Lanson wrote home to her adoptive guardian expressing dismay that she and her classmates were barred from attending the Congregational church in the village and had to travel to one in Packersville. But instead of dwelling on the inconvenience, Lanson pledged “to consecrate [to God] the little knowledge [she had] to his service.”85 Similarly, another student reminded her classmates that Prudence had taught them “not to indulge in angry feelings towards [their] enemies.” Quoting scripture on forgiveness (Romans 12:20) and loving one’s enemy (Luke 6:28), the student urged steadfast adherence to Christian principles of love and peace. She exhorted her classmates, “Feel at peace with all men; for we all know this is the spirit of the Christian, and this we must possess to support us through the trials we are called upon to pass in this life.”86 No matter what, Christian scriptures best governed human actions and behaviors, especially during trying times.
A strong commitment to Christian love did not preclude these young women from labeling the actions of white Canterbury residents unrighteous. As Christian women, they could, according to scripture (Romans 12:9), “abhor what is evil.” That evil was racial prejudice. In her address the same student explained, “We as a body, my dear school-mates . . . know . . . it is the prejudice the whites have against us that causes us to labor under so many disadvantages.” After all, African Americans’ pursuit of knowledge had actually inflamed prejudice and provoked white violence. This student stated matter-of-factly, “White people . . . put every obstacle they can in our way to prevent our rising to an equal.”87 She recognized the pattern of systematic oppression that inhibited black advancement. Her observations were valid: George Benson overheard one opponent confess that if the Canterbury Female Seminary flourished, then free blacks in Canterbury “would begin to look up and claim an equality with the whites.”88 Clearly the very idea of an educated African American woman terrified some residents. Racial prejudice was the disease that had to be named and cured precisely by fighting for African American education.
At the same time that Prudence’s students criticized their white opponents, however, the most radical dimension of their invocation of Christian love was its insistence that African Americans belonged to a universal Christian family. In a separate address, an anonymous student linked Christian love to the fight for racial equality. In the Christian imagination, this student explained, God was the father of humankind, which certainly included African Americans, and thus African Americans and whites shared a “common father.” Racial prejudice, then, made little sense, and all good Christians had an obligation to fight it. This student encouraged civic action and implored the public to “obey the voice of duty” and follow the example of the few like Prudence, who “stepped from within the shadow of prejudice, and [were] now pleading [African Americans’] cause, in the midst of persecution, with great success.”89 This student’s remarks evoked radical abolitionist ideology. As the historian Paul Goodman argued, radical abolitionists were “serious Christians [who] grounded their belief in human equality in faith.”90 They took seriously the biblical verse “God hath made of one blood all nations of men” (Acts 17:26). The fight for black equality and freedom was both a Christian duty and a national cause.
Students’ public writings sought to teach white Canterbury residents to be civil and moral, stressing Christian axioms of loving one’s neighbor and the Golden Rule. “If all were taught to love their neighbors as themselves, to do to others as they would be done unto, there would be no disposition to repeat the crime of him who slew his brother,” reflected one student.91 By recasting the biblical story of Cain and Abel as one of kinship relations instead of racial marking, this student attributed the conflict and violence in Canterbury to an absence of Christian love. The emphasis on Christian love implied neither submission nor complacency; rather it represented the potential for change. If Canterbury residents actually practiced a law of love, they would not and could not continue their course of action to destroy the Canterbury Female Seminary. These young women were students, but they were also teachers, showing whites how to behave civilly.
By invoking the ethic of Christian love, these young women proved that religious beliefs and values were central to their lives. They relied on this ethic to provoke a kind of resigned acceptance from white Canterbury residents who would then allow the seminary to exist. A more combative response, in all likelihood, would not have benefited the cause. Opponents near and far, not just slaveholders, regularly assailed the character of African American women and men, deeming them unworthy, inferior, and even dangerous, especially after Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. While these young women might have agreed with a radical activist like David Walker, who warned that the perpetuation of slavery would result in violence, they articulated no such sentiments in their writings. Rather an ethic of Christian love prevailed, becoming an important mode for African American women’s public self-expression and civic engagement.
White women abolitionists also espoused an ethic of Christian love to highlight the bonds of sisterhood. Frances Whipple, an abolitionist from Rhode Island, wrote a poem lauding Prudence’s heroism while imploring all women to help each other, for “God loveth all alike.”92 Likewise, an anonymously authored appeal, published in the Female Advocate, a moral reform newspaper, argued that the Canterbury affair concerned every American woman. Potentially any woman, this columnist suggested, could be thrown “into prison, for seeking female improvement and elevation.” This appeal urged women to band together and join the struggle for women’s education. It closed by encouraging women to be “vigilant . . . [and] active,” like the biblical figure Esther, in order to “save [the] country.” Education was about good character as well as intellectual improvement, which would be useful in the domestic realm and beyond.93
This seemingly local controversy over African American women’s education triggered a statewide initiative to curb free blacks seeking education. Canterbury opponents abandoned their plan to arrest students for violating old Connecticut laws and instead drafted and pushed through the Connecticut General Assembly an addendum to the Act for the Admission of Inhabitants in Towns that targeted African Americans from other states. This addendum stated that the migration of African Americans to Connecticut “injured” the state and its citizens, and it forbade the establishment of “any school, academy, or literary institution, for the instruction or education of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this state . . . without the consent, in writing . . . of the civil authority.”94 This so-called Black Law resembled legislation passed in various southern states that had outlawed the instruction of African Americans, free and enslaved. For instance, a Virginia law of 1819 prohibited enslaved African Americans, and those associated with them, from meeting for the purpose of “teaching them reading or writing.”95 The Virginia legislature later amended this antiliteracy law to include free blacks and mulattoes along with enslaved African Americans.96 Both the Virginia and the Connecticut law targeted specific sites of learning, whether the school or the church, and restricted black access to teaching and learning overall. With the help of Phillip Pearl, a white state senator from Hampton whose daughter had attended Prudence’s first, white female boarding school in Canterbury, the Connecticut law passed, effectively criminalizing the Canterbury Female Seminary.
In June 1833 Canterbury officials arrested Prudence and her younger sister, Almira, for violating the Black Law. The charges against Almira were dismissed since she was a minor; however, the charges against Prudence remained. Instead of posting bail in the amount of $150, she and her abolitionist supporters believed that her jailing in Brooklyn, the county seat, would shame Canterbury officials.97 Throwing a white Quaker woman in jail might prove, at least according to May, “how bad, how wicked, how cruel” the Black Law was.98 Prudence’s students agreed. They regarded the law as “unrighteous,” and they even sang a song comparing the biblical persecution and imprisonment of Paul and Silas to that of Prudence.99 After Prudence had spent one night in jail, George Benson posted bond, and she was soon released.
Abolitionists used the press to rebuke Canterbury opponents and turn the myth of African savagery on its head. In bold print ran the headlines “More Barbarism” and “Savage Barbarity,” attacking the white men of Canterbury who sought to destroy the seminary.100 The Liberator labeled Prudence’s imprisonment an act of “savage barbarity,”
