The right of the people to peacefully assemble is ingrained within our First Amendment to our Constitution. However, when you are an enslaved people, as in the antebellum times, when particular States of the union, permitted and abetted this particular institution, there were laws that defined unlawful assembly in such a manner as to take what would for white people be considered under all circumstances to be a lawful assembly, to be unlawful for slaves. For instance, in Mississippi its legal code of 1857 stated in regards to an assembly of more than five of slaves, free Negroes, or mulattoes that: " … at any school for the purpose of teaching them reading or writing, either in the daytime or at night, under whatever pretext, shall be deemed an unlawful assembly." These types of laws in the States that later would make up the Confederacy were similar in nature to one another, all having the same purpose of precluding or making it unlawful to aid and abet the making of a slave literate.
The above law in application against slaves reflects the power of the written word to convey both information and knowledge. That is to say, if slaves are illiterate than their only ability to communicate is verbal, to which their verbal skills will be minimize to imitating words and their perceived meanings through trial and error. So too without knowledge of reading and writing along with the ability to do the most basic mathematics being stymied, this in essence kept the slaves perpetually in a state of ignorance, and essentially by law meant treating them as if they were beasts of burden. In addition, those that are not literate are perpetually in the grasp of those that are, so too those that cannot add and subtract are subservient to those that are, and those that cannot use their mind to perform gainful employment, or limited exclusively to their physical skills.
An unlawful assembly law specifically directed against slaves and those that wished or desired to help educate them, was both insidious as well as inhumane. While the purpose of the law was quite clear, there was though a secondary purpose to the law which was to effectively make it illegitimate for slaves to congregate in groups amongst themselves, except as needed for labor, and for rest. The desire was to keep one's slaves dependent upon the slave owner for all of their material needs as well as limiting outside influence on their minds. Additionally, the access to outside contact with other plantations was both well monitored and controlled, which limited the slave's options and kept slaves mired in a world of endless drudgery of unrequited toil.
The laws against unlawful assembly were made specifically because slave owners knew that information is power and that the controlling of information or the providing of misinformation was vital to maintaining their control over their plantation slaves in which on any major plantation, the amount of slaves on that plantation far exceeded the few white plantation owners and their families that lived on it. These plantation owners had no intention whatsoever of providing the means of uplifting the Negro, because their entire economy, their lifestyle, and their money, was based on extracting the profits from enslaved labor into their own hands, and thereby they knew for a certainty that when such a time came, that the slave would see that the Emperor did indeed not have any clothes, that the slaves would recognize for a certainty the swindle that had been played upon them when they were first stolen from their west African shores.