lina) there is a small chapel, which the negroes call their prayer-house. The owner of one of these told me that having furnished the prayer-house with seats having a back rail, his negroes petitioned him to remove it, because it did not leave them room enough to pray. It was explained to me that it is their custom, in social worship, to work themselves up to a great pitch of excitement, in which they yell and cry aloud, and finally, shriek and leap up, clapping their hands and dancing, as it is done in heathen festivals.”[1] No doubt “heathen festival” is the right name.
The same writer has given a description of the religious exercises of negroes, which he witnessed himself in a chapel, not on a plantation, but in the city of New Orleans.[2] It is such that it could scarcely be transcribed without shocking the reader, and the religious state which it reveals has nothing, but the names which are hideously profaned, in common with the religion of Christians.
It seems that the American Slave-owners are so conscious of the connexion between truth and freedom that they sometimes repel with dread even the oral instruction of slaves in the truth. In South Carolina a Methodist clergyman had been chosen by his Church as a discreet and cautious man to preach to slaves. He was stopped by a remonstrance signed by more than three hundred and fifty of the leading planters and citizens. He pleaded that it was his intention to confine himself to verbal instruction. “Verbal instruction,” replied the remonstrants, “will increase the de-
