Marlene Wagman-Geller

Dec 29, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

Prudence Crandall

 

“My whole life has been one of opposition.”—Prudence Crandall (age eighty-four)

 

Prudence Crandall Museum (opened 1984)

 

A 1907 song by Will D. Cobb and Gus Edwards recalls, “School days, school days / Dear old Golden Rule Days.” Not everyone waxes nostalgic about school days, which was the case with the girls who attended the Canterbury Female Boarding School. To enter the Prudence Crandall Museum is to step into a threshold where great courage walked together with great hate.

Not many connect Connecticut with intolerance, but a nineteenth-century Quaker turned the state into the epicenter of controversy. The aptly named Prudence, who created a tempest in a New England town, was born in Rhode Island, one of four children of farmer Pardon Crandall and his wife, Esther. When Prudence was ten, the Crandalls moved to Canterbury, Connecticut, due to inexpensive farmland and its acceptance of Quakers. Prudence attended the New England Friends’ Boarding School in Providence, founded by abolitionist Moses Brown.

The town encouraged Prudence to open an academy for their daughters, and she obliged by purchasing a large house where she opened The Canterbury Female Boarding School. Her pupil, Hannah, was the daughter of Phillip Pearl, a state senator. On Sundays, church services were mandatory.

Outside the picturesque enclave, the country was aflame. In Boston, William Lloyd Garrison published an antislavery newspaper, The Liberator. In North Carolina, the editor of the North Carolina Free Press stated those who wanted to end slavery ought to be barbequed.

A historic chapter began when twenty-year-old African American Sarah Harris asked Prudence if she could enroll as a student as preparation for opening her own school. In January 1933, Sarah took her seat at one of the desks, thereby integrating the school, a fact that did not sit well with the town.   (In tribute to her teacher, Sarah was to christen her baby Prudence Crandall Fayerweather.)

Petitions circulated that claimed bringing undesirables across Connecticut’s border was “an evil of great magnitude.” Citizens of Canterbury argued that educating blacks would lead to a bloody rebellion such as the one led by Nat Turner. The greatest opposition came from Andrew T. Judson who lived across the street from the school. He belonged to the American Colonization Society whose members, including President Andrew Jackson, held that it was God’s will that the races remain separate. They threated that if Prudence persisted, repercussions would follow. Prudence’s response, “The school may sink, but I will not give up Sarah Harris.”

In 1833 Prudence penned a letter to William Lloyd Garrison imploring his assistance. His response was an advertisement in The Liberator that requested “young ladies and little misses of color” to enroll in the Canterbury Female Boarding School. When word spread, a Mr. Frost visited Prudence to delineate the dangers of her enterprise, citing his concern blacks might start to believe they could marry whites. Her rejoinder, “Moses had a black wife.”

Girls from New York, Rhode Island, Boston, and Providence arrived in Canterbury. While the Cobb and Edwards song recalled lessons in “Reading and ’riting and ’rithmetic / Taught to the tune of the hickory stick,” the Crandall school taught history, chemistry, and moral philosophy—with never an inclusion of a hickory stick.

The first retaliation was from store owners who refused to sell Prudence groceries which led her father, Pardon and brother Hezekiah to deliver supplies. Vandals smeared dung on the school’s steps and door handles. After the Canterbury Congressional Church told the girls they were no longer welcome, they switched to the Packerville Baptist Church. On one occasion, heading home, fearing trouble, their carriage-driver ordered them to dismount. His premonition was prescient; teenaged boys dragged the vehicle to the river and deposited it upside down. Pardon rescued the carriage; church services ended. Despite Canterbury’s enmity, Prudence persevered, feeling her duty was to fight against prejudice that she called “the mother of all abominations.”

When intimidation failed, the Connecticut state legislature passed the 1833 “black law” which prohibited instruction for “colored persons who are not inhabitants of this state.” In celebration, the citizens of Canterbury fired a cannon thirteen times, the church bell chimed for hours. Prudence recalled those times were “weary, weary days.”

An event Prudence knew was coming arrived when a deputy sheriff took her to court where she pled not guilty. The justice of the peace, Rufus Adams, offered her the choice of jail or posting bail. When she chose prison, the men were dumbstruck. Their concern was that incarcerating a white religious woman would reflect badly on them and make people sympathetic to the accused. When Sheriff Roger Coit escorted Prudence to her cell, she was pleased, as her fear had been the men would not put her behind bars. The Liberator denounced, “SAVAGE BARBARITY! Miss Crandall imprisoned!!!” Throughout the Northeast, the abolitionist presses publicized the trial. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote in the Essex Gazette, “In prison for teaching colored sisters to read the Bible . . . Just God! Can this be possible?” The following afternoon, Prudence was free to await trial in her home. As in the lyric of “School Days,” Prudence continued to stress to her students the Golden Rule. The first court hearing ended in a mistrial; in the second, the trial ended in a conviction. However, the court overturned the verdict on a technicality. Crandall V. The State of Connecticut (1834) influenced impacted two United States Supreme Court Cases: Dred Scott v. Sandford (1875) and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). Moreover, it laid the foundation for the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

On a winter afternoon, Frederick Olney, a black handyman, was at Prudence’s parlor when he saw smoke rising from a corner of the room. He put out the fire that raged from a first-floor window. The police arrested Olney for arson.

