In a word, every attempt to instruct or convert them has been constantly opposed by their masters." See Rush, _An Address to the Inhabitants_, etc., p.

16.] [Footnote 3: Meade, _Sermons of Rev.Thomas Bacon_, pp.

81-97.] [Footnote 4: Wesley, _Thoughts upon Slavery_, p.

92.] William Pinkney, the antislavery leader of Maryland, believed also that Negroes are no worse than white people under similar conditions, and that all the colored people needed to disprove their so-called inferiority was an equal chance with the more favored race.[1] Others like George Buchanan referred to the Negroes' talent for the fine arts and to their achievements in literature, mathematics, and philosophy.
Buchanan informed these merciless aristocrats "that the Africans whom you despise, whom you inhumanly treat as brutes and whom you unlawfully subject to slavery with tyrannizing hands of despots are equally capable of improvement with yourselves."[2] [Footnote 1: Pinkney, _Speech in Maryland House of Delegates_, p.

6.] [Footnote 2: Buchanan, _An Oration on the Moral and Political Evil of Slavery_, p.