this standard curriculum, which would enable a woman to “acquit herself aright, to whatever social duty she may be justly called.”35 The female seminary was thus an academically rigorous environment, and the Canterbury Female Boarding School offered all of these subjects and even added chemistry, astronomy, rhetoric, and French.
In these white female spaces, racial hierarchies and boundaries were implicitly, if not explicitly, observed and maintained, especially when it came to socializing. Mary Eckert, a young white woman from a well-to-do family, penned a letter to her parents while at her aunt’s female boarding school in Washington, Pennsylvania. Mary noted the planned lecture tour by Reverend John B. Pinney, a white Presbyterian missionary who worked as an agent for the American Colonization Society. Mary recounted hearing “a lady ask . . . why our blacks should not be educated and taken into company with the whites, that she would like to see them taken into our parties.” Though it is unclear where Mary was when she heard the question, her sentiments were made clear when she recorded her thoughts on the matter: “I think that’s carrying the joke rather too far.”36 The question of whether African Americans should even be permitted at parties aside, Mary’s description of their mere presence in white spaces as a “joke” is revealing.
The very rationale for white women’s education made the presence of African American women at female seminaries precarious, at best. As Mary Kelley argues, the female seminary encouraged young white women to “chart the nation’s course.”37 An African American woman attending a seminary demonstrated her desire and ability to improve her mind and lead a purposeful life. And allowing her to attend a seminary affirmed her legitimate inclusion within the broader project of nation-building, which conflicted with racial ideologies that refused African Americans an equal place in the nation, let alone recognized their ability to contribute to it. An African American woman’s desire for learning, as well as her capacity to learn, was thus summarily dismissed.
Nevertheless African American families invested in and cared deeply about their children’s learning. When Prudence Crandall decided to open a seminary for African American girls, she visited the homes of African American families who “seemed to feel much for the education of their children.”38 With an introduction from Garrison in hand, she traveled to Providence, where she met Elizabeth Hall Hammond, a free, middle-class African American widow with two daughters, Ann Eliza and Sarah Lloyd, who showed interest in attending a female seminary.39 Elizabeth introduced Prudence to other black families as well as white abolitionists, including George William Benson, a leather and wool merchant in Providence, and his brother, Henry E. Benson, an agent for the Liberator. The Benson brothers, who helped to establish the Providence Anti-Slavery Society, had ties to the Brooklyn, Connecticut, community, where their father, George Benson, settled the family in 1824. Esther Baldwin, a young white woman from Canterbury who attended the Norwich Female Academy, wrote to her sisters, one of whom had attended Prudence’s boarding school, “The blacks [in Norwich] talk about Miss Crandall’s academy.”40 The network of free black New England families from Providence to Norwich was abuzz over this new African American female seminary.
Grace Lanson, a seventeen-year-old African American indentured servant from New Haven, Connecticut, had apparently learned of the Canterbury Female Seminary. She labored at the Litchfield, Connecticut, residence of Benjamin Tallmadge, a white politician and military officer who had served with George Washington in the American Revolution. In August 1833 Grace ran away, and Tallmadge placed an advertisement in the Columbian Register reporting her escape and explaining as her reason for fleeing “to attend some new boarding school.”41 Whether she ever reached the Canterbury Female Seminary, returned to the Tallmadge residence, or remained missing is unknown. On the one hand, Tallmadge’s advertisement registered white anxiety about African American women’s education: Grace forfeited her indenture to attend school; on the other hand, it reveals that at least one African American girl put herself at great risk to pursue knowledge.
Very few institutions existed in early 1830s Connecticut for African American children and youth seeking advanced study. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the town of Colchester earmarked funds to build a school for formerly enslaved children. A unique educational initiative, this school, located adjacent to the prestigious Bacon Academy, welcomed approximately forty African American children.42 Prince Saunders, a mixed-race man from New England, taught at the school while taking courses in Latin and Greek at Bacon Academy. Such an arrangement was an early example of the hyperlocal nature of schools. Indeed, there appears to have been no recorded objections to Saunders’s presence at Bacon Academy or the existence of a school for African American children, for that matter. This school did, however, close in 1840. Prudence’s African American female seminary was thus truly one of a kind.
When Prudence shifted her school’s female student body from white to African American, her decision was so politically significant—and, to some, dangerous and offensive—precisely because it affirmed African American women’s capacity for and pursuit of learning. As Prudence traveled the eastern seaboard, personally meeting with prospective female scholars, the Liberator carried an advertisement for the school. It resembled the old advertisement for her all-white boarding school, except for two key differences: rhetoric was no longer listed as a course offering, and black and white abolitionists replaced white town leaders in the list of boosters. The advertisement was less a recruitment tool than a declaration in support of African American women’s learning.43 It represented the seminary’s aim to show that young African American women were refined and elegant ladies, with a right to learn and the potential to excel at it.
Of the fifteen male boosters who acted as references for the seminary, at least six were African American, including three New York City clergymen, Peter Williams, Theodore S. Wright, and Samuel Cornish; two Philadelphia businessmen, James Forten and Joseph Cassey; and one Connecticut clergyman, Jehiel Beman. In addition to commending this educational endeavor, these boosters vouched for Prudence as a teacher and helped to recruit students. Cornish boldly claimed, “Every measure for the thorough and proper education of colored females is a blow aimed directly at slavery. As such it is felt by slave-holders at the south, and their friends and abettors at the north.”44
African American female enrollment at the seminary was small at first but steadily increased. In April 1833 Prudence had only “two boarders and one day scholar,” Sarah Harris and likely the Hammond sisters.45 A month later as many as thirteen African American girls and women had enrolled, including Sarah’s younger sister, Mary.46 Another sibling pair were the Glasko sisters from Griswold, Connecticut: twenty-two-year-old Eliza and thirteen-year-old Miranda, the daughters of Isaac Glasko, a successful blacksmith, and his wife, Lucy Brayton Glasko.47 Fourteen-year-old Mary E. Miles, who grew up in a Quaker family in Rhode Island, also attended the seminary.48 Sixteen-year-old Theodosia deGrasse came from a fairly well-known family in New York. Her father, George, was a Hindu man born in Calcutta and adopted by the white French admiral Count de Grasse; George deGrasse petitioned for U.S. citizenship, which was granted in 1804. Theodosia’s mother, Maria, was probably a mixed-race woman descended from Abram Jansen Van Salee, the son of a Moroccan woman and Jan Jansen Van Haarlem, a Dutchman.49 During the seventeen-month period that the seminary remained open, as many as twenty-five students may have passed through its doors.
While some of the students at the seminary came from middle-class and elite free black families who could afford the $25 tuition per quarter, others did not. Fifteen-year-old Harriet Rosetta Lanson performed domestic work at the school to offset her tuition costs. Adopted by Simeon Jocelyn, a white pastor from Connecticut and an engraver by trade, Harriet attended both public primary and Sabbath schools and was particularly interested in studying the Bible. Jocelyn noted that Harriet possessed a “love of study and habits of observation.”50 At least one student from New York was supported financially not by her mother but by a former slave woman whom she knew. Another student’s father was a former slave. One editorialist pointed to the diverse backgrounds of these young women as proof of their ambition: “Where can we find such thirsting for knowledge among our white population?”51
Whether learning from their teachers or each
