Although cloaked with the purpose of bringing the blacks to God by giving them religious instruction the institution permitted its workers to teach them reading and writing when they were not allowed to study such in other institutions.[1] Even the radical slaveholder was slow to object to a policy which was intended to facilitate the conversion of men's souls.

All friends especially interested in the mental and spiritual uplift of the race hailed this movement as marking an epoch in the elevation of the colored people.
[Footnote 1: See the reports of almost any abolition society of the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

_Special Report of the U.S.
Com.

of Ed_., 1871, p.

200; and Plumer, _Thoughts on the Religious Instruction of Negroes_.] In the course of time racial difficulties caused the development of the colored "Sabbath-school" to be very much like that of the American Negro Church.