In Pursuit of Knowledge. Kabria Baumgartner
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