Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/72

58 This is a striking proof how closely Christianity and liberty are associated together.

A French planter of St Domingo, in a book which he published concerning that colony, admits that it is desirable to have negroes know enough of religion to make them friends to humanity, and grateful to their Creator; but he considers it very wrong to load their weak minds with a belief in supernatural dogmas, such as a belief in a future state. He says, "such knowledge is apt to render them intractable, averse to labor, and induces them to commit suicide on themselves and their children, of which the colony, the state, and commerce have equal need.

Our slave holders, in general, seem desirous to have the slave just religious enough to know that insurrections and murder are contrary to the maxims of Christianity; but it is very difficult to have them learn just so much as this, without learning more. In Georgia, I have been told, that a very general prejudice prevails against white missionaries. To avoid this danger, old domestic slaves, who are better informed than the plantation slaves, are employed to hear sermons and repeat them to their brethren; and their repetitions are said to be strange samples of pulpit eloquence. One of these old negroes, as the story goes, told his hearers that the Bible said slaves ought to get their freedom; and if they could not do it in any other way, they must murder their masters. The slaves had never been allowed to learn to read, and of course they could not dispute that such a doctrine was actually in the Scriptures. Thus do unjust and absurd laws "return to plague the inventor."

. 12.—Whole power of the laws exerted to keep negroes in ignorance.

South Carolina made the first law upon this subject. While yet a province, she laid a penalty of one hundred pounds upon any person who taught a slave to write, or allowed him to be taught to write. In Virginia, any