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Prudence Crandall's Legacy

The Fight for Equality in the 1830s, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education

Wesleyan University Press

Fire in the Night Sky

Throughout her life, Prudence Crandall wanted to teach. Education offered the potential for opportunity, self-sufficiency, even freedom, especially for women, blacks, and the poor. Crandall discovered, however, that educating the oppressed involved risk and clashed with deep-rooted traditions in American society.

In 1833 Crandall's school for black women in Canterbury, Connecticut, attracted hostility and national attention. Newspapers throughout the country reported on the opposition to Crandall's school and the danger of emancipating blacks. On the evening of November 12, 1833, as Crandall's twenty black female students went to sleep, a natural phenomenon — some thought it was the end of the world — briefly overshadowed the controversy surrounding Crandall's school.

In the slave quarters of the Brodess farm in Bucktown, Maryland, thirteen-year-old Harriet Tubman slept soundly. Tubman was still recovering from a severe head injury that nearly had killed her; a slave owner had thrown an iron weight that hit her in the head after she had refused to restrain a fellow slave. That November evening, her brother Robert stood guard watching for the white men known as the "slave patrol," who often harassed the slaves. Robert saw numerous bursts of light and shouted for Harriet to come outside. She watched silently as hundreds of stars broke free from their anchors and poured down from the sky.

On the same November night, twenty-four-year-old Abraham Lincoln returned to a tavern in New Salem, Illinois, where he boarded. Lincoln, a struggling merchant who managed a general store and surveyed land, read the law books he had borrowed from a friend in the hope of becoming a lawyer and went to bed. "I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the deacon's voice exclaiming, 'Arise, Abraham, the day of judgment has come!'" Through the glare of light streaming through his window Lincoln saw the sky ablaze with a thousand fireballs.

In the early morning hours of November 13, 1833, a meteor shower of extraordinary brilliance and intensity — "one of the most terrorizing spectacles" ever witnessed by Americans — turned night into day throughout North America. One man compared it to a gigantic volcano exploding and filling the horizon with flying molten glass. In many communities, including Natchez, Mississippi, and Baltimore, Maryland, residents believed that their cities were engulfed in flames, and sounded alarms. Tourists at Niagara Falls directed their attention to the flashes of light that descended "in fiery torrents" over the dark and roaring water.

Yale Professor Denison Olmstead said no other celestial phenomenon in history had created such widespread fear and amazement. He calculated that he had seen hundreds of thousands of meteors in New Haven for many hours that night. It was "the greatest display of celestial fireworks that has ever been seen since the beginning of the world," Olmstead wrote.

Some saw the meteors as a sign of hope. "I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle and was awe struck," said Frederick Douglass, who was fifteen years old and a slave in Maryland. "I was not without the suggestion, at the moment, that it might be the harbinger of the coming of the Son of Man; and in my then state of mind I was prepared to hail Him as my friend and deliverer."

Others were certain that the meteors foreshadowed a time of great conflict. A minister in Winchester, Kentucky, opened his church in the middle of the night to accommodate frightened parishioners who feared they were witnessing the end of the world. A columnist in Maine at the Portland Evening Advertiser concluded that the meteors signaled the beginning of the "latter days" and the end of civilization. Another observer in Fredericksburg, Virginia, said the country could expect the rise of widespread violence and war. "The whole starry host of heaven seemed to be in a state of practical secession and revolt ... which finds parallel only in the affairs of earth."

* During the 1830s racial tensions in the United States exploded. Nat Turner, a slave in Virginia, believed God had chosen him to lead other slaves in a violent overthrow of slavery throughout the South. After witnessing a solar eclipse in 1831 that Turner took as a divine signal, he commenced a bloody revolt that left sixty whites and more than one hundred blacks murdered in 1831. Turner's attack triggered the fear of a broader slave uprising and terrified many in the South and the North. Southern newspapers claimed that the words of Boston publisher William Lloyd Garrison and black author David Walker — encouraging immediate emancipation of the slaves — had spurred Turner to violence. Many southern states passed laws prohibiting the distribution of Garrison's newspaper and antislavery materials and urged northern states to do the same. Later in the 1830s race riots led to violence, destruction, and mob rule in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and other northern cities.

