Читать книгу In Pursuit of Knowledge - Kabria Baumgartner - Страница 11

On a walk around the village green of Canterbury, nineteen-year-old Sarah Harris (Figure 1.2) might have spied the large, two-story, Federal-style building that housed the Canterbury Female Boarding School. She and her family had recently moved to the area. Her father, William Montflora Harris, born in the West Indies, emigrated to the United States, likely during the Haitian Revolution. He settled in Norwich, Connecticut; married Sally Prentice, who was of Mohegan and European descent; and raised eleven children.1 In January 1832 he purchased a farm in Canterbury, which dates the family’s arrival at that village. About seventy free blacks resided in Canterbury in 1830, constituting less than 4 percent of the village’s population.

Sarah and her siblings likely received their early education at Sunday schools.2 They may have gone to the public primary schools in Canterbury too, which, like some other small towns and villages in Connecticut, allowed African American and white children to attend together. In urban areas such as Hartford, however, public primary schools were racially segregated. In any case, a boarding school was different. Operated by Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker woman, the Canterbury Female Boarding School enrolled twenty young, middle-class and elite white women from the Windham County area. The Board of Visitors, an eight-member, all-white, all-male board consisting of lawyers and politicians, praised Prudence’s teaching.3 The young female students enjoyed their experiences; years later, two former students reminisced about “the many pleasant moons we have spent together under the chesnut [sic] tree studying our definitions.”4 While these young women studied English grammar, natural and moral philosophy, and music and drawing, among other subjects, Sarah labored as a servant in the house of her white neighbor Jedediah Shepherd.5

But in September 1832, only eight months after arriving in Canterbury, an ambitious Sarah asked for admission to Prudence Crandall’s all-white school. Her goal, she explained, was to get “a little more learning, enough to teach colored children.”6 What inspired Sarah to reject servitude and push for advanced study? We cannot know for sure, but possibly a recent lecture had inspired her. That same month, Maria W. Stewart, an African American lecturer, delivered a speech about servitude at Franklin Hall in Boston, which was later printed in the Liberator, an antislavery newspaper edited by the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Stewart asserted that African Americans “ha[d] dragged out a miserable existence of servitude from the cradle to the grave.”7 Perhaps her words resonated with Sarah, a servant herself, and also a reader of the Liberator. Sarah’s father and her brother, Charles, both circulated the newspaper, and Sarah once described it as a “welcome visiter [sic]” in her home.8 Sarah’s rather modest personal goal—to acquire enough learning “to teach colored children”—thus suggests not simply a personal ambition but also a communal mission to see free blacks move beyond a position of servitude.

Prudence weighed Sarah’s request carefully.9 She suspected some of her white students might bristle at the idea of attending classes with a young African American woman, but Sarah’s earnestness prevailed. “If I was injured on her account I would bear it,” Prudence resolved, and she agreed to admit Sarah.10 And bear it she did, for Sarah’s admission completely unsettled the village of Canterbury. The parents of the white students held a meeting with Prudence and demanded that she dismiss “the nigger girl.”11 When they threatened to withdraw their daughters, Prudence pushed back, reopening the school in April 1833 exclusively for African American girls and women. Now the school’s stated purpose was to train young African American women as teachers.12

FIGURE 1.1. Sarah Harris (1812–1878) was the first African American student to desegregate the Canterbury Female Boarding School in Connecticut in 1832. The controversy surrounding her admission led to the establishment of the Canterbury Female Seminary for African American girls and women in April 1833. Sarah later married George Fayerweather and settled in Kingston, Rhode Island. Courtesy of the Prudence Crandall Museum. Canterbury, CT.

This reconstituted female seminary faced bitter opposition from white residents such as Andrew T. Judson, a Connecticut state attorney and politician who fervently supported the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 to resettle African Americans in Liberia. Hence the very idea of educating young African American women instead of young white women—not to mention devoting an entire school to the task in the United States—conflicted with Judson’s colonizationist views. Opposition from white residents intensified over a seventeen-month period, with verbal threats, legal action, and finally violence, which led to the school’s abrupt closure in September 1834.13

How did African American girls and women individually and collectively contest this escalation of white opposition and racism in Canterbury? Writings from several students at the seminary published in the antislavery press provide a glimpse into their thoughts and actions. These writings, consisting of speeches and letters, cite scripture, praise God, and highlight the power of Christian love. Canterbury’s African American students evoked and implemented an ethic of Christian love, which included biblical principles to “love God” and “love thy neighbor.” This ethic was neither meek nor militant but rather, I argue, an act of social protest. Just as historians have analyzed moral suasion and other ideologies as foundational tactics in antebellum social movements, so too must we recuperate African American women’s self-developed ethic of Christian love.14

Perhaps most remarkable is that these young women espoused an ethic of Christian love amid the looming threat of violence. Instead of citing biblical passages from Exodus, commonly referenced by African American ministers, these women turned to the Gospel of Mark, the Letter to the Romans, and the Book of John—scriptures emphasizing love that enabled them to argue for inclusion and belonging. Time was of the essence since they wanted to remain at Prudence’s school. These students bound their communal project of learning with an appeal to the minds and hearts of the white Christian men of Canterbury. They decried white wrongdoing, all the while urging their opponents to do right: to love. In turning to a discourse that counseled compassion for the very people trying to thwart them, these young women transformed the seminary into a significant site for African American women’s activism.15

Before Prudence Crandall (Figure 1.2) established her all-white boarding school, the Rhode Island native had attended the New England Friends School, a well-known Quaker boarding school in Providence. There she met classmate Abby Kelley, later a staunch antislavery and woman’s rights activist. Prudence decried the sinfulness of slavery but had yet to identify the struggle for African American education as part of her own mission. She later admitted that she had been “entirely ignorant” of the experiences of northern free blacks. Before coming to Canterbury, she had lived in nearby Plainfield, Connecticut, where she ran a school for young white women. Impressed with her initiative, training, and curricular emphasis on literature and writing, some Canterbury citizens, including Judson, recruited her to establish a school for young white women in the area. Samuel Hough, a white factory owner, loaned her the money to buy the school building, and the school opened in 1831.16

FIGURE 1.2. This portrait of Prudence Crandall (1803–1890) was painted by Francis Alexander in 1834. Prudence was a white abolitionist from Rhode Island and the proprietor of the Canterbury Female Seminary in Connecticut. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

The Canterbury Female Boarding School fit firmly within the tradition of the female seminary movement. This movement began in the Revolutionary era as leading white intellectuals, including Benjamin Rush and Judith Sargent Murray, raised concerns about the twin goals of forming the national character and developing a unified citizenry. These concerns helped to accelerate support for widespread schooling of both young white men and women at colleges and seminaries, respectively. In 1787 Rush, a white physician, political leader, and educator in Philadelphia, delivered a speech, “Thoughts upon Female Education,” at the Young Ladies’ Academy. He proposed a curriculum of English language and grammar, writing, bookkeeping, geography, and history to “prepare [women] for the duties of social and domestic life.”17 This proposal stressed the usefulness of a woman’s advanced learning to manage household affairs, to influence her husband, to promote the well-being of her family, and to engage in intellectual conversation. Rush and other leaders cast women as central actors in stabilizing the nation and seminaries as sites of meaning-making and cultural production.18

From 1790 to 1860 more than 350 female seminaries and academies were founded in the United States.19 Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, a white female educator and writer, observed in 1837 that seminaries were “institutions of a permanent and elevated character” that were “fast multiplying” across the nation.20 While a few poor and working-class white female students received tuition scholarships, most of the students who attended female seminaries were twelve- to eighteen-year-old young white women from middle-class and elite families who could afford the tuition and room and board.21 Hence only a small percentage of the population could actually avail themselves of these institutions. The historian Margaret Nash asserts that female seminaries “played an [important] role in class formation and consolidation.”22 For instance, material conditions and cultural values like self-improvement and morality defined middle-class status and were often reinforced at seminaries and academies.23

