and Chauncey Cleveland asked the court to uphold the judgment of the lower court. Judson repeated his and Daggett’s outright rejection of black citizenship, pointing to a lack of voting rights for African American men and the degraded condition and inferiority of African Americans in general. He also played on the fears of the white community, asserting that a victory for Prudence would amount to a surrender of the entire American nation. “I would appeal to this Court—to every American citizen,” he avowed, “and say that America is ours—it belongs to a race of white men.”119 That this proclamation of white manhood emerged in a court of law where a white woman was convicted of educating African American women was no coincidence. Judson used the courtroom to call on white men to close ranks and stop the radical abolition movement’s threats to the racial and gender order. In their remarks, Judson and Cleveland essentially requested the affirmation of white male supremacy, of its institutions, and of the denial of black educational rights.
Ellsworth and Goddard sought to refute the lower court’s verdict by arguing that the Black Law violated the Privileges and Immunities Clause in the U.S. Constitution. To make the case for African American citizenship, Ellsworth relied on a gendered construction of citizenship tied to black male military service and voting, which enabled him to assert normative ideas about race and gender. His entire defense was predicated on the contention that “a distinction found in color . . . is inconvenient and impracticable.”120 African Americans were thus like white Americans. An argument in favor of African American women’s citizenship apart from African American men would have seemingly affirmed racial distinction. That is, as the historian Corinne Field explains, to “promote the equal rights of black women . . . would . . . suggest that . . . black people’s capacities followed a different normative pattern than white people’s maturation, thus giving credence to the idea of natural racial differences.”121 Nevertheless Ellsworth and Goddard took a radical stance when they defended the humanity, citizenship, and rights of African American women.122
African American women activists like Sarah Mapps Douglass and Maria W. Stewart defined citizenship in terms of Christian faith, national allegiance, and inclusion. They espoused what the historian Stephen Kantrowitz has termed a “citizenship of the heart,” namely legal freedom, civil rights, and belonging.123 Douglass claimed America as her home, vowing to “embrace her [America] the closer,” despite the fact that it “unkindly strives to throw me from her bosom.”124 By late September 1833 Stewart had left the Boston lecture circuit, largely due to disapprobation from African American male leaders. She delivered an impassioned farewell address, celebrating and encouraging a kind of activism rooted in “godliness” and “peace.”125 Christian love was about people’s relationship to one other and to God. Though Stewart and Douglass rarely invoked the word “citizen” in their writings, they shared this sentiment.
Likewise, Prudence prepared her students for active citizenship determined by knowledge and character, not sex or race. Indeed many politicians and educational reformers in early America linked education to democratic citizenship. Calvin Goddard put it plainly: the Black Law denied African Americans “of all opportunity to acquire that knowledge and those habits which [could] render them good citizens, useful to each other and their native country.”126 The assertion of black female citizenship by Prudence’s legal team laid bare this crucial question: What constituted citizenship in early America, particularly for women and African Americans? Years later, in 1848, James Kent affirmed black citizenship, regardless of status, arguing that “the privilege of voting, and the legal capacity for office, are not essential to the character of a citizen.”127 Prudence and her allies and students might have agreed: common humanity, peace, love, and forgiveness constituted good citizenship. African American female students at Canterbury possessed a desire for knowledge and acted in a loving way, which reflected their character. This stood in stark contrast to their detractors, who turned to acts of violence that ought to have thrown their own citizenship into question.
As the Crandall case wound its way through the court, African American women students continued to board at the school and attend classes. When Charles Stuart, a white Bermuda-born abolitionist, visited in June 1834, he observed that the school was “in a very flourishing and happy condition, although still occasionally subject to annoyance.”128 These annoyances were actually incidents of violence and harassment directed at Prudence Crandall as well as the school’s teachers and students. That same month William Burleigh, one of the teachers, was assaulted with eggs; he was later arrested for violating the Black Law; and a one-pound stone was hurled through one of the school’s windows, landing in a student’s room.129 Earlier that year, on January 28, a fire broke out at the seminary. No one was hurt, but Chauncey Cleveland charged Frederick Olney, an African American man who had performed odd jobs at the school, with arson. Three African American female students testified at Olney’s trial; Maria Robinson, Amy Fenner, and Henrietta Bolt recounted his work at the schoolhouse, particularly on the day in question. Given the thin evidence in the case, Olney was found not guilty.130
Because Canterbury had proven to be an unwelcome site for her seminary, over a year earlier Prudence had contemplated a move to Reading, Massachusetts, and May had received a letter from the townspeople there, who were “willing to have [Prudence’s] school established.”131 It is unclear why Prudence did not relocate her school there, but her personal life changed when she married Calvin Philleo, a widowed white Baptist minister from New York, on August 12, 1834. Calvin Philleo became increasingly involved in the seminary. First the couple tried to broker a deal to relocate the school to another part of Canterbury, but the local governing board ignored the offer. Prudence next set her sights on Philadelphia. Lydia White, cofounder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and proprietor of a free labor goods business, had visited the Canterbury Female Seminary that August 1834 and may have alerted Prudence to the possibilities available in the City of Brotherly Love. Later that month Prudence and her husband traveled to Philadelphia, where they met with the activists James Forten, Charlotte Vandine Forten, and Lucretia Mott, among others.132 During this visit, Prudence devised a plan to establish a school for black children and recruited fifty boys and girls.133 The idea of an African American female seminary in Philadelphia apparently fell by the wayside. It may have been reasoned that focusing solely on African American women’s education was too limited, especially when qualified teachers were needed to staff Philadelphia’s black schools. Most critical at that moment was keeping the project of African American education alive. In the end, given Philadelphia’s ongoing problems with racial violence in the summer of 1834, Prudence felt that relocating her school there was not a viable option.134
Meanwhile in Connecticut, the Canterbury controversy had ignited spirited debates about colonization and radical abolition among the inhabitants of Windham County. At its fourth annual meeting on July 4, 1834, the Windham County Colonization Society, which Judson attended, resolved to do more to spread colonization, including increasing the number of auxiliary societies. But it was the local antislavery movement that grew. The following month, the Anti-Slavery Society of Plainfield and its vicinity (including Canterbury) formed with forty-three members, a number that nearly tripled weeks later. A New England antislavery convention report claimed that “much alarm was manifested at [this] rapid spread of Abolitionism.”135
On July 28, 1834, the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its decision in the Crandall case, voting three to one to dismiss the charges, thus overturning the lower court’s ruling. Justice Williams wrote the majority opinion, citing a technicality, and Daggett was the lone dissenter. The inconclusive legal outcome of the case only fanned the flames. The Vermont Chronicle put it succinctly: “Mr. Judson and his associates must endure Miss Crandall’s school till they can go through the whole process again—at least.”136
The prospect of another trial coupled with the growth of the antislavery movement in Connecticut may well have pushed Prudence’s opponents over the edge. Possibly responding to all that the Canterbury Female Seminary represented and the inconclusive legal outcome, a group of men attacked the school building in September 1834. They smashed most of the windows, leaving the building, in one anonymous student’s words, “almost untenantable.” This student remained grateful, though, that
