1. education
2. school

CCC 61:1 / september 2009
Shevaun E. Watson
“Good Will Come of This Evil”: Enslaved Teachers
and the Transatlantic Politics of Early Black
Literacy
This essay offers an earlier chapter in the history of African American literacy by examining colonial literacy campaigns within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The
discussion focuses on one such transatlantic effort spanning from London to Barbados,
South Carolina, and West Africa, which used enslaved teachers as agents of literacy.
T
he Charles-Town Negro School, perhaps the most sustained effort in
promoting slave literacy by a single organization in early America, provides a
remarkable case for investigating an earlier chapter in the history of African
American literacy. Opened in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1743, the school
provided a rudimentary Christian education for hundreds of slaves and free
blacks in the low country until it closed in 1764.1 The school was supported
by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), the
missionizing arm of the Church of England. Its purpose was to bring, through
the printed word, Christian light to the “Pagan Darkness” of the colonies’
plantations as part of a “sound imperial policy” (Secker; emphasis mine). Of
course, the SPG managed other slave missions in the American colonies, and
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
W66
Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 66
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
other Christian organizations were also involved in early education efforts
for blacks, not to mention that many individuals took it upon themselves to
teach slaves or free blacks (e.g., Pinckney 34; see also Richards; Webber). The
Charles-Town Negro School, however, is a particularly interesting site of black
literacy in early America because it was part of a large-scale, intercontinental
experiment in plantation pedagogy.
Faced with little success in the first decades of its slave missions, the SPG
began in the 1730s to articulate a new method of conversion that sought to
meld literacy with Christian slave owning. Literacy was crucial for slaves’ salvation, and so, the Church argued, providing such instruction was among the
masters’ highest Christian duties: “If it be said that no time can be spared from
the daily labour of the Negroes to instruct them, this is in effect to say that no
consideration of propagating the gospel of God, or saving the souls of men, is
to make the least abatement from the temporal profit of the masters” (Gibson,
“Letter 1” 25; see also “Address”). An important aspect of their experiment in
Charleston actually involved the SPG itself in slave ownership: the Church
purchased young male slaves to serve as catechists (lay schoolmasters) to
teach their fellow slaves in the hopes that these boys could speed the language
acquisition, and thereby the conversion, process.2 Though ultimately the SPG
was unable to demonstrate the efficacy of this novel approach or to persuade
slave owners that literacy and Christianity could complement slavery, and even
though the Charles-Town School was regarded by some as a failed mission, a
glimpse into this unique effort is valuable nonetheless for contemporary considerations of black literacy.
The history of African American literacy is necessarily intertwined with
the particularities of American slavery, with all of its various mechanisms of
power and control. At times, slave codes impeded or altogether prohibited
blacks’ access to the printed word. “Literacy,” as Henry Louis Gates explains,
“stood as the ultimate parameter by which to measure the humanity of the
authors struggling to define an African self in Western letters” (131). For the
better part of the twentieth century, historians, sociologists, and folklorists,
among others, traced the perils and possibilities of black literacy through the
paths of households, hush harbors, slave narratives, white and black churches,
established and informal schools, antislavery and abolitionist organizations,
southern plantations, northern cities, early American print culture, colonial
experiments, antebellum reforms, and postbellum promises (e.g., Du Bois;
Woodson; Cornelius, Slave and “When”; Joyner, Down and “If You”). A new generation of historians has deepened our understanding of the circuitous paths
W67
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 67
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
many ordinary blacks took to educate themselves during and after slavery (e.g.,
McHenry; Williams). Scholars in rhetoric and composition have put their own
mark on this research as well, expounding upon the historical, theoretical, and
pedagogical dimensions of African American reading and writing practices (e.g.,
Gilyard; Royster; Richardson). All together, this body of scholarship illustrates
the myriad ways in which literacy functioned for enslaved and free blacks as
a complex and contested site of liberation, self-determination, and collective
action, as well as indoctrination, disillusionment, and “social death” (Fordham,
Blacked and “ ‘Signithia’ ”).
Some of the most useful understandings of literacy today, those that are
versatile and “ecological” rather than deterministic, account for the fundamental ambivalence—what Frederick Douglass described as both a “blessing”
and a “curse”—that reading and writing has historically entailed for blacks in
this country. Though he “prized it highly,” Douglass considered literacy a cruel
contradiction: “As I read . . . [t]hat very discontentment which Master Hugh
had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment
and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. . . . In moments of agony, I envied
my fellow-slaves for their stupidity” (58, 61). This struggle with the vexed nature of literacy is an aspect of the history of black literacy that is perhaps too
rarely pondered. Though Douglass is commonly used as a touchstone within
explanatory frameworks of African American literacy that emphasize individual
triumph and collective liberation, undercurrents of ambivalence and resistance
can be traced back to a host of shortcomings and unintended consequences
of literacy for Africans in colonial America. As Harvey Graff notes, the history of literacy “holds powerful lessons in disappointment and misplaced
expectations” (Labyrinths 325). More than a century before Douglass penned
his autobiography, some Africans at the Charles-Town Negro School “writhed
under” (to use his words) the literacy efforts associated with colonial schemes
for power of the Atlantic and its North American rim.
My discussion of early black literacy through the lens of the SPG’s Negro
School is organized around the intersections of literacy and colonization, specifically as they pertain to issues of race, slavery, and Christianizing campaigns
throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the burgeoning black
Diaspora. I focus in part on the two boys who were enslaved teachers at this
school by considering their dual roles as slaves and (school) masters, as well
as their difficult negotiations of Anglo-European literacy in their lives. Some of
my work here is admittedly speculative given the lack of direct evidence about
these individuals in the archives, but such speculation—or “critical imagina-
W68
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 68
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
tion,” as Jacqueline Royster calls informed historical guesswork—is warranted
when reconstructing the past from the silenced or neglected point of view. In
doing so, I seek instead to elaborate some possible understandings of these
boys’ unenviable fates, as well as some tenable connections to today that help
illuminate a past about which we know very little.
I rely upon some contemporary, critical approaches to literacy to help
make sense of these slaves’ lives specifically and to understand the complicated
nature of black literacy in colonial Atlantic America more generally. Brian
Street’s work on “colonial literacy,” Harvey Graff ’s theories of the “literacy
myth,” and John Ogbu’s analyses of “oppositional culture” among America’s
“involuntary minorities” all offer useful ways to reconceptualize the ostensible failure of the Negro School. Much more than a curiosity of Anglican or
South Carolina history, the Charles-Town School can be usefully understood in
terms of the ideological work of schooled literacy within an imperial context.
A colonial and transatlantic history of African literacy in America highlights
meaningful connections between the coercive nature of the black Diaspora and
oppositional responses to it that included, among other things, ambivalence,
disengagement, and “unutterable anguish” in the face of misplaced expectations about the consequences of literacy.
