Читать книгу Prudence Crandall’s Legacy - Donald E. Williams - Страница 10

1 : Fire in the Night Sky

Throughout her life, Prudence Crandall wanted to teach. Education offered the potential for opportunity, self-sufficiency, even freedom, especially for women, blacks, and the poor. Crandall discovered, however, that educating the oppressed involved risk and clashed with deep-rooted traditions in American society.

In 1833 Crandall’s school for black women in Canterbury, Connecticut, attracted hostility and national attention. Newspapers throughout the country reported on the opposition to Crandall’s school and the danger of emancipating blacks. On the evening of November 12, 1833, as Crandall’s twenty black female students went to sleep, a natural phenomenon—some thought it was the end of the world—briefly overshadowed the controversy surrounding Crandall’s school.

In the slave quarters of the Brodess farm in Bucktown, Maryland, thirteen-year-old Harriet Tubman slept soundly. Tubman was still recovering from a severe head injury that nearly had killed her; a slave owner had thrown an iron weight that hit her in the head after she had refused to restrain a fellow slave.¹ That November evening, her brother Robert stood guard watching for the white men known as the “slave patrol,” who often harassed the slaves. Robert saw numerous bursts of light and shouted for Harriet to come outside. She watched silently as hundreds of stars broke free from their anchors and poured down from the sky.²

On the same November night, twenty-four-year-old Abraham Lincoln returned to a tavern in New Salem, Illinois, where he boarded. Lincoln, a struggling merchant who managed a general store and surveyed land, read the law books he had borrowed from a friend in the hope of becoming a lawyer and went to bed.³ “I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the deacon’s voice exclaiming, ‘Arise, Abraham, the day of judgment has come!’”⁴ Through the glare of light streaming through his window Lincoln saw the sky ablaze with a thousand fireballs.

In the early morning hours of November 13, 1833, a meteor shower of extraordinary brilliance and intensity—“one of the most terrorizing spectacles” ever witnessed by Americans—turned night into day throughout North America.⁵ One man compared it to a gigantic volcano exploding and filling the horizon with flying molten glass.⁶ In many communities, including Natchez, Mississippi, and Baltimore, Maryland, residents believed that their cities were engulfed in flames, and sounded alarms. Tourists at Niagara Falls directed their attention to the flashes of light that descended “in fiery torrents” over the dark and roaring water.⁷

Yale Professor Denison Olmstead said no other celestial phenomenon in history had created such widespread fear and amazement. He calculated that he had seen hundreds of thousands of meteors in New Haven for many hours that night. It was “the greatest display of celestial fireworks that has ever been seen since the beginning of the world,” Olmstead wrote.⁸

Some saw the meteors as a sign of hope. “I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle and was awe struck,” said Frederick Douglass, who was fifteen years old and a slave in Maryland. “I was not without the suggestion, at the moment, that it might be the harbinger of the coming of the Son of Man; and in my then state of mind I was prepared to hail Him as my friend and deliverer.”⁹

Others were certain that the meteors foreshadowed a time of great conflict. A minister in Winchester, Kentucky, opened his church in the middle of the night to accommodate frightened parishioners who feared they were witnessing the end of the world.¹⁰ A columnist in Maine at the Portland Evening Advertiser concluded that the meteors signaled the beginning of the “latter days” and the end of civilization.¹¹ Another observer in Fredericksburg, Virginia, said the country could expect the rise of widespread violence and war. “The whole starry host of heaven seemed to be in a state of practical secession and revolt … which finds parallel only in the affairs of earth.”¹²

During the 1830s racial tensions in the United States exploded. Nat Turner, a slave in Virginia, believed God had chosen him to lead other slaves in a violent overthrow of slavery throughout the South. After witnessing a solar eclipse in 1831 that Turner took as a divine signal, he commenced a bloody revolt that left sixty whites and more than one hundred blacks murdered in 1831.¹³ Turner’s attack triggered the fear of a broader slave uprising and terrified many in the South and the North. Southern newspapers claimed that the words of Boston publisher William Lloyd Garrison and black author David Walker—encouraging immediate emancipation of the slaves—had spurred Turner to violence. Many southern states passed laws prohibiting the distribution of Garrison’s newspaper and antislavery materials and urged northern states to do the same.¹⁴ Later in the 1830s race riots led to violence, destruction, and mob rule in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and other northern cities.

After Prudence Crandall opened her school for black women in April 1833 in Canterbury, Connecticut, a local attorney predicted no less than the surrender of the country to the black race and the end of America.¹⁵ Andrew T. Judson said that Crandall’s school was “a scheme, cunningly devised, to destroy the rich inheritance left by your fathers.”¹⁶ He claimed that Crandall and her supporters had disturbed “the tranquility of this whole nation” and “commenced the work of dissolving the Union.”¹⁷ Crandall’s worst offense, Judson said, was to “have the African race placed on the footing of perfect equality with the Americans.”¹⁸

