Bible Obey Master Never Read to Her That Again Illiterate

Literacy and Religious Instruction

From the earliest days of the Virginia colony, there was a strong connection between the literacy of slaves and organized religion. Many slaveholders and clergymen believed it was their duty to convert enslaved African Americans to Christianity and sometimes used the promise of such conversions as a justification for slavery. Religious instruction, nevertheless, often involved catechism, thus requiring some caste of literacy among potential converts. This was complicated by common-law norms that equated Christian baptism and liberty. In 1656, for example, a Virginia court awarded freedom to the enslaved woman Elizabeth Key—the daughter of an enslaved woman and a free white male parent—after she proved that she had been baptized. Slaveholders who considered teaching their slaves to read the Bible may have been discouraged from doing so by such a ruling. Two laws changed that, however. In 1662, the Full general Assembly connected a person's enslavement or freedom to "the condition of the female parent," and in 1667 the assembly removed baptism as an avenue to liberty. Co-ordinate to lawmakers, "masters" were now gratuitous to "more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity."

By 1680 their efforts might have produced an unanticipated event 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 Firm of Burgesses declared it unlawful "for whatever negro … to goe or depart from his main'south basis without a certificate from his main, mistress or overseer." That is to say, in the absence of proper written consent, slaves could exist taken up as runaways and could receive "20 lashes on the blank back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said principal, mistris or overseer."

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

By "Christianizing," Godwyn meant didactics slaves to read. Equally early as the 1660s, reading had get a fundamental office of catechizing new parishioners in England. "As shortly every bit memorizing was going well," the historian Ian Dark-green has explained, "the focus was shifted to comprehension." Increasingly, "we find catechetical authors either associating literacy with learning a catechism or assuming that those using a form would already be literate." And with that "thorow knowledge of [Christian] Principles," Godwyn declared, slaves could also realize their primary purpose in life, "namely to glorifie and serve God."

Letter to Bishop Edmund Gibson

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

Gibson was a member of the Society 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 office, the bishop distributed a seventeen-question "Paper of Enquiries" to the Anglican clergy in North America. He asked well-nigh the size of congregations, how services were conducted, and—peradventure influenced by the Virginia letter, which he had but received—whether "there are any Infidels, bond or free, inside your Parish; and what means are used for their conversion?"

At the fourth dimension Virginia had fifty-four parishes; responses from twenty-eight accept survived. They suggest that but a pocket-size number of slaves received an teaching; that nearly who did were built-in in America; that their instruction was continued to religious conversion; and that reading was an essential part of that instruction. Indeed, extant birth and baptism records suggest that slaves mastered reading before receiving the rite of baptism.

"Nosotros've no infidels, that are gratuitous," reported Henry Collins, the rector of Saint Peter's Parish, in New Kent Canton, "merely a great many Negro-bondslaves; some of which are suffered by the respective Masters to be baptized … simply others are not." The parson'south observation matches the historical record. During the 1720s, only 15 percentage of the 283 slaves whose births had been recorded by Saint Peter'southward were after baptized. George Robertson, the rector of Bristol Parish in James City County, expressed similar sentiments. "Some masters instruct Slaves at habitation 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 education. 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 among them, w[how-do-you-do]ch volition produce a blest 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 Principal to send them to me to be instructed. And in Order to their Conversion I have set a office every Saturday in the afternoon and Catechize them at my Glebe firm." John Cargill, the rector of Southwark Parish, in Surry County, mentioned a school for Indians in his parish. "Equally to ye Negro slaves in that location," he wrote, "some of their Masters on whom I practise prevail to have ye baptized: I taught, only non many."

In a public answer to the letters he had received, Gibson encouraged "the Schoolmasters in several Parishes, parts of whose Business it is to instruct Youth in the Principles of Christianity … [carry] on this Piece of work … on the Lord's 24-hour interval, when both they and the Negroes are most at Liberty."

Slave Advertisements

In addition to church building records, runaway slave advertisements provide evidence that some slaves learned to read and write. Between 1736 and 1776, approximately 1,000 avoiding-slave notices appeared in the Virginia Gazette, published in Williamsburg. Of that number, 55 runaways, or more than v percent, were described every bit literate. In the first three years of the newspaper's publication, 44 slaves were reported as having stolen themselves abroad. None, withal, was reported as literate. Merely in the following decade, 1 of 33 was identified as educated. By the 1750s that number grew. Around the aforementioned time the colony's slave population almost doubled, 3 of 72 runaways were noted equally existence literate. In the 1760s, xvi out of 233 runaways, or 6.8 percent, had learned to read and write. By the time the colony declared independence, 35 of 648 runaways, or 5.4 pct, had achieved literacy.