I want to offer two specific insights we might gain from this particular
historical case. First, the Charles-Town School provides valuable evidence for
how black literacy functioned before the nineteenth century. By 1845, twelve
states had passed anti-literacy statutes or education restrictions on slaves and
free blacks, the vast majority of which were enacted not in the 1700s but in the
1830s, which suggests that current estimates of black literacy in the eighteenth
century may be too low (see Richards). Not only were there a variety of discreet
ways for Africans to acquire Anglo-European literacy, but such efforts were in
general less restricted before the Revolution than after, as racism was to become more tightly woven into America’s social, political, and legal fabric. The
colonial era reveals no “better” or “worse” circumstances for blacks’ literacy
acquisition, but a set of different relationships to and experiences with written texts. Second, an enterprise like the Negro School demands a more serious
historical and theoretical engagement with the African Diaspora in relation to
black literacies. As the educational anthropologist Signithia Fordham argues,
drawing upon the work of John Ogbu, the opposition of some contemporary
black students to mainstream education is “the Diasporic resistances of persistent peoples.” She explains that “displaced peoples are involuntary migrants
who must reinvent themselves constantly, often from positions of systematic
W69
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 69
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
subordination or threatened extinction (“ ‘Signithia’ ” 158). An important part
of the history of African American literacy includes such “acts of persistence”
in the face of Diasporic realities. Resistance to education among particular
demographic groups in America can be understood by studies of past schools,
students, and teachers, as well as current ones.
The Transatlantic Mission of the SPG
One of the key differences between colonial America and later eras, such as
the antebellum and abolitionist periods that are more typically referenced
in historical discussions of African American literacy, is the centrality of the
Atlantic world in the orientations of blacks and whites alike. In the 1700s, the
colonies were more closely identified with the Atlantic world than with any
conception of “America.” As much recent scholarship in early American studies
has illustrated, exclusively North American perspectives on the colonial era are
no longer viable; instead, the Atlantic world functions as an “intercontinental
unit of analysis,” especially for understanding slavery’s intricate mechanisms
of power—some of which pertained directly to literacy (Piot 155; e.g., Gilroy;
Linebaugh and Redicker; Carretta and Gould). Transatlantic connections of all
kinds have shaped America throughout its history, but in the eighteenth century the transatlantic world dominated people’s identifications and networks,
which then shifted slowly toward a national consciousness after the American
Revolution. The campaigns of British organizations such as the SPG placed
black literacy very early on within this cross-cultural context. With executive
power located in the imperial center of London, and individual agents dispersed
throughout the Atlantic, the SPG managed the slave missions as parts of a
whole, regularly transporting ideas, materials, missionaries, and slaves from
one location to another.
The SPG provides an apt historical example of what Street calls “colonial
literacy,” involving campaigns conducted across nation-states. “Members of an
outside culture,” he explains, “introduced their particular form of literacy to
a colonized people as part of a much wider process of domination,” including
“the spread of their own religion and of the colonial administration to set up
bureaucratic structures through which they could rule” (36). As early as 1660,
Britain’s Council on Foreign Plantations was ordered by Charles II to devise
viable ways “to invite Native Americans and African slaves to the Christian
Faith” (qtd. in O’Connor 31).3 Hearing reports of the aggressive and even violent
evangelizing tactics of the Spanish, the Church of England adopted different
promotional strategies, ones embracing “the Gospel Spirit of Meekness and
W70
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 70
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
Charity.” Instead of using brute force, the SPG vowed to employ “softer, milder
ways”—the rhetorical force of reason and benevolence—to make Anglicanism
seem like a better choice to “those barbarous People” (qtd. in O’Connor 32). An
empire of converts attained through literacy, education, free will, and spiritual
insight would be an emblem of the Church’s power, and such converts would
help pave desirable political and economic paths throughout the Atlantic.
When, to universal surprise, the SPG fell heir to two large Barbadian sugar
plantations, the Church was presented with a rare opportunity to enact its
particular brand of benevolent imperialism: to rule with compassion rather
than fear; to care for slaves’ bodies, minds, and souls; and to gain an invaluable foothold in the West Indies that would enable the spread of Anglicanism
alongside British colonialism.
S-O-C-I-E-T-Y Spells Trouble: The SPG in Barbados
The Church first became a slave-owning institution when one Christopher
Codrington bequeathed a good deal of his Barbadian property to the SPG upon
his death in 1701. The SPG planned to use the booming profits from the sugar
trade to transform the Codrington plantations into harmonious and edifying
Christian communities of literate and docile blacks. By 1711, the Society had
formalized its plan to teach the Codrington slaves to read so that they might be
converted and baptized, and further, for these plantations to become “a center
for the Christianization of the American slaves” through the development of a
“college” that would “breed up” missionaries to be sent abroad (Bennett, “S.P.G.”
191; emphasis mine). Bishop William Fleetwood seized upon this moment in
his widely disseminated 1711 SPG annual sermon to castigate masters who
would not allow Christian instruction: “These unhappy people” are endowed
“with the same Faculties, and intellectual Powers; Bodies of the same Flesh and
Blood, and Souls as certainly immortal. . . . Let any of the cruel Masters tell us,
what part of all these Blessings were not intended for their unhappy Slaves by
God . . . and yet not permit these slaves to be Instructed?” (qtd. in Pennington,
“S.P.G.” 14–15). The “Force and Cruelty” exercised by many slaveholders, Fleetwood argued, directly hindered conversion efforts. The Society sought to cast
their form of slave ownership as a civilized, effective, and replicable model for
the Atlantic world, particularly the American colonies. “Success, it was hoped,
would lead to improvement of slaves’ condition elsewhere, and to the spread
of education” (Klingberg, “British” 453; see also Calam 50).
Slavery and sugar turned out to be more vicious masters than the Church
anticipated. The Codrington plantations perennially lost money, requiring
W71
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 71
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
greater demands of the slaves. The Africans languished there, many dying
each year from malnutrition, sickness, and disease. The Society found itself
relying heavily on the slave trade to maintain the estates’ productivity. Most
of the West Africans brought to Codrington practiced tribal forms of worship
and showed no interest in Christianity, literacy, or the SPG. By 1726, not one
slave had been converted or baptized, and the “college” there opened in 1745
and was long reserved for educating white children. The only “reading” and
“writing” that seemed to involve slaves for a long time was the practice of
branding. The letters S-O-C-I-E-T-Y were burned onto the chests or backs of
all Codrington slaves until 1733, when the local catechist suggested that the
Society might not want to continue to engage in “a thing voted to be done only
by the severest Masters or to the worst of Slaves” (qtd. in Klingberg, “British”
464).4 For several decades, the bodies of the Codrington slaves advertised to the
world the cruel irony of being owned by a Christian organization that touted
beneficence. Moreover, these slaves physically represented the very impossibility of an Anglo-European literacy flourishing amid the fierce contradictions
wrought by colonial ambitions. “By definition,” Street argues, colonial literacy
is “transferred from a different culture, so that those receiving it will be more
conscious of the nature and power of that culture than of the mere technical aspects of reading and writing” (30). The Africans at Codrington did not
need any “technical” Anglo-literacy training to be able to decipher the letters
S-O-C-I-E-T-Y: they read quite clearly “enslaved.”