Others weighed in with predictions of apocalypse and catastrophe as a result of Crandall’s efforts. Her opponents said she planned to use her school for black women to promote intermarriage between the races and destroy the country. The fact that Crandall persisted in teaching black women was not “in itself so alarming a matter,” one journalist noted. It was Crandall’s support for an immediate end to slavery that created a larger threat. Her opponents said that immediate emancipation of the slaves would undermine the southern economy, cripple northern trade and commerce, and result in blacks “cutting the throats of all the white men throughout the south” and committing “horrible indignities upon all the white women.”¹⁹

Legislators in Connecticut passed a law designed to criminalize and close Crandall’s school. The Canterbury sheriff arrested Prudence Crandall for the crime of educating black women. Crandall noted that those who fought for equality between the races could expect “to be branded with all the marks of disgrace that can be heaped upon them by their enemies.”²⁰ William Lloyd Garrison, who published an antislavery newspaper in Boston and helped Crandall launch her school, acknowledged he “had the worst possible reputation as a madman and fanatic” because he promoted immediate emancipation of the slaves and equal rights between the races.²¹ Garrison’s fierce opposition to slavery resulted in death threats; Garrison feared southern plantation owners would pay for his abduction and murder.²²

Against a rising tide of violence toward those who opposed slavery and discrimination, Prudence Crandall—through the example of her school for black women—helped lead those who supported racial equality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the abolitionist movement built a small but growing foundation of public support for equality in America, culminating in Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.²³ A century later the work of Crandall, Garrison, and their allies influenced the outcome of the pivotal 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down segregation.

In the 1830s and for many years thereafter, however, most Americans did not side with the abolitionists. Newspaper editors throughout the country attacked Crandall and Garrison as disturbers of the peace and opponents of the Union. In the 1830s Prudence Crandall and William Lloyd Garrison were national public figures—if not national public enemies.

Prudence Crandall’s pursuit of equality may have originated in her Quaker faith, which associated slavery and prejudice with sin.²⁴ As early as 1688 the Quakers believed that “we should do to all men like as we will be done ourselves, making no difference of what descent or colour they are.”²⁵ The Quakers were not alone in their quest for equality and respect for human dignity. The new world of America inspired dreams of equality long before Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence.

“We must be knit together in this work, as one man,” John Winthrop told the Puritans as they left England for America in 1630. “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own. … For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”²⁶ In 1765 John Adams wrote in his diary, “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”²⁷

The early history of America also included the introduction of slavery. Christopher Columbus reportedly had African slaves on his ships; on encountering the Native Americans of the New World, he wrote, “from here we can send as many slaves as can be sold.”²⁸ Spaniards brought slaves to St. Augustine, Florida, as early as 1565, and Dutch traders sold African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619.²⁹ Slavery represented the opposite of what John Adams had envisioned for America. “Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States,” Adams said. “I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in … abhorrence.”³⁰

Many of America’s founding fathers professed opposition to slavery. “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” said George Washington in 1786.³¹ In an address to the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Benjamin Franklin described slavery as “an atrocious debasement of human nature.”³² John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court said, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. … To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”³³ At the Virginia State Convention of 1788, concerning the adoption of the federal Constitution, Patrick Henry described the conflicts slavery presented: “Slavery is detested. We feel its fatal effects—we deplore it with all the pity of humanity. … But is it practicable, by any human means, to liberate (the slaves) without producing the most dreadful and ruinous consequences?”³⁴

The founding fathers failed to outlaw the practice of slavery in their midst. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Jay, and Henry all owned slaves, as did most of the other founders. (John Adams did not; he and his wife Abigail consciously hired only free, white employees as servants.)³⁵ Throughout his life Jefferson remained uncertain about how and when to end slavery, and he could not envision different races living together as equals.³⁶

“Deep rooted prejudices entertained by whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinction which nature has made; and many other circumstances will divide us into parties,” Jefferson wrote, “and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.”³⁷ In Notes On the State of Virginia, Jefferson speculated that the intellectual capabilities of blacks were “much inferior” to whites and that blacks did not possess the same foresight, imagination, or empathy.³⁸ “Their griefs are transient,” Jefferson wrote.³⁹ “This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”⁴⁰ Jefferson later modified his view of emancipation: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever. … I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution … preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for total emancipation.”⁴¹

Jefferson wrote his last words on slavery—predicting its demise—in a private letter in 1826, the year he died. “The revolution in public opinion which this cause requires, is not to be expected in a day, or perhaps an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.”⁴² Jefferson did not want to make public his prediction of even a gradual end to slavery; he asked his correspondent to keep the contents of his letter confidential.

In 1829 black writer and Boston activist David Walker, the son of a slave father and free black mother, challenged Jefferson and the founders. Walker contrasted Jefferson’s pronouncement “that all men are created equal” with the “cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us.”⁴³ Walker asked whether England’s oppression of American colonists was “one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you.”⁴⁴ Walker’s words opened a controversial dialogue about the use of force to cast off the chains of slavery.

