seminary, represented Prudence since she could not attend on account of her gender. Their presence, later joined by Henry E. Benson, infuriated residents who viewed abolitionists as interlopers. All of those who spoke at the meeting condemned the seminary except for George S. White, a white Episcopal minister and émigré, who rebutted Judson’s inflammatory claims. Still, the townspeople voted in favor of numerous resolutions opposing the seminary. One associated the abolitionist-backed seminary with the town’s demise—a claim that, according to May, stirred up a frenzy among the townspeople “that a dire calamity was impending over them.”68 Given the hostile environment, neither May nor Buffum said anything during the meeting, but afterward May spoke out, defending Prudence and her students. Judson and others organized yet another town meeting, where further resolutions were passed to remove the seminary once and for all. These resolutions, however, did not stop Prudence.
The sequence of Prudence’s decision-making here is important. At first, she sought only to admit Sarah Harris to her all-white boarding school. However, the parents of the white female students, and likely some of the white female students themselves, could not accept an African American girl as a classmate. If they had hoped to discourage Prudence, they failed. For it was only after this that Prudence decided to establish a seminary specifically for African American girls and women, which meant reconstituting her student body. In a private conversation, May told Judson exactly that: “If you and your neighbors in Canterbury had quietly consented that Sarah Harris, whom you knew to be a bright good girl, should enjoy the privilege she so eagerly sought, this momentous conflict would not have arisen in your village.”69 Judson, however, saw no place for free blacks in the United States, let alone at a female seminary across the road from his house, and surely not at the expense of white women.
Judson and another of Prudence’s opponents, Rufus Adams, a lawyer and justice of the peace, raised two other key objections to the seminary that revolved around Prudence’s alleged misconduct. First, Judson and Adams condemned the “the manner in which Miss C. effected the change in her school,” which they deemed “very objectionable.” Judson averred that Prudence had disregarded her “fellow-citizens,” the same citizens who had recruited her from nearby Plainfield, by failing to inform them of her plan. Second, Prudence had “forced upon” Canterbury this “evil” school, without so much as a discussion. These objections soon gave way to racist explanations, threats, and legal maneuvers, all intended to shut down the seminary.70
One of Judson’s first lines of attack was to recapitulate oppressive ideologies that called into question the character of African American girls and women. Through the press, Judson stated quite clearly why he and others objected to the presence of young African American women in and around Canterbury: “[Their] characters and habits might be various and unknown to us, thereby rendering insecure, the persons, property, and reputations of our own citizens.”71 This objection, framed as a deeply held concern, evoked the racist and sexist ideologies that placed African American women outside of True Womanhood.72 Never mind that Sarah Harris, described by Prudence as “the daughter of honorable parents,” was known to Judson and other residents, or that some of the scholars at the seminary came from middle-class and elite free black families.73 To opponents, all these scholars were “foreigners” whose illegitimate demand for education had established “a black seminary to the exclusion of a white one,” rendering the entire (white) community insecure.74
Just as slaveholders suggested that literacy would spoil a slave, so too did colonizationists marshal a form of false benevolence to argue that schooling African American women would ruin their lives. One anonymous writer, who claimed to be a colonizationist, wrote a letter to the editor of the Norwich Republican denouncing African American education and defending Canterbury opponents. The Canterbury Female Seminary, in the words of this writer, offered a “pernicious” kind of education in which African American women learned about “their own dignity and consequence” in a nation where they would “be met with spontaneous, unconquerable aversion of the white to the black.” The argument acknowledged only part of the seminary’s teachings. Prudence did affirm African American women’s respectability; she and her students believed that prejudice could be conquered by young women armed with education and thus empowered to advance themselves and their communities as they fought for their civil rights. In the writer’s estimation, however, the educational outcome would not be winning black rights or even, as some abolitionists predicted, a weakening of racial prejudice, but instead would leave African American women “angry” and “sink [them] into degradation and infamy.” This writer revealed his unwillingness to see educated and empowered African American women.75
By allying herself with her African American female scholars, Prudence forced, albeit briefly, a conversation about the virulence of racial prejudice in the North. She described white racism as “inveterate” and “the strongest, if not the only chain that bound those heavy burdens on the wretched slaves,” thus linking slavery and racial prejudice. This injustice motivated her to establish the Canterbury Female Seminary, whose mission was to “fit and prepare teachers for the people of color.”76 Preparing women for the teaching profession at female seminaries was hardly a new endeavor, though it had, until then, been one mostly reserved for white women. For instance, Ipswich Female Academy, founded in 1828 and run by Zilpah Grant, graduated twenty-seven female students between 1829 and 1830, all but two of whom immediately became teachers.77 Prudence’s words and actions thus forced her opponents to confront their prejudices. One editorialist confessed, “Will it be said that this is prejudice?—Be it so.”78
Prudence also faced sexist attacks, further demonstrating that white opposition was intimately tied to constructions of manhood and womanhood. Opponents smeared her, painting her as a crook who transformed her school only to make money, and as a champion of racial mixing. One editorialist from the United States Telegraph suggested that getting the “young lady [Prudence] a husband” would surely lure her away from her experiment—implying that Prudence suffered from her lack of a husband and was not genuinely committed to educating African American women.79 Judson went even further, accusing her of “step[ping] out of the hallowed precincts of female propriety” by betraying her original mandate and refusing men’s demands to return to it. Prudence’s opponents sought to reset the racial and gender order she had upset, restoring white women to their subordinate status to white men (and African American women excluded altogether).80
Opponents of the seminary employed various means to force its demise. Ann Eliza Hammond, the sixteen-year-old African American woman from Providence whose mother introduced Prudence to other families, became the first out-of-state student at the school. The sheriff of Windham County served a warrant, signed by Rufus Adams, against Ann Eliza, citing the Act for the Admission of Inhabitants in Towns, an eighteenth-century Connecticut law allowing local government officials to deport any nonresident in the state. If the person did not leave, he or she had to pay a fine of $1.67 per week, and if the person had not paid the fine and had not left after ten days, he or she was to be “whipped on the naked body not exceeding ten stripes.”81 The warrant was meant to put Ann Eliza in her place and also to put her out: out of Canterbury or, if colonizationists had their wish, out of the United States altogether. May advised Ann Eliza to “bear meekly the punishment, if they should in their madness inflict it; knowing that every blow they should strike her would resound throughout the land, if not over the whole civilized world, and call out an expression of indignation before which Mr. Judson and his associates would quail.” May need not have worried: Ann Eliza was “ready for the emergency” and responded to the challenge “with the spirit of a martyr.”82 However, Prudence disagreed with May’s idea about how to handle legal violence and refused to put Ann Eliza in harm’s way. Instead she decided to pay the first fine, which ended the matter.83 May’s depiction of a courageous Ann Eliza coupled with Judson’s “madness” prompted abolitionists to ask publicly, “Who are the savages now?”84 The Act for the Admission of Inhabitants in Towns echoed larger systems of violence against black bodies, particularly the African slave trade and slavery itself.
Some of Prudence’s students reacted to the sexist and violent attacks with both anger and sadness, though these emotions