Plantation 101: Retooling the Experiment for the Mainland
Colonies
Despite the enormous difficulties at Codrington, the missionizing zeal of the
SPG continued unabated, and interest in discovering a reliable method of plantation pedagogy only redoubled in the 1730s.5 Then Bishop of London, Edmund
Gibson, reflected upon the difficulties of the white catechists at Codrington;
he discerned that they could not make any inroads into the slave communities
there. Gibson wondered if some of the slaves themselves could be trained and
utilized as teachers: “At least some of them, who are more capable and more
serious than the rest, might be easily instructed both in our Language and Religion, and then be made use of to convey Instruction to the rest” (“Letter 1” 21,
23). Moreover, he reasoned, “whatever Difficulties there may be in instructing
those who are grown-up . . . Children, who are born and bred in our Plantations
. . . may be easily trained up to our own Language” and teach others (23). The
Bishop had hit upon a plan: using young slaves as lay teachers for their own
W72
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 72
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
communities. It would not be put into place for another 15 years, but in this
unexpected way, Codrington did inform the SPG’s transatlantic operations.
In hopes of rekindling previously failed efforts in North America, Gibson
appointed the shrewd and dogmatic Reverend Alexander Garden as commissary (local Church leader) of the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Bahamas in 1729.
Feeling no small amount of pressure to increase significantly and rapidly the
number of slave converts throughout the Carolina low country, Garden informed London of his plan in 1740, a blueprint for plantation pedagogy that
clearly echoed Gibson’s: “Touching the most effectual Method for Instructing
the Negro in the principles of our holy religion, as it has been a Matter of my
long and Serious Attention, I shall now humbly offer my final sentiment upon
it in these following Conclusions,” which included five points: 1) relinquishing
the attempt to instruct the “whole Body of Slaves, of so many various Ages,
Nations & Languages”; 2) focusing only on “Home-Born” slaves under ten years
of age as prospective students; 3) recognizing the neglect of slave masters and
the failure of “White Schoolmasters” to teach slaves; 4) shifting the work of
instruction to “Negro Schoolmasters, Home-born, & equally Property as the
other Slaves but educated for this Service and employed in it during their Lives”;
and, finally, requesting private contributions from local planters to supplement
the Society’s charity (Letters, Sept. 19, 1740). He asked the SPG to empower
“Three or Four or more of the Clergy in this province” to purchase, on behalf
of the Society, “Three, Four, or Five Male Slaves, not under the age of Twelve,
not exceeding that of Sixteen Years,” and for these slaves to receive instruction at the Negro School for two years, and then for these slaves to be used as
schoolmasters on plantations across the low country (Letters, Sept. 19, 1740).
In other words, the Charles-Town Negro School was originally conceived as a
teacher-training ground for blacks, in addition to serving as a school for slaves.
Garden amended Gibson’s plan by perceiving that the SPG could foster
a kind of grassroots appeal for slave education if the organization shifted its
attention and resources to creating a cadre of well-trained black Anglican
teachers (see Gibson, “Letter 1” and “Letter 2”; Humphreys 15). The approach
was nothing if not pragmatic: using slaves to teach other slaves was one way
for the SPG to circumvent the new prohibition against organized slave literacy
campaigns (Garden, “Letter from the Rev. Alexander Garden”). In 1740, the
Carolina Assembly passed a revised Negro Act, which incorporated some antiliteracy provisions to quell whites’ anxieties in the aftermath of the 1739 Stono
Rebellion. The explicit curtailment of educational opportunities for slaves was a
main feature of the new statutory framework. However, the law did not prohibit
W73
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 73
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
catechetical instruction to slaves, and its restrictions were directed at writing
rather than reading (Cooper and McCord 7: 413). Moreover, the 1740 statute
was not assiduously enforced, especially compared to the anti-literacy measures
that were codified later in the nineteenth century.6 With Garden’s plan, slaves
could effectively function as Church proxies. Like other missions throughout
the Atlantic, this literacy campaign needed to be nonthreatening to whites
and, at the same time, successful in reaching as many slaves as possible. Young
male slaves were the key: “As among us religious instruction usually descends
from parents to children, so among them it must first ascend from children, or
from young to old” (qtd. in Creel 75). The boys could appeal to the “child-like”
intellects of the slaves, Garden reasoned, while maintaining the docility and
pliability of youths. The explicit exclusion of female slaves from teaching or
learning also contributed to the favorability of Garden’s educational plan. He
understood that slaves could be taught to read “so long as it was done discreetly
and caused no problems” (Garden, Letters, Sept. 19, 1740). Boys teaching fellow
male slaves to read the Book of Common Prayer provided a discreet and politic
form of literacy instruction.
Further still, teacher training harnessed the appeal of blacks teaching
other blacks: “These youths would be of signal benefit,” Garden believed, as
“negroes would receive instruction from them with more facility than from
white teachers” (Letters, May 6, 1740). Whether or not he was aware that slaves
had always been teaching others through informal, clandestine methods, the
Charles-Town School adopted slaves’ longtime practice of autodidacticism and
communal education (Williams). Garden, like Gibson before him, was quick
to recognize white missionaries’ inability to penetrate in any meaningful way
the social network of the slaves: “They are as ‘twere, a Nation within a Nation,”
Garden remarked in one letter. “They labour together and converse almost
wholly among themselves.” He imagined that “a Sett or two of these children
would gradually diffuse and increase into open Day . . . the blessed Light among
them” (Letters, May 6, 1740).
In October 1742, the Society agreed to back his plan, hopeful that “good
[would] come of this evil,” that by realizing their full missionizing potential,
the evils of slavery and of their own slaveholding practices could be mitigated.7
They authorized the purchase of “two Male Negro Children such as they shall be
judged most proper for Instruction.” The committee reviewing Garden’s request
added that they intended to “consider whether this Scheme may not be of use
to the Society’s Plantations in Barbadoes [sic]” (Society). By 1741, “two Negro
youths” in Barbados were being trained in preparation for a similar school to be
W74
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 74
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
started at Codrington (Klingberg, “British” 472–73). The SPG continued working
across geographical, political, and cultural sites, illustrating the way in which
notions about early black literacy and plantation pedagogy were promulgated
within an atmosphere of cross-fertilization and colonization.
