Prudence Crandall’s Legacy. Donald E. Williams
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They continued their private debate. Judson said if the old vagrancy law was insufficient to block students from coming into the town, “then we will get a law passed by our Legislature, now in session, forbidding the institution of such a school as Miss Crandall proposes, in any part of Connecticut.”12 May said Crandall’s supporters would challenge such a law “up to the highest court of the United States.”13
Judson’s visit with May did not result in a reconciling of their respective views. “Mr. Judson left me in high displeasure,” May wrote. “I never met him afterwards but as an opponent.”14 Three days later on Thursday, March 14, 1833, eleven men arrived at Prudence Crandall’s home to present her with the resolutions passed at the town meeting. This time, Crandall did not face the committee alone—her father Pardon and sister Almira were with her when the men arrived.15 Samuel Hough, the owner of an axe factory and the man who had loaned Crandall some of the money she needed to purchase the schoolhouse, read the resolutions to Crandall and her family.16 The visit was an anticlimax to the hostility at the town meeting. The resolutions stated what was already well known; many in town were fearful of the proposed school and hoped Crandall would abandon her plan. There was no requirement for her to do or refrain from doing anything. Crandall resumed preparing the schoolhouse for the new students.
The war of words continued. The next issue of the Liberator appeared on March 16 and included Henry Benson’s account of the Canterbury town meeting. William Lloyd Garrison set the names of five prominent opponents to Crandall’s school—Andrew Judson, Rufus Adams, Solomon Paine, Richard Fenner, and Andrew Harris—in large, bold letters below the banner headline, “Heathenism Outdone.” Garrison called them “shameless enemies of their species” and said their disgraceful behavior “will attach to them as long as there exists any recollection of the wrongs of the colored race.”17 Six days later, on Friday, March 22, Judson and his supporters released a lengthy attack on Crandall’s school titled “Appeal to the American Colonization Society.” Excerpts from Judson’s letter were printed in a number of publications, including the Norwich Republican. “In their wild career of reform,” Judson said, referring to Garrison and the abolitionists, “those gentlemen would justify intermarriages with the white people!!”18
Judson submitted a longer draft of his letter to the North American Magazine and took additional jabs at Garrison and his quest for emancipation. “What right has William Lloyd Garrison to tell us that we are slumbering in moral death, and that he and his immediate associates first made the attempt to arouse us?” Judson asked. “Before Garrison was born, there existed in the public mind as deep an abhorrence of slavery, as he can excite with his tongue or his pen. But New England well knows, that by the Constitutional terms of our national compact, she has no more right to interfere with the internal domestic policy of the Southern states, than with the concerns of a foreign power. … Talk of immediate abolition! You might as safely open the gates of a menagerie, and permit its savage tenants to roam among the haunts of men, as at once to emancipate the slaves. Talk of forcing the South to abolish slavery! You might as well think of uprooting the Allegheny Mountains from their deep foundations.”19
Many in the North viewed slavery as a necessary evil permitted by the Constitution and required to support the economy of the South. Judson shared Thomas Jefferson’s views regarding slavery in some respects; Judson believed that slavery would disappear at some ill-defined point in the future, perhaps through colonization and sending blacks back to Africa. “Southern prejudice in relation to slavery, is like the oak,” said Judson. “But by calm rational effort, I doubt not, but that the axe may be laid at the root in due time, and this towering tree will come to the ground.”20
As Judson intensified his campaign in favor of colonization and against Crandall’s school, Arthur and Lewis Tappan moved to cut their last ties to the colonization movement. When the American Colonization Society became popular in the 1820s, the Tappan brothers had supported the effort to send blacks to Liberia. Lewis Tappan helped organize the Massachusetts Colonization Society in 1822.21 Arthur Tappan joined the American Colonization Society in 1827, and he served as vice president of the African Education Society, a subcommittee of the Colonization Society.22 Arthur and Lewis Tappan also had a financial interest in the colonization movement; the Tappans secured potentially lucrative contracts for exports and shipping between Liberia and the United States.23
The Tappan brothers left the Colonization Society in 1831. The shipping business that the Tappans expected from Liberia never materialized, and their business contact in Liberia died of fever.24 Arthur Tappan did not criticize the colonization movement publicly at that time, as many of his friends and customers continued to support colonization. Two years later, however, Tappan decided to publicly denounce colonization when the Anti-Slavery Society of Andover, Massachusetts, asked him whether colonization “is worthy of the patronage of the Christian public?”25 In his letter of March 26, 1833, he admitted he was once one of colonization’s warmest friends, but now believed that colonization would “deepen the prejudice against the free colored people” and strengthen slavery.26
“It had its origin in the single motive to get rid of the free colored people, that the slaves may be held in greater safety,” Tappan wrote. “Good men have been drawn into it under the delusive idea that it would break the chains of slavery and evangelize Africa; but the day is not far distant, I believe, when the society will be regarded in its true character, and be deserted by everyone who wishes to see a speedy end put to slavery in this land of boasted freedom.”27 Garrison published Tappan’s letter in the Liberator on April 6, 1833.
Tappan’s shift away from colonization represented an important turning point for antislavery activists in New York City and elsewhere. Tappan held many progressive views, but most regarded him as a moderate compared to abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. Tappan helped promote Garrison’s call for immediate emancipation to a broader audience. Throughout the 1830s, many opponents of slavery followed the example of the Tappan brothers and withdrew their support for colonization.28
Prudence Crandall prepared for the opening of her school for black women, scheduled for Monday, April 1, 1833. George Benson stopped by the school to assist Crandall. “I have just returned from Canterbury and Brooklyn, where all is commotion,” Benson reported to William Lloyd Garrison. “The cause of the oppressed will be maintained, the school will go into operation next week, and I trust will be nobly supported.”29
Andrew Judson and his allies realized the resolutions they had passed at the March 9 town meeting had accomplished nothing. Judson scheduled another town meeting specifically to call on the state legislature to close Crandall’s school. On the evening of April 1, townspeople gathered at the Congregational Church to vote on a new resolution. The meeting had none of the tension and drama of the first town meeting. The rhetoric of the resolution, however, was more pointed and alarmist. It claimed the school was in fact not a school at all, but rather a theater from which the abolitionists would “promulgate their disgusting doctrines of amalgamation and their pernicious sentiments of subverting the Union.”30 The resolution stated that Crandall’s school, under the false pretense of educating black women, would instead “scatter firebrands, arrows and death among brethren of their own blood.”31 After some discussion the townspeople “voted that a petition in behalf of the town of Canterbury to the next General Assembly be drawn up in suitable language, deprecating the evil consequences of bringing from other towns and other states people of color for any purpose. …”32 Judson also attempted to outlaw criticism of the colonization movement. The resolution called on the legislature to prohibit schools from “disseminating the principles and doctrines opposed to the Benevolent Colonization System.”33 Finally, the resolution requested that the legislature enact such laws as necessary to put an end to the “evil” of Crandall’s school.34 The resolution once again established a committee, which included Andrew Judson, for the purpose drafting a petition to the general assembly and encouraging other towns to send similar petitions to the legislature.
The town meeting vote provided Andrew Judson, who served