Prudence Crandall, educator, emancipator, and human rights advocate, established a school in 1833 that became the first Black female academy in New England at Canterbury, Connecticut. This later action resulted in her arrest and imprisonment for violating the “Black Law.” She was born on September 3, 1803, to Pardon and Esther Carpenter Crandall, a Quaker couple living in Carpenter’s Mills in Hopkinton, Rhode Island. When she was 10, her father moved the family to Canterbury, Connecticut. As her father thought little of the local public school, he paid for her to attend the Black Hill Quaker School in Plainfield, 5 miles east of Canterbury.
Prudence attended the New England Yearly Meeting School, a Quaker boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island, for one year. The school existed due to the generosity of Moses Brown, an abolitionist and co-founder of Brown University; in 1904, it renamed itself the Moses Brown School. After graduating, Prudence Crandall taught at a school in Plainfield. She became a Baptist in 1830.
In 1831, she purchased the Elisha Payne house with her sister Almira Crandall to establish the Canterbury Female Boarding School at the request of Canterbury’s aristocratic residents to educate young girls in the town. With the help of her sister and a maid, she taught about forty children different subjects, including geography, history, grammar, arithmetic, reading, and writing. As principal of the female boarding school, Prudence Crandall was deemed successful in her ability to educate young girls, and the school flourished until September 1832.
Although Prudence Crandall grew up as a North American Quaker, she admitted she was not acquainted with many Black people or abolitionists. She discovered the problems that plagued Black people through the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which she learned of through her housekeeper, “a young black lady,” whose fiancé was the son of the paper’s local agent. After reading The Liberator, Prudence Crandall said in an earlier account that she “contemplated for a while how I might best serve the people of color.”
Prudence Crandall’s chance to help people of color came in the fall of 1832. Sarah Harris, the daughter of a free African American farmer near Canterbury, asked to be accepted to the school to prepare for teaching other African Americans. Although Crandall was uncertain about whether to admit Harris, whom she liked, she consulted her Bible, which, as she told it, came open to Ecclesiastes 4:1:
“So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.” The same quotation is on the title page of Charles Crawford’s Observations upon Negro-slavery, 1790.
She then admitted the girl, establishing the first integrated school in the United States. Prominent townspeople objected and pressured Crandall to dismiss Harris from the school, but she refused. Although the white students in the school did not openly oppose the presence of Sarah Harris, the families of the current white students removed their daughters from the school.
Consequently, Crandall devoted herself to teaching African American girls after traveling to Boston to consult with abolitionists Samuel J. May and William Lloyd Garrison about the project. Both were supportive and gave her letters of introduction to prominent African Americans in locations from Providence, Rhode Island, to New York. She temporarily closed the school and began directly recruiting new students of color. On March 2, 1833, Garrison published advertisements for new pupils in his newspaper, The Liberator. Crandall announced that on the first Monday of April 1833, she would open a school “for the reception of young Ladies and Little Misses of color.” Terms, $25 per quarter, one half paid in advance.” Her references included leading abolitionists Arthur Tappan, May, and Garrison.
As word of the school spread, African American families began arranging for their daughters to enroll in Crandall’s academy. On April 1, 1833, twenty African American girls from Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and the surrounding areas in Connecticut arrived at Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color.
Her neighbor, Andrew Judson, an attorney, and Canterbury’s leading politician, led the opposition to Crandall’s school for Black girls, having represented it in both the Connecticut House and Senate and would soon be Connecticut’s at-large member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In the national debate that was awkwardly taking place over “what to do” with the freed or soon-to-be-freed slaves, Judson supported “colonization”: sending them to Africa. He said: “We are not merely opposed to the establishment of that school in Canterbury; we mean there shall not be such a school set up anywhere in our State. The colored people can never rise from their menial condition in our country; they ought not to be permitted to rise here. They are an inferior race of beings and never can or ought to be recognized as the equals of the whites.” He predicted the town’s destruction if Crandall’s school for colored children succeeded. Judson was also involved in efforts to capture David Garrison and turn him over to Southerners; there was a $10,000 reward.
In response to the new school, a committee of four prominent white men in the town, Rufus Adams, Daniel Frost Jr., Andrew Harris, and Richard Fenner, attempted to convince Crandall that her school for young women of color would be detrimental to the safety of the white people in the town of Canterbury. Frost claimed that the boarding school would encourage “social equality and intermarriage of whites and blacks.” Her response was, “Moses had a black wife.”
At first, citizens of Canterbury protested the school and then held town meetings “to devise and adopt such measures as would effectually avert the nuisance, or speedily abate it.” The town response escalated into warnings, threats, and acts of violence against the school. Crandall was faced with great local opposition, and her detractors had no plans to back down.
On May 24, 1833, the Connecticut legislature passed a “Black Law,” which prohibited a school from teaching African American students outside the State without town permission. In July, Crandall was arrested and placed in the county jail for one night—she refused to be bonded out, as she wished the public to know she was being jailed. (A Vermont newspaper reported it under the headline “Shame on Connecticut.” The next day, she was released under bond to await her trial. Under the Black Law, the townspeople refused any amenities to the students or Crandall, closing their shops and meeting houses to them. However, they were welcomed at Prudence’s Baptist church in neighboring Plainfield. Stage drivers refused to provide them with transportation, and the town doctors refused to treat them. Townspeople poisoned the school’s well—its only water source—with animal feces and prevented Crandall from obtaining water from other sources. Not only did Crandall and her students receive backlash, but her father was also insulted and threatened by the citizens of Canterbury. Although she faced extreme difficulties, Crandall continued to teach the young women of color, which angered the community even further.
Crandall’s students also suffered. Ann Eliza Hammond, a 17-year-old student, was arrested; however, with the help of local abolitionist Samuel J. May, she was able to post a bail bond. Some $10,000 was raised through collections and donations. A prominent abolitionist, Arthur Tappan of New York, donated $10,000 to hire the best lawyers to defend Crandall throughout her trials. The first opened at the Windham County Court on August 23, 1833. The case challenged the constitutionality of the Connecticut law prohibiting the education of African Americans from outside the State. The defense argued that African Americans were citizens in other states, so, therefore, there was no reason why they should not be considered as such in Connecticut. Thus, they focused on the deprivation of the rights of African American students under the United States Constitution. By contrast, the prosecution denied the fact that freed African Americans were citizens in any state. The county court jury ultimately failed to reach a decision for the cases.
A second trial in Superior Court decided against the school, and the case was taken to the Supreme Court of Errors (now called the Connecticut Supreme Court) on appeal in July 1834. The Connecticut high court reversed the lower court’s decision, dismissing the case on July 22 because of a procedural defect. The Black Law prohibited the education of black children from outside of Connecticut unless the local civil authority and town selectmen granted permission. However, the prosecution’s information that charged Crandall did not allege that she had established her school without the consent of the civil authority and selectmen of Canterbury. Therefore, the Supreme Court held that the information was fatally defective because the conduct which it alleged did not constitute a crime. The Court did not address the issue of whether the citizenship of free African Americans had to be recognized in every State.
The judicial process had not stopped the operation of the Canterbury boarding school, but the townspeople’s vandalism against it increased. The residents of Canterbury were so angry that the court dismissed the case that vandals set the school on fire in January 1834, but they failed to destroy the school. On September 9, 1834, townspeople broke almost ninety window glass panes using heavy iron bars. Prudence Crandall closed her school on September 10, 1834, for the safety of her students, her family, and herself. Connecticut officially repealed the Black Law in 1838.
At the suggestion of William Garrison, who raised money from “various antislavery societies,” Francis Alexander painted a portrait of Crandall in April 1834. She had to go to Boston for the sittings, where she “became the center of attention at abolitionist parties and gatherings each evening. The Boston abolitionists honored her as a true heroine of the antislavery cause.” In August 1834, Crandall married the Rev. Calvin Philleo, a Baptist minister in Canterbury, Connecticut. The couple moved to Massachusetts for some time after they fled the town of Canterbury and lived in Rhode Island, New York, and Illinois. Crandall was involved in the women’s suffrage movement and ran a school in LaSalle County, Illinois. She separated from Philleo in 1842 after his “deteriorating physical and mental health” led him to be abusive. He died in Illinois in 1874.
After the death of her husband, Crandall relocated with her brother Hezekiah to Elk Falls, Kansas, around 1877, and it was there that her brother eventually died in 1881. A visitor of 1886, who described her as “of almost national renown,” with “a host of good books in her house,” quoted her as follows:
“My whole life has been one of opposition. I never could find anyone near me to agree with me. Even my husband opposed me more than anyone. He would not let me read the books that he read, but I did read them. I read all sides and searched for the truth, whether in science, religion, or humanity. I sometimes think I would like to live somewhere else. Here, in Elk Falls, there is nothing for my soul to feed upon. Nothing, unless it comes from abroad in the shape of books, newspapers, and so on. There is no public library, and there are only one or two persons in the place that I can converse with profitably for any time. No one visits me, and I begin to think they are afraid of me. The ministers are afraid I shall upset their religious beliefs and advise the members of their congregation not to call on me, but I don’t care. I speak on spiritualism sometimes but more on temperance, and I am a self-appointed member of the International Arbitration League. I don’t want to die yet. I want to live long enough to see some of these reforms consummated.”
In 1886, the State of Connecticut honored Prudence Crandall with an act by the legislature prominently supported by the writer Mark Twain, providing her with a $400 annual pension. On February 21, 1965, the NBC television series Profiles in Courage broadcast an episode about her. The Prudence Crandall House in Canterbury was acquired by the State of Connecticut in 1969. Now a Connecticut state museum, it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1991. In 1973, the Prudence Crandall Center for Women was founded in New Britain, Connecticut, to provide shelter for victims of domestic violence. Crandall was the subject of a Walt Disney/NBC television movie entitled She Stood Alone (1991), in which actress Mare Winningham portrayed her. In 1994, Crandall was inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame. The following year, the Connecticut General Assembly designated Prudence Crandall as the State’s official heroine.
Prudence Crandall died in Kansas on January 28, 1890, at the age of 86. She was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2001.
For additional reading:
1. The Linda Lear Center for Special Collections & Archives, at Connecticut College, in New London, Connecticut, has a Prudence Crandall Collection. It contains “23 letters and one manuscript of poems by Crandall, including three letters to the abolitionist Simeon Jocelyn detailing the opposition to her school.
2. Green, Arnold W. (January–March 1966). “Nineteenth Century Canterbury Tale”.
3. Wormley, G. Smith. The Journal of Negro History, “Prudence Crandall,” Vol. 8, No. 1, January 1923.
4. Tisler, C.C. “Prudence Crandall, Abolitionist,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908–1984), Vol. 33, No. 2, June 1940.
5. Small, Edwin W. Small, “Prudence Crandall Champion of Negro Education,” New England Quarterly. December 1944.
6. “State Heroine Prudence Crandall,” ConnecticutHistory.org. September 3, 2020.
7. “Prudence Crandall and the Canterbury Female Boarding School,” Country Cultures. May 15, 2011.
8. Greene, Rowland, “An Address to the Free People of Color in New England and other Free States in America,” The Liberator, October 8, 1836.
9. “The Drama of Prudence Crandall.” Prudence Crandall Collection, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections & Archives, Connecticut College.
10. Rycenga, Jennifer (2005). “A Greater Awakening: Women’s Intellect as a Factor in Early Abolitionist Movements, 1824–1834”. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.
11. Lang, Joel, “Hate Makes a Heroine,” Hartford Courant, November 7, 2017.
12. Williams Jr., Donald. Prudence Crandall’s Legacy: The Fight for Equality in the 1830s, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education.