The Alphabet as Resistance

Laws Against Literacy and Religion in the Slave South

Could slavery get worse after centuries of it? It did in the slave South in the decades just before the Civil War. This book explores the expansion of slavery during the period, the growth of the mass-labor cotton and sugar plantations, the expulsion of the Native Americans, and the new types of repression.

Those new types of repression included new laws that prohibited the teaching of a slave to read or write, under penalty of whippings or worse. Other new types of repression included laws against gatherings—aimed at religious gatherings in particular. Laws requiring slaves to have a pass from the slaveowner or a White person were ancient—they were tightened under the new regime. The laws were enforced by the notorious patrols, made of poorer White men, whose service was always mandatory and often drunken. The book chronicles, often in the voices of the slaves themselves, both the repression against literacy and religion and their resistance to it.

©2023 Jerry Cunningham (P)2023 Jerry Cunningham