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241 9 Literacy Instruction and the Enslaved In the fall of 1745, Joseph Hildreth of the New York Charity School, appointed its schoolmaster a year earlier, reported that he had other pupils than the forty poor white children who were attending his school in the daytime: “12 Negroes” who did not attend his regular school but came in the evenings to learn how to sing psalms. A few years later, Hildreth noted that he had fifteen Negroes in the evenings, to whom he was teaching not only psalm-singing but reading the Bible.1 By treating “Negroes” as educable human beings, Hildreth was ignoring the laws of the land, which treated them as chattel. Their status appears vividly in advertisements. One such advertisement, as unexceptional as the scores of others like it that ran in every paper, appeared in the Boston Weekly News-Letter on May 19, 1737, placed there by Thomas Fleet, the newspaper’s printer. It was for an auction, and among the property to be auctioned, human beings are jumbled in with books and dishes: This Afternoon, will be sold by Thomas Fleet, at the Heart and Crown in Cornhill, by Way of Auction or Vendue, the best Part of the Books which should have been Sold last Night, together with Two likely young Negro Women, in good Health, and most Sorts of Houshold Goods. The term Negro in colonial America denoted, specifically, an enslaved African. In fact, the word free had to be added to denote an African who was not enslaved. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the enslavement of Africans in the American colonies, whether in the northern, southern, or middle regions, had solidified into an institution bolstered by legislation of all kinds. Between 1680 and 1710, in particular, almost every English colony promulgated laws that attempted to define the status of the enslaved as human property and enshrine measures that addressed the contradictions inherent in treating a person as a thing.2 One of these contradictions was the status of the enslaved soul. Samuel Sewall had raised the question in 1700 when he wrote that holding one’s neighbors under perpetual bondage “seems to be no proper way of gaining Assurance that God has given them Spiritual Freedom.” Those who believed that at the spiritual level, at least, every man and woman was created equal and that it was their duty to promulgate the Christian message to life’s downtrodden could not ignore their obligation to offer that message to the enslaved. This obligation was reinforced by 242 New Paths to Literacy Acquisition, 1750 to 1776 a letter sent to the colonies in 1727 by Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, who was also the head of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In it, he urged masters and mistresses of the enslaved to “encourage and promote the Instruction of their Negroes in the Christian Faith.”3 Two kinds of action were possible for the devout: individual and group. A look at individual conversion efforts involving literacy instruction provides glimpses of the consequences of literacy for the enslaved; an examination of institutional activities shows how slave literacy was viewed by religious groups. The explorations reveal a striking dichotomy between reading and writing instruction. As was true in other contexts, reading instruction was heavily favored as the vehicle for transmitting Christianity; however, in the context of slavery, writing instruction was avoided at all costs by all the slaveholding groups that could have provided it. Individual slaves, however, were sometimes able to learn to write, and this acquisition became a crucial part of their self-definition. While some groups of West Africans lived on the “margins of literacy,” thanks to their contact with Muslim traders who were literate in Arabic, most Africans who were kidnapped in their own country and exported by violence into an alien one had not encountered literacy before.4 They reacted to books on their first exposure to them in much the same way as native Americans initially did. Indeed, the trope of the “talking book” is a common one in African American lore. Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped from Benin in the late 1750s, first encountered books after he was sold to the owner of a trading ship heading for England. When he heard his young master or his friend Dick reading, he thought they were talking to the books. (His experience reemphasizes the oral nature of personal and private reading.) When alone, he would pick...

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