This ethic of Christian love armed students with the discursive power to promote inclusion and equal treatment, at the schoolhouse and beyond. Alongside their abolitionist allies, these women resisted their dehumanization and devaluation through the pursuit, acquisition, and use of knowledge, insisting all the while that they themselves were valuable members of the community.
Moreover these students staked their claims to the category of woman. Just as middle-class and elite white women students learned to take on a distinctive social role, so too did African American women at this seminary develop a particular kind of social reform rooted in their Christian faith. These students also showed that they could play an influential role in their own communities, as both mothers and reformers. In doing so, they enacted their own idealized version of purposeful womanhood, one that required resilience and love.
FIGURE 1.3. “Colored Schools Broken Up in the Free States.” This illustration from the American Anti-Slavery Almanac (1839) essentially reinterprets the violent attack on the Canterbury Female Seminary in 1834 and connects it to other attacks on African American schools that happened throughout the North, from Ohio to New Hampshire. Author’s collection.
Five years after the closure of the Canterbury Female Seminary, an illustration in the American Anti-Slavery Almanac (1839) depicted a scene of a mob attacking a school for young African American women; the caption read, “Colored Schools Broken Up in the Free States” (Figure 1.3). In the illustration, a mob wields weapons and hurls rocks at the front of the “School for Colored Girls.” A man holding a torch moves toward the side of the building, lunging at two African American women fleeing through the back door, with only a wooden gate separating them from the man. The illustration linked the attack on the Canterbury Female Seminary to similar incidents in Canaan, New Hampshire, and Brown County, Ohio, where “law-makers and the mob” conspired to destroy schools for African Americans.160 What happened in Canterbury, then, was not unique; I estimate that violence had erupted in the antebellum North over African American education at least ten times (see appendix D).
African American activists, however, remained committed to women’s education. Despite waves of white opposition, young African American women continued their educational quest. Four years after the Canterbury Female Seminary closed, one student, Mary E. Miles, found a place at a female seminary in Clinton, Oneida County, New York, a school that did not share the same fate as Prudence Crandall’s school.
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