Sept. 5, '56.
Wm. M. Langhorne, Edgewood, Va.
Dear Sir: — I
recollect perfectly your proposal to instruct blind negroes. It was a most
humane and Christian project, and I trust you have not abandoned it.
You ask me whether in my opinion you would not “take from
Northern fanaticism a potent weapon by a vigorous and systematic plan of moral
and religious instruction of our (your) negroes.” I answer that any plan for
the moral elevation of the blacks must have a higher motive than that of human
favour or disfavour. Never mind what fanatics in the North who would give to
slaves their freedom may say, never mind what fanatics in the South who would
deny them freedom may say, but go on, in God's name, and give to the negroes
moral and religious instruction.
But in order that they may obey the Scripture command, and be
able to give a reason for the faith that is in them, enlighten their minds with
ample knowledge; cultivate their understandings; improve all their faculties;
teach them to reason; to understand all the laws of God whether revealed in his
book of nature or in the Bible; to know their rights and duties, and the rights
and duties of others. Do not bury their poor talent in a napkin, but improve
and increase it. Do to them as you do to your own children. Develop all the
moral and all the mental faculties which God has implanted in them (and to
smother which is quenching the spirit), train them up to the practice of all
the virtues, including self respect and a determination to wrong no man and let
no man wrong them; do all this and the blessing of Heaven will rest upon you.
If, thus enlightened — thus trained — the negroes on
arriving at man's estate choose to work for the whites without wages; choose to
be considered as chattels; to be bought and sold as cattle are — to be deprived
of all those rights which you value so highly — why, then they may do so, at
their own dreadful peril and cost; for it would be selling what they ought to
maintain to the last gasp of their lives.
Until you have done all this you should not conclude as you
seem to do that they do not want to be free; any more than you would take a
white child of eight or ten years old and assert that because he said he
preferred to be always a child and depend upon you, he therefore renounced the
glorious privilege of coming to manhood, calling no man master, and bowing down
to God alone.
Remember, you have kept your slaves in mental childhood; you
do not help them develop to the uttermost the mental faculties which God gave —
as he gives every thing, — to be used and improved.
Look at the matter, my dear sir, from the standpoint of high
humanity, — of reason, — of Christianity (not the letter, but the spirit
of Christianity), and I think some scales will fall from your eyes. They
have from mine, for I did not always think as I do now about it.
Truly yrs,
S. G. Howe.
SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and
Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 246-8
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