Is one embraced in the command 'Search the Scriptures'?
So is the other."[1] He maintained that unless masters could lawfully degrade their slaves to the condition of beasts, they were just as much bound to teach them to read the Bible as to teach any other class of their population.
[Footnote 1: _African Repository_, vol.xxxii., p.

16.] But great as was the interest of the religious element, the movement for the education of the Negroes of the South did not again become a scheme merely for bringing them into the church.

Masters had more than one reason for favoring the enlightenment of the slaves.

Georgia slaveholders of the more liberal class came forward about the middle of the nineteenth century, advocating the education of Negroes as a means to increase their economic value, and to attach them to their masters.

This subject was taken up in the Agricultural Convention at Macon in 1850, and was discussed again in a similar assembly the following year.