Enslaved and Free Blacks before 1862

Abstract

It was in part because the justification for North American settlement included the opportunity to bring the Gospel to native peoples who had never heard it that frequent, though usually ineffective, efforts were made to provide Western-style schooling to different Indian peoples. No such geopolitical rationale existed in the case of slaves and free Blacks, though similar efforts were not altogether lacking, mostly by initiatives from England. Anglican clergyman (later bishop) and philosopher George Berkeley complained, in 1731, about the resistance of the colonists to his own efforts to that end because of their “ancient antipathy to the Indians … together with an irrational contempt for the Blacks, as creatures of another species, who had no right to be instructed.”¹