A Is for American by Jill Lepore

Author:Jill Lepore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307424389
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Olaudah Equiano. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

Committed to taking that path, to becoming fully literate, Douglass eloquently related his struggle to acquire the tools with which to read and write, emphasizing his Franklinesque hardscrabble ambition and street-wise resourcefulness: he learned the names of letters by observing marked timbers in a shipyard; he tricked a white boy into teaching him the alphabet by challenging his knowledge; he bartered with hungry white boys living on the street to trade bread for reading lessons. “During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk,” Douglass recalled. “With these, I learned mainly how to write. I then commenced and continued copying the Italics in Webster’s Spelling Book, until I could make them all without looking on the book. . . . Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.” 29

Douglass’s tale of triumph over adversity emphasizes a very particular obstacle: legal statutes that made it illegal to teach slaves. In forbidding his wife to teach Douglass to read, his master, Mr. Auld, admonished “that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read.” But before about 1820 it had not in fact been illegal to teach slaves to read in most places. Most slaveowners wished their slaves to be Christian (in order that they learn of the biblical justification for slavery and learn to submit to their masters as Christians submit to God’s will), and reading was considered essential to conversion. Writing, however, was another matter entirely. Beginning in South Carolina in 1740, teaching slaves to write was declared criminal and punishable by a fine of a hundred pounds, on the grounds that “the having of slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in writing, may be attended with great inconveniences”—mainly, that those who could write could forge passes and plan rebellions. 30

After about 1820, teaching slaves to read too became illegal. As the abolitionist movement grew and more and more abolitionist literature was smuggled into the South, slaveowners came to see reading as fostering not submission but subversion.

Even under such conditions, a small number of southern slaves, probably about 5 to 10 percent, managed to learn to read. Fewer still learned to write, but those few, like Douglass, had a profound impact on the abolitionist movement and the eventual end of American slavery. Free blacks who could read and write often employed their literacy in the service of abolitionism. David Walker, born free in North Carolina, published an Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World in Boston in 1829, calling for “the entire emancipation of your enslaved brethren all over the world.” When copies of Walker’s incendiary pamphlet reached Georgia, it almost immediately inspired the state legislature to pass a newly restrictive slave code “to prevent the circulation of written or printed papers within this State calculated to excite

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