In Louisiana, the penalty for teaching slaves to read or write, is one year's imprisonment. In plain English, education is regarded as positively inconsistent with slavery, and its prohibition as indispensable to the continuance of the system. But let us see what is the extent of instruction in those states which do not expressly interdict it by statute. We have specified Kentucky as an example of this nature, and she is perhaps the fairest specimen among all the slaveholding states. The following testimony is quoted from the address of the Kentucky Synod already referred to.
Slavery dooms thousands of human beings to hopeless ignorance.
Here and there a family is found, where humanity and religion impel the master, mistress, or children, to the laborious task of private instruction. The afternoon sermon is always intended especially for the blacks. The number present yesterday was probably over 400. Rev. Mr. Houp informed me that preaching was not kept up regularly in any other Methodist church in Middle Alabama except Montgomery. The Rev. Mr. Converse, who was at one period an agent of the Colonization Society, and resided for some time in Virginia, states in a discourse before the Vermont Colonization Society, that 'almost nothing is done to instruct the slaves in the principles and duties of the Christian religion.