After Prudence Crandall opened her school for black women in April 1833 in Canterbury, Connecticut, a local attorney predicted no less than the surrender of the country to the black race and the end of America. Andrew T. Judson said that Crandall's school was "a scheme, cunningly devised, to destroy the rich inheritance left by your fathers." He claimed that Crandall and her supporters had disturbed "the tranquility of this whole nation" and "commenced the work of dissolving the Union." Crandall's worst offense, Judson said, was to "have the African race placed on the footing of perfect equality with the Americans."

Others weighed in with predictions of apocalypse and catastrophe as a result of Crandall's efforts. Her opponents said she planned to use her school for black women to promote intermarriage between the races and destroy the country. The fact that Crandall persisted in teaching black women was not "in itself so alarming a matter," one journalist noted. It was Crandall's support for an immediate end to slavery that created a larger threat. Her opponents said that immediate emancipation of the slaves would undermine the southern economy, cripple northern trade and commerce, and result in blacks "cutting the throats of all the white men throughout the south" and committing "horrible indignities upon all the white women."

Legislators in Connecticut passed a law designed to criminalize and close Crandall's school. The Canterbury sheriff arrested Prudence Crandall for the crime of educating black women. Crandall noted that those who fought for equality between the races could expect "to be branded with all the marks of disgrace that can be heaped upon them by their enemies." William Lloyd Garrison, who published an antislavery newspaper in Boston and helped Crandall launch her school, acknowledged he "had the worst possible reputation as a madman and fanatic" because he promoted immediate emancipation of the slaves and equal rights between the races. Garrison's fierce opposition to slavery resulted in death threats; Garrison feared southern plantation owners would pay for his abduction and murder.

Against a rising tide of violence toward those who opposed slavery and discrimination, Prudence Crandall — through the example of her school for black women — helped lead those who supported racial equality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the abolitionist movement built a small but growing foundation of public support for equality in America, culminating in Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. A century later the work of Crandall, Garrison, and their allies influenced the outcome of the pivotal 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down segregation.

In the 1830s and for many years thereafter, however, most Americans did not side with the abolitionists. Newspaper editors throughout the country attacked Crandall and Garrison as disturbers of the peace and opponents of the Union. In the 1830s Prudence Crandall and William Lloyd Garrison were national public figures — if not national public enemies.

Prudence Crandall's pursuit of equality may have originated in her Quaker faith, which associated slavery and prejudice with sin. As early as 1688 the Quakers believed that "we should do to all men like as we will be done ourselves, making no difference of what descent or colour they are." The Quakers were not alone in their quest for equality and respect for human dignity. The new world of America inspired dreams of equality long before Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence.

"We must be knit together in this work, as one man," John Winthrop told the Puritans as they left England for America in 1630. "We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own. ... For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." In 1765 John Adams wrote in his diary, "I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth."

The early history of America also included the introduction of slavery. Christopher Columbus reportedly had African slaves on his ships; on encountering the Native Americans of the New World, he wrote, "from here we can send as many slaves as can be sold." Spaniards brought slaves to St. Augustine, Florida, as early as 1565, and Dutch traders sold African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Slavery represented the opposite of what John Adams had envisioned for America. "Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States," Adams said. "I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in ... abhorrence."

Many of America's founding fathers professed opposition to slavery. "There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it," said George Washington in 1786. In an address to the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Benjamin Franklin described slavery as "an atrocious debasement of human nature." John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court said, "It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. ... To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused." At the Virginia State Convention of 1788, concerning the adoption of the federal Constitution, Patrick Henry described the conflicts slavery presented: "Slavery is detested. We feel its fatal effects — we deplore it with all the pity of humanity. ... But is it practicable, by any human means, to liberate (the slaves) without producing the most dreadful and ruinous consequences?"

