while also calling attention to African American women’s collective ambition in an address delivered on behalf of her peers who had finally “begun to enjoy what our minds have long desired; viz. the advantages of a good education.”52 At the Canterbury Female Seminary, African American female scholars proved that their minds were neither weak nor empty and, within an openly hostile local environment, asserted an educated identity that defied racist antebellum stereotypes.
African American women’s education gained broader public attention thanks to Prudence’s seminary, as African American women activists praised the students who had enrolled and encouraged more to attend. Under the penname Zillah, Sarah Mapps Douglass published a letter in the antislavery newspaper Emancipator urging young African American women “who promised to become Miss Crandall’s pupils, to go forward.”53 Her public letter may have been inspired by her own advocacy of women’s education, not to mention that her cousin, Elizabeth Douglass Bustill, may well have attended the seminary.54 In her letter, Douglass asked prospective students to be active, courageous, and resilient—essentially, to be purposeful women. The very act of pursuing advanced study was a form of activism that opened up new opportunities. She did not deny the challenges ahead; rather she counseled the students to endure the inevitable “insults, wounds, and oppressive acts” for the sake of an education.55
Just as African American religious and political associations became sites of abolitionist protest, so too did educational institutions.56 Four white abolitionists taught at this seminary, including Prudence’s sister, Almira; Samuel J. May, a minister and educational reformer in Connecticut; and William Burleigh, the brother of Charles Burleigh, a journalist and abolitionist, from nearby Plainfield. May believed that “education is one of the primal, fundamental rights of all the children of men,” a declaration that must have felt empowering to students.57 Teachers and students conversed on subjects such as religion and slavery, making it a vibrant, intellectual, and politically engaging space. In an essay published in the Liberator, one student described slavery as an “awful, heaven-daring sin” and condemned slaveholders and their defenders for contradicting both God’s will and biblical teachings.58
Given the wide age range of students, spanning some thirteen years, Prudence may have adopted the monitorial system, a popular instructional method developed by Joseph Lancaster, a white British-born educator. This method arranged for older, typically more advanced students to teach younger, less advanced students.59 At Canterbury older students could have also taught younger ones about the principles of the radical abolition movement, which included ending slavery and promoting racial equality.
Regardless of the specific pedagogical method employed, Christian teachings were the glue that held the curriculum together. Though the school did not advertise biblical instruction, Prudence opened and closed the school day with prayer.60 Moreover she and her students attended church services, welcomed preachers at the schoolhouse, and learned and quoted from scripture in their addresses, published writings, and private letters. Some students, among them Harriet Rosetta Lanson, actually experienced their conversion at the seminary.61 Far from being a spiritual layer that supplemented the scholarship, Christianity was inextricably woven into the school’s pedagogical mission. Through their studies, these young African American women gained knowledge of their own dignity and that of the word of God. In other words, they experienced God’s love as righteous, intellectual human beings.
Prudence both facilitated and participated in female interracial solidarity and collective action at the seminary. As one student observed in an article for the Liberator, there was a strong sense of community at the school: “Love and union seems [sic] to bind our little circle in the bonds of sisterly affection.” The student reminded her classmates that they had been “adorned with virtue and modesty,” and now was their moment to “pursue every thing that will bring respect to ourselves, and honor to our friends who labor so much for our welfare.” Nothing was ever just an individual pursuit; rather students and faculty alike saw themselves as contributing to a greater good and a broader purpose.62
This effort to educate African American women had many implications for radical abolitionists who were committed to African American education in the antebellum North. At the First Annual Convention of the Free People of Color at Wesleyan Church in Philadelphia, in June 1831, Simeon Jocelyn and five other white abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, proposed to establish a manual labor college for African American men in New Haven, the first college of its kind in the nation. For Garrison, this initiative was crucial to racial uplift: “It can be, and must be, accomplished.”63 However, both elite and working-class white New Haven residents rejected the proposal, citing fear of economic competition, incongruity with the aims of the American Colonization Society, and an overall revulsion at the presence of African Americans. The weight of opposition, at times violent, in New Haven did not lead proponents to abandon the project immediately; however, they explored the possibility of opening the college in a different location, but nothing ever came of that.
Historians rightfully cite a fear of economic competition to explain white opposition to the manual labor college initiative, but such an explanation fails to account for white opposition to an African American female seminary. Educated African American men aimed to compete with white men in the labor market for skilled jobs. Arguably African American women did not pose such an economic threat to white women, or men for that matter, since an educated woman’s role was not intended to be in the public sphere. The goal of women’s education, in the words of Leonard Worcester, a white principal of the Newark Young Ladies’ Institute in New Jersey, was to make women “fit companions for educated men” and “qualified to educate their children,” thus forming “individual and national character.”64 Worcester’s reasoning followed that of Benjamin Rush. Likewise, Samuel Young, a New York state senator, suggested that “no universal agent of civilization exists, but our mothers.”65 Educated women, if anything, would not compete for jobs and should have been less threatening.
Nevertheless African American education, whether pursued by men or women, was rooted in the broader project of achieving black civil rights, which did threaten social and racial hierarchies, thus angering white opponents. After all, servants might relinquish their post, as Sarah Harris and Grace Lanson had done. Moreover racialized dimensions of white opposition were still informed by gender. The scholar Mary Kelley argues that the curriculum at female academies “schooled [women] for social leadership” and as “makers of public opinion.” This distinctive social role within civil society “informed the subjectivities [of female] students,” as Kelley notes, but also protected and ensconced white girlhood in the female seminary until marriage. The female seminary movement helped to shape the very notion of the ideal woman; it reinforced the assumption that she was a white, middle-class or elite, educated, and nurturing wife and mother. Including young African American women in the female seminary movement threatened to overstep racial boundaries, but such a move insisted, too, on the students’ status as women capable of striving for the same idealized femininity.66
The failure of the manual labor college initiative in New Haven was, in Garrison’s words, “a bad precedent” with potentially devastating consequences. Another educational failure in the region might sound the death knell for the entire project of African American education. “If we suffer the school to be put down in Canterbury,” Garrison wrote, “other places will partake of the panic, and also prevent its introduction in their vicinity.” Opposition was contagious and imitative. Garrison’s predictions revealed the uphill struggle that African Americans and their allies faced in pursuit of educational opportunity. No gain could be taken for granted, and no setback could be assumed to be minor. Hence Garrison’s injunction: “Miss [Crandall] must be sustained at all hazards.”67
For Canterbury residents who opposed her seminary, Prudence’s project amounted to a kind of betrayal—a betrayal that, ironically, stood directly across the street from the home of Andrew T. Judson, one of the very men who had recruited Prudence to open a boarding school for young white women. Judson quickly became a leading opponent of the African American seminary, organizing town meetings,
