The aim of these workers was not merely to enable the Negroes to take over sufficient of Western civilization to become nominal Christians, not primarily to increase their economic efficiency, but to enlighten them because they are men. To strengthen their position these defendants of the education of the blacks cited the customs of the Greeks and Romans, who enslaved not the minds and wills, but only the bodies of men. Nor did these benefactors fail to mention the cases of ancient slaves, who, having the advantages of education, became poets, teachers, and philosophers, instrumental in the diffusion of knowledge among the higher classes. There was still the idea of Cotton Mather, who was willing to treat his servants as part of the family, and to employ such of them as were competent to teach his children lessons of piety.[1] [Footnote 1: Meade, _Sermons of Thomas Bacon_, appendix.] The chief objection of these reformers to slavery was that its victims had no opportunity for mental improvement. "Othello," a free person of color, contributing to the _American Museum_ in 1788, made the institution responsible for the intellectual rudeness of the Negroes who, though "naturally possessed of strong sagacity and lively parts," were by law and custom prohibited from being instructed in any kind of learning.[1] He styled this policy an effort to bolster up an institution that extinguished the "divine spark of the slave, crushed the bud of his genius, and kept him unacquainted with the world." Dr. McLeod denounced slavery because it "debases a part of the human race" and tends "to destroy their intellectual powers."[2] "The slave from his infancy," continued he, "is obliged implicitly to obey the will of another. There is no circumstance which can stimulate him to exercise his intellectual powers." In his arraignment of this system Rev. David Rice complained that it was in the power of the master to deprive the slaves of all education, that they had not the opportunity for instructing conversation, that it was put out of their power to learn to read, and that their masters kept them from other means of information.[3] Slavery, therefore, must be abolished because it infringes upon the natural right of men to be enlightened. [Footnote 1: _The American Museum_, vol. iv., pp. 415 and 511.] [Footnote 2: McLeod, _Negro Slavery_, p. 16.] [Footnote 3: Rice, Speech in the Constitutional Convention of Kentucky, p. 5.]