In January of the following year, Garden reported to Society headquarters
that he had purchased two boys from the plantation of Barbadian emigrant
Alexander Skene (Garden, Letters, April 9, 1742; Skene 93).9 Though Garden
regretted that it took him so long to find boys “to our liking,” Harry, fourteen,
and Andrew, fifteen, seemed promising, “both Baptized in their Infancy and
[able to] say the Church Catechism.” The boys lived with Garden under his
“Maintenance and Education without charge to the Society,” and within eight
months, Harry proved to be “of excellent Genius, & can now read the New
Testament.” Garden surmised that Harry would be ready to teach in about six
more months (Letters, Sept. 24, 1742). Andrew, by comparison, seemed “of a
somewhat slower Genius, but of a milder & better Temper . . . requir[ing] less
Authority and Inspection over him.” Garden intended for one slave to teach at
Charleston and for the other “to be employed in like manner in one or other of
the best settled Country Parishes” under the care of the missionary there (Letters, Sept. 24, 1743). The commissary clearly imagined this scheme replicating
itself throughout the province as quickly as schoolhouses could be built and
slaves purchased and trained. In March 1743, Garden publicly announced in
the local newspaper his plan for the Charleston school since the schoolmaster
(Harry) was now “sufficiently qualified,” and with donations from local families, the school opened in September of that year (“Advertisements”; “Negro”).
For a little over two decades, the slave boy Harry instructed between 20
and 40 students each year. After one year, Garden reported to London that the
school “succeeds even beyond my first Hopes or Expectation,” with 60 slaves in
regular attendance: “18 of whom read in the Testament well; 20 in the Psalter,
and the rest were in the Spelling-Book” (Letters, Nov. 6, 1744). Eight months
later, the school was expanding still, teaching 55 children during the day and
15 adults in the evening (Letters, March 15, 1744). Each of Garden’s reports
describes the school’s accomplishments in the most sanguine terms: the school
was “flourishing,” in a state of “continued prosperity,” “full of children,” and, a
decade later, “going on with all desirable success,” turning out about 20 “Scholars” each year (Letters, April 23, 1745; see also Dec. 22, 1748; Nov. 20, 1751). Such
regular reports were required by London authorities, but they were also part of
Garden’s promotional effort to obtain much-needed books and materials from
SPG headquarters. He even appealed to other missionaries and churchmen in
W75
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 75
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
Carolina for donations, receiving at one time fifty copies of Thomas Wilson’s
The Knowledge and Practice of Christianity Made Easy to the Meanest Capacities (1740), which Garden deemed to be “of the greatest Service” for the school
(Van Horne 94–95). From all of the commissary’s accounts, the experiment
with enslaved teachers seemed a viable model of effective plantation pedagogy.
The Trouble with Harry and Andrew: Separation by Education
However shrewd, the SPG’s experiment was also deeply flawed. Its logic was
predicated on the infantilization of blacks, and it seriously overestimated slaves’
desire to do the work of the SPG. The Charles-Town School is not, as some have
argued, a “monument to the [SPG’s] belief in the intelligence of the Negro and
his equal rights to the benefits of religion and education” (Klingberg, Appraisal
102), but instead a highly fraught venture that succeeded at the expense of
Harry and Andrew themselves. Being in positions of spiritual and intellectual
leadership conceivably allowed them some rare measures of autonomy:
Blacks quickly perceived that the slave mission[s] offered them an opportunity
to create a small space in the oppressive conditions of slavery: to conduct their
own meetings, to take advantage of the privileges of leadership, to seize chances
for literacy, and to build the black community and the black church. . . . [They]
provided a rationale for training and supporting black leaders. (Cornelius, Slave 3)
Such outcomes or possibilities were clear by the 1840s and 1850s, but much
less so a century earlier. Being “the onliest one who could read” within a slave
community was not always enviable or beneficial (former slave qtd. in Cornelius, When 88).
Harry and Andrew’s work was underwritten and overseen by an Anglo
organization that wove itself into the sociopolitical fabric of the low country
slave system as part of a transatlantic colonial scheme—a reality that surely
circumscribed the boys’ roles in and out of the classroom. By slaves’ own accounts, plantation teachers were rarely, if ever, appointed by white authorities;
instead, those of a certain “predilection” were identified and encouraged by
fellow slaves to teach others: “In order that I might study the Bible,” recalled one
former slave, “the other slaves on the place worked my [garden] patch for me [in
the evening] so I [could] study the book and read it to them” (Cornelius, Slave
138–39; When 88; see also Williams). Slaves helped, and likely respected, those
teachers who grew out of the black community itself. In other words, Harry and
Andrew may have been acceptable instructors in the eyes of Garden and other
whites, but the blacks likely perceived these boy-schoolmasters quite differently.
W76
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 76
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
On eighteenth-century South Carolina plantations, as elsewhere at the
time, literacy was often perceived as necessarily changing a person’s being,
and thus transforming his or her relationship to others and the world. Some
early slave narratives remark upon the sacred authority of the “talking book,”
a view that permeated colonial slave communities (e.g., Equiano; see also
Gates; Richards 366; Street 66–68). To the degree that they were perceived as
somehow fundamentally different from others, literate slaves sometimes found
themselves ironically divested of power, respect, and place in the slave quarters.
Historian Richard Olwell discusses such examples of educated and Christianized slaves who were ostracized on colonial Carolina plantations. These slaves
lived “in a cultural ‘no man’s land’” between their masters and fellow slaves,
neither identifying with, nor welcomed by, either group: “if they could not go
forward into the community of the ruling class,” Olwell notes, “it was equally
impossible for them to return to where they had been” (129).
This presents a severe case of “separation by education,” as Richard Hoggart describes the alienating experience of educational imperialism (Promises
65). Harry and Andrew’s struggle to conform to Christian doctrine and to
share their knowledge of print most likely “earned them only rebuke from their
masters and derision from many unconverted slaves” (Olwell 131). The SPG’s
literacy campaign entailed just as much possibility for individual isolation as
it did for black liberation. As Hoggart illustrated in his groundbreaking work,
The Uses of Literacy, acculturation through schooling can ultimately thwart
one’s ability to activate the transformative possibilities of education. Harry and
Andrew probably experienced acute social isolation: once children within a
familial plantation community, the boys were reared by Garden himself within
an exacting Christian setting and were then expected to teach such “values”
alongside literacy in the Negro School.
Though none of the SPG reports indicates any problems with Harry, the
slave teacher was rather suddenly deemed “maniacal” and “profligate” after
twenty-one years of ostensibly loyal service and effective teaching. The local
vestry, a governing body of lay church members, ordered in 1768 that “Harry, the
Negroe that keeps the School at the parsonage (for Repeated Transgressions)
be sent to the Work house, and to be put into the Mad house, there to be kept
till orders from the Vestry take him out” (St. Philip’s). The “work house” was
Charleston’s penitentiary for recalcitrant slaves; owners brought incorrigibles
there to be whipped and “broken.” Conditions at the nearby insane asylum are
much less clear, but they could not have been agreeable, and church records
do not ever indicate Harry’s release (Magazine Street, n.p.). Harry’s confound-
W77
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 77
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
ing and tragic fate provokes us to ponder the possible connections between
Harry’s education, his bondage as a teacher, his sanity, and whites’ and blacks’
perceptions of his mental and social stability.