Slavery in America expanded significantly in the early 1800s. Alabama’s slave population more than doubled in ten years, increasing to 117,000 by 1830. There were more than 200,000 slaves in Georgia and North Carolina, and South Carolina had more slaves than whites—315,000 slaves to 258,000 whites. Virginia had more slaves than any other state in 1830—nearly 470,000 or 43 percent of its population.⁴⁵ Slavery provided labor for planting and harvesting crops, transporting goods, and transforming wilderness into civilization. Skilled slave labor built many homes, businesses, churches, roads, and bridges. Southern families measured their wealth by the number of slaves they possessed. One official in Wilmington, North Carolina, noted that when a father married off his daughter, her dowry was measured in her share of the family slaves.⁴⁶

2. Slave purchase flyer, Charleston, South Carolina.

Slave purchase flyer, Charleston, South Carolina, 1835. Library of Congress.

South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who had graduated from Yale and studied law in Connecticut, said slavery “was an inevitable law of society” where both slaves and masters “appeared to thrive under the practical operation of this institution.”⁴⁷ Many agreed with Frederick Augustus Ross, who argued that the Bible sanctioned slavery.⁴⁸ Ross, a Presbyterian minister in Huntsville, Alabama, said that slavery in the United States provided a greater good for the slave. “The Southern slave, though degraded compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared with his brethren in Africa.”⁴⁹

The North had its own legacy of slavery. As one commentator noted, “the North found its profits in the traffic and transportation of the slave, the South in his labor.”⁵⁰ Economic development in New England depended in significant part on slave labor, with textile mills and factories profiting from the cotton and raw materials produced by slaves. Throughout the 1700s and into the early 1800s, northern businessmen made fortunes importing and selling slaves. The northern slave trade involved distilling rum in New England, transporting the rum to Africa where it was traded for slaves, and delivering the slaves—shackled together in irons on crowded slave ships—to ports along the East Coast of the United States and plantations in Cuba.⁵¹ Northern banks, blacksmiths, distillers, ship builders, sailors, merchants, and mill owners all profited from the slave trade.⁵²

Stories about the mistreatment of slaves commonly were told and repeated among opponents of slavery. “I witnessed a heart-rending spectacle, the sale of a negro family under a sheriff’s hammer,” wrote Elkanah Watson of Massachusetts, a veteran of the Revolutionary War who later lived in North Carolina. “They were driven in from the country like swine for market,” Watson said. “A poor wench clung to a little daughter, and implored, with the most agonizing supplication, that they might not be separated. But alas … they were sold to different purchasers.”⁵³ White slave owners targeted black women for rape and sexual exploitation; by 1860 mulattos made up more than 70 percent of the free black population in North Carolina.⁵⁴

3. Slave traders and auctioneers were not prohibited from separating husband from wife or children from parents.

The Parting, Henry Louis Stephens, 1863. Library of Congress.

David Walker wrote in graphic terms about the brutality toward slaves he witnessed: a son forced to whip his mother, a pregnant woman beaten until she lost her child, runaway slaves caught and murdered. “The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority. … We see them acting more like devils than accountable men.”⁵⁵ Walker’s writings in the late 1820s influenced a small group of activists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Prudence Crandall.

4. Slaves often were brutally punished; no consequence ensued to a slave owner who injured or killed a slave.

The Lash, Henry Louis Stephens, 1863. Library of Congress.

Prudence Crandall’s unusual and privileged childhood began when she was born in the village of Carpenter’s Mills, Rhode Island, near Hopkinton, on September 3, 1803. Carpenter’s Mills was named for her maternal grandfather and grew as a result of his initiative as an early industrialist.⁵⁶ In 1770 Hezekiah Carpenter built a dam across the Wood River and created a series of small mills and factories that became known as Carpenter’s Mills.⁵⁷ A community of workers and shopkeepers developed from the factories, and Hezekiah built a two-story home near the center of town. Prudence’s parents, Pardon and Esther, lived with Esther’s parents in their home.

Pardon Crandall and Esther Carpenter were married in Carpenter’s Mills in December 1799; Pardon was twenty-one and Esther was fifteen on their wedding day. Esther wore a black satin, empire-style wedding dress—black was a popular wedding-dress color at the time—with a red broadcloth jacket and a red bonnet.⁵⁸ Four years later Esther gave birth to Prudence in the Carpenter family home—the second child for Esther and Pardon Crandall. Prudence had three siblings: an older brother, Hezekiah, a younger brother, Reuben, and a younger sister, Almira.⁵⁹

Prudence Crandall spent her early childhood years near relatives and extended family members. Carpenter’s Mills was located seven miles north of Westerly, Rhode Island, where her father’s parents and many other Crandalls lived. Shortly after Prudence’s birth, her parents moved into another home owned by Hezekiah Carpenter on nearby Mechanic Street—still within walking distance to Prudence’s maternal grandparents and directly across the street from the mills. Pardon Crandall disliked living in a village dominated by his father-in-law. To further complicate matters, Pardon convinced Esther to leave the Baptist church—the church of the Carpenter family—and affiliate with the Quakers. Their conversion was not well received by the Carpenters.⁶⁰

Pardon Crandall’s unhappiness occasionally resulted in harsh behavior with his wife and family. During one summer Esther asked Pardon to take her to the Rhode Island shore, where she planned to meet friends for a picnic on the beach. After many pleas by Esther, Pardon reluctantly agreed. They traveled in silence for the hour-long trip. When in view of Esther’s friends on the beach, Pardon turned the wagon around without stopping and returned home. “You wanted to go to the clam-bake,” Pardon said. “I took ye, didn’t I?”⁶¹ Prudence Crandall’s niece Rena Keith Clisby, who had heard the story repeated by Crandall relatives, noted that “men were stern in those days, showing little tenderness or concern for wives.”⁶² On another occasion years later, Pardon struck the family Bible, threw it to the floor, and shouted, “It’s a damned lie!”⁶³ Esther rescued the Bible, and Pardon provided no explanation for his outburst.