Among that number was Isaac Bee, who fled from the Mecklenburg County manor of Lewis Burwell in July 1774. A member of the House of Burgesses, Burwell placed an advertisement in the September 8 issue of the Virginia Gazette calling for the render of "a likely Mulatto Lad named ISAAC BEE." He described Bee equally xviii to nineteen years old 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, but I exercise not know that he can write; however, he may hands get some One to forge a Pass 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 high: 62 pct. Thus, while Burwell was non certain every bit to whether Bee had learned to write, he had good 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 group founded in 1724 past the Anglican clergyman Thomas Bray, who had already established the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1699 and the Social club for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in 1701. In keeping with the prophet Isaiah's injunction to "seek ye out the book of the Lord, and read," the Assembly established schools in Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Isle, and Virginia that provided enslaved people Christian education through biblical literacy. As in Bray's other groups, reading represented a central aspect of the Associates' mission and was seen as an instrument of reform.

The school in Williamsburg operated at various 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 schoolhouse opened in Fredericksburg in 1765 and was run past the merchant Fielding Lewis. It airtight during the wintertime of 1769–1770 due to low enrollment and hostility from local slaveholders. All the Bray schools in America had closed by 1776.

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

As many as 400 by and large urban slaves and a few complimentary blacks in and around Williamsburg were educated at the Bray schoolhouse. They attended in classes of between twenty and 30, with their numbers adequately evenly divided between boys and girls. Perhaps equally few as 40 or 50 students attended the Fredericksburg school. As a letter from a Virginia chaplain to the Associates revealed, African-built-in slaves were not considered to exist adept candidates for biblical literacy because they were thought to be also unfamiliar with Western languages.

In addition to the Fredericksburg and Williamsburg schools, a number of unofficial Bray schools operated in the colony. Most were run by churchwardens who usually also served as the schoolmasters. Two of these schools used slaves as schoolmasters. Adam Dickie, the government minister of Drysdale Parish in Rex and Queen County, taught several slaves, some of whom he trusted to teach others. In 1732, the parson boasted that he had 14 slaves in his congregation who "could reply for themselves and repeat the Canon very distinctly." Two years later, he circulated SPG books to those slaves "he idea most diligent and desirous to read." Jonathan Boucher, a minister in Hanover Parish, King George Canton, too employed slaves every bit 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 Canton in 1764, Boucher continued the practice. "The Method I take," he wrote in a letter to the Associates, "I hope They will think is not misapplying it, I generally find out an old Negro … able to read, to whom I give Books, with an Injunction to Them to instruct such & such Slaves in their respective 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 one, a slave's power to read and write contradicted 1 of the ideological foundations of slavery—the thought that Africans and African Americans were intellectually and morally inferior and, therefore, in need of guidance by white men. For another, the education of slaves risked exposing them to ideas of human 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 bound and summer of 1800 dozens of enslaved men in and around Richmond concocted a program to kill their masters and other white people, seize Governor James Monroe, and burn Richmond. Gabriel's Conspiracy, every bit the plot came to be known, was betrayed at the final moment and its participants seized. Twenty-half dozen slaves were hanged and eight 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 movement about and provided them some access to written ideas. In addition, skilled slaves were often hired out, enhancing their exposure to a variety of people and perhaps giving them greater admission to notions of liberty and liberty. As a literate blacksmith regularly hired out by his master, Gabriel may have represented a threat to many white Virginians, and in the aftermath of the conspiracy that bore his name, the Full general Assembly passed new restrictions that attempted to make such an outcome less probable in the future. Most, even so, focused on the office of free blacks in the conspiracy and did not address the educational activity of slaves. In January 1804, the assembly prohibited all slaves from gathering together at dark—at churches, meetinghouses, or anywhere else—under any pretext. Although the law did not explicitly connect such gatherings with slaves learning to read or write, it was implied in part considering much of that learning took identify in churches at night.

The education of slaves, meanwhile, was not expressly prohibited. In 1805, the General Associates updated its earlier police prohibiting the gathering of slaves to clarify that it was not intended to prevent masters from taking their slaves to church building. In 1819, the associates farther clarified the law. In add-on to being prohibited from gathering at meetinghouses, slaves were at present banned from "any school or schools for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night." It connected to be legal for slaveholders to instruct their slaves outside of schools, churches, and meetinghouses, and some masters believed that literacy increased a slave's value. Almost slaveholders, withal, resisted the impulse to educate. Still, many of their slaves worked difficult and often took groovy risks to brainwash themselves.