Harry’s “profligacy” may be understood then as “a result of pressures accumulated during the quarter-century during which he lived a solitary life in
the inhospitable terrain between cultural lines” demarcated by literacy (Olwell
130). All SPG agents needed to conform to a stringent set of “appropriate”
behaviors, a mandate surely all the more important for a slave instructor like
Harry. Teaching others to become “moral and religious beings fit for the business of life” required that schoolmasters “take especial care of their manner,
both in and out of School . . . [a]nd that they do in their conversation show
themselves examples of Piety and Virtue to their Scholars, and to all with whom
they shall converse” (Pascoe 844–45). Within this context, any “transgression”
could be easily perceived as immoral or reckless. It is certainly possible that
decades of servitude in the SPG classroom drove Harry to what seemed like
an unmanageable state. He might very well have lost his bearings, so to speak,
becoming adrift from the social moorings that defined his community and
his place within it. Resorting to madness—or as it was typically called, “outlandishness”—may be seen as an “act of persistence,” to use Fordham’s phrase.
The “physical, spiritual, and political survival” of Diasporic peoples “required
strategies both subtle and outrageous,” she argues: “Evasion and dissemblance
to avert violation and avoid the tyranny of pain; creating and passing on alternative identities to those imposed by the master class . . . organizing to defy
the well defended boundaries that hemmed us in” (158). “Profligacy” may have
been Harry’s deliberate strategy to be released from the care of the parsonage,
or it may have been the tragic result of being (over)educated, converted, and
forever distanced from his fellow Africans.
The boy’s “failure” could also pertain more directly to his colonized status.
In the terms of Ogbu’s theories of racial disparities in educational achievement,
Harry can be understood as part of an “involuntary minority,” descended from
people who were brought to the United States against their will through slavery
or conquest and are ad infinitum denied full assimilation into mainstream
society (Ogbu; Ogbu and Simons). Ambivalence and resistance, particularly
in response to schooling that promulgates and polices mainstream values, are
two common coping mechanisms. Harry’s difficulty in managing dual roles and
conflicting identifications within and outside of the Negro School may actually
extend beyond simply his education, beyond his ability to read and understand
both potential freedoms and systematic oppressions in his world—Douglass’s
W78
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 78
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
“curse” of literacy—and relate to larger issues of the black Diaspora and colonialism. Ogbu’s minority typology suggests that schooling or literacy alone are
not the reasons for social alienation and intellectual disengagement; rather,
the social function and ideological aspects of education when paired with a
certain historical status render an oppositional identity or frame of reference
for dealing with whites’ exclusions (see Ogbu; emphasis mine). Like Harry’s
ambivalence, that of Douglass, about being able to read and write, does not
pertain so much to actual abilities, or even to particular insights gained, but
to the ways in which literacy and schooling function for blacks as sites of the
greatest tension wrought by their Diasporic status in America.
This tension was also likely felt by the other slave teacher, Andrew, who
seemed to negotiate it differently. While the school flourished under Harry’s
tutelage, Andrew’s placement had become a problem. Another SPG minister
in South Carolina, Reverend Guy, made several requests for Andrew’s services.
Guy reported to London that the local vestry “express[ed] interest with respect
to the Instruction of Negroes according to the Proposal of the Rev. Mr. Commissary Garden . . . [and] they do humbly desire that the other Negro Young man
may be sent into this parish to instruct his Fellow Negroes and the Children
in the same way” (Society; Garden, Letters, March 26, 1744). Garden, however,
had his reservations about the boy: “tho an exceeding [sic] good natur’d and
willing Creature, [he] yet proves of so weak an understanding that I’m afraid
he will not be qualified to teach alone” (Garden, Letters, Nov. 6, 1744). Even
with an extra period of instruction, and after trying Andrew as an assistant
to Harry, Garden concluded that the boy needed to be sold. But SPG authorities had their larger, Atlantic project in mind, and in September 1746 ordered
Garden to send Andrew to Codrington to revive instructional efforts there.
For reasons not entirely clear, one month later, the SPG transferred power of
attorney to Garden for the “Sale or Disposition of . . . one Negro known by the
name of Andrew” (Society). Since the boy was a native Carolinian, it might well
be the case that family members still residing on the nearby Skene plantation
persuaded Garden not to send Andrew away to Barbados. In 1750, Garden
informed SPG authorities that he had finally sold Andrew locally and that the
profits were used to purchase more books and supplies for the school (Garden,
Letters, Sept. 9, 1750).
In light of Harry’s troubles, we might likewise consider that Andrew’s
“weak-mindedness” points not to some deficiency but defiance: maybe he did
not want to become “literate” in the colonial sense of things, let alone a teacher
of others. It is by no means the case that slaves simply embraced any and all
W79
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 79
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
opportunities for education; they did not need theories of critical pedagogy
to tell them that schooled literacy entails some degree of indoctrination and
assimilation. As one former low country slave put it, “If you ain’t got education, you’ve got to use your brain” (qtd. in Joyner 255). While it is widely noted
that teaching slaves to read pushed against the limits of the slave system, it is
equally true, though perhaps less obvious, that Anglo-European literacy pushed
against the boundaries of slave communities as well.
Andrew may have shared some slaves’ suspicion of or disinterest in Anglosponsored literacy. Might he have feigned stupidity? The slave boy may not
have been “slow” at all, but in fact rather quick to recognize a way out of the
classroom and a situation he loathed: pretend to be too dim-witted to learn,
too obtuse to teach. Andrew could have easily witnessed scenes similar to one
described by another SPG missionary in the low country of the eighteenth
century: “Our Baptized Negroes . . . pray’d and read some part of their Bibles
in the field and in their quarters, in the hearing of those who could not read;
and took no notice of some profane men who laught [sic] at their Devotions”
(qtd. in Olwell 131). While the white onlookers interpreted such ridicule as
slaves’ envy of education, such ostracizing behavior can also be understood as
a disavowal of that education. The colonial sensibility of the SPG agents, and
of their entire literacy campaign, assumes a fundamental desire on the part
of enslaved blacks and colonized groups for particular kinds of literacies that
are tied to particular formations of power. It may be the case that a colonial
sensibility continues today and entails this same assumption, occluding from
our historical view individual rejections and collective “failures” of literacy.