5. Hezekiah Carpenter House, Prudence Crandall’s birthplace, in Hope Valley, Rhode Island.

Hezekiah Carpenter House, Prudence Crandall’s birthplace, in Hope Valley, Rhode Island. Photo by author.

Despite Pardon Crandall’s occasional eccentricities, he wanted all of his children including his daughters to have access to education and opportunity. Pardon learned of other Quaker families who lived in Plainfield and Canterbury, Connecticut, and decided to move his family away from Carpenter’s Mills. In 1813 Pardon purchased a farm in Canterbury, Connecticut, with the proceeds of a generous inheritance from Hezekiah Carpenter, who died in 1809.⁶⁴

Pardon Crandall did not follow his father-in-law into the field of manufacturing. He concentrated instead on his farm and worked the land during the spring, summer, and fall months and taught school in the winter.⁶⁵ He bought additional land with money he earned from the sale of crops and timber. Pardon was not afraid to take risks; with his earnings from farming he took the unusual step of investing in a merchant schooner, the Hope, which sailed from Norwich, Connecticut, and frequented ports along the East Coast and the West Indies.⁶⁶ Pardon intended to sell his crops and livestock to distant markets and import foreign goods. The investment relationship concluded after only one year with Pardon presumably not reaping significant financial rewards. On balance, however, the Crandall family enjoyed financial security from the profit of their Canterbury farm and the inheritance from Hezekiah Carpenter.

Both Prudence and her brother Reuben attended the local Quaker school in the Black Hill section of Plainfield, a few minutes east from Canterbury on horseback.⁶⁷ Pardon Crandall considered the private school a necessary supplement to the local public district school, which offered little more than primitive instruction in reading and writing. “Reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, history, grammar, and all the branches of an English education were most successfully taught,” one student at the Quaker school recalled.⁶⁸

After classes the students often walked west across a red bridge that spanned the Quinebaug River to the shops in the Canterbury town center. They bought raisins at Stephen Coit’s general store and “milk punch” at Chauncey Bacon’s Tavern.⁶⁹ On arrival back at the school, “rye-biscuits, rye-dough-nuts, rye-bread (and) rye-coffee” kept the students in a “healthful condition.”⁷⁰ Rowland Greene was the headmaster of the Black Hill Quaker School when Prudence was a student. Greene opposed slavery and later wrote an essay for William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper discussing the importance of education for black children.⁷¹

Many of the free blacks Prudence Crandall saw in northeastern Connecticut were former slaves. Farmers in her hometown of Canterbury owned slaves through the end of the 1700s. Throughout the eighteenth century, slave ships regularly brought captured blacks from Africa to harbors in the Northeast, including ports in Connecticut and Newport, Rhode Island.⁷² Newport was one of the busiest slave-trading ports in America during the 1700s; slaves were held in pens on the Newport waterfront until they could be sold and transported throughout New England.⁷³ There were 951 slaves in Connecticut according to the national census of 1800.⁷⁴ By the time Prudence Crandall began her teaching career in 1830, the number had dropped to twenty-five as a result of antislavery sentiment and legislation that slowly phased out slavery in Connecticut.⁷⁵

Prudence Crandall lived at a time of unprecedented social and economic upheaval; towns throughout Connecticut and New England experienced rapid growth and the dawn of the industrial age. “The manufacturing furor raged with great violence,” one historian wrote.⁷⁶ “Everybody was hard at work, building, digging, planting, carting, weaving, spinning, picking cotton, making harnesses, dipping candles, and attending to the thousands of wants of the hour.”⁷⁷ Men increasingly left their farms to work in mills, and a small but growing number of women left their households to work in factories or teach in the classrooms. The gentle landscape of open fields, stone walls, and family farms increasingly gave way to cotton factories, grain mills, clothier works, tanneries, brickyards, and sawmills. Prudence’s brother Hezekiah decided to leave the family farm when he turned twenty-one; with his father’s help he built a cotton mill next to Rowland’s Brook in Canterbury that made yarn and rope.⁷⁸

Hezekiah Crandall likely built his mill in response to speculation that a canal would provide easy transit for his cotton products. Plans called for a canal to connect all of eastern Connecticut with Massachusetts to the north and New London and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and to link with Hezekiah’s mill on Rowland’s Creek. Before construction began, however, public opinion turned against it. A local newspaper ridiculed the canal idea as hopelessly outdated and embraced the new technology of railroads. In 1832 plans for a canal were abandoned in favor of the incorporation of the Boston, Norwich and New London Railroad Company.⁷⁹ The rail line did not pass near Hezekiah Crandall’s factory in Canterbury.

