I do not believe I have ever seen a law in any slave state which prohibited a master from teaching a slave to read or for that matter, prohibited a master from teaching anything to slave. There are laws about what slaves can do off he premises of the masters' lands and the are prosecutions in VA for whites teaching slaves or free blacks to read -- but these would have been other people's slaves.
******************
Paul Finkelman, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow
Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism
University of Pennsylvania
and
Scholars Advisory Panel
National Constitution Center
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
518-439-7296 (w)
518-605-0296 (c)
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www.paulfinkelman.com
From: Lewis Burruss <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2015 12:34 PM
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Teaching slaves to read
It is interesting to note that Robert Russa Moton was taught to read by the
daughter of his former master, Samuel Vaughan, of Prince Edward County. In
fact, I believe he mentions that fact in his autobiography.
Happy Thanksgiving.
L.H. Burruss
On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 12:35 PM, Jon Kukla <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Legal restrictions or prohibitions against teaching slaves to read are
> pretty widely mentioned for the antebellum period -- and yet the reports to
> the Bishop of London or the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,
> etc., from 18th-century clergymen show that Virginia's Anglican ministers
> were regularly teaching the Bible and Catechism (as well as administering
> communion) to enslaved Virginians -- and presumably many evangelical
> encouraged biblical literacy as well.
>
> I'm curious about precisely when and how laws and practice changed; I
> would be grateful either for references to the statutes by which teaching
> slaves to read came to be illegal, or perhaps reliable scholarship about
> this. And curious, too, about whether the timing and nature of this change
> in Virginia law and practice was similar or different from adjacent
> Southern colonies/states.
>
> Thank you - and Happy Thanksgiving to all (regardless of where the
> holiday originated).
>
> Jon Kukla
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