The founding fathers failed to outlaw the practice of slavery in their midst. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Jay, and Henry all owned slaves, as did most of the other founders. (John Adams did not; he and his wife Abigail consciously hired only free, white employees as servants.) Throughout his life Jefferson remained uncertain about how and when to end slavery, and he could not envision different races living together as equals.

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinction which nature has made; and many other circumstances will divide us into parties," Jefferson wrote, "and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race." In Notes On the State of Virginia, Jefferson speculated that the intellectual capabilities of blacks were "much inferior" to whites and that blacks did not possess the same foresight, imagination, or empathy. "Their griefs are transient," Jefferson wrote. "This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people." Jefferson later modified his view of emancipation: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever. ... I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution ... preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for total emancipation."

Jefferson wrote his last words on slavery — predicting its demise — in a private letter in 1826, the year he died. "The revolution in public opinion which this cause requires, is not to be expected in a day, or perhaps an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also." Jefferson did not want to make public his prediction of even a gradual end to slavery; he asked his correspondent to keep the contents of his letter confidential.

In 1829 black writer and Boston activist David Walker, the son of a slave father and free black mother, challenged Jefferson and the founders. Walker contrasted Jefferson's pronouncement "that all men are created equal" with the "cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us." Walker asked whether England's oppression of American colonists was "one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you." Walker's words opened a controversial dialogue about the use of force to cast off the chains of slavery.

Slavery in America expanded significantly in the early 1800s. Alabama's slave population more than doubled in ten years, increasing to 117,000 by 1830. There were more than 200,000 slaves in Georgia and North Carolina, and South Carolina had more slaves than whites — 315,000 slaves to 258,000 whites. Virginia had more slaves than any other state in 1830 — nearly 470,000 or 43 percent of its population. Slavery provided labor for planting and harvesting crops, transporting goods, and transforming wilderness into civilization. Skilled slave labor built many homes, businesses, churches, roads, and bridges. Southern families measured their wealth by the number of slaves they possessed. One official in Wilmington, North Carolina, noted that when a father married off his daughter, her dowry was measured in her share of the family slaves.

South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who had graduated from Yale and studied law in Connecticut, said slavery "was an inevitable law of society" where both slaves and masters "appeared to thrive under the practical operation of this institution." Many agreed with Frederick Augustus Ross, who argued that the Bible sanctioned slavery. Ross, a Presbyterian minister in Huntsville, Alabama, said that slavery in the United States provided a greater good for the slave. "The Southern slave, though degraded compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared with his brethren in Africa."

The North had its own legacy of slavery. As one commentator noted, "the North found its profits in the traffic and transportation of the slave, the South in his labor." Economic development in New England depended in significant part on slave labor, with textile mills and factories profiting from the cotton and raw materials produced by slaves. Throughout the 1700s and into the early 1800s, northern businessmen made fortunes importing and selling slaves. The northern slave trade involved distilling rum in New England, transporting the rum to Africa where it was traded for slaves, and delivering the slaves — shackled together in irons on crowded slave ships — to ports along the East Coast of the United States and plantations in Cuba. Northern banks, blacksmiths, distillers, ship builders, sailors, merchants, and mill owners all profited from the slave trade.

Stories about the mistreatment of slaves commonly were told and repeated among opponents of slavery. "I witnessed a heart-rending spectacle, the sale of a negro family under a sheriff 's hammer," wrote Elkanah Watson of Massachusetts, a veteran of the Revolutionary War who later lived in North Carolina. "They were driven in from the country like swine for market," Watson said. "A poor wench clung to a little daughter, and implored, with the most agonizing supplication, that they might not be separated. But alas ... they were sold to different purchasers." White slave owners targeted black women for rape and sexual exploitation; by 1860 mulattos made up more than 70 percent of the free black population in North Carolina.

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Excerpted from Prudence Crandall's Legacy by Donald E. Williams Jr.. Copyright © 2014 Donald E. Williams Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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