The swift expansion of the local economy exposed the region’s inadequate road system, which consisted primarily of poorly constructed cart paths. Businessmen pressured towns to raise taxes and invest in new roads and bridges. A few years earlier, residents of the nearby town of Killingly defeated a proposed turnpike to the Rhode Island border; taxpayers said they would “never submit to such invasion.”⁸⁰ Despite pockets of opposition and the occasional defeat, most towns moved aggressively to build the roads and bridges that linked their businesses to the rest of New England. The Brooklyn and Windham Turnpike—an important passageway to Hartford to the west and Providence and Boston to the east—was completed in 1826.

Long days of work on the Crandall farm in Canterbury and in Hezekiah’s cotton mill required hearty meals. Breakfast in New England was “no evanescent thing,” Samuel Goodrich observed in 1832.⁸¹ It often included boiled potatoes, beef, ham, sausages, pies, bread, butter, cider, and coffee.⁸² The common bread of the rural towns was made from rye and Indian corn.⁸³ Pardon Crandall and other farmers set aside space in their homes to cure pumpkins, dry peaches and store apples, potatoes, and carrots.⁸⁴ Dinner included seasonal fruits and vegetables, meats, salted cod, and white beans baked with salt pork until the beans were thoroughly saturated with fat.⁸⁵

Most New Englanders consumed modest amounts of alcoholic cider each day. “In the country, it is hardly considered reputable among farmers to omit to offer cider to any casual visitor or traveler,” a traveler noted. “It is usually drawn in a mug or bowl.”⁸⁶

Local taverns provided food and drink.⁸⁷ Beer, wine, brandy, and gin all were popular. One of the most consumed and abused drinks in New England was rum distilled from molasses instead of sugar cane. A day’s wages purchased three gallons.⁸⁸ Those who drank at the tavern often were the first to hear the latest stories and controversies from surrounding communities. Private carriages and public coaches dropped off mail, newspapers, and passengers who brought news from Hartford, Providence, Boston, New York, and beyond.

Prudence Crandall enrolled in a prominent Quaker boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island, when she was twenty-two years old. The New England Yearly Meeting School, or the Friend’s School as it was known, was located on land donated by Moses Brown, a Providence businessman.⁸⁹ After Prudence’s first full year at the school beginning in the fall of 1825 and ending in the spring of 1826, she came home to Canterbury to help her parents at the Crandall farm. She did not go back to school in 1826. In the fall of 1827, however, she returned to the Friend’s School and studied there for the next three years, graduating in the spring of 1830.⁹⁰

The school’s founder, Moses Brown, was eighty-seven years old when Crandall began her studies in 1825. At the beginning of each school year Brown met with students and faculty.⁹¹ The Friend’s School existed as a result of Brown’s financial assistance and his desire to create a school that would teach young men and women “obedience to that principle of light and truth.”⁹² The Friend’s School was unique in its progressive philosophy and attention to both male and female students.

Moses Brown converted to the Quaker faith when he was thirty-six years old, the same year he freed the slaves he owned and became a fierce abolitionist. He assisted runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad as they fled from the South to New England and Canada.⁹³ In 1784 Brown championed the first emancipation law in Rhode Island, granting freedom to all children of slaves on reaching adulthood.⁹⁴ He also introduced Samuel Slater, the English cotton yarn pioneer and industrialist, to Rhode Island and in turn helped establish New England as the center for the textile industry. Brown was personally acquainted with each U.S. president from George Washington to Andrew Jackson.

When Prudence Crandall arrived at Brown’s school, she saw a large, brick school building, open fields and lawns, stands of oak and chestnut trees, and in the distance forests of maple and hemlock trees. Prudence likely joined with other students and climbed to the top of the school building’s cupola where they looked across the state toward Narragansett Bay.⁹⁵

Crandall’s dormitory room was small and unadorned; Quaker traditions frowned on decorations of any kind.⁹⁶ Prudence and her fellow female students did not curl their hair or wear lace, ruffles, bright colors, or jewelry. Chores included sweeping, chamber work, carrying wood from the cellar for the stoves and fireplaces, and on occasion making the beds of the male students, which fellow student Elizabeth Buffum noted “in our narrow circle of amusements, was considered a privilege.”⁹⁷ The boys followed similar rules; they helped with outdoor maintenance of the school and adhered to simple traditions in appearance and manners. “Plain language was in use and plain apparel, with nothing for show in form or color … no rolling collars or extra buttons for ornament on coats being allowed,” one male student recalled.⁹⁸

Classes began before sunrise and continued throughout the day.⁹⁹ Tin oil lamps provided light on each desk.¹⁰⁰ Faculty taught lessons in reading, spelling, and grammar in large classes with students reciting together. Other subjects, however, were taught on an individual basis. One of Prudence Crandall’s classmates remembered “each student being independent and going as slowly or rapidly as his brain-power and ambition prescribed.”¹⁰¹ In addition to classes in Latin, natural and intellectual philosophy, political economy, history, and religion, Prudence and the other female students learned knitting, spinning, and other needlework considered essential for young women.¹⁰² The entire school of 120 male and female students gathered together in the main room for Quaker meetings twice a week.