"I recollect that I had an intense longing to learn to read," Booker T. Washington recalled in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, published in 1901. Washington was born enslaved about 1856 in Franklin County. "I determined, when quite a small child, that, if I accomplished nothing else in life, I would in some fashion get enough education to enable me to read." To that end, he "induced" his "mother to get hold of a volume" for him. "How or where she got it I do non know, but in some fashion she procured an old copy of Webster's 'blue-back' spelling-book, which contained the alphabet, followed by such meaningless words equally 'ab,' 'ba,' 'ca,' 'da.' I began at in one case to devour this book."

In his memoir 20-Viii Years a Slave (1909), Thomas L. Johnson recalled that his mother had been his kickoff 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'due south Prayer." James West. Sumler, who escaped from Norfolk to Canada in 1855, told an interviewer that he also learned to read: "I hid in a hayloft on Lord's day, and got the younger white children to teach me. I bought the volume with a ninepence that a human gave me for holding his equus caballus."

Extant narratives and letters also 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 outside church, Washington wrote Annie Gordon, a free black daughter several years his junior love letters and flirtatious notes. A Virginia slave adult female named Maria Perkins wrote her husband Richard, lamenting the auction of their children.

Sundays proved to be perhaps the most advantageous days for learning. They afforded enslaved Virginians such equally Washington, Perkins, Sumler, and others some time off for religious observance and a chance to steal abroad to read and write. Most masters preached from the New Testament, but slave songs document a preference for the Former Testament. Instead of messages of subservience and obedience, slaves throughout Virginia favored reading and singing virtually deliverance and faith.

Nat Turner

A particularly potent fusion of literacy and prophetic religion establish a home in the enslaved preacher Nat Turner, of Southampton Canton. Built-in in 1800, the year of Gabriel'due south Conspiracy, Turner came of historic period in a deeply religious slave community. He regularly attended church building with his grandmother. Past almost supernatural circumstances, he had learned to read and write. "The manner in which I learned to read and write," he explained from his jail cell, "I acquired information technology with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet." To the astonishment of his family and the local community, he began, at a relatively young age to read. "I day," he noted, "when a book was shewn me to keep me from crying, I began spelling the names of different objects."

Notwithstanding he learned, Turner'due south educational activity improved as he grew older. At historic period twenty-two, he underwent a series of spiritual visions through which, he believed, God spoke to him. Transfixed past images of claret-stained corn, hieroglyphic characters, and numbers he discovered in the woods, in improver to blackness and white apparitions fighting in the sky and his ain reading of John the Campaigner, Turner became convinced that "the neat day of judgment was at manus" and that he was commissioned to destroy the wicked institution of slavery. On that twenty-four hours, in his mind, "the first should be last and the concluding should be starting time." Months before Turner led a group of slaves, complimentary 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 education, the assembly declared "that all meetings of free negroes or mulattoes, at any school firm, church, meeting-house or other place for pedagogy them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be considered equally an unlawful assembly." Furthermore, sympathetic whites caught teaching free negroes or mulattoes to read or write were fined fifty dollars, or twice that sum if they were caught instructing slaves. To discourage such meetings, they connected to threaten corporal punishment. But these efforts were ultimately in vain; slaves continued to learn to read and write.

In the aftermath of Turner's failed revolt, the Full general Assembly debated whether to cease slavery in Virginia altogether, deciding eventually to adopt legislation that more strictly regulated the beliefs of the state'due south enslaved population. 7 months afterwards Turner and his political party had been captured and hanged, the assembly outlawed slaves preaching at whatsoever time. Complimentary blacks, mulattoes, and slaves were too prohibited from attending unsupervised meetings "held for religious purposes, or other instruction." White ministers were forbidden from preaching to gratuitous blacks, mulattoes, or slaves without permission. Moreover, punishments were too prescribed for whites, gratis 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 risk, enslaved African Americans in Virginia learned to read and write. Sources ranging from delinquent ads to archaeological finds suggest that equally many as 5 percent of slaves learned to read earlier the American Revolution. Historians looking at ads and accounts by enslaved and formerly enslaved people believe that may have doubled to 10 percent during the antebellum era. This want for an pedagogy continued slaves to Christian religion and the outside earth, and it followed them to liberty. As Union 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 end of the war and the 1880s, and to seventy per centum past 1910.

And always 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 clean. She said: 'Mr. Washin'ton, God knows I spent de bes' days of my life in slavery. God knows I'due south ignorant an' poor… I knows y'all is tryin' to make meliorate men an' improve women for de coloured race. I ain't got no money, simply I wants you to take dese six eggs, what I's been savin' upward, an' I wants y'all 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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