Nineteenth-century educational advocates argued that both white men and women possessed intellectual abilities in need of refinement, even though these groups would occupy different roles in the nation. The rationale for women’s pursuit of advanced education focused on notions of usefulness and intellectual growth, with gender ideology an important but not singular consideration. To be sure, proponents of female seminaries such as Rush emphasized that educated women would make good wives and mothers.24 The explosion of religious revivalism and the emergence of the market revolution further stimulated the growth of female seminaries, and the seminary movement would soon become a watershed in the history of white women’s education.25

But like other educational movements of the day, the female seminary movement did not serve African American girls and women, a fact that angered many African American activists and their allies. In 1830 the free black population in the United States stood at 300,000, with over 40 percent located in the free states and territories of the North.26 Whether in urban areas or small towns, African Americans confronted discrimination, and the schoolhouse was no exception. Some public schools barred African American children from attending. Only a small number of African American men were admitted to colleges and universities. The female seminary fared no better. A letter on women’s education, signed by a person named Matilda and featured in Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper, simultaneously praised the emerging national dialogue claiming that the mind had no sex while lamenting the fact that racial prejudice qualified the dialogue. “We possess not the advantages with those of our sex whose skins are not colored like our own,” Matilda declared.27 As the national dialogue went, the mind had no sex, but it certainly had a race.28

Female seminaries endorsed a racialized and gendered model of republican citizenship; an unspoken requirement for admission was whiteness, apparently even before sex.29 For example, the Albany Female Seminary in New York enrolled both young white women and “small [white] boys.”30 In the early nineteenth century, coeducation at seminaries and academies was not unusual, but racial integration was.31 Hence white women applicants to seminaries and academies such as Bradford Academy in Massachusetts had to be ladies of “good character”—a seemingly amorphous category with specifically racialized assumptions about who did and did not qualify.32 So when white women attended these seminaries, they inhabited predominantly white female spaces.33

Though called a boarding school, Prudence Crandall’s school was, for all intents and purposes, a female seminary.34 Female seminaries typically offered a three-year course of study in English language and literature, reading and composition, arithmetic, geography, history, natural and moral philosophy, and botany, as well as electives such as drawing and music. William Russell, an instructor of reading at a Massachusetts-area female seminary, extolled the virtues of this standard curriculum, which would enable a woman to “acquit herself aright, to whatever social duty she may be justly called.”35 The female seminary was thus an academically rigorous environment, and the Canterbury Female Boarding School offered all of these subjects and even added chemistry, astronomy, rhetoric, and French.

In these white female spaces, racial hierarchies and boundaries were implicitly, if not explicitly, observed and maintained, especially when it came to socializing. Mary Eckert, a young white woman from a well-to-do family, penned a letter to her parents while at her aunt’s female boarding school in Washington, Pennsylvania. Mary noted the planned lecture tour by Reverend John B. Pinney, a white Presbyterian missionary who worked as an agent for the American Colonization Society. Mary recounted hearing “a lady ask . . . why our blacks should not be educated and taken into company with the whites, that she would like to see them taken into our parties.” Though it is unclear where Mary was when she heard the question, her sentiments were made clear when she recorded her thoughts on the matter: “I think that’s carrying the joke rather too far.”36 The question of whether African Americans should even be permitted at parties aside, Mary’s description of their mere presence in white spaces as a “joke” is revealing.

The very rationale for white women’s education made the presence of African American women at female seminaries precarious, at best. As Mary Kelley argues, the female seminary encouraged young white women to “chart the nation’s course.”37 An African American woman attending a seminary demonstrated her desire and ability to improve her mind and lead a purposeful life. And allowing her to attend a seminary affirmed her legitimate inclusion within the broader project of nation-building, which conflicted with racial ideologies that refused African Americans an equal place in the nation, let alone recognized their ability to contribute to it. An African American woman’s desire for learning, as well as her capacity to learn, was thus summarily dismissed.

Nevertheless African American families invested in and cared deeply about their children’s learning. When Prudence Crandall decided to open a seminary for African American girls, she visited the homes of African American families who “seemed to feel much for the education of their children.”38 With an introduction from Garrison in hand, she traveled to Providence, where she met Elizabeth Hall Hammond, a free, middle-class African American widow with two daughters, Ann Eliza and Sarah Lloyd, who showed interest in attending a female seminary.39 Elizabeth introduced Prudence to other black families as well as white abolitionists, including George William Benson, a leather and wool merchant in Providence, and his brother, Henry E. Benson, an agent for the Liberator. The Benson brothers, who helped to establish the Providence Anti-Slavery Society, had ties to the Brooklyn, Connecticut, community, where their father, George Benson, settled the family in 1824. Esther Baldwin, a young white woman from Canterbury who attended the Norwich Female Academy, wrote to her sisters, one of whom had attended Prudence’s boarding school, “The blacks [in Norwich] talk about Miss Crandall’s academy.”40 The network of free black New England families from Providence to Norwich was abuzz over this new African American female seminary.

Grace Lanson, a seventeen-year-old African American indentured servant from New Haven, Connecticut, had apparently learned of the Canterbury Female Seminary. She labored at the Litchfield, Connecticut, residence of Benjamin Tallmadge, a white politician and military officer who had served with George Washington in the American Revolution. In August 1833 Grace ran away, and Tallmadge placed an advertisement in the Columbian Register reporting her escape and explaining as her reason for fleeing “to attend some new boarding school.”41 Whether she ever reached the Canterbury Female Seminary, returned to the Tallmadge residence, or remained missing is unknown. On the one hand, Tallmadge’s advertisement registered white anxiety about African American women’s education: Grace forfeited her indenture to attend school; on the other hand, it reveals that at least one African American girl put herself at great risk to pursue knowledge.

Very few institutions existed in early 1830s Connecticut for African American children and youth seeking advanced study. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the town of Colchester earmarked funds to build a school for formerly enslaved children. A unique educational initiative, this school, located adjacent to the prestigious Bacon Academy, welcomed approximately forty African American children.42 Prince Saunders, a mixed-race man from New England, taught at the school while taking courses in Latin and Greek at Bacon Academy. Such an arrangement was an early example of the hyperlocal nature of schools. Indeed, there appears to have been no recorded objections to Saunders’s presence at Bacon Academy or the existence of a school for African American children, for that matter. This school did, however, close in 1840. Prudence’s African American female seminary was thus truly one of a kind.

When Prudence shifted her school’s female student body from white to African American, her decision was so politically significant—and, to some, dangerous and offensive—precisely because it affirmed African American women’s capacity for and pursuit of learning. As Prudence traveled the eastern seaboard, personally meeting with prospective female scholars, the Liberator carried an advertisement for the school. It resembled the old advertisement for her all-white boarding school, except for two key differences: rhetoric was no longer listed as a course offering, and black and white abolitionists replaced white town leaders in the list of boosters. The advertisement was less a recruitment tool than a declaration in support of African American women’s learning.43 It represented the seminary’s aim to show that young African American women were refined and elegant ladies, with a right to learn and the potential to excel at it.

