In Pursuit of Knowledge. Kabria Baumgartner
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