Crandall experienced firsthand Moses Brown’s progressive educational philosophy. The Friend’s School treated all students as equals. “All distinctions,” Brown said, “are to be avoided as much as possible.”¹⁰³ The students came from a variety of family and financial backgrounds, with scholarships provided to those in need. “They are all to be considered as children of one family, under the care of that body which interests itself deeply in the welfare of them all,” Brown said. “The riches, the poverty, the good or bad conduct of their connections, must here have no other regard paid them.”¹⁰⁴

Living in Providence surrounded by students from throughout New England exposed Crandall to a world with diverse perspectives and ideas. At the Friend’s School, teachers valued the intellect of all students, including women. Prudence Crandall’s academic and life lessons at the Friend’s School influenced her decision to become a teacher and provided her with the confidence to open a school of her own.

When Crandall returned to eastern Connecticut in 1830, she began her teaching career. Connecticut’s fledgling public schools lacked books and adequate funding. “There is no State of the Union today in a more desperate plight in respect to popular education than Connecticut in 1830,” a commentator noted.¹⁰⁵ The “reactionary” repeal of the state school tax a few years earlier plunged the public schools—known as “district” or “common” schools—into steep decline.¹⁰⁶ “In addition to a lack of books, equipment was scarce and outmoded, facilities were poor, and teachers were underpaid and badly trained,” one historian wrote. “Small wonder that teaching was neither a desired nor respected profession.”¹⁰⁷

Educators in the 1830s faced additional challenges. “The coming in of a foreign-born population at the call of the rising manufacturing interest” brought new languages and cultures into the classroom.¹⁰⁸ Connecticut had no child labor laws, and mill owners encouraged young children to leave school and work in their factories (the state did not address child labor in any way until 1841, when the legislature required that children under the age of fifteen work no more than ten hours a day).¹⁰⁹ Teachers taught obedience through liberal use of corporal punishment—the rod was a constant presence in the classroom. “If I was not whipped more than three times a week, I considered myself for the time peculiarly fortunate,” remembered Eliphalet Nott, a student at the district school in Ashford, Connecticut.¹¹⁰

Connecticut native Noah Webster—the man who created the famous dictionary—spoke at a convention of educators in Hartford and pleaded for reform. Teachers could barely survive on their wages; male teachers were paid between twelve and sixteen dollars per month and female teachers received four to five dollars per month and were expected to “board round.”¹¹¹ Reverend Samuel Joseph May, who moved from Boston to Brooklyn, Connecticut, in the 1820s and became a close friend of Prudence Crandall, “was astonished to find that the public schools were even inferior to those of Massachusetts.”¹¹²

Prudence Crandall’s first teaching job was in town of Lisbon, Connecticut, and shortly thereafter she taught at a small school in Plainfield. Plainfield was known for its numerous cotton and woolen mills and its excellent private school, the Plainfield Academy. Plainfield Academy attracted students from throughout New England and was “one of the most important, if not at the time the most important academy in the state.”¹¹³ Crandall did not teach at the Academy. The contrast between Plainfield Academy and every other school in northeastern Connecticut was not lost on Crandall. The families of most local children could not afford the tuition of a private academy. Amory Dwight Mayo wrote, “Naturally, the wealthy and educated class, as in all similar conditions of public opinion and policy, provided for themselves through the multiplication of private and academical schools.”¹¹⁴ Crandall taught at a more humble school where the conditions were similar to those found by Jehiel Chester Hart, a teacher at a district school in Connecticut. Hart described his school as an unsightly structure covered with poorly matched boards and an interior that was rough and tumbled down. “The seats were made from slabs from the neighboring saw mill … it was no uncommon thing to have them tip over and leave a lot of urchins sprawling on the floor.”¹¹⁵

While teaching in the shadow of the Plainfield Academy, Crandall learned that the Academy provided a different model for educating young men and women, similar to what Crandall had experienced at the Friend’s School in Providence. There was no corporal punishment. Instead, the Academy achieved results through “the use of moral suasion, and other kindred and kindly influences, in place of the rod.”¹¹⁶ At the Plainfield Academy, both men and women received lessons together in the same classroom.¹¹⁷ Crandall sought to emulate many of the methods and practices enjoyed by those fortunate enough to attend Plainfield Academy.

Both parents and students recognized Crandall’s superior teaching ability.¹¹⁸ One year later, with the encouragement of local citizens in Canterbury, she made plans to open her own school and bought the former Luther Paine home. The house became the Canterbury Female Seminary, located in the center of town next to the home of Andrew Harris, a doctor, and across the street from Andrew T. Judson, an attorney and aspiring politician. Both men agreed to assist and promote her school for young women as members of the school’s “Board of Visitors.” Crandall bought the Luther Paine home for two thousand dollars; she paid five hundred dollars from her family’s funds and borrowed the rest from Samuel Hough, who owned a local factory that made axes. Hough also agreed to serve on the school’s Board of Visitors.¹¹⁹

The community happily embraced Prudence Crandall’s school for a variety of reasons. Public high schools or their equivalent did not exist in Connecticut. Parents who wanted an education for their daughters beyond the inadequate local district schools had few choices. Colleges were exclusively for men; Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard were all closed to women. Finishing schools taught women social graces and domestic skills but lacked academic rigor. Crandall’s school provided a local solution for parents who wanted to truly educate their daughters. In addition, the town fathers believed Crandall’s school would bring prestige and commerce to the small town by attracting young women from prominent families throughout the region and introducing them to the shops of the village.

