There were among the Episcopalians, however, some striking exceptions to this rule. Among these should be mentioned Bishop Polk of Louisiana. In 1854, he informed Frederick L. Olmsted, who was then traveling through that country, that he had confirmed thirty black persons near the station assigned to the Legree estate, where the conditions set forth in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, he contended, did not obtain. Bishop Polk owned 400 slaves himself but endeavored to bring them up in a religious manner, baptizing all of their children and teaching them the catechism. "All without exception," says Olmsted, "attend the church service, and the chanting is creditably performed by them in the opinion of their owner. Ninety of them are communicants, marriages are celebrated according to the church ritual, and the state of morals is satisfactory. Twenty infants had been baptized by the Bishop just before his departure from home, and he had left his whole estate, his keys and the like, in the sole charge of one of his slaves, without the slightest apprehension of loss or damage." Referring further to the slaveholding of this minister of the gospel, Olmsted remarked that "in considering the position of this Christian prelate as a slaveholder, the English reader must bear in mind that by the laws of Louisiana emancipation had been rendered all but impracticable, and that if practicable it would not necessarily be in all cases an act of mercy or of justice." Taking up again the religious instruction of the slaves, Olmsted found "that there were widely different practices in that State." He observed that there were some other slaveholders who, like Bishop Polk, encouraged and even obliged their slaves to engage in religious exercises. Yet among the wealthier slave owners, and especially in that section of the country where the blacks outnumbered the whites, there was generally a visible and often an avowed distrust of the effect of religious exercises upon slaves and even the preaching of white clergymen to them was permitted by many only with reluctance. The prevailing impression among northern people with regard to the important influence of slavery in promoting the spread of religion among the blacks, he contended, was erroneous. Northern clergymen supposed as a general thing that there was a regular daily instruction of the slaves in the truths of Christianity. "So far as this is from being the case," said Olmsted, "although family prayers were held in several of the fifty planters' houses in Mississippi and Alabama in which I passed a night, I never in a single instance saw a field hand attend or join in the devotions of the family."