Of the fifteen male boosters who acted as references for the seminary, at least six were African American, including three New York City clergymen, Peter Williams, Theodore S. Wright, and Samuel Cornish; two Philadelphia businessmen, James Forten and Joseph Cassey; and one Connecticut clergyman, Jehiel Beman. In addition to commending this educational endeavor, these boosters vouched for Prudence as a teacher and helped to recruit students. Cornish boldly claimed, “Every measure for the thorough and proper education of colored females is a blow aimed directly at slavery. As such it is felt by slave-holders at the south, and their friends and abettors at the north.”44

African American female enrollment at the seminary was small at first but steadily increased. In April 1833 Prudence had only “two boarders and one day scholar,” Sarah Harris and likely the Hammond sisters.45 A month later as many as thirteen African American girls and women had enrolled, including Sarah’s younger sister, Mary.46 Another sibling pair were the Glasko sisters from Griswold, Connecticut: twenty-two-year-old Eliza and thirteen-year-old Miranda, the daughters of Isaac Glasko, a successful blacksmith, and his wife, Lucy Brayton Glasko.47 Fourteen-year-old Mary E. Miles, who grew up in a Quaker family in Rhode Island, also attended the seminary.48 Sixteen-year-old Theodosia deGrasse came from a fairly well-known family in New York. Her father, George, was a Hindu man born in Calcutta and adopted by the white French admiral Count de Grasse; George deGrasse petitioned for U.S. citizenship, which was granted in 1804. Theodosia’s mother, Maria, was probably a mixed-race woman descended from Abram Jansen Van Salee, the son of a Moroccan woman and Jan Jansen Van Haarlem, a Dutchman.49 During the seventeen-month period that the seminary remained open, as many as twenty-five students may have passed through its doors.

While some of the students at the seminary came from middle-class and elite free black families who could afford the $25 tuition per quarter, others did not. Fifteen-year-old Harriet Rosetta Lanson performed domestic work at the school to offset her tuition costs. Adopted by Simeon Jocelyn, a white pastor from Connecticut and an engraver by trade, Harriet attended both public primary and Sabbath schools and was particularly interested in studying the Bible. Jocelyn noted that Harriet possessed a “love of study and habits of observation.”50 At least one student from New York was supported financially not by her mother but by a former slave woman whom she knew. Another student’s father was a former slave. One editorialist pointed to the diverse backgrounds of these young women as proof of their ambition: “Where can we find such thirsting for knowledge among our white population?”51

Whether learning from their teachers or each other, these girls and women were knowledge seekers. One anonymous student dispelled the myth of black intellectual apathy while also calling attention to African American women’s collective ambition in an address delivered on behalf of her peers who had finally “begun to enjoy what our minds have long desired; viz. the advantages of a good education.”52 At the Canterbury Female Seminary, African American female scholars proved that their minds were neither weak nor empty and, within an openly hostile local environment, asserted an educated identity that defied racist antebellum stereotypes.

African American women’s education gained broader public attention thanks to Prudence’s seminary, as African American women activists praised the students who had enrolled and encouraged more to attend. Under the penname Zillah, Sarah Mapps Douglass published a letter in the antislavery newspaper Emancipator urging young African American women “who promised to become Miss Crandall’s pupils, to go forward.”53 Her public letter may have been inspired by her own advocacy of women’s education, not to mention that her cousin, Elizabeth Douglass Bustill, may well have attended the seminary.54 In her letter, Douglass asked prospective students to be active, courageous, and resilient—essentially, to be purposeful women. The very act of pursuing advanced study was a form of activism that opened up new opportunities. She did not deny the challenges ahead; rather she counseled the students to endure the inevitable “insults, wounds, and oppressive acts” for the sake of an education.55

Just as African American religious and political associations became sites of abolitionist protest, so too did educational institutions.56 Four white abolitionists taught at this seminary, including Prudence’s sister, Almira; Samuel J. May, a minister and educational reformer in Connecticut; and William Burleigh, the brother of Charles Burleigh, a journalist and abolitionist, from nearby Plainfield. May believed that “education is one of the primal, fundamental rights of all the children of men,” a declaration that must have felt empowering to students.57 Teachers and students conversed on subjects such as religion and slavery, making it a vibrant, intellectual, and politically engaging space. In an essay published in the Liberator, one student described slavery as an “awful, heaven-daring sin” and condemned slaveholders and their defenders for contradicting both God’s will and biblical teachings.58

Given the wide age range of students, spanning some thirteen years, Prudence may have adopted the monitorial system, a popular instructional method developed by Joseph Lancaster, a white British-born educator. This method arranged for older, typically more advanced students to teach younger, less advanced students.59 At Canterbury older students could have also taught younger ones about the principles of the radical abolition movement, which included ending slavery and promoting racial equality.

Regardless of the specific pedagogical method employed, Christian teachings were the glue that held the curriculum together. Though the school did not advertise biblical instruction, Prudence opened and closed the school day with prayer.60 Moreover she and her students attended church services, welcomed preachers at the schoolhouse, and learned and quoted from scripture in their addresses, published writings, and private letters. Some students, among them Harriet Rosetta Lanson, actually experienced their conversion at the seminary.61 Far from being a spiritual layer that supplemented the scholarship, Christianity was inextricably woven into the school’s pedagogical mission. Through their studies, these young African American women gained knowledge of their own dignity and that of the word of God. In other words, they experienced God’s love as righteous, intellectual human beings.

Prudence both facilitated and participated in female interracial solidarity and collective action at the seminary. As one student observed in an article for the Liberator, there was a strong sense of community at the school: “Love and union seems [sic] to bind our little circle in the bonds of sisterly affection.” The student reminded her classmates that they had been “adorned with virtue and modesty,” and now was their moment to “pursue every thing that will bring respect to ourselves, and honor to our friends who labor so much for our welfare.” Nothing was ever just an individual pursuit; rather students and faculty alike saw themselves as contributing to a greater good and a broader purpose.62

This effort to educate African American women had many implications for radical abolitionists who were committed to African American education in the antebellum North. At the First Annual Convention of the Free People of Color at Wesleyan Church in Philadelphia, in June 1831, Simeon Jocelyn and five other white abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, proposed to establish a manual labor college for African American men in New Haven, the first college of its kind in the nation. For Garrison, this initiative was crucial to racial uplift: “It can be, and must be, accomplished.”63 However, both elite and working-class white New Haven residents rejected the proposal, citing fear of economic competition, incongruity with the aims of the American Colonization Society, and an overall revulsion at the presence of African Americans. The weight of opposition, at times violent, in New Haven did not lead proponents to abandon the project immediately; however, they explored the possibility of opening the college in a different location, but nothing ever came of that.

Historians rightfully cite a fear of economic competition to explain white opposition to the manual labor college initiative, but such an explanation fails to account for white opposition to an African American female seminary. Educated African American men aimed to compete with white men in the labor market for skilled jobs. Arguably African American women did not pose such an economic threat to white women, or men for that matter, since an educated woman’s role was not intended to be in the public sphere. The goal of women’s education, in the words of Leonard Worcester, a white principal of the Newark Young Ladies’ Institute in New Jersey, was to make women “fit companions for educated men” and “qualified to educate their children,” thus forming “individual and national character.”64 Worcester’s reasoning followed that of Benjamin Rush. Likewise, Samuel Young, a New York state senator, suggested that “no universal agent of civilization exists, but our mothers.”65 Educated women, if anything, would not compete for jobs and should have been less threatening.