To counteract the horror, romance entered when the thirty-one-year-old Prudence fell in love with the widowed Calvin Philleo, a Baptist minister she described as her “choicest blessing.” In 1834, when a Canterbury minister refused to marry the couple, they took their vows in a Brooklyn church. After their honeymoon, Calvin, along with his son and daughter, moved into Prudence’s home, and classes resumed. The honeymoon cocoon ended with a midnight attack where men used iron bars to shatter windows and furniture. A terrified student coughed up blood. Prudence closed the school and sold her home. Although the perpetrators of the violence felt vindicated with the demise of the Canterbury Female Boarding School, the repercussions of the closure had unexpected results. The short-lived school, that existed for seventeen months, helped the abolitionist movement gain momentum.

Shortly after their marriage, Calvin exhibited signs of mental instability, called his wife “old squash head,” squandered their money, and left her to raise her stepchildren. His death ended their wretched union. Hezekiah and Prudence settled on a book-filled rundown farm in Elk Falls, Kansas, where Connecticut’s state motto, Qui Transtulit Sustinet, which means, “He Who Transplanted Still Sustains,” came to pass. Her former town issued a mea culpa when the state legislature granted the eighty-four-year-old Prudence an annual four-hundred-dollar pension, as they were “mindful of the dark blot on our fair name and her straightened circumstances.” Mark Twain offered to reinstate her in her old home; she refused but asked him to send her his books and photograph. A century after her death, Prudence became Connecticut’s official state heroine. The Connecticut House of Representatives established her birthday as Prudence Crandall Day.

As Prudence lay dying, Reverend McKesson  asked what he should recite at her eulogy, to which she responded, “Preach the truth.”

 

Prudence Crandall Museum

The truth lies in her former home. The history of the museum echoes Romeo’s words as he walked the streets of Verona that bore witness to the city’s ancient feud, “Here’s much to do with love but more with hate.” Throughout the ground floor, the curators have instituted a banner style exhibit entitled, “The Canterbury Female Boarding School: Courage, Conscience, and Continuance.” Through the message on the banners, visitors discover the story of the school, its teacher, and her students.  The tour guides encourage guests to consider how they can make a difference by carrying out Prudence’s precepts of justice and equality. Interactive questions, part of the exhibit, encourage visitors to examine current educational barriers and reflect on solutions. An effecting aspect of the tour is the newly discovered charred beam-the result of the arson attack on the school-that builders discovered during renovations. In the entry hall is a reproduction portrait of the schoolteacher-activist, her hair worn short, in defiance of the current Victorian fashion. The New England Anti-Slavery Society had invited Prudence to Boston where Francis Alexander painted her portrait. During her sitting, William Lloyd Garrison came to the studio to keep her company. The original 1834 painting resides in the Cornell University Library.

       After completing a two-year restoration, the former schoolhouse focuses on sharing Prudence’s principles of equal protection under the law whereby education is the great equalizer. Currently, banner style displays, that encompass all five rooms of the first floor, shares the stories of teacher Prudence Crandall, her students, and a chapter from Canterbury’s past. A banner showcases the subpoena that mandated the students testify against their teacher that leaves one with the horror of their conundrum. Another banner is of Prudence’s arrest warrant, a smoking-gun of the racial tempest of the era. Her incarceration presages the words of fellow New Englander, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote in Civil Disobedience, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

        The current zeitgeist in education is the belief that rather than teachers acting as the sage on the stage, they should be the guide by the side. The pedagogy is one which the museum follows as its staff makes the former students an integral part of the exhibits. Prudence would have been proud. Through documents and photographs, one can experience Sarah Harris’ sampler, Eliza Hamilton’s passport application. In a nod to nostalgia, the museum shares images of Prudence’s signed schoolbooks from her years at the Moses Brown School. In a nod to the dearth of objects that are currently in storage, Joan DiMartino, the museum’s curator and site superintendent stated, “The building itself, site of the school, is our most important artifact.”

In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims journeyed from London to Canterbury; in the nineteenth century, Miss Crandall’s students likewise made a pilgrimage, one that comprises Connecticut’s Canterbury Tale.

A View from Her Window

In her times of sorrow, as Prudence glanced from her Palladian window, she would have seen the remains of egg yolks, cracks from stones, and those who desperately desired the demise of her school.

Nearby Attraction: Yale University Art Gallery

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