Despite all the reports of success, it is curious that this experiment in
slave education was never attempted again elsewhere in the low country. In
fact, when Harry was “released” from his duties in 1764, the school itself did
not remain open: “As there were no other black, or coloured persons competent
to take charge of the school, it was discontinued” (Dalcho 193). Though the
Society had consented to replace Andrew with another slave boy, such efforts
to “keep up the [slave] stock for the purpose of education” were not pursued
with the same vigor that got the Charles-Town School up and running (McCrady 247). That no acceptable replacements could be found from among all
the slaves taught over the course of two decades may point to another botched
attempt by the SPG. The school’s closing seems inexplicable from the source
materials. If the school’s end is to be considered a failure, such inefficacy or
incompetence should not be attributed to the slave teachers or the students
W80
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 80
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
themselves. Clearly, some significant literacy instruction took place for many
years at the Negro School, and likely beyond its walls: Harry and Andrew, and
unnamed others who undertook the teaching of slaves on their own, “should
be regarded,” as historian Jeffrey Richards argues, “as early African American
schoolmasters, literate and capable of pedagogical innovation beyond what
whites could offer slaves” (362).
From Carolina to Codrington to Cape Coast
Within a larger, transatlantic context, the closing of the Charles-Town School
may have been unfortunate, and likely symptomatic of the Anglicans’ overall
inability to capture the hearts and minds of early Americans (thanks in part to
the great success of Methodism and other evangelical denominations throughout North America), but it was by no means the disaster that Codrington was.
The organization’s experiment with enslaved catechists continued to be a
popular technique to help convert blacks around the Atlantic world into the
early nineteenth century. With the success of the school in Charleston, the
SPG pursued their plan for revamping slave education at Codrington without
the services of Andrew. In June 1745, new catechists from London arrived in
Barbados, “herald[ing] improvements” on the plantations there.
The main teacher there, Joseph Bewsher, turned the instruction of the
plantation children over to two boys, John Bull and Bacchus, whom he supervised. These “promising youngsters had been receiving special instruction
since 1741,” and acting “on a suggestion of the Reverend Alexander Garden of
South Carolina that Negroes could be brought to Christianity by educated men
of their own race,” he felt confident that the boys were “ready to teach others”
(qtd. in Bennett, Bondsmen 83–84). Bewsher even used the same schoolbook
at Codrington as in Charleston since Garden praised the efficacy of Wilson’s
catechetical text geared toward the conversion of slaves. With John Bull and
Bacchus, whom we know nothing about, Bewsher pursued an ambitious literacy campaign, attempting “to teach reading to all of the slaves from four to
seven years of age” (84). Bewsher, and the SPG at large it seems, took hope in
Garden’s positive reports from Charleston, and whether they recognized it or
not, the American colony became the model of black education and conversion for Codrington rather than the other way around. The 1750s and 1760s
brought political turmoil for the SPG in America and Barbados alike. Attitudes
toward the Church of England became increasingly hostile, in Charleston and
elsewhere, as the American colonies moved toward revolution. In Barbados,
W81
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 81
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
Figure 1. The transatlantic network of early black literacy. Source: Thomas T. Smiley,“Atlantic Ocean,”
Smiley’s Atlas (1842). Adapted and used with permission from Cartography Associates David Rumsey
Collection: <http://www.davidrumsey.com/index.html>.
the reasons were different—the Society became enmeshed in fierce local and
colonial politics, but the result was essentially the same: pulling out and relocating missionizing efforts elsewhere.
W82
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 82
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
The SPG turned to Africa. A former missionary in New Jersey, Thomas
Thompson asked the Society to send him to the “Coast of Guiney, [so] that I
might go to make a Trial with the Natives, and see what Hopes there would be
of introducing them to the Christian Religion” (qtd. in Glasson 333). Thompson
arrived in Cape Coast, a central hub of the English slave trade and transatlantic
commerce, in 1751. Here, more than any other missionizing site, the SPG was
intricately connected to the slave trade and transatlantic networks as Africans
and Europeans of all sorts crossed paths in the port town. Thompson’s situation
in Africa was obviously different from his station in America, but the CharlesTown School remained influential in his and the SPG’s approach: if African
catechists “were only to be had by way of Purchase,” London advised him, “be
careful in choosing out the most promising ones” (qtd. in Glasson 340, fn 18).
However, rather than instructing the boys himself in Cape Coast, Thompson
sent them to England for their education and training, hoping it would tie
them more closely to the Church and the British Crown. In 1754, three young
African men—William Cudjo, Thomas Caboro, and Philip Quaque—arrived in
England and were sent to a school in Islington.
Only Quaque returned as a missionary to Cape Coast in 1765, the other
two having died while abroad. He was ordained a minister and quickly began
work within the “multi-national, multi-ethnic, and polyglot community” that
characterized the Atlantic town (Glasson 367). As an African local, Quaque
was better able to negotiate these social and political complexities than any
white SPG agent, harkening back to why the SPG had begun to invest in “native” missionaries in the first place. However, Quaque lived in a liminal position
shot through with ambivalence about language, culture, and religion. Similar
to how Harry and Andrew struggled to finesse their multiple identifications
and conflicting roles in the Charles-Town Negro School, Quaque’s kinship ties
and local connections actually hindered rather than helped his missionizing
efforts in Africa. This was a paradox the SPG did not anticipate or ever truly
understand. Indeed, the contradiction of using enslaved and black teachers to
missionize within societies organized around race-based slavery presented a
fundamental contradiction that the Society never could reconcile.
Rethinking Early Black Literacy
The aspects of the history of African American literacy discussed here point
to broader contexts and contingencies that need to be reckoned with, a web
of transatlantic figures and forces circumscribing nearly every aspect of black
literacy in the Carolina low country for several decades of the mid-eighteenth
W83
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 83
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
century. Garden was a colonial agent, Carolina planters were Atlantic exiles
and emigrants, and, perhaps most important, Harry and Andrew and the
other slaves were members of the African Diaspora whose sensibilities and
worldviews were Atlantic rather than national. As Alan Rice argues in Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic, “Such people carried their culture in their
heads, which meant that even in America, Africa was part of their existence”
(24). As critics of the “Black Atlantic” and others have made clear, transatlanticism itself as a theoretical or historical construct does not necessarily negate a
preoccupation with America, but it does offer a useful way to reframe things.
“The creation of different black cultures on all sides of the Atlantic seaboard is
pivotally dependent on marine rather than land-based exigencies, on cultural
exchange rather than national homogeneity and the ideologies that flow from
a controlling nation-state” (Rice 202). Situating African American literacy
within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, rather than an American one,
is not only more historically accurate, but it also puts pressure on teleological
and romanticized understandings of the power of literacy for blacks in this
country. A transatlantic perspective disrupts heroic narratives of literacy acquisition as well as tropes of American exceptionalism by reminding us that
black literacy has deep ties to the imperial networks and colonial economies
of the African Diaspora.