Nevertheless African American education, whether pursued by men or women, was rooted in the broader project of achieving black civil rights, which did threaten social and racial hierarchies, thus angering white opponents. After all, servants might relinquish their post, as Sarah Harris and Grace Lanson had done. Moreover racialized dimensions of white opposition were still informed by gender. The scholar Mary Kelley argues that the curriculum at female academies “schooled [women] for social leadership” and as “makers of public opinion.” This distinctive social role within civil society “informed the subjectivities [of female] students,” as Kelley notes, but also protected and ensconced white girlhood in the female seminary until marriage. The female seminary movement helped to shape the very notion of the ideal woman; it reinforced the assumption that she was a white, middle-class or elite, educated, and nurturing wife and mother. Including young African American women in the female seminary movement threatened to overstep racial boundaries, but such a move insisted, too, on the students’ status as women capable of striving for the same idealized femininity.66

The failure of the manual labor college initiative in New Haven was, in Garrison’s words, “a bad precedent” with potentially devastating consequences. Another educational failure in the region might sound the death knell for the entire project of African American education. “If we suffer the school to be put down in Canterbury,” Garrison wrote, “other places will partake of the panic, and also prevent its introduction in their vicinity.” Opposition was contagious and imitative. Garrison’s predictions revealed the uphill struggle that African Americans and their allies faced in pursuit of educational opportunity. No gain could be taken for granted, and no setback could be assumed to be minor. Hence Garrison’s injunction: “Miss [Crandall] must be sustained at all hazards.”67

For Canterbury residents who opposed her seminary, Prudence’s project amounted to a kind of betrayal—a betrayal that, ironically, stood directly across the street from the home of Andrew T. Judson, one of the very men who had recruited Prudence to open a boarding school for young white women. Judson quickly became a leading opponent of the African American seminary, organizing town meetings, proposing resolutions, and rebuking Prudence. At the first town meeting, on March 9, 1833, Samuel J. May and Arnold Buffum, de facto trustees of the new seminary, represented Prudence since she could not attend on account of her gender. Their presence, later joined by Henry E. Benson, infuriated residents who viewed abolitionists as interlopers. All of those who spoke at the meeting condemned the seminary except for George S. White, a white Episcopal minister and émigré, who rebutted Judson’s inflammatory claims. Still, the townspeople voted in favor of numerous resolutions opposing the seminary. One associated the abolitionist-backed seminary with the town’s demise—a claim that, according to May, stirred up a frenzy among the townspeople “that a dire calamity was impending over them.”68 Given the hostile environment, neither May nor Buffum said anything during the meeting, but afterward May spoke out, defending Prudence and her students. Judson and others organized yet another town meeting, where further resolutions were passed to remove the seminary once and for all. These resolutions, however, did not stop Prudence.

The sequence of Prudence’s decision-making here is important. At first, she sought only to admit Sarah Harris to her all-white boarding school. However, the parents of the white female students, and likely some of the white female students themselves, could not accept an African American girl as a classmate. If they had hoped to discourage Prudence, they failed. For it was only after this that Prudence decided to establish a seminary specifically for African American girls and women, which meant reconstituting her student body. In a private conversation, May told Judson exactly that: “If you and your neighbors in Canterbury had quietly consented that Sarah Harris, whom you knew to be a bright good girl, should enjoy the privilege she so eagerly sought, this momentous conflict would not have arisen in your village.”69 Judson, however, saw no place for free blacks in the United States, let alone at a female seminary across the road from his house, and surely not at the expense of white women.

Judson and another of Prudence’s opponents, Rufus Adams, a lawyer and justice of the peace, raised two other key objections to the seminary that revolved around Prudence’s alleged misconduct. First, Judson and Adams condemned the “the manner in which Miss C. effected the change in her school,” which they deemed “very objectionable.” Judson averred that Prudence had disregarded her “fellow-citizens,” the same citizens who had recruited her from nearby Plainfield, by failing to inform them of her plan. Second, Prudence had “forced upon” Canterbury this “evil” school, without so much as a discussion. These objections soon gave way to racist explanations, threats, and legal maneuvers, all intended to shut down the seminary.70

One of Judson’s first lines of attack was to recapitulate oppressive ideologies that called into question the character of African American girls and women. Through the press, Judson stated quite clearly why he and others objected to the presence of young African American women in and around Canterbury: “[Their] characters and habits might be various and unknown to us, thereby rendering insecure, the persons, property, and reputations of our own citizens.”71 This objection, framed as a deeply held concern, evoked the racist and sexist ideologies that placed African American women outside of True Womanhood.72 Never mind that Sarah Harris, described by Prudence as “the daughter of honorable parents,” was known to Judson and other residents, or that some of the scholars at the seminary came from middle-class and elite free black families.73 To opponents, all these scholars were “foreigners” whose illegitimate demand for education had established “a black seminary to the exclusion of a white one,” rendering the entire (white) community insecure.74

Just as slaveholders suggested that literacy would spoil a slave, so too did colonizationists marshal a form of false benevolence to argue that schooling African American women would ruin their lives. One anonymous writer, who claimed to be a colonizationist, wrote a letter to the editor of the Norwich Republican denouncing African American education and defending Canterbury opponents. The Canterbury Female Seminary, in the words of this writer, offered a “pernicious” kind of education in which African American women learned about “their own dignity and consequence” in a nation where they would “be met with spontaneous, unconquerable aversion of the white to the black.” The argument acknowledged only part of the seminary’s teachings. Prudence did affirm African American women’s respectability; she and her students believed that prejudice could be conquered by young women armed with education and thus empowered to advance themselves and their communities as they fought for their civil rights. In the writer’s estimation, however, the educational outcome would not be winning black rights or even, as some abolitionists predicted, a weakening of racial prejudice, but instead would leave African American women “angry” and “sink [them] into degradation and infamy.” This writer revealed his unwillingness to see educated and empowered African American women.75

By allying herself with her African American female scholars, Prudence forced, albeit briefly, a conversation about the virulence of racial prejudice in the North. She described white racism as “inveterate” and “the strongest, if not the only chain that bound those heavy burdens on the wretched slaves,” thus linking slavery and racial prejudice. This injustice motivated her to establish the Canterbury Female Seminary, whose mission was to “fit and prepare teachers for the people of color.”76 Preparing women for the teaching profession at female seminaries was hardly a new endeavor, though it had, until then, been one mostly reserved for white women. For instance, Ipswich Female Academy, founded in 1828 and run by Zilpah Grant, graduated twenty-seven female students between 1829 and 1830, all but two of whom immediately became teachers.77 Prudence’s words and actions thus forced her opponents to confront their prejudices. One editorialist confessed, “Will it be said that this is prejudice?—Be it so.”78

Prudence also faced sexist attacks, further demonstrating that white opposition was intimately tied to constructions of manhood and womanhood. Opponents smeared her, painting her as a crook who transformed her school only to make money, and as a champion of racial mixing. One editorialist from the United States Telegraph suggested that getting the “young lady [Prudence] a husband” would surely lure her away from her experiment—implying that Prudence suffered from her lack of a husband and was not genuinely committed to educating African American women.79 Judson went even further, accusing her of “step[ping] out of the hallowed precincts of female propriety” by betraying her original mandate and refusing men’s demands to return to it. Prudence’s opponents sought to reset the racial and gender order she had upset, restoring white women to their subordinate status to white men (and African American women excluded altogether).80

Opponents of the seminary employed various means to force its demise. Ann Eliza Hammond, the sixteen-year-old African American woman from Providence whose mother introduced Prudence to other families, became the first out-of-state student at the school. The sheriff of Windham County served a warrant, signed by Rufus Adams, against Ann Eliza, citing the Act for the Admission of Inhabitants in Towns, an eighteenth-century Connecticut law allowing local government officials to deport any nonresident in the state. If the person did not leave, he or she had to pay a fine of $1.67 per week, and if the person had not paid the fine and had not left after ten days, he or she was to be “whipped on the naked body not exceeding ten stripes.”81 The warrant was meant to put Ann Eliza in her place and also to put her out: out of Canterbury or, if colonizationists had their wish, out of the United States altogether. May advised Ann Eliza to “bear meekly the punishment, if they should in their madness inflict it; knowing that every blow they should strike her would resound throughout the land, if not over the whole civilized world, and call out an expression of indignation before which Mr. Judson and his associates would quail.” May need not have worried: Ann Eliza was “ready for the emergency” and responded to the challenge “with the spirit of a martyr.”82 However, Prudence disagreed with May’s idea about how to handle legal violence and refused to put Ann Eliza in harm’s way. Instead she decided to pay the first fine, which ended the matter.83 May’s depiction of a courageous Ann Eliza coupled with Judson’s “madness” prompted abolitionists to ask publicly, “Who are the savages now?”84 The Act for the Admission of Inhabitants in Towns echoed larger systems of violence against black bodies, particularly the African slave trade and slavery itself.

