Slave owners saw literacy as a threat to the institution of slavery and their financial investment in it; as a North Carolina statute stated, "'Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion." First, literacy enabled the enslaved to read the widely-distributed writings of abolitionists, who informed readers about the slave revolution in Haiti of 1791–1804 and the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. It also allowed slaves to discover that thousands of the enslaved had escaped, often with the assistance of the Underground Railroad, to safe refuges in the Northern states and Canada. Finally, literacy was believed to make the enslaved unhappy at best, insolent and sullen at worst. As put by prominent Washington lawyer Elias B. Caldwell: