Prudence Crandall’s Legacy. Donald E. Williams
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Pardon Crandall’s occasional eccentricities, he wanted all of his children including his daughters to have access to education and opportunity. Pardon learned of other Quaker families who lived in Plainfield and Canterbury, Connecticut, and decided to move his family away from Carpenter’s Mills. In 1813 Pardon purchased a farm in Canterbury, Connecticut, with the proceeds of a generous inheritance from Hezekiah Carpenter, who died in 1809.64
Pardon Crandall did not follow his father-in-law into the field of manufacturing. He concentrated instead on his farm and worked the land during the spring, summer, and fall months and taught school in the winter.65 He bought additional land with money he earned from the sale of crops and timber. Pardon was not afraid to take risks; with his earnings from farming he took the unusual step of investing in a merchant schooner, the Hope, which sailed from Norwich, Connecticut, and frequented ports along the East Coast and the West Indies.66 Pardon intended to sell his crops and livestock to distant markets and import foreign goods. The investment relationship concluded after only one year with Pardon presumably not reaping significant financial rewards. On balance, however, the Crandall family enjoyed financial security from the profit of their Canterbury farm and the inheritance from Hezekiah Carpenter.
Both Prudence and her brother Reuben attended the local Quaker school in the Black Hill section of Plainfield, a few minutes east from Canterbury on horseback.67 Pardon Crandall considered the private school a necessary supplement to the local public district school, which offered little more than primitive instruction in reading and writing. “Reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, history, grammar, and all the branches of an English education were most successfully taught,” one student at the Quaker school recalled.68
After classes the students often walked west across a red bridge that spanned the Quinebaug River to the shops in the Canterbury town center. They bought raisins at Stephen Coit’s general store and “milk punch” at Chauncey Bacon’s Tavern.69 On arrival back at the school, “rye-biscuits, rye-dough-nuts, rye-bread (and) rye-coffee” kept the students in a “healthful condition.”70 Rowland Greene was the headmaster of the Black Hill Quaker School when Prudence was a student. Greene opposed slavery and later wrote an essay for William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper discussing the importance of education for black children.71
Many of the free blacks Prudence Crandall saw in northeastern Connecticut were former slaves. Farmers in her hometown of Canterbury owned slaves through the end of the 1700s. Throughout the eighteenth century, slave ships regularly brought captured blacks from Africa to harbors in the Northeast, including ports in Connecticut and Newport, Rhode Island.72 Newport was one of the busiest slave-trading ports in America during the 1700s; slaves were held in pens on the Newport waterfront until they could be sold and transported throughout New England.73 There were 951 slaves in Connecticut according to the national census of 1800.74 By the time Prudence Crandall began her teaching career in 1830, the number had dropped to twenty-five as a result of antislavery sentiment and legislation that slowly phased out slavery in Connecticut.75
Prudence Crandall lived at a time of unprecedented social and economic upheaval; towns throughout Connecticut and New England experienced rapid growth and the dawn of the industrial age. “The manufacturing furor raged with great violence,” one historian wrote.76 “Everybody was hard at work, building, digging, planting, carting, weaving, spinning, picking cotton, making harnesses, dipping candles, and attending to the thousands of wants of the hour.”77 Men increasingly left their farms to work in mills, and a small but growing number of women left their households to work in factories or teach in the classrooms. The gentle landscape of open fields, stone walls, and family farms increasingly gave way to cotton factories, grain mills, clothier works, tanneries, brickyards, and sawmills. Prudence’s brother Hezekiah decided to leave the family farm when he turned twenty-one; with his father’s help he built a cotton mill next to Rowland’s Brook in Canterbury that made yarn and rope.78
Hezekiah Crandall likely built his mill in response to speculation that a canal would provide easy transit for his cotton products. Plans called for a canal to connect all of eastern Connecticut with Massachusetts to the north and New London and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and to link with Hezekiah’s mill on Rowland’s Creek. Before construction began, however, public opinion turned against it. A local newspaper ridiculed the canal idea as hopelessly outdated and embraced the new technology of railroads. In 1832 plans for a canal were abandoned in favor of the incorporation of the Boston, Norwich and New London Railroad Company.79 The rail line did not pass near Hezekiah Crandall’s factory in Canterbury.
The swift expansion of the local economy exposed the region’s inadequate road system, which consisted primarily of poorly constructed cart paths. Businessmen pressured towns to raise taxes and invest in new roads and bridges. A few years earlier, residents of the nearby town of Killingly defeated a proposed turnpike to the Rhode Island border; taxpayers said they would “never submit to such invasion.”80 Despite pockets of opposition and the occasional defeat, most towns moved aggressively to build the roads and bridges that linked their businesses to the rest of New England. The Brooklyn and Windham Turnpike—an important passageway to Hartford to the west and Providence and Boston to the east—was completed in 1826.
Long days of work on the Crandall farm in Canterbury and in Hezekiah’s cotton mill required hearty meals. Breakfast in New England was “no evanescent thing,” Samuel Goodrich observed in 1832.81 It often included boiled potatoes, beef, ham, sausages, pies, bread, butter, cider, and coffee.82 The common bread of the rural towns was made from rye and Indian corn.83 Pardon Crandall and other farmers set aside space in their homes to cure pumpkins, dry peaches and store apples, potatoes, and carrots.84 Dinner included seasonal fruits and vegetables, meats, salted cod, and white beans baked with salt pork until the beans were thoroughly saturated with fat.85
Most New Englanders consumed modest amounts of alcoholic cider each day. “In the country, it is hardly considered reputable among farmers to omit to offer cider to any casual visitor or traveler,” a traveler noted. “It is usually drawn in a mug or bowl.”86
Local taverns provided food and drink.87 Beer, wine, brandy, and gin all were popular. One of the most consumed and abused drinks in New England was rum distilled from molasses instead of sugar cane. A day’s wages purchased three gallons.88 Those who drank at the tavern often were the first to hear the latest stories and controversies from surrounding communities. Private carriages and public coaches dropped off mail, newspapers, and passengers who brought news from Hartford, Providence, Boston, New York, and beyond.
Prudence Crandall enrolled in a prominent Quaker boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island, when she was twenty-two years old. The New England Yearly Meeting School, or the Friend’s School as it was known, was located on land donated by Moses Brown, a Providence businessman.89 After Prudence’s first full year at the school beginning in the fall of 1825 and ending in the spring of 1826, she came home to Canterbury to help her parents at the Crandall farm. She did not go back to school in 1826. In the fall of 1827, however, she returned to the Friend’s School and studied there for the next three years, graduating in the spring of 1830.90
The school’s founder, Moses Brown, was eighty-seven years old when Crandall began her studies in 1825. At the beginning of each school year Brown met with students and faculty.91 The Friend’s School existed as a result of Brown’s financial assistance and his desire to create a school that would teach young men and women “obedience to that principle of light and truth.”92 The Friend’s School was unique in its progressive philosophy and attention to both male and female students.
Moses Brown converted to the Quaker faith when he was thirty-six years old, the same year he freed the slaves he owned and became a fierce abolitionist. He assisted runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad as they fled from the South to New England and Canada.93 In 1784 Brown championed the first emancipation law in Rhode Island, granting freedom to all children of slaves on reaching adulthood.94 He also introduced Samuel Slater, the English cotton yarn pioneer and industrialist, to Rhode