Who would tolerate an indictment against his son or daughter for teaching a slave to read?
Such laws look to me as rather cowardly."[2] This attorney was almost of the opinion of many others who believed that the argument that to Christianize and educate the colored people of a slave commonwealth had a tendency to elevate them above their masters and to destroy the "legitimate distinctions" of the community, could be admitted only where the people themselves were degraded.
[Footnote 1: DeBow, _The Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States_, vol.ii., p.

269.] [Footnote 2: DeBow, _The Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States_, vol.ii., p.

279.] After these laws had been passed, American slavery extended not as that of the ancients, only to the body, but also to the mind.
Education was thereafter regarded as positively inconsistent with the institution.

The precaution taken to prevent the dissemination of information was declared indispensable to the system.

The situation in many parts of the South was just as Berry portrayed it in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1832.