Some of Prudence’s students reacted to the sexist and violent attacks with both anger and sadness, though these emotions did not endure. Most viewed white opposition as a sign that white Canterbury residents needed Christian love. Harriet Rosetta Lanson wrote home to her adoptive guardian expressing dismay that she and her classmates were barred from attending the Congregational church in the village and had to travel to one in Packersville. But instead of dwelling on the inconvenience, Lanson pledged “to consecrate [to God] the little knowledge [she had] to his service.”85 Similarly, another student reminded her classmates that Prudence had taught them “not to indulge in angry feelings towards [their] enemies.” Quoting scripture on forgiveness (Romans 12:20) and loving one’s enemy (Luke 6:28), the student urged steadfast adherence to Christian principles of love and peace. She exhorted her classmates, “Feel at peace with all men; for we all know this is the spirit of the Christian, and this we must possess to support us through the trials we are called upon to pass in this life.”86 No matter what, Christian scriptures best governed human actions and behaviors, especially during trying times.

A strong commitment to Christian love did not preclude these young women from labeling the actions of white Canterbury residents unrighteous. As Christian women, they could, according to scripture (Romans 12:9), “abhor what is evil.” That evil was racial prejudice. In her address the same student explained, “We as a body, my dear school-mates . . . know . . . it is the prejudice the whites have against us that causes us to labor under so many disadvantages.” After all, African Americans’ pursuit of knowledge had actually inflamed prejudice and provoked white violence. This student stated matter-of-factly, “White people . . . put every obstacle they can in our way to prevent our rising to an equal.”87 She recognized the pattern of systematic oppression that inhibited black advancement. Her observations were valid: George Benson overheard one opponent confess that if the Canterbury Female Seminary flourished, then free blacks in Canterbury “would begin to look up and claim an equality with the whites.”88 Clearly the very idea of an educated African American woman terrified some residents. Racial prejudice was the disease that had to be named and cured precisely by fighting for African American education.

At the same time that Prudence’s students criticized their white opponents, however, the most radical dimension of their invocation of Christian love was its insistence that African Americans belonged to a universal Christian family. In a separate address, an anonymous student linked Christian love to the fight for racial equality. In the Christian imagination, this student explained, God was the father of humankind, which certainly included African Americans, and thus African Americans and whites shared a “common father.” Racial prejudice, then, made little sense, and all good Christians had an obligation to fight it. This student encouraged civic action and implored the public to “obey the voice of duty” and follow the example of the few like Prudence, who “stepped from within the shadow of prejudice, and [were] now pleading [African Americans’] cause, in the midst of persecution, with great success.”89 This student’s remarks evoked radical abolitionist ideology. As the historian Paul Goodman argued, radical abolitionists were “serious Christians [who] grounded their belief in human equality in faith.”90 They took seriously the biblical verse “God hath made of one blood all nations of men” (Acts 17:26). The fight for black equality and freedom was both a Christian duty and a national cause.

Students’ public writings sought to teach white Canterbury residents to be civil and moral, stressing Christian axioms of loving one’s neighbor and the Golden Rule. “If all were taught to love their neighbors as themselves, to do to others as they would be done unto, there would be no disposition to repeat the crime of him who slew his brother,” reflected one student.91 By recasting the biblical story of Cain and Abel as one of kinship relations instead of racial marking, this student attributed the conflict and violence in Canterbury to an absence of Christian love. The emphasis on Christian love implied neither submission nor complacency; rather it represented the potential for change. If Canterbury residents actually practiced a law of love, they would not and could not continue their course of action to destroy the Canterbury Female Seminary. These young women were students, but they were also teachers, showing whites how to behave civilly.

By invoking the ethic of Christian love, these young women proved that religious beliefs and values were central to their lives. They relied on this ethic to provoke a kind of resigned acceptance from white Canterbury residents who would then allow the seminary to exist. A more combative response, in all likelihood, would not have benefited the cause. Opponents near and far, not just slaveholders, regularly assailed the character of African American women and men, deeming them unworthy, inferior, and even dangerous, especially after Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. While these young women might have agreed with a radical activist like David Walker, who warned that the perpetuation of slavery would result in violence, they articulated no such sentiments in their writings. Rather an ethic of Christian love prevailed, becoming an important mode for African American women’s public self-expression and civic engagement.

White women abolitionists also espoused an ethic of Christian love to highlight the bonds of sisterhood. Frances Whipple, an abolitionist from Rhode Island, wrote a poem lauding Prudence’s heroism while imploring all women to help each other, for “God loveth all alike.”92 Likewise, an anonymously authored appeal, published in the Female Advocate, a moral reform newspaper, argued that the Canterbury affair concerned every American woman. Potentially any woman, this columnist suggested, could be thrown “into prison, for seeking female improvement and elevation.” This appeal urged women to band together and join the struggle for women’s education. It closed by encouraging women to be “vigilant . . . [and] active,” like the biblical figure Esther, in order to “save [the] country.” Education was about good character as well as intellectual improvement, which would be useful in the domestic realm and beyond.93

This seemingly local controversy over African American women’s education triggered a statewide initiative to curb free blacks seeking education. Canterbury opponents abandoned their plan to arrest students for violating old Connecticut laws and instead drafted and pushed through the Connecticut General Assembly an addendum to the Act for the Admission of Inhabitants in Towns that targeted African Americans from other states. This addendum stated that the migration of African Americans to Connecticut “injured” the state and its citizens, and it forbade the establishment of “any school, academy, or literary institution, for the instruction or education of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this state . . . without the consent, in writing . . . of the civil authority.”94 This so-called Black Law resembled legislation passed in various southern states that had outlawed the instruction of African Americans, free and enslaved. For instance, a Virginia law of 1819 prohibited enslaved African Americans, and those associated with them, from meeting for the purpose of “teaching them reading or writing.”95 The Virginia legislature later amended this antiliteracy law to include free blacks and mulattoes along with enslaved African Americans.96 Both the Virginia and the Connecticut law targeted specific sites of learning, whether the school or the church, and restricted black access to teaching and learning overall. With the help of Phillip Pearl, a white state senator from Hampton whose daughter had attended Prudence’s first, white female boarding school in Canterbury, the Connecticut law passed, effectively criminalizing the Canterbury Female Seminary.

In June 1833 Canterbury officials arrested Prudence and her younger sister, Almira, for violating the Black Law. The charges against Almira were dismissed since she was a minor; however, the charges against Prudence remained. Instead of posting bail in the amount of $150, she and her abolitionist supporters believed that her jailing in Brooklyn, the county seat, would shame Canterbury officials.97 Throwing a white Quaker woman in jail might prove, at least according to May, “how bad, how wicked, how cruel” the Black Law was.98 Prudence’s students agreed. They regarded the law as “unrighteous,” and they even sang a song comparing the biblical persecution and imprisonment of Paul and Silas to that of Prudence.99 After Prudence had spent one night in jail, George Benson posted bond, and she was soon released.

Abolitionists used the press to rebuke Canterbury opponents and turn the myth of African savagery on its head. In bold print ran the headlines “More Barbarism” and “Savage Barbarity,” attacking the white men of Canterbury who sought to destroy the seminary.100 The Liberator labeled Prudence’s imprisonment an act of “savage barbarity,” the same term used earlier by an anonymous African American female student and by May to describe the threat of violence against Ann Eliza Hammond. Abolitionists surmised that the “persecution” that Prudence and her students endured resulted from the “genuine fruit of colonization principles and prejudices,” a criticism of colonization as both primitive and racist.101 Arthur Tappan, a wealthy white entrepreneur and brother of businessman Lewis Tappan, even bankrolled the creation of a newspaper, eventually called the Unionist, to “disabuse the public mind of the misrepresentations and falsehoods” about the Canterbury Female Seminary, Prudence Crandall, free black communities, and the radical abolition movement more broadly.102 Abolitionists framed white Canterbury opponents as savage, thus turning upside down the myth of African savagery and, by extension, the rationale for racial prejudice and slavery.