If literacy is ideologically correlated with economic productivity, political stability, participatory democracy, urbanization, modernization, and
“civilization,” such relationships pertain most powerfully to, and such myths
are promulgated most aggressively within, the Western world and the United
States specifically, as Graff, Street, and others have argued. The case of the
Charles-Town School provides some caution against elevating individual abilities above historical realities, or using such stories of “American” triumph to
suggest that education can always improve upon or rectify a past wrong. This
portrait enriches current discussions and debates about race, literacy, and
schooling by offering an important historical correlate to some of today’s most
vexing problems. This is not to overstate similarities between colonial and
twenty-first-century America, but to demonstrate that the history of African
American literacy extends much further back than commonly recognized and
that past examples of blacks’ ambivalence or resistance to Anglo-European
literacy can illuminate a different (i.e., colonial) context that still has bearing
on today. Varied conceptions of African American literacy, both contemporary
and historical, play a central role in efforts to recalibrate simplistic assumptions
about the “consequences” of literacy. The lives of the enslaved teachers at the
W84
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 84
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
Charles-Town Negro School portray a history of black literacy in the United
States that is never simply “good” or “evil” but always syncretic and multivalent.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank my research assistant, Jamie Boyle, who contributed a great
deal of time and intellectual energy to this project. Her tenacity in the archives
yielded valuable information, and our conversations helped me gain new insight.
Joshua Call also assisted with research. I am indebted to the many staff members
who offered their assistance at the repositories that hold the materials used here:
South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina Rare Books and Special
Collections, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, and South Carolina Historical Society. I also received various forms of financial and intellectual
support from the Department of English at the University of South Carolina; I am
enormously grateful for my colleagues there. Finally, I would like to thank the CCC
reviewers whose suggestions helped me to improve this article immensely.
Notes
1. Charleston was pronounced and written “Charles Town” (and variations thereof)
until its incorporation in 1783. I use the historical spelling here to refer to the name
of the school but the modern spelling for the city itself. The “low country” is a
specific cultural area encompassing South Carolina’s lower coastal plain, running
about two hundred miles north from the Georgia border.
2. For more on the SPG’s slave-owning practices and views toward slavery, see
Glasson.
3. The work of the SPG among the American Indians, especially in the Northeast,
is addressed by Brooks; Wyss. For more on the SPG’s work with Indians in South
Carolina, see Bolton.
4. In 2006, the Church formally apologized for its involvement in the slave trade,
especially as it pertained to Codrington Plantation (“Church”).
5. I’ve adapted the phrase “Plantation 101” from Hesse’s 2005 CCCC Chair’s Address:
“The term [‘abolitionist movement’ to refer to ending the first-year composition
requirement] is hyperbolic, promising the end of enslavement for both students
and teachers, trading the tile to the plantation of English 101 for different intellectual spaces.”
6. See Cornelius (Slave Missions and “When”) on slave literacy; Finkelman on slave
statutes; Williams on slave education; Egerton on connections between literacy
and slave rebellions.
7. The phrase “good will come of this evil” is taken from the 1766 SPG annual sermon
W85
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 85
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
by Bishop William Warburton. Though this sermon postdates the Charles-Town
Negro School, the logic of Warburton’s sentiment about the slave-owning practices
of the SPG existed long before 1766 and continued to be reiterated for several decades after. See Klingberg, “British” (462) and Introduction.
8. Alexander Skene was among the many white Barbadian planters dispossessed
of land when the island’s sugar production was consolidated into massive plantations like Codrington, and many of these farmers like Skene immigrated to South
Carolina at the beginning of the eighteenth century. As early as 1713, Skene was
among a handful of South Carolina planters openly educating slaves or allowing
them to be instructed by SPG missionaries (Pascoe 15), so it is not surprising that
he is the South Carolina planter who sells two of his young slave boys to Garden.
9. Source: Thomas T. Smiley, “Atlantic Ocean,” Smiley’s Atlas (1842). Adapted and
used with permission from Cartography Associates David Rumsey Collection:
<http://www.davidrumsey.com/index.html>.
Works Cited
Bennett, J. Harry, Jr. Bondsmen and Bishops:
Slavery and Apprenticeship on the
Codrington Plantations of Barbados,
1710–1838. 1958. Rpt. Millwood, NY:
Kraus, 1980.
. “The S.P.G. and Barbadian Politics,
1710–1720.” Historical Magazine of the
Protestant Episcopal Church 20.2 (1951):
190–206.
Bolton, S. Charles. Southern Anglicanism:
The Church of England in Colonial South
Carolina. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1982.
Brooks, Joanna, ed. The Collected Works of
Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership
and Literature in Eighteenth-Century
Native America. New York: Oxford UP,
2006.
Calam, John. Parsons and Pedagogues: The
S.P.G. Adventure in American Education.
New York: Columbia UP, 1971.
Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, ed.
Genius in Bondage: Literature of the
Early Black Atlantic. Lexington: UP of
Kentucky, 2001.
“Church Apologises for Slave Trade.” BBC
News 8 Feb 2006. 25 Feb 2008 <http://
news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/
uk/4694896.stm>.
Cooper, Thomas, and David J. McCord, eds.
The Statutes at Large of South Carolina.
10 vols. Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnston,
1836–1841.
Cornelius, Janet Duitsman. Slave Missions
and the Black Church in the Antebellum
South. Columbia: U of South Carolina P,
1998.
. “When I Can Read My Title Clear”:
Literacy Slavery, and Religion in the
Antebellum South. Columbia: U of South
Carolina P, 1991.
Creel, Margaret Washington. “A Peculiar
People”: Slave Religion and CommunityCulture among the Gullahs. New York:
New York UP, 1988.
Dalcho, Frederick. An Historical Account of
the Protestant Episcopal Church in SouthCarolina. Charleston, SC: E. Thayer, 1820.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass: An American Slave,
W86
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 86
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP,
1988.
Written by Himself. 1845. Rpt. Ed. David
W. Blight. Boston: Bedford, 1993.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Education of Black
People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960. Ed.
Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1973.
Gibson, Edmund. “An Address to Serious
Christians.” 1727. Rpt. Humphreys 16–20.
Egerton, Douglas R. Rebels, Reformers and
Revolutionaries: Collected Essays and
Second Thoughts. New York: Routledge,
2002.
. “Letter 1: The Bishop of London’s
Letter to the Masters and Mistresses
of Families in the English Plantations
Abroad.” 1727. Rpt. Humphreys 21–31.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. 1789. Rpt. Classic
Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates
Jr. New York: Penguin, 1987.
. “Letter 2: The Bishop of London’s
Letter to the Missionaries in the English
Plantations.” 1727. Rpt. Humphreys
32–34.
Finkelman, Paul, ed. Race, Law, and American History, 1700–1990. The AfricanAmerican Experience. 11 vols. New York:
Garland, 1992.
