In Pursuit of Knowledge. Kabria Baumgartner
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.
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