Some New England journalists defended Judson by arguing that Prudence had sullied her own reputation and that of Canterbury in her overambitious and misguided effort to educate African American women. One unnamed writer regarded the entire project as “outlandish.” This writer caricatured the students as “girls with black skins, wooly heads and flat noses,” a far cry from “young ladies and little misses.”103 The Rhode Island Republican referred to Prudence as successful only in “[making] herself look ridiculous” by associating with “fanatical friends”—surely a reference to abolitionists—who rejected the notion that the Black Law was a “good and wholesome” measure to protect Canterbury and its residents from being “overrun” by African Americans.104 Similarly the New Hampshire Gazette found Prudence’s “overzealous [spirit] too much influenced by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Buffum,” assuming that any agency on the part of a woman must be traceable to a man.105

The case of State of Connecticut v. Prudence Crandall began on August 23, 1833, in a Windham County courtroom in Brooklyn, Connecticut, with Judge Joseph Eaton of Plainfield presiding. Prudence pleaded not guilty. The prosecution, led by Jonathan A. Welch, a Windham County lawyer, with Judson and Ichabod Bulkley appointed as assistant prosecutors, alleged that Prudence taught and boarded African American students without first obtaining a license to do so, violating the Black Law. Arthur Tappan financed Prudence’s legal defense, which included three distinguished white lawyers, William Ellsworth, Calvin Goddard, and Henry Strong.106 Ellsworth, the lead defense attorney, Yale College graduate, and congressman, argued that the Black Law was unconstitutional because it denied African American citizens equal rights. Twelve white male jurors would decide the fate of Prudence and her seminary. This trial, Prudence’s biographer Donald E. Williams Jr. contends, became “the first civil rights case in American history.”107

Though Prudence was the defendant in this case, the prosecution figuratively put her students on trial with her. Contrary to how they had been characterized by Judson and others, however, they came across as educated and poised. In an effort to prove that Prudence had violated the Black Law, the prosecution called at least five African American female students, all nonresidents of Connecticut, to testify, including Theodosia deGrasse, Ann Elizabeth Wilder, Catharine Ann Weldon, Ann Peterson, and Ann Eliza Hammond.108 All five invoked their constitutional right against self-incrimination and thus did not testify. Judson called another student, Eliza Glasko, to the stand, and she too refused. Judson argued that Eliza was in contempt of court for failing to “declare her knowledge in the matter” and thus should be jailed.109 Judge Eaton agreed. The prosecution then spotted Mary Benson in the courtroom and compelled her to testify. Mary, a member of the Benson family of Brooklyn, Connecticut, was Prudence’s friend and had helped her that fateful day that she had been arrested and jailed. The prosecution recognized her. As Donald E. Williams Jr. makes clear, legally she “had no constitutional basis on which to refuse to answer.”110 She testified that Prudence taught Ann Eliza of Providence, Rhode Island, a violation of the Black Law. On the heels of this testimony, Ellsworth advised Eliza Glasko to testify. She did so, recalling that she and her fellow schoolmates learned “reading, writing, grammar, [and] geography” and that “the scriptures were read and explained daily” at the school.111 This depiction captured the eloquence and dignity of the students and portrayed the Canterbury Female Seminary as decidedly Christian, a picture that numerous supporters confirmed.112 A reporter for the Connecticut Courant summed it up best: “Miss Crandall appeared at the bar of the court very interesting, and her pupils were inferior to no others, in their conduct, language and appearance.”113 After closing arguments, the jury deliberated for a few hours, but could not reach a verdict.

The date of the second trial came sooner than Prudence’s defense team expected. Judson refiled charges against her, and the court set her trial date for October 3, 1833. This time, Judson and state attorney Chauncey Cleveland prosecuted the case with new evidence. Judson introduced the testimony of Mary Barber, a white servant who worked alongside Sarah Harris in Jedidiah Shephard’s house. Mary presented a different version of the origins of the Canterbury Female Seminary; she alleged that Prudence convinced Sarah to postpone her engagement to George Fayerweather, a blacksmith, in order to attend the seminary. Donald E. Williams Jr. questions whether Judson and the prosecution influenced and perhaps even composed Mary’s testimony so as to bring Prudence into disrepute.114 Given Mary’s subordinate status, had she been persuaded to give this testimony for the good of the cause of getting rid of the seminary? Or was she being truthful? Both Prudence and Sarah flatly denied her account. By November 1833 Sarah had left the Canterbury Female Seminary anyway and married Fayerweather. Still, Barber’s testimony, which the prosecution likely leaked to the press before the second trial commenced, painted Prudence not as a Christian woman embodying a spirit of benevolence but as a schemer who had lied about her school and defied the conventions of womanhood by redirecting Sarah’s goals. In turn, Barber’s testimony stripped Sarah of any ambition, portraying her instead as pliable, perhaps even passive.

The actions of Chief Justice David Daggett, coupled with Judson’s dogged determination, greatly influenced the outcome of the second trial. While in the first trial, the prosecution focused on Prudence’s violation of the Black Law, in the second trial they resorted to racist scare tactics. Judson described the United States as a “nation of white men” who should “indulge that pride and honor.” To combat a carefully calculated mission by abolitionists to end slavery and bring about race mixing, Judson framed the Black Law as an act of protection. He warned that Prudence’s school and her association with abolitionists threatened that honor and could actually “work to dissolve the Union.” Such an appeal may well have excited the jury despite Ellsworth’s own impassioned speech.115

In both trials Ellsworth’s line of defense actually affirmed the rights and protections of citizenship for African American women. In the first trial, he made an emotional appeal to the jury to support African American education by arguing that the Black Law would “extinguish the light of knowledge, would degrade those who are now degraded, and depress those who are now depressed.” Another of the defense attorneys, Henry Strong, asked the jury to look directly at the young African American women in the courtroom and think about whether they were “worthy of being instructed.” The request cast African American women in a position that departed from prevailing views about black womanhood, not to mention legal restrictions on black civil rights.116

In a moment of judicial activism, Judge Daggett settled the question about black citizenship by stating unequivocally, “Slaves, free blacks or Indians . . . are not citizens.”117 To support this conclusion, he quoted a renowned legal scholar, James Kent, chancellor of New York, who had written, “Free white persons and free colored persons of African blood did not participate equally with the whites in the exercise of civil and political rights.”118 Daggett, who had opposed the manual labor college in New Haven a year or so earlier, instructed the jury to come to a decision on this case based on the alleged fact that the Black Law was constitutional. After a short period of deliberation, the jury found Prudence Crandall guilty and the court ordered her to pay a fine as well as court costs. Most important, the ruling meant that she had to close her seminary. Ellsworth filed an appeal, to be heard in the next session of the Connecticut Supreme Court, in July 1834.

The arguments in the state supreme court case essentially pitted black civil rights against white male supremacy. On July 22, 1834, four Connecticut Supreme Court justices heard Crandall’s appeal: Thomas S. Williams, Clark Bissell, Samuel Church, and Chief Justice Daggett, who opted not to recuse himself. Judson and Chauncey Cleveland asked the court to uphold the judgment of the lower court. Judson repeated his and Daggett’s outright rejection of black citizenship, pointing to a lack of voting rights for African American men and the degraded condition and inferiority of African Americans in general. He also played on the fears of the white community, asserting that a victory for Prudence would amount to a surrender of the entire American nation. “I would appeal to this Court—to every American citizen,” he avowed, “and say that America is ours—it belongs to a race of white men.”119 That this proclamation of white manhood emerged in a court of law where a white woman was convicted of educating African American women was no coincidence. Judson used the courtroom to call on white men to close ranks and stop the radical abolition movement’s threats to the racial and gender order. In their remarks, Judson and Cleveland essentially requested the affirmation of white male supremacy, of its institutions, and of the denial of black educational rights.

