In Pursuit of Knowledge. Kabria Baumgartner
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.