As a show of support, eighteen local men, including three attorneys, a doctor, a minister, and local merchants, offered to provide assistance and guidance to Crandall and her school. Led by Andrew Judson, they sent her a formal note of encouragement on October 3, 1831. “Take this method to signify our entire approbation of the proposed undertaking, and our strong desire in its accomplishment,” Judson wrote. “Permit us to offer you our efficient aid, and our cordial support.”¹²⁰

Crandall’s school served the white daughters of well-established families in Windham County. There was no reason to foresee controversy for Crandall’s school regarding the education of black women. The Canterbury Female Seminary was a private school. The tuition, while not exorbitant, was a barrier to some and would have been regarded—if anyone had thought about it—as impossible for the few black families in the region.

When Crandall moved into the schoolhouse in October 1831, newspaper advertisements promoted the new Canterbury Female Seminary: “The Board of Visitors recommend to the public patronage of Miss Crandall’s school and cheerfully add that she has already acquired a high reputation as an instructress, and the assiduity and attention which she devotes to the health and morals of her pupils renders her school a suitable place for education.”¹²¹ Twenty-seven-year-old Prudence Crandall launched her school.

Crandall’s experience working as a teacher in the neighboring town of Plainfield did not fully prepare her for the challenges involved in establishing an academy for girls. The idea of a woman creating a school, purchasing the necessary real estate, and serving as the school’s director and head teacher conflicted with fundamental conventions of the day. When Crandall joined the Canterbury Temperance Society to fight alcohol abuse, protocol prohibited Crandall and other women from speaking at the society’s public meetings—that privilege was reserved for men.¹²² In the 1830s women could not speak or vote at town meetings. Ironically, the fact that Crandall was not married provided her with a crucial advantage; under common law married women did not have the right to own real estate, control their finances, or conduct business through contracts.¹²³ As a single woman, Crandall could control and manage the business affairs of her school.

The school operated continuously throughout the year, and students entered on a rolling basis. In the fall of 1831, more than twenty young women enrolled in the school. Most students came from Canterbury, but a few traveled from other towns and boarded at the school, including the daughter of State Senator Philip Pearl, who lived in the nearby town of Hampton.¹²⁴ Crandall expanded the course offerings to include art, piano, and French.¹²⁵ Her efforts impressed the Board of Visitors when they toured the Canterbury Female Seminary in January 1832.

Religion was always a central part of Crandall’s life; she adopted the Quaker beliefs of her parents and attended Quaker schools. Crandall believed moral affronts such as slavery, however, demanded active opposition, which was not always the Quaker way.¹²⁶ At this pivotal moment in her life a religious movement took hold in much of the United States—a movement that drew her away from her Quaker roots.¹²⁷

In the late 1820s and 1830s religious revivalism swept though the Northeast. After experiencing significant change in their social and economic lives, many Americans hungered for meaning and purpose beyond profit and materialism. Urbanization challenged agricultural traditions. Improved transportation created new markets and sources of goods, increased competition, and facilitated migrations of population.¹²⁸ These changes brought higher standards of living for some, but also hastened the end of a diverse and local village economy. Industrialization and the expanding scale of manufacturing threatened the livelihoods of individual craftsmen and artisans and caused many to question whether the economic changes benefited their communities.¹²⁹ As economic and social changes threatened older, familiar traditions, a new religious revival movement was born: the Second Great Awakening.¹³⁰

Ministers such as Lyman Beecher preached evangelicalism as the religion of the common man.¹³¹ “Men are free agents, in the possession of such faculties, and placed in such circumstances, as render it practicable for them to do whatever God requires,” Beecher said.¹³² Beecher was wary of too much activism, however, especially regarding slavery and emancipation. He opposed the immediate abolition of slavery and favored the plan of gradual repatriation of blacks to Africa as advocated by the American Colonization Society.¹³³ The religious awakening, however, soon promoted activism in all matters of reform, including abolitionism.

The religious movement became a crusade that challenged existing churches and denominations. Traveling ministers toured the New England countryside and held services in tents and open farm fields. Staid and predictable religious ceremonies were abandoned in favor of spontaneous revivals with emphatic and thrilling sermons. The charismatic preachers rejected complicated doctrine and spoke plainly and directly to parishioners. The outdoor revivals typically lasted three or four days and pushed all who attended to the brink of their endurance. In spite of exhaustion or perhaps as a result of it, those who participated were often filled with a sense of revelation and connection to the spiritual world.