Ellsworth and Goddard sought to refute the lower court’s verdict by arguing that the Black Law violated the Privileges and Immunities Clause in the U.S. Constitution. To make the case for African American citizenship, Ellsworth relied on a gendered construction of citizenship tied to black male military service and voting, which enabled him to assert normative ideas about race and gender. His entire defense was predicated on the contention that “a distinction found in color . . . is inconvenient and impracticable.”120 African Americans were thus like white Americans. An argument in favor of African American women’s citizenship apart from African American men would have seemingly affirmed racial distinction. That is, as the historian Corinne Field explains, to “promote the equal rights of black women . . . would . . . suggest that . . . black people’s capacities followed a different normative pattern than white people’s maturation, thus giving credence to the idea of natural racial differences.”121 Nevertheless Ellsworth and Goddard took a radical stance when they defended the humanity, citizenship, and rights of African American women.122

African American women activists like Sarah Mapps Douglass and Maria W. Stewart defined citizenship in terms of Christian faith, national allegiance, and inclusion. They espoused what the historian Stephen Kantrowitz has termed a “citizenship of the heart,” namely legal freedom, civil rights, and belonging.123 Douglass claimed America as her home, vowing to “embrace her [America] the closer,” despite the fact that it “unkindly strives to throw me from her bosom.”124 By late September 1833 Stewart had left the Boston lecture circuit, largely due to disapprobation from African American male leaders. She delivered an impassioned farewell address, celebrating and encouraging a kind of activism rooted in “godliness” and “peace.”125 Christian love was about people’s relationship to one other and to God. Though Stewart and Douglass rarely invoked the word “citizen” in their writings, they shared this sentiment.

Likewise, Prudence prepared her students for active citizenship determined by knowledge and character, not sex or race. Indeed many politicians and educational reformers in early America linked education to democratic citizenship. Calvin Goddard put it plainly: the Black Law denied African Americans “of all opportunity to acquire that knowledge and those habits which [could] render them good citizens, useful to each other and their native country.”126 The assertion of black female citizenship by Prudence’s legal team laid bare this crucial question: What constituted citizenship in early America, particularly for women and African Americans? Years later, in 1848, James Kent affirmed black citizenship, regardless of status, arguing that “the privilege of voting, and the legal capacity for office, are not essential to the character of a citizen.”127 Prudence and her allies and students might have agreed: common humanity, peace, love, and forgiveness constituted good citizenship. African American female students at Canterbury possessed a desire for knowledge and acted in a loving way, which reflected their character. This stood in stark contrast to their detractors, who turned to acts of violence that ought to have thrown their own citizenship into question.

As the Crandall case wound its way through the court, African American women students continued to board at the school and attend classes. When Charles Stuart, a white Bermuda-born abolitionist, visited in June 1834, he observed that the school was “in a very flourishing and happy condition, although still occasionally subject to annoyance.”128 These annoyances were actually incidents of violence and harassment directed at Prudence Crandall as well as the school’s teachers and students. That same month William Burleigh, one of the teachers, was assaulted with eggs; he was later arrested for violating the Black Law; and a one-pound stone was hurled through one of the school’s windows, landing in a student’s room.129 Earlier that year, on January 28, a fire broke out at the seminary. No one was hurt, but Chauncey Cleveland charged Frederick Olney, an African American man who had performed odd jobs at the school, with arson. Three African American female students testified at Olney’s trial; Maria Robinson, Amy Fenner, and Henrietta Bolt recounted his work at the schoolhouse, particularly on the day in question. Given the thin evidence in the case, Olney was found not guilty.130

Because Canterbury had proven to be an unwelcome site for her seminary, over a year earlier Prudence had contemplated a move to Reading, Massachusetts, and May had received a letter from the townspeople there, who were “willing to have [Prudence’s] school established.”131 It is unclear why Prudence did not relocate her school there, but her personal life changed when she married Calvin Philleo, a widowed white Baptist minister from New York, on August 12, 1834. Calvin Philleo became increasingly involved in the seminary. First the couple tried to broker a deal to relocate the school to another part of Canterbury, but the local governing board ignored the offer. Prudence next set her sights on Philadelphia. Lydia White, cofounder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and proprietor of a free labor goods business, had visited the Canterbury Female Seminary that August 1834 and may have alerted Prudence to the possibilities available in the City of Brotherly Love. Later that month Prudence and her husband traveled to Philadelphia, where they met with the activists James Forten, Charlotte Vandine Forten, and Lucretia Mott, among others.132 During this visit, Prudence devised a plan to establish a school for black children and recruited fifty boys and girls.133 The idea of an African American female seminary in Philadelphia apparently fell by the wayside. It may have been reasoned that focusing solely on African American women’s education was too limited, especially when qualified teachers were needed to staff Philadelphia’s black schools. Most critical at that moment was keeping the project of African American education alive. In the end, given Philadelphia’s ongoing problems with racial violence in the summer of 1834, Prudence felt that relocating her school there was not a viable option.134

Meanwhile in Connecticut, the Canterbury controversy had ignited spirited debates about colonization and radical abolition among the inhabitants of Windham County. At its fourth annual meeting on July 4, 1834, the Windham County Colonization Society, which Judson attended, resolved to do more to spread colonization, including increasing the number of auxiliary societies. But it was the local antislavery movement that grew. The following month, the Anti-Slavery Society of Plainfield and its vicinity (including Canterbury) formed with forty-three members, a number that nearly tripled weeks later. A New England antislavery convention report claimed that “much alarm was manifested at [this] rapid spread of Abolitionism.”135

On July 28, 1834, the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its decision in the Crandall case, voting three to one to dismiss the charges, thus overturning the lower court’s ruling. Justice Williams wrote the majority opinion, citing a technicality, and Daggett was the lone dissenter. The inconclusive legal outcome of the case only fanned the flames. The Vermont Chronicle put it succinctly: “Mr. Judson and his associates must endure Miss Crandall’s school till they can go through the whole process again—at least.”136

The prospect of another trial coupled with the growth of the antislavery movement in Connecticut may well have pushed Prudence’s opponents over the edge. Possibly responding to all that the Canterbury Female Seminary represented and the inconclusive legal outcome, a group of men attacked the school building in September 1834. They smashed most of the windows, leaving the building, in one anonymous student’s words, “almost untenantable.” This student remained grateful, though, that her “lot was no worse,” which may mean that the men had not physically harmed her or any of her classmates.137 That night Calvin Philleo went to Judson’s house across the street from the school to tell him of the attack and to ask if anyone had witnessed anything, but Judson was dismissive. Feeling she had no choice, Prudence asked Samuel J. May to do what she could not: tell the students that the school had to close for their protection and safety. May later wrote of the events, “I felt ashamed of Canterbury, ashamed of Connecticut, ashamed of my country, ashamed of my color.”138

Though their education was abruptly halted, these young African American women still championed Christian love. Not only were they steadfast in their faith in God and their love for each other, but they also remained committed to extending that love to their neighbors. After all, the Bible stated that love was a Christian principle (1 John 3:23). These women entered the school in love and parted in love, remembering the biblical definition of goodness (Romans 12:9). In a short essay, one student shared her memories of female friendship at the seminary, where “love was without dissimulation.” She credited May with helping her to develop morally and intellectually. By embodying Christian values, he had taught her a lot about religion: “With him I saw religion, not merely adopted as an empty form, but a living, all-pervading principle of action. He lived like those who seek a better country: nor was his family devotion a cold pile of hypocrisy, on which the fire of God never descends. No, it was a place of communion with heaven.” This student’s reflection revealed her understanding of Christianity. On the one hand, Judson and other opponents favored prejudice, rage, and violence; they acted unjustly. On the other hand, May, Crandall, and her students believed in peace, thus upholding an ethic of Christian love.139

