty. As a literate blacksmith regularly hired out by his master, Gabriel may take represented a threat to many white Virginians, and in the aftermath of the conspiracy that bore his name, the General Assembly passed new restrictions that attempted to brand such an event less likely in the hereafter. Nigh, however, focused on the office of gratis blacks in the conspiracy and did non address the education of slaves. In January 1804, the assembly prohibited all slaves from gathering together at night—at churches, meetinghouses, or anywhere else—nether any pretext. Although the law did non explicitly connect such gatherings with slaves learning to read or write, it was implied in function because much of that learning took place in churches at night.

The instruction of slaves, meanwhile, was not expressly prohibited. In 1805, the General Associates updated its before law prohibiting the gathering of slaves to clarify that it was not intended to prevent masters from taking their slaves to church. In 1819, the associates further antiseptic the law. In improver to being prohibited from gathering at meetinghouses, slaves were now banned from "any schoolhouse or schools for teaching them reading or writing, either in the mean solar day or night." It connected to exist legal for slaveholders to instruct their slaves outside of schools, churches, and meetinghouses, and some masters believed that literacy increased a slave'southward value. Nearly slaveholders, still, resisted the impulse to educate. Notwithstanding, many of their slaves worked hard and often took great risks to educate themselves.

"I recall that I had an intense longing to acquire to read," Booker T. Washington recalled in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, published in 1901. Washington was built-in enslaved almost 1856 in Franklin Canton. "I determined, when quite a small child, that, if I accomplished nothing else in life, I would in some way get enough instruction to enable me to read." To that end, he "induced" his "female parent to get hold of a volume" for him. "How or where she got it I do not know, only in some way she procured an former re-create of Webster'south 'blue-back' spelling-book, which contained the alphabet, followed by such meaningless words every bit 'ab,' 'ba,' 'ca,' 'da.' I began at once to devour this volume."

In his memoir Xx-Eight Years a Slave (1909), Thomas L. Johnson recalled that his mother had been his starting time teacher. "She taught me what she knew," he wrote. "The whole of her education consisted in a knowledge of the Alphabet, and how to count [to] a hundred. She first taught me the Lord's Prayer." James W. Sumler, who escaped from Norfolk to Canada in 1855, told an interviewer that he also learned to read: "I hid in a hayloft on Sunday, and got the younger white children to teach me. I bought the book with a ninepence that a man gave me for holding his horse."

Extant narratives and letters too demonstrate that enslaved Virginians used their ability to read and write for many ends. Born a slave in 1838 in Fredericksburg, John M. Washington learned to read from his mother Sarah Tucker. In his early teens, he taught himself to write. Like other Virginia slaves, he used literacy to communicate with his extended family unit. When not recounting parties and gossip inside and exterior church, Washington wrote Annie Gordon, a gratis black daughter several years his junior love letters and flirtatious notes. A Virginia slave woman named Maria Perkins wrote her married man Richard, lamenting the sale of their children.

Sundays proved to be perhaps the about advantageous days for learning. They afforded enslaved Virginians such every bit Washington, Perkins, Sumler, and others some fourth dimension off for religious observance and a chance to steal away to read and write. About masters preached from the New Attestation, but slave songs document a preference for the Sometime Testament. Instead of messages of subservience and obedience, slaves throughout Virginia favored reading and singing well-nigh deliverance and faith.

Nat Turner

A particularly potent fusion of literacy and prophetic religion found a home in the enslaved preacher Nat Turner, of Southampton Canton. Born in 1800, the year of Gabriel's Conspiracy, Turner came of age in a deeply religious slave customs. He regularly attended church building with his grandmother. By nearly supernatural circumstances, he had learned to read and write. "The style in which I learned to read and write," he explained from his jail cell, "I caused information technology with the well-nigh perfect ease, so much then, that I take no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet." To the astonishment of his family and the local community, he began, at a relatively immature age to read. "One day," he noted, "when a volume was shewn me to go on me from crying, I began spelling the names of unlike objects."

Even so he learned, Turner's education improved as he grew older. At age twenty-two, he underwent a series of spiritual visions through which, he believed, God spoke to him. Transfixed by images of blood-stained corn, hieroglyphic characters, and numbers he discovered in the forest, in addition to blackness and white apparitions fighting in the heaven and his own reading of John the Apostle, Turner became convinced that "the dandy day of judgment was at paw" and that he was deputed to destroy the wicked institution of slavery. On that 24-hour interval, in his heed, "the showtime should be terminal and the concluding should be first." Months before Turner led a grouping of slaves, free African Americans, and at least one white indentured retainer in the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history, the General Assembly expressed concerns about slave education.

Revising the 1819 law prohibiting slave teaching, the assembly declared "that all meetings of gratis negroes or mulattoes, at any schoolhouse firm, church, coming together-house or other place for education them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under any pretext, shall be considered every bit an unlawful assembly." Furthermore, sympathetic whites caught teaching free negroes or mulattoes to read or write were fined 50 dollars, or twice that sum if they were caught instructing slaves. To discourage such meetings, they connected to threaten corporal penalisation. Just these efforts were ultimately in vain; slaves continued to learn to read and write.

In the aftermath of Turner's failed revolt, the General Assembly debated whether to end slavery in Virginia altogether, deciding eventually to adopt legislation that more than strictly regulated the behavior of the land's enslaved population. Vii months after Turner and his party had been captured and hanged, the assembly outlawed slaves preaching at any time. Complimentary blacks, mulattoes, and slaves were likewise prohibited from attending unsupervised meetings "held for religious purposes, or other instruction." White ministers were forbidden from preaching to costless blacks, mulattoes, or slaves without permission. Moreover, punishments were also prescribed for whites, complimentary blacks, mulattoes, and slaves who were caught with written or printed materials that encouraged insurrection.

Legacy

Despite the many social and legal obstacles, and indeed sometimes the physical hazard, enslaved African Americans in Virginia learned to read and write. Sources ranging from runaway ads to archaeological finds suggest that as many as 5 per centum of slaves learned to read before the American Revolution. Historians looking at ads and accounts by enslaved and formerly enslaved people believe that may have doubled to 10 per centum during the antebellum era. This desire for an education continued slaves to Christian faith and the outside world, and it followed them to liberty. Every bit Wedlock armies arrived in Virginia in 1861, African Americans immediately began opening schools. They utilized black teachers and, over the years, an increasing number of white Northerners. Literacy rates rose accordingly, to 30 percent between the cease of the war and the 1880s, and to 70 percent past 1910.

And ever there was an insatiable want to learn. Booker T. Washington recalled an elderly woman who "hobbled into the room where I was, leaning on a cane. She was clad in rags; only they were make clean. She said: 'Mr. Washin'ton, God knows I spent de bes' days of my life in slavery. God knows I's ignorant an' poor… I knows you is tryin' to make better men an' amend women for de coloured race. I ain't got no coin, simply I wants you to accept dese half-dozen eggs, what I'due south been savin' up, an' I wants you to put dese six eggs into the eddication of dese boys an' gals."

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Source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/slave-literacy-and-education-in-virginia/

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