The evangelical churches that focused on revivalism and reform included the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, and the Baptists. Charles G. Finney, a Presbyterian minister who led revivals throughout the Northeast, was born in Connecticut, raised in upstate New York, and believed in religious self-determination. “Religion is the work of man,” Finney said. “It is something for man to do.”¹³⁴ Finney believed that true Christians followed the word of God and actively worked to eradicate sin. Finney expected the revival movement to achieve nothing less than the universal reformation of the world.¹³⁵ Finney preached against slavery on moral grounds, and other clergy and denominations in the Northeast followed suit.¹³⁶ The New England Baptists broke away from their southern colleagues on the issue of slavery and adopted a proabolition stance.¹³⁷

Plainfield mill owner Daniel Packer—soon to be an important friend of Prudence Crandall—financed the construction of a new Packerville Baptist Church during this time on the town line between Canterbury and Plainfield. For Packer, the church represented an opportunity to bring civility to a community he believed had deteriorated. Packer wanted to rid the region of newly developed “bad elements,” including drinking, horse racing, loose morals, and general vice that wreaked havoc with his workforce.¹³⁸ A search for a minister resulted in the selection of Reverend Levi Kneeland, a graduate of the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution in Hamilton, New York.¹³⁹ Kneeland became the church’s first full-time minister in 1828. During the first eight months of Kneeland’s ministry at Packerville, church membership quadrupled.¹⁴⁰ Kneeland baptized three hundred people during his six years at the Packerville Baptist Church.¹⁴¹

Prudence Crandall attended a number of Baptist revivals and started worshipping regularly at the Packerville church. On July 3, 1830, Crandall and a group of parishioners traveled by wagon to the banks of the Quinebaug River. Rev. Kneeland, Crandall, and a few of the church elders waded into the cool water. The current of the river was not strong in July, and they proceeded into the river until they were all waist deep. Holding Crandall’s arm with one hand and placing his other hand on her head, Rev. Kneeland baptized Crandall as she plunged underwater—fully immersed in the river—three times in acknowledgment of the Holy Trinity.¹⁴²

Prudence’s interest in revivals and the “dunkers” as the Baptists were sometimes called, worried her younger brother Reuben, who practiced medicine in Peekskill, New York. Reuben believed her religious activity and attendance at revivals interfered with her responsibilities at the school. In the summer of 1831 he advised her in a letter to stop wasting time at revival meetings.¹⁴³ “Do you, all hands, run off three to four days to meeting?” Reuben asked. “If you, the principal, or your assistants do, I shall have a very poor opinion of the principal or her assistants.”¹⁴⁴ This became an ongoing source of disagreement between brother and sister. “I said enough when I was home, and I presume you think by this time I have said enough on any of these subjects,” Reuben wrote.¹⁴⁵ Prudence did not let the opinion of her younger brother change her course. Her faith played a significant role in her decisions regarding the school, and Levi Kneeland served Crandall as a spiritual leader and friend.

Another reform movement—the temperance cause—gained great popularity throughout New England. The ravages of alcohol abuse destroyed families and lessened productivity. During the 1820s and 1830s, community leaders and businessmen formed temperance societies in nearly every city and town with the goal of eradicating alcohol use.

“Every neighborhood had its death-roll of victims,” historian Ellen Larned wrote, “its shocking casualties—drunken men and women frozen and burnt to death; children starved, women beaten and murdered, promising young men brutalized and lost.”¹⁴⁶ In the late 1820s William Fisher, a foreman at a factory in Killingly, Connecticut, became alarmed when his three young sons did not return home after their last day of school. He did not know that teachers and students celebrated the end of the school year with generous toasts of alcoholic beverages—even the youngest students were expected to drink up. Fisher found his sons at the school, intoxicated; his youngest son was unconscious.¹⁴⁷

The temperance movement swept through eastern Connecticut; the first temperance society was organized on August 25, 1828, in Canterbury.¹⁴⁸ Those who joined pledged to abstain fully from the use of “ardent spirits” as well as refrain from providing drink to friends or employees. Prudence Crandall joined the Canterbury Temperance Society and supported the temperance cause for the rest of her life.

The spring and summer of 1832 brought continued success for the Canterbury Female Seminary. Prudence Crandall had what most women of her time could never have—a professional career in a position of leadership, financial independence, and a life increasingly filled with the promise of security and stature. Crandall’s family supported her work, and her sister Almira worked full time at the school teaching and managing its affairs. The community continued to embrace the school and assisted in its growing enrollment.

8. Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, Connecticut, site of Prudence Crandall Museum.

Prudence Crandall’s School in Canterbury, Connecticut. Collection of the Prudence Crandall Museum, Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, State of Connecticut. Photographer: Dennis Oparowski.

At the end of the school’s busy first year the daughter of a local black farmer approached Prudence Crandall. The young woman knew one of the hired girls at the school and often visited during classes. She asked Crandall if she could enroll as a student; her father earned enough from his farm to pay for her tuition. This simple request likely triggered conflicting thoughts and considerations for Crandall. State law did not require segregation in schools or elsewhere, but social custom assumed separation of the races at most gatherings and functions. Many in the North opposed slavery, but few believed in true equality for blacks.

Crandall understood that if she granted the young woman’s request she might offend her neighbors and supporters. She knew the admission of a black student could threaten the future of her school. Answering the woman’s question required Crandall to reconcile her desire to meet the expectations of her community with the principles she had learned from her family, her faith, and the Friend’s School. As Crandall met the gaze of the anxious, young black woman, she did not have an answer.