Fordham, Signithia. Blacked Out: Dilemmas
of Race, Identity and Success at Capital
High. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1993.
Gilyard, Keith. “African American Contributions to Composition Studies.” College
Composition and Communication 50.4
(1999): 626–44.
Garden, Alexander. “Advertisements.” South
Carolina Gazette 14 Mar 1742: n.p.
Glasson, Travis F. “Missionaries, Slavery,
and Race: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in
the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic
World.” Diss. Columbia U, 2005. ProQuest Digital Dissertations. ProQuest.
U of South Carolina, Columbia. 28 Sep.
2007 <http://www.proquest.com/>
. “Letter from the Rev. Alexander
Garden.” 1742–43. Rpt. New-England
Historical and Genealogical Register and
Antiquarian Journal 24 (1870): 117–18.
Graff, Harvey J. The Labyrinths of Literacy:
Reflections on Literacy Past and Present.
2nd ed. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P,
1995.
. “‘Signithia, You Can Do Better Than
That’: John Ogbu (and Me) and the Nine
Lives Peoples.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 35.1 (2004): 149–61.
. Letters to the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts. SPG Minutes, microfilm, reels 4–5.
South Caroliniana Library, University of
South Carolina. SPG Transcripts, Series
B, vol. 4, 5, 9–15, 19–20. Microfilm, South
Carolina Department of Archives and
History.
. “Negro School-House at CharlesTown Accompt [sic].” South Carolina
Gazette 2 Apr. 1744.
. The Literacy Myth: Literacy and
Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City. New York: Academic P, 1979.
Hesse, Douglas. “Who Owns Writing?”
Conference on College Composition and
Communication. San Francisco Convention Center, San Francisco. 17 Mar. 2005.
Chair’s Address.
Hoggart, Richard. Promises to Keep: Thoughts
in Old Age. London: Continuum, 2005.
W87
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 87
9/14/09 5:34 PM
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of
Working Class Life. London: Chatto and
Windus, 1957.
Humphreys, David. An Historical Account of
the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, from
its Foundation to the Year 1728. 1730.
Rpt. New York: Arno P, 1969.
Joyner, Charles W. Down by the Riverside:
A South Carolina Slave Community.
Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.
. “‘If You Ain’t Got Education’: Slave
Language and Slave Thought in Antebellum Charleston.” Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston. Ed. Michael O’Brien
and David Moltke-Hansen. Knoxville: U
of Tennessee P, 1986. 255–278.
. “British Humanitarianism at Codrington.” Journal of Negro History 23.4
(1938): 451–86.
. Introduction. Codrington Chronicle:
An Experiment in Anglican Altruism on
a Barbados Plantation, 1710–1834. 1949.
Rpt. Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1974. 3–12.
Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The
Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History
of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London:
Verso, 2000.
Magazine Street vertical file (#30-01) South
Carolina Historical Society.
McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers:
Recovering the Lost History of African
American Literary Societies. Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2002.
Ogbu, John U., ed. Minority Status, Oppositional Culture, and Schooling. New York:
Routledge, 2008.
Ogbu, John U., and Herbert D. Simons.
“Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities:
A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School
Performance with Some Implications for
Education.” Anthropology and Education
Quarterly 29.2 (1998): 155–88.
Olwell, Richard. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South
Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell UP, 1998.
Pascoe, C. F. Two Hundred Years of the
S.P.G.: An Historical Account of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in Foreign Parts, 1701–1900. London:
Published at the Society’s Office, 1901.
Klingberg, Frank J. An Appraisal of the
Negro in South Carolina: A Study in
Americanization. Philadelphia, Porcupine P, 1975.
McCrady, Edward. The History of South
Carolina under the Royal Government,
1719–1776. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
O’Connor, Daniel, et al. Three Centuries of
Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000. London:
Continuum, 2000.
Pennington, Edgar Legare. “The Reverend
Alexander Garden.” Historical Magazine
of the Protestant Episcopal Church 3.2
(1934): 111–19.
. “The S.P.G. Anniversary Sermons,
1702–1783.” Historical Magazine of the
Protestant Episcopal Church 20.1 (1951):
10–43.
Pinckney, Elise, ed. The Letterbook of Eliza
Lucas Pinckney, 1739–1762. Columbia: U
of South Carolina P, 1997.
Piot, Charles. “Atlantic Aporias.” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001): 155–70.
Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black
Atlantic. New York: Continuum, 2003.
Richards, Jeffrey H. “Samuel Davies and
the Transatlantic Campaign for Slave
Literacy in Virginia.” Virginia Magazine
of History and Biography 111.4 (2003):
333–78.
W88
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 88
9/14/09 5:34 PM
wat s o n / “ g o o d w i l l co m e o f t h i s e v i l”
ment of Archives and History, Columbia,
SC.
Richardson, Elaine. African American Literacies. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a
Stream: Literacy and Social Change
among African American Women. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1994.
Street, Brian V. Social Literacies: Critical
Approaches to Literacy Development,
Ethnography and Education. New York:
Longman, 1995.
Secker, Thomas. “Sermon VI: Preached
before the Incorporated Society of the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts; at the Anniversary Meeting in
the Parish-Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow,
on Friday, February 20, 1740–1.” Rpt.
Fourteen Sermons Preached on Several
Occasions. 2nd ed. London: Francis and
Rivington, 1771. 110–47.
Van Horne, John C., ed. Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of
Dr. Bray, 1717–1777. Urbana: U of Illinois
P, 1985.
Skene, Alexander. Property inventory. 25
Nov. 1741. South Carolina Inventories,
vols. 41-431. Microfilm, South Carolina
Department of Archives and History.
Williams, Heather Andrea. Self-Taught:
African American Education in Slavery
and Freedom. Chapel Hill: U of North
Carolina P, 2005.
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in Foreign Parts. Transcripts. Miscellaneous South Carolina Papers, 1715–1833.
Microfilm, South Carolina Department
of Archives and History, Columbia, SC.
Woodson, Carter G. The Education of the
Negro Prior to 1861. 1919. Rpt. New York:
Arno Press, 1968.
Webber, Thomas L. Deep Like the Rivers:
Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865. New York: Norton, 1978.
St. Philip’s Parish Vestry Minutes. 17 Mar.
1768. Microfilm, South Carolina Depart-
Wyss, Hilary E. Writing Indians: Literacy,
Christianity, and Native Community in
Early America. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000.
Shevaun E. Watson
Shevaun E. Watson is an assistant professor of English and the director of composition at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. She is completing her manuscript
on African American rhetoric before 1830, entitled Coming to Terms: Toward a
Cultural History of Black Rhetorics in Early America. Her work has appeared in
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetorica, Early American Literature, Composition Studies, Writing Center Journal, and several recent edited collections.
W89
W66-89-Sept09CCC.indd 89
9/14/09 5:34 PM