5 : The Black Law

      As the month of April ended, Prudence Crandall had only three black students at her school. In addition to local opposition, Crandall now battled a dire fiscal situation and realized she could not rely on advertisements in the Liberator to increase enrollment. When she received a letter from Arthur Tappan encouraging her to keep her school open, Crandall saw an opportunity.¹ She traveled to Norwich on Monday, April 22, 1833, and boarded a ferry for New York City.

      Crandall also made a decision concerning Ann Eliza Hammond and the vagrancy charge. While she appreciated the advice of Rev. May to stand firm and persuade Miss Hammond to submit to a whipping if necessary, Crandall did not agree. Crandall could not allow a child in her care to face even the remote possibility of brutal punishment at the hands of the town. With the deadline of the May 2 hearing fast approaching, Crandall paid the fine and ended the matter for the time being.²

      The bitter opposition to the school took a toll on Crandall’s family, particularly her father. Pardon Crandall did not enjoy public attention and wanted to see the controversy brought to an end. “I have advised her often to give up her school and sell her property, and relieve Canterbury from their imagined destruction,” Pardon wrote. “Not that I thought she had committed a crime or had done anything which she had not a perfect right to do. But I wanted peace and quietness.”³

      While Pardon privately encouraged his daughter to abandon her plans to educate black women, he stood by her when others criticized her school. Andrew Judson’s attacks in the press moved Pardon to respond. He sent a letter to Judson and Chester Lyon; Lyon was the assessor, sheriff, and judge of probate for Canterbury.⁴ Pardon included his letter in a pamphlet titled Fruits of Colonization, which combined letters and editorials critical of Judson and other opponents of Crandall’s school.

      “The spirit of a father that waketh for the daughter is roused,” Pardon wrote. “I know the consequence. I now come forward to oppose tyranny with my property at stake, my life in my hand.”⁵ Pardon described how a gang of men came to his house and threatened to destroy his daughter’s schoolhouse unless she closed her school. The men also threatened to attack Pardon’s farm and demanded that he leave Canterbury. “It will be easy to raise a mob and tear down your house,” they said.⁶

      The following day Pardon visited Andrew Judson and accused him of leading the “ungenerous and unrighteous conduct that has been pursued towards my daughter Prudence Crandall.”⁷ Judson responded with the threat of a lawsuit. “I had rather sue you than to sue her,” Judson told Pardon.⁸ Pardon said that a lawsuit seemed unnecessary given Judson’s plans to “pass a law that will destroy the school without a series of litigations.”⁹

      Crandall’s impulsive trip to New York City, where she implored Arthur Tappan and the black ministers who supported her school to immediately secure students, resulted in success. By early May 1833, six students arrived from New York City. Shortly thereafter, enrollment swelled from nine to thirteen and then to twenty-two, with students from New York, Philadelphia, Providence, and Boston. Within Connecticut, students came from Canterbury, Griswold, and New Haven.¹⁰ Crandall finally had the income she needed to meet her basic expenses. Students filled the schoolhouse, and Crandall immersed herself in the job of teacher and headmistress of a school for black women. “In the midst of this affliction I am as happy as at any moment of my life—I never saw the time when I was the least apprehensive that adversity would harm me,” Prudence wrote. “I have put my hand to the plough and I will never, no never look back—I trust God will help me keep this resolution.”¹¹

      Crandall’s work mirrored the ongoing efforts of black leaders and ministers in New York City, who operated schools for members of their congregations with guidance in “morals, literature, and mechanical arts.”¹² In the spring of 1833, Reverend Samuel Cornish, Theodore Wright, Peter Williams, and Christopher Rush founded the Phoenix Society. They successfully opened a high school for young black men, and later opened a school for black women.¹³ Both Arthur Tappan and his brother Lewis helped in the effort—Arthur served as treasurer, and Lewis taught at a Sabbath school sponsored by the Society.¹⁴ Rev. Cornish wrote that the schools served as “seed sown in good ground,” leading to better lives for people of color.¹⁵ Cornish appealed to the community for donations of books, maps, and supplies for the education of black students. The Phoenix Society received many donations as a result of Cornish’s appeal.¹⁶

      Prudence Crandall could only dream of such a scenario.¹⁷ In Canterbury, no one solicited contributions for her school. Instead, local officials lobbied the legislature to pass laws to close it. Andrew Judson and nine other men circulated petitions calling for an end to “the evil consequences of bringing from other States and other towns people of color for any purpose.”¹⁸ Sixteen Connecticut cities and towns sent petitions to the legislature supporting the law proposed by Judson. The petitions contained the same language: “We consider the introduction of the people of color into the state … as an evil of great magnitude, as a calamity,” and the resulting “burdens of pauperism … (will) render less secure the person and property of our own fellow citizens.”¹⁹

      The legislature also received a letter from Prudence Crandall’s father. Pardon expressed his disappointment with local officials, who sought to destroy his daughter’s school rather than encourage the education of black women. “I entreat the members of the General Assembly, when acting on this petition, to remember those self-evident truths, that all mankind are created free and equal, that they are endued with inalienable rights, of which no man nor set of men have a right to deprive them. And my request is, that you will not … pass any act that will curtail or destroy any of the rights of the free people of this State or other States, whether they are white or black.”²⁰

      State Senator Philip Pearl chaired the committee considering Judson’s proposal. Pearl lived in Hampton, and his daughter had attended Prudence Crandall’s school until she was dismissed with the other white students. The committee reviewed the petitions and quickly drafted a report.²¹ In a preface to its findings, the committee discussed the evils of slavery but noted, “Our obligations as a State, acting in its sovereign capacity are limited to the people of our own territory.”²² Senator Pearl concluded that the Constitution denied blacks the basic rights of citizenship.

      “It is not contemplated for the Legislature to judge the wisdom of that provision of the Constitution which denies the franchise to the people of color; but your committee are not advised that it has ever been a subject of complaint,” Senator Pearl wrote.²³ The report said the legislature “ought not to impede” the education of blacks who lived in Connecticut, but concluded that the state had no duty to educate blacks from other states. “Here our duties terminate,” Senator Pearl said.²⁴ “We are under no obligations, moral or political, to incur the incalculable evils of bringing into our own state colored emigrants from abroad. … The immense evils which such a mass of colored population would gather within this state … would impose on our own people burdens which would admit