It Was Illegal to Teach a Slave to Read or Write by the 1830s
On August 21, 1831, enslaved Virginian Nat Turner led a encarmine revolt, which changed the course of American history. The uprising in Southampton County led to the killing of an estimated 55 white people, resulting in execution of some 55 Black people and the beating of hundreds of others by white mobs.
While the rebellion only lasted about 24 hours, information technology prompted a renewed wave of oppressive legislation prohibiting enslaved people's movement, assembly—and teaching.
At the same time, abolitionists saw an opening for the argument that the system of slavery was untenable. Lawmakers in Virginia argued over which path to accept. A vote to free slaves through gradual emancipation gained back up with the land'due south leaders. "It was a legitimate contend," says Patrick Breen, author of The Land Shall Exist Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt . Information technology was "not obvious that it wasn't going to laissez passer."
Nat Turner (1800-1831) accosted in the woods by a man hunting for Black people seeking freedom.
Corbis/Getty Images
Ultimately, yet, Virginia and other southern states opted to go along slavery in place and tighten control of African Americans' lives, including their literacy. In the antebellum South, it's estimated that only 10 percentage of enslaved people were literate. For many enslavers, even this rate was too high. As Clarence Lusane, a professor of political science at Howard Academy notes, there was a growing belief that "an educated enslaved person was a dangerous person."
The 1831 defection confirmed this view, which had been gaining steam for years. Turner was a passionate preacher guided by spiritual visions. His ability to read the Bible immune him to find stories of divine support for fights against injustice, explains Sarah Roth, professor of history at Meredith Higher and creator of The Nat Turner Project.
Enslavers and their clergy controlled the Biblical narrative amid illiterate enslaved people, but educated Black Americans, similar Turner, saw past this "sanitized" version, which didn't call slavery into question.
Abolitionists Agitate Through Written Give-and-take
African American literacy wasn't simply problematic to enslavers because of the potential for illuminating Biblical readings. "Anti-literacy laws were written in response to the rise of abolitionism in the n," says Breen. One of the nearly threatening abolitionists of the fourth dimension was Black New Englander David Walker. From 1829-1830, he distributed theAppeal, a pamphlet calling for uprisings to end slavery. Black sailors brought Walker's text, surreptitiously sewn into the seams of clothes, to the South.
Nat Turner's bible on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Civilisation in Washington, D.C., 2017.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images
In that location'southward no proof that Turner, himself, read the Entreatment and was inspired by it, according to Edward Rugemer, history professor at Yale Academy. Still, in that location's "a lot of show that abolitionist writings direct influenced" Caribbean uprisings around this fourth dimension, he notes. If written "abolitionist agitation was shaping the nature of slave resistance" in the islands, American enslavers believed that it could influence enslaved populations stateside.
Adding to such fears was William Lloyd Garrison'south abolitionist paper, The Liberator, which began publishing on January 1, 1831. Although it was edited by Garrison, who was described as a "radical" white abolitionist, Rugemer argues it was largely seen as a "Black newspaper," since near of its readers were African Americans, forth with a "few radical whites who believed in antislavery and antiracism." Southern enslavers saw this paper as another case of exterior agitation spread through the written give-and-take.
Literacy Threatens Justification of Slavery
Black Americans' literacy also threatened a major justification of slavery—that Black people were "less than human being, permanently illiterate and dumb," Lusane says. "That gets disproven when African Americans were educated, and undermines the logic of the system."
States fighting to hold on to slavery began tightening literacy laws in the early 1830s. In April 1831, Virginia declared that whatsoever meetings to teach free African Americans to read or write was illegal. New codes besides outlawed teaching enslaved people.
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Other southern states passed similarly strict anti-literacy laws effectually this time. In 1833, an Alabama law asserted that "any person or persons who shall attempt to teach any gratuitous person of color, or slave, to spell, read, or write, shall upon conviction thereof of indictment be fined in a sum not less than two hundred and fifty dollars." (The fine would be the equivalent of about $7,600 in today's dollars.)
Despite the consequences, many enslaved people continued to learn to read. And numerous enslavers may have supported this. Many enslaved people did "sophisticated piece of work, including management of operations," which required literacy, explains Rugemer. Barring Black Americans from reading and writing wasn't a applied strategy for anyone.
And information technology was too late.
After Ceremonious State of war, Schools Leap Up
Antislavery ideas had already spread, largely through the written word. Every bit Roth points out, "Literacy promotes thought and raises consciousness. It helps you lot to get outside of your ain cultural constraints and think about things from a totally different angle."
Freed Blackness people learning to read with white teachers in schoolhouse circa 1860.
Fotosearch/Getty Images
The view that slavery was wrong and should be concluded was reinforced through written texts. Soon later Turner'due south rebellion, in 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation alleged that all slaves in us currently engaged in rebellion against the Matrimony "shall be so, thenceforward, and forever free."
When U.Southward. army units began arriving in Virginia in 1861, members of the freed Black customs quickly began opening up schools for African Americans, staffed with Blackness teachers, as well as white Northerners. Post-obit the end of the Civil State of war, literacy rates climbed steadily amidst Blackness Americans, rising from xx percent in 1870 to nearly seventy percentage by 1910, according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.
READ More than: Slavery in America
Source: https://www.history.com/news/nat-turner-rebellion-literacy-slavery
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