That night Calvin Philleo went to Judson’s house across the street from the school to tell him of the attack and to ask if anyone had witnessed anything, but Judson was dismissive. Feeling she had no choice, Prudence asked Samuel J. May to do what she could not: tell the students that the school had to close for their protection and safety. May later wrote of the events, “I felt ashamed of Canterbury, ashamed of Connecticut, ashamed of my country, ashamed of my color.”138
Though their education was abruptly halted, these young African American women still championed Christian love. Not only were they steadfast in their faith in God and their love for each other, but they also remained committed to extending that love to their neighbors. After all, the Bible stated that love was a Christian principle (1 John 3:23). These women entered the school in love and parted in love, remembering the biblical definition of goodness (Romans 12:9). In a short essay, one student shared her memories of female friendship at the seminary, where “love was without dissimulation.” She credited May with helping her to develop morally and intellectually. By embodying Christian values, he had taught her a lot about religion: “With him I saw religion, not merely adopted as an empty form, but a living, all-pervading principle of action. He lived like those who seek a better country: nor was his family devotion a cold pile of hypocrisy, on which the fire of God never descends. No, it was a place of communion with heaven.” This student’s reflection revealed her understanding of Christianity. On the one hand, Judson and other opponents favored prejudice, rage, and violence; they acted unjustly. On the other hand, May, Crandall, and her students believed in peace, thus upholding an ethic of Christian love.139
Years later this ethic of Christian love still governed the actions of some former students. One from Hartford, with the initials E.F., penned a temperance song that was sung at the Colored Temperance Convention in Middletown, Connecticut, in May 1836.140 Harriet Rosetta Lanson vowed to devote her life to doing God’s work. She joined the temperance movement and began to prepare for a career as a Sabbath school teacher. She gave speeches, most likely at church services, where she encouraged parents to guide children and youth. “Pour in the oil of counsel, and guide their tottering steps to tread the upward path to virtue,” she urged. Upon her death from consumption on November 8, 1835, Simeon Jocelyn remembered her as a faithful young Christian woman who sought to “kindle a love for virtue” among African American youth.141 Her piety manifested in her commitment to her own education and that of others.142
Following Prudence’s example, radical abolitionists began to develop educational initiatives for African American children and youth. In an 1841 letter to the editor of the Philanthropist, Davis Day, a young African American man who attended Oberlin College, linked moral and intellectual improvement to women’s influence, arguing, “The elevation of our race, depends in a great degree upon the talents and education of our females.” Day spoke of the critical need for educated African American teachers in black communities in Ohio; ignoring African American women’s education undermined the struggle for black freedom.143 The American Anti-Slavery Society, established in December 1833, passed resolutions that supported Prudence’s “philanthropic efforts” in educating African American women, praised educational institutions that accepted African Americans, and condemned antiliteracy laws “which prevent or restrict the education of the people of color, bond or free.” Jocelyn vowed to campaign to abolish these laws “more earnestly than corporeal slavery itself [because] ignorance enslaves the mind and tends to the ruin of the immortal soul.”144 African American education, for enslaved and free blacks, was understood as a multidimensional strategy for freedom.
In the mid-1830s a few white proprietors and abolitionists made concerted efforts to establish schools for African American women. Theodore Dwight Weld helped to build literary institutions in Cincinnati, Ohio, and planned to open a school for African American women that was to be led by Charlotte Lathrop, a young white woman from Connecticut.145 Martha and Lucy Ball, two white abolitionist sisters, opened a school for African American women in Boston that taught “reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, &c. and . . . plain sewing, knitting, &c.”146 One of the African American teachers at that school was Julia Williams, who had studied at the Canterbury Female Seminary. She earned public praise for her excellent teaching and for her work in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.147 Another white woman taught African American women “spelling, reading, and writing, needle-work, &c.” at the home of Peter Gray in Boston.148 In 1834 Rebecca Buffum, the daughter of Arnold Buffum, founded a school in Philadelphia for young women “without regard to their complexion.”149 While these efforts advanced African American women’s education to some extent, they lasted only a few years.
For African American women, teaching was central to racial uplift. Of the twelve or so young African American women who we know attended the Canterbury Female Seminary, at least six went on to become teachers: Ann Eliza Hammond, Elizabeth H. Smith, Julia Ward Williams, Miranda Glasko, Mary E. Miles, and Mary Harris. Upon her return to her home state of Rhode Island, Ann Eliza taught at the coeducational Providence English School for Colored Youth, operated by Reverend John W. Lewis.150 Her classmate Elizabeth worked as a teacher and principal at the Meeting Street School in Providence.151 Miranda taught at a school for African American children in New London, Connecticut, in the late 1830s.152 Though it is difficult to assess whether and how Christian love figured in the work of these African American women teachers later in their lives, they were often remembered in obituaries and memorials as learned and virtuous Christian women who defended their communities.153
The Harris sisters too devoted themselves to a life of learning and activism. While many members of the Harris family remained in Canterbury, Sarah—the young woman who had moved to that village with her parents and siblings in 1832—and her husband, George Fayerweather, eventually settled in his native state of Rhode Island. She only briefly studied at Prudence’s school before starting her own family and raising her children. Her daughter, Isabella, went to a high school in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Sarah encouraged her, probably on more than one occasion, “Improve your time at school.”154 Sarah also remained active in the antislavery movement, corresponding with Garrison as well as attending lectures and abolitionist meetings throughout the Northeast.155 Her sister, Mary Harris, married Pelleman Williams, an African American teacher, and they settled in New Haven, where Williams taught. Mary reared their three children and, like many free black women, worked occasionally as a domestic servant to supplement the household income.156 In the post–Civil War era, the family moved to Louisiana, where Mary and her husband taught freed people.157
For Sarah Harris Fayerweather, the experience at Canterbury was politically and morally formative. At an antislavery meeting in the summer of 1862, Emma Whipple, Prudence’s stepdaughter, met Sarah, who introduced herself as the “first colored scholar at Prudence Crandall’s school,” revealing her pride in the title. Emma described Sarah as “very intelligent and lady-like[,] well-informed in every movement relative to the removal of slavery.” In their conversation, Sarah expressed “the warmest love and gratitude” for Prudence. She had even named one of her daughters Prudence, and she named one of her sons Charles Frederick Douglass.158 Her activist ties only deepened over the years. Crandall and Sarah maintained a loving long-distance friendship, exchanging letters and remembering the activism of early allies. Sarah even traveled to Crandall’s home in Kansas for a visit in 1877. A year later, Sarah passed away. The inscription on her gravestone reads, “Her’s [sic] was a living example of obedience to faith, devotion to her children and a loving, tender interest in all.”159
For seventeenth months, nearly two dozen young African American women had access to advanced schooling in Canterbury. African American and white abolitionists celebrated this milestone, but white residents were incensed. The black pursuit of knowledge provoked racialized and gendered forms of violence, which ranged from the threatened whipping of Ann Eliza Hammond to the eventual attack on the school building. Virulent white opposition arose out of a place of racism and sexism, anger at Prudence’s decision to establish a new seminary that displaced white women, and anxiety about the status of African Americans in the nation. Prudence and her students characterized this violence as unchristian.
Amid
