They set about their work with resolute purpose, often against determined opposition.
Part of that work had to do with providing better conditions for free Negroes. Two cases in Connecticut, both arising in 1831, showed how difficult was the fight that lay ahead.
In June of that year, at a United States convention of colored people in Philadelphia, the Reverend Simeon S. Jocelyn proposed the establishment, at New Haven, of “a Collegiate school on the manual labor system” where Negro students would “cultivate habits of industry” and “obtain a useful Mechanical or agricultural profession.” The school would be “established on the self supporting system,” but preliminary backing was essential to its founding. The proposal was ratified by the convention, and a committee with the Reverend S. E. Cornish as “agent” was appointed to solicit funds. Forthwith there was issued an “appeal to the benevolent,” setting forth the difficulties met by colored youths in gaining admission to ordinary institutions, their need f6r adequate preparation, and the purpose of the proposed school to supply it.
Opposition to the plan among citizens of New Haven was immediate. The mayor, as soon as he heard of the idea, summoned first his Council, then a town meeting. Here, it is reported, the “air ran hot and foul” as the plan was heatedly discussed. Despite all the proponents could do, the town meeting adopted resolutions fatal to the reformers’ hopes:
1. That it is expedient that the sentiments of our Citizens should be expressed on these subjects, and that the calling of this Meeting by the Mayor and Aldermen is warmly approved by the citizens of this place.
2. That inasmuch as slavery does not exist in Connecticut, and whenever permitted in other States depends on the Municipal Laws of the State which allows it, and over which, neither any other State, nor the Congress of the United States has any control, that the propagation of sentiments favorable to the immediate emancipation of slaves, in disregard of the civil institutions of the States in which they belong, and as auxiliary thereto, the contemporaneous founding of Colleges for educating Colored People, is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States and ought to be discouraged.
3. And Whereas in the opinion of this Meeting, Yale College, the institutions for the education of females, and the other schools, already existing in this City, are important to the community and the general interests of science, and as such have been deservedly patronized by the public, and the establishment of a College in the same place to educate the Colored population is incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning, and will be destructive of the best interests of the City: and believing as we do, that if the establishment of such a College in any part of the Country were deemed expedient, it should never be imposed on any community without their consent,—Therefore; Resolved—by the Mayor, Aldermen, Common Council, and Freemen of the City of New Haven in City meeting assembled, that we will resist the establishment of the proposed College in this place, by every lawful means.
In face of this attitude, Jocelyn’s plan was dropped. The citizens of New Haven had plainly recorded their indifference to the slavery issue; their awareness that Negro education must lead, however slowly and indirectly, to emancipation and racial equality; and their wish to avoid any offense to Southern slaveholders whose sons attended Yale or with whom, as merchants, they had had business dealings.6
Starting in that same year, the people of the little village of Canterbury became involved in a somewhat similar case that grew to command nation-wide attention. It began in an atmosphere of general approval when Prudence Crandall, a Quaker from nearby Plainfield, opened a “young ladies boarding school” whose pupils included an impressive number of daughters of “the best families in town.”7 Everyone admired Miss Crandall; she was a lady of all the classical virtues, her pupils became devoted to her, parents recognized her as a teacher of great ability, and ministers and public officials in surrounding towns recommended her school to public patronage. All was going smoothly when Sarah Harris applied for admission to the school.
Sarah was a pious girl of seventeen, daughter of “a respectable man who owned a small farm” in the vicinity, and she was sincerely anxious to “get a little more learning.” Everything was in Sarah’s favor—except the fact that she was a Negress.
Miss Crandall was perfectly aware of the problem she thus had to face, and for a time she hesitated. But she had all the sense of justice and the moral courage of her Quaker persuasion. Her sympathies, she said later, “were greatly aroused”; she admitted Sarah as a day scholar. As soon as her action was known, protests arose on every side—mutterings, threats of withdrawal from her pupils’ parents, the direct warning from a prominent minister’s wife that, if she did not dismiss Sarah, her school would fail. Let it fail then, returned Miss Crandall, “for I should not turn her out.” She went further than that; she resolved to remake her school into one exclusively for colored girls.
Local reaction was immediate. The citizens of Canterbury swung into action, under the leadership of Andrew T. Judson, state senator, proslavery spokesman, and advocate of colonization. First a town meeting was called to “avert the impending calamity”—for, as Judson and his followers saw it, “should the school go into operation, their sons and daughters would be forever ruined, and property no longer safe.” Most of those present accepted this specious view, and when Arnold Buffum and Samuel J. May attempted to speak in Miss Crandall’s behalf, they were shouted down before they could deliver their message—which was, essentially, that Miss Crandall was prepared to move her school elsewhere if given time to do so and a fair price for her property. But the citizens never heard that proposal; they were too busy resolving that “the obvious tendency of this school would be to collect within the town of Canterbury, large numbers of persons from other States, whose characters and habits might be various and unknown to us, there-by rendering insecure the persons, property, and reputation of our citizens,” and that they would oppose the school “at all hazards.”
These resolutions were conveyed to Miss Crandall. They produced no effect whatsoever. She remained peaceful and kind at all times, but her purpose never wavered. She dismissed her white pupils and reopened the school to colored girls only, with a small group of students from relatively prosperous families in Boston, New York, Providence, and Philadelphia.
Thereupon she and her pupils became the targets for the strongest sort of opposition. First, the selectmen submitted an appeal for help to the American Colonization Society, in which they castigated the members of the Anti-Slavery Society who, they said, “wished to admit the Negroes into the bosom of our society” and to justify “intermarriages with the white people.” Then the citizens, at another town meeting, resolved that “the establishment of the rendezvous falsely denominated a school was designed by its projectors as the theatre, as the place to promulgate their disgusting doctrines of amalgamation, and their pernicious sentiments of subverting the Union.”
Meanwhile the school was subjected to all kinds of meannesses and harassments. The well was filled with stable refuse. Stones and rotten eggs were thrown through the windows. The village store refused to sell groceries for the school’s use. Miss Crandall’s father was threatened with mob violence and legal action when he brought her food. She and her pupils were stoned on the streets. Doctors refused to treat her when she was ill. The local authorities dusted off an old vagrancy law and invoked it against one of the girls, Ann Eliza Hammond. Under the terms of this enactment, Miss Hammond had “forfeited to the town $1.62 for each day she had remained in it, since she was ordered to depart; and that in default of payment, she WAS TO BE WHIPPED ON THE NAKED BODY NOT EXCEEDING TEN STRIPES, unless she departed within ten days after conviction.” This brutality was avoided only when abolitionists of the vicinity managed to raise $10,000 to meet the financial demands of the obsolete law.
Meanwhile, Andrew Judson introduced a so-called “Black Law” into the General Assembly, which enacted it in the spring of 1833. Its preamble read as follows: “Attempts have been made to establish literacy institutions in this State for the instruction of colored persons belonging to other States and countries, which would tend to the great increase of the colored population of this State, and thereby to the injury of the people.” The act went on to provide that “every person, who shall set up or establish