Prudence Crandall’s Legacy. Donald E. Williams
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of foul disgrace on all who have aided in the passage of this law or joined in its clamorous celebration?” The writer speculated that allowing blacks access to education “might seriously endanger that superiority in intellectual attainments which the whites at present boast, and also a more immediate consequence might mortify the pride of A. T. Judson, candidate for Congress and Captain Richard Fenner, rum retailer on the Canterbury Green.”46
A letter appeared in the Hartford Courant on June 24, signed “Canterbury,” that sarcastically condemned the new law. “The law does not prohibit colored people coming into the state—this you know would be against the Constitution of the United States—but it declares they should not be instructed. And why should they be? They are not white and it is doubtful if they have souls or will exist in a future state.”47 Connecticut had “taken her stand” against the “wicked and romantic act of putting down slavery,” the writer mockingly said, and had defended the planters of the South who were the true lovers of liberty.48 “I have long been convinced that nothing is more false than the specious statement in the Declaration of our Independence ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights … that none are entitled to exclusive privileges from the community,’ this is all flummery. Let us rejoice that the time has come when our political leaders have dared to abrogate these heretical and pestilential notions.”49 The author said the law was “an enduring monument of glory,” and “the inspiration of a distinguished statesman from Canterbury.”50
During this same time, notices sincerely praising Andrew Judson and the Black Law also appeared. The directors of the Windham County Colonization Society appointed Andrew Judson as the agent and orator of the Society and said he “was the man they delighted to honor.”51 The pages of the New York Commercial Advertiser were “loaded with criminations of Miss Crandall, and vindications of the Black Act.”52 The Advertiser said of Judson, “a warmer heart than his throbs in few bosoms, and the African race has no firmer friend than him.”53 Most newspapers supported the Black Law. “The inhabitants of Canterbury … [are] as quiet, peaceable, humane and inoffensive people as can be named in the United States,” said the editors of the Advertiser. They said the New York State Legislature should consider a law similar to Connecticut’s Black Law “to prevent our charitable institutions from being filled to overflowing with black paupers from the South, and white paupers from Europe.”54
Two weeks after passage of the Black Law, Andrew Judson paid a visit to Pardon Crandall and his wife, Esther. Judson wanted to discuss Pardon’s letter to legislators and the severity of the sanctions in the new law. “Mr. Crandall, when you sent your printed paper to the General Assembly, you did not injure us, it helped very much in getting the bill through,” Judson told Pardon. “When they received it every man clinched his fist, and the chairman of the committee sat down and doubled the penalty. Members of the legislature said to me, ‘If this law does not answer your purpose, let us know, and next year we will make you one that will.’”55
Judson told Pardon the new law would bankrupt those who assisted Prudence’s school. “Mr. Crandall, if you go to your daughter’s you are to be fined $100 for the first offence, $200 for the second, and double it every time,” Judson said. “Mrs. Crandall, if you go there, you will be fined and your daughter Almira will be fined, and Mr. May and those gentlemen from Providence, if they come there will be fined at the same rate.”56
Judson said he intended to use the full force of the law to arrest Prudence Crandall and close her school. “Your daughter, the one that established the school for colored females, will be taken up the same way as for stealing a horse, or for burglary,” Judson said. “Her property will not be taken but she will be put in jail, not having the liberty of the yard. There is no mercy to be shown about it!”57
31. Engraving inspired by Crandall’s school and the refusal of the Canterbury Congregational Church to admit Crandall’s students.
Colored Scholars Excluded from Schools. From American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1839 1, no. 4 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1839), 13.
Samuel May and George W. Benson traveled from Brooklyn to Canterbury to visit Crandall and discuss the future of her school.58 If Crandall dismissed the out-of-state students in order to comply with the Black Law, the school would not survive financially; there were not enough local black students whose families could afford the tuition. Neither Crandall nor her supporters wished to capitulate to the new law. They settled on a course of civil disobedience and wasted no time in preparation for her likely arrest and trial.59
May urged Crandall to challenge her opponents, “to show to the world how base they were, and how atrocious was the law they had induced the legislature to enact—a law by the force of which a woman might be fined and imprisoned as a felon in the State of Connecticut, for giving instruction to colored girls.”60 May previously had encouraged Crandall to allow Ann Eliza Hammond to risk a public whipping for violation of a vagrancy law in order to reveal the despicable nature of their opponents. Crandall had declined and paid a fine because she wanted to protect her students. Under the new law, however, those who risked prosecution were not the students, but rather the teachers and supporters of the school. Without hesitation Crandall agreed to challenge Judson and his allies and risk arrest, fines, and jail pursuant to the Black Law.61
With Crandall’s knowledge and consent, May and Benson reached out to those who were sympathetic to Crandall and her school and asked for restraint in the event of her arrest. “Mr. Benson and I therefore went diligently around to all whom we knew were friendly to Miss Crandall and her school, and counseled them by no means to give bonds to keep her from imprisonment,” May wrote. “Nothing would expose so fully to the public the egregious wickedness of the law, and the virulence of her persecutors, as the fact that they had thrust her into jail.”62
Prudence’s younger sister Almira turned twenty years old on June 27, 1833. The school for black women had existed for nearly three months, and Almira played a critical role. She worked and taught there every day; when Prudence Crandall traveled to Providence, Norwich, Boston, New York, or elsewhere, Almira managed the school. Rev. May, who also taught at the school, gave Almira great credit for the school’s survival. “Miss Almira Crandall, though she did not plan the enterprise, has given it from the beginning her unremitted co-operation,” May wrote. “Let her praise therefore be ever coupled with that, which is her sister’s due. Having partaken largely in the labor, anxiety, and suffering, let her share as largely in the reward.”63
Almira’s birthday celebration did not last long. That morning, only four weeks after passage of the Black Law, deputy sheriff George Cady arrived at the school and presented Prudence and Almira with arrest warrants. The two sisters were accused of “instructing and teaching certain colored persons, who at the time so taught and instructed were not inhabitants of any town in this state.”64 The warrants also charged Prudence and Almira with “harboring and boarding certain colored persons” from out of state. The Crandall sisters were charged with teaching black women from other states without written permission from the selectmen of the town, as required by the new law. The deputy sheriff told them that he was “commanded forthwith” to arrest Prudence and Almira Crandall and bring them before attorney Rufus Adams, justice of the peace, to be “dealt with there on as the law doth require.”65
Prudence Crandall had discussed this scenario with her family and staff and had prepared for this moment, yet it nonetheless came as a terrible shock. Her students were stunned at the sight of the sheriff arresting both Prudence and Almira and leading them away from their school. Prudence told her assistant Mariah Davis to go immediately to her father’s house and tell him of the new developments.66 The sheriff then escorted the sisters out the front door of the school to a waiting carriage and drove them to the house of Chauncey Bacon, where Bacon and Rufus Adams formally charged them with the crime of violating the Black Law.
Later that day, a messenger raced