Years later this ethic of Christian love still governed the actions of some former students. One from Hartford, with the initials E.F., penned a temperance song that was sung at the Colored Temperance Convention in Middletown, Connecticut, in May 1836.140 Harriet Rosetta Lanson vowed to devote her life to doing God’s work. She joined the temperance movement and began to prepare for a career as a Sabbath school teacher. She gave speeches, most likely at church services, where she encouraged parents to guide children and youth. “Pour in the oil of counsel, and guide their tottering steps to tread the upward path to virtue,” she urged. Upon her death from consumption on November 8, 1835, Simeon Jocelyn remembered her as a faithful young Christian woman who sought to “kindle a love for virtue” among African American youth.141 Her piety manifested in her commitment to her own education and that of others.142

Following Prudence’s example, radical abolitionists began to develop educational initiatives for African American children and youth. In an 1841 letter to the editor of the Philanthropist, Davis Day, a young African American man who attended Oberlin College, linked moral and intellectual improvement to women’s influence, arguing, “The elevation of our race, depends in a great degree upon the talents and education of our females.” Day spoke of the critical need for educated African American teachers in black communities in Ohio; ignoring African American women’s education undermined the struggle for black freedom.143 The American Anti-Slavery Society, established in December 1833, passed resolutions that supported Prudence’s “philanthropic efforts” in educating African American women, praised educational institutions that accepted African Americans, and condemned antiliteracy laws “which prevent or restrict the education of the people of color, bond or free.” Jocelyn vowed to campaign to abolish these laws “more earnestly than corporeal slavery itself [because] ignorance enslaves the mind and tends to the ruin of the immortal soul.”144 African American education, for enslaved and free blacks, was understood as a multidimensional strategy for freedom.

In the mid-1830s a few white proprietors and abolitionists made concerted efforts to establish schools for African American women. Theodore Dwight Weld helped to build literary institutions in Cincinnati, Ohio, and planned to open a school for African American women that was to be led by Charlotte Lathrop, a young white woman from Connecticut.145 Martha and Lucy Ball, two white abolitionist sisters, opened a school for African American women in Boston that taught “reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, &c. and . . . plain sewing, knitting, &c.”146 One of the African American teachers at that school was Julia Williams, who had studied at the Canterbury Female Seminary. She earned public praise for her excellent teaching and for her work in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.147 Another white woman taught African American women “spelling, reading, and writing, needle-work, &c.” at the home of Peter Gray in Boston.148 In 1834 Rebecca Buffum, the daughter of Arnold Buffum, founded a school in Philadelphia for young women “without regard to their complexion.”149 While these efforts advanced African American women’s education to some extent, they lasted only a few years.

For African American women, teaching was central to racial uplift. Of the twelve or so young African American women who we know attended the Canterbury Female Seminary, at least six went on to become teachers: Ann Eliza Hammond, Elizabeth H. Smith, Julia Ward Williams, Miranda Glasko, Mary E. Miles, and Mary Harris. Upon her return to her home state of Rhode Island, Ann Eliza taught at the coeducational Providence English School for Colored Youth, operated by Reverend John W. Lewis.150 Her classmate Elizabeth worked as a teacher and principal at the Meeting Street School in Providence.151 Miranda taught at a school for African American children in New London, Connecticut, in the late 1830s.152 Though it is difficult to assess whether and how Christian love figured in the work of these African American women teachers later in their lives, they were often remembered in obituaries and memorials as learned and virtuous Christian women who defended their communities.153

The Harris sisters too devoted themselves to a life of learning and activism. While many members of the Harris family remained in Canterbury, Sarah—the young woman who had moved to that village with her parents and siblings in 1832—and her husband, George Fayerweather, eventually settled in his native state of Rhode Island. She only briefly studied at Prudence’s school before starting her own family and raising her children. Her daughter, Isabella, went to a high school in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Sarah encouraged her, probably on more than one occasion, “Improve your time at school.”154 Sarah also remained active in the antislavery movement, corresponding with Garrison as well as attending lectures and abolitionist meetings throughout the Northeast.155 Her sister, Mary Harris, married Pelleman Williams, an African American teacher, and they settled in New Haven, where Williams taught. Mary reared their three children and, like many free black women, worked occasionally as a domestic servant to supplement the household income.156 In the post–Civil War era, the family moved to Louisiana, where Mary and her husband taught freed people.157

For Sarah Harris Fayerweather, the experience at Canterbury was politically and morally formative. At an antislavery meeting in the summer of 1862, Emma Whipple, Prudence’s stepdaughter, met Sarah, who introduced herself as the “first colored scholar at Prudence Crandall’s school,” revealing her pride in the title. Emma described Sarah as “very intelligent and lady-like[,] well-informed in every movement relative to the removal of slavery.” In their conversation, Sarah expressed “the warmest love and gratitude” for Prudence. She had even named one of her daughters Prudence, and she named one of her sons Charles Frederick Douglass.158 Her activist ties only deepened over the years. Crandall and Sarah maintained a loving long-distance friendship, exchanging letters and remembering the activism of early allies. Sarah even traveled to Crandall’s home in Kansas for a visit in 1877. A year later, Sarah passed away. The inscription on her gravestone reads, “Her’s [sic] was a living example of obedience to faith, devotion to her children and a loving, tender interest in all.”159

For seventeenth months, nearly two dozen young African American women had access to advanced schooling in Canterbury. African American and white abolitionists celebrated this milestone, but white residents were incensed. The black pursuit of knowledge provoked racialized and gendered forms of violence, which ranged from the threatened whipping of Ann Eliza Hammond to the eventual attack on the school building. Virulent white opposition arose out of a place of racism and sexism, anger at Prudence’s decision to establish a new seminary that displaced white women, and anxiety about the status of African Americans in the nation. Prudence and her students characterized this violence as unchristian.

Amid this rising tide of violence, African American women and their allies mobilized. Maria W. Stewart, for instance, championed love, especially within the black community, just as Prudence’s students espoused Christian love to persuade Canterbury residents to accept Prudence’s educational project. This ethic of Christian love armed students with the discursive power to promote inclusion and equal treatment, at the schoolhouse and beyond. Alongside their abolitionist allies, these women resisted their dehumanization and devaluation through the pursuit, acquisition, and use of knowledge, insisting all the while that they themselves were valuable members of the community.

Moreover these students staked their claims to the category of woman. Just as middle-class and elite white women students learned to take on a distinctive social role, so too did African American women at this seminary develop a particular kind of social reform rooted in their Christian faith. These students also showed that they could play an influential role in their own communities, as both mothers and reformers. In doing so, they enacted their own idealized version of purposeful womanhood, one that required resilience and love.

FIGURE 1.3. “Colored Schools Broken Up in the Free States.” This illustration from the American Anti-Slavery Almanac (1839) essentially reinterprets the violent attack on the Canterbury Female Seminary in 1834 and connects it to other attacks on African American schools that happened throughout the North, from Ohio to New Hampshire. Author’s collection.

Five years after the closure of the Canterbury Female Seminary, an illustration in the American Anti-Slavery Almanac (1839) depicted a scene of a mob attacking a school for young African American women; the caption read, “Colored Schools Broken Up in the Free States” (Figure 1.3). In the illustration, a mob wields weapons and hurls rocks at the front of the “School for Colored Girls.” A man holding a torch moves toward the side of the building, lunging at two African American women fleeing through the back door, with only a wooden gate separating them from the man. The illustration linked the attack on the Canterbury Female Seminary to similar incidents in Canaan, New Hampshire, and Brown County, Ohio, where “law-makers and the mob” conspired to destroy schools for African Americans.160 What happened in Canterbury, then, was not unique; I estimate that violence had erupted in the antebellum North over African American education at least ten times (see appendix D).

African American activists, however, remained committed to women’s education. Despite waves of white opposition, young African American women continued their educational quest. Four years after the Canterbury Female Seminary closed, one student, Mary E. Miles, found a place at a female seminary in Clinton, Oneida County, New York, a school that did not share the same fate as Prudence Crandall’s school.