that he had seen hundreds of thousands of meteors in New Haven for many hours that night. It was “the greatest display of celestial fireworks that has ever been seen since the beginning of the world,” Olmstead wrote.8
Some saw the meteors as a sign of hope. “I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle and was awe struck,” said Frederick Douglass, who was fifteen years old and a slave in Maryland. “I was not without the suggestion, at the moment, that it might be the harbinger of the coming of the Son of Man; and in my then state of mind I was prepared to hail Him as my friend and deliverer.”9
Others were certain that the meteors foreshadowed a time of great conflict. A minister in Winchester, Kentucky, opened his church in the middle of the night to accommodate frightened parishioners who feared they were witnessing the end of the world.10 A columnist in Maine at the Portland Evening Advertiser concluded that the meteors signaled the beginning of the “latter days” and the end of civilization.11 Another observer in Fredericksburg, Virginia, said the country could expect the rise of widespread violence and war. “The whole starry host of heaven seemed to be in a state of practical secession and revolt … which finds parallel only in the affairs of earth.”12
After Prudence Crandall opened her school for black women in April 1833 in Canterbury, Connecticut, a local attorney predicted no less than the surrender of the country to the black race and the end of America.15 Andrew T. Judson said that Crandall’s school was “a scheme, cunningly devised, to destroy the rich inheritance left by your fathers.”16 He claimed that Crandall and her supporters had disturbed “the tranquility of this whole nation” and “commenced the work of dissolving the Union.”17 Crandall’s worst offense, Judson said, was to “have the African race placed on the footing of perfect equality with the Americans.”18
Others weighed in with predictions of apocalypse and catastrophe as a result of Crandall’s efforts. Her opponents said she planned to use her school for black women to promote intermarriage between the races and destroy the country. The fact that Crandall persisted in teaching black women was not “in itself so alarming a matter,” one journalist noted. It was Crandall’s support for an immediate end to slavery that created a larger threat. Her opponents said that immediate emancipation of the slaves would undermine the southern economy, cripple northern trade and commerce, and result in blacks “cutting the throats of all the white men throughout the south” and committing “horrible indignities upon all the white women.”19
Legislators in Connecticut passed a law designed to criminalize and close Crandall’s school. The Canterbury sheriff arrested Prudence Crandall for the crime of educating black women. Crandall noted that those who fought for equality between the races could expect “to be branded with all the marks of disgrace that can be heaped upon them by their enemies.”20 William Lloyd Garrison, who published an antislavery newspaper in Boston and helped Crandall launch her school, acknowledged he “had the worst possible reputation as a madman and fanatic” because he promoted immediate emancipation of the slaves and equal rights between the races.21 Garrison’s fierce opposition to slavery resulted in death threats; Garrison feared southern plantation owners would pay for his abduction and murder.22
Against a rising tide of violence toward those who opposed slavery and discrimination, Prudence Crandall—through the example of her school for black women—helped lead those who supported racial equality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the abolitionist movement built a small but growing foundation of public support for equality in America, culminating in Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.23 A century later the work of Crandall, Garrison, and their allies influenced the outcome of the pivotal 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down segregation.
In the 1830s and for many years thereafter, however, most Americans did not side with the abolitionists. Newspaper editors throughout the country attacked Crandall and Garrison as disturbers of the peace and opponents of the Union. In the 1830s Prudence Crandall and William Lloyd Garrison were national public figures—if not national public enemies.
Prudence Crandall’s pursuit of equality may have originated in her Quaker faith, which associated slavery and prejudice with sin.24 As early as 1688 the Quakers believed that “we should do to all men like as we will be done ourselves, making no difference of what descent or colour they are.”25 The Quakers were not alone in their quest for equality and respect for human dignity. The new world of America inspired dreams of equality long before Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence.
“We must be knit together in this work, as one man,” John Winthrop told the Puritans as they left England for America in 1630. “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own. … For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”26 In 1765 John Adams wrote in his diary, “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”27
The early history of America also included the introduction of slavery. Christopher Columbus reportedly had African slaves on his ships; on encountering the Native Americans of the New World, he wrote, “from here we can send as many slaves as can be sold.”28 Spaniards brought slaves to St. Augustine, Florida, as early as 1565, and Dutch traders sold African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619.29 Slavery represented the opposite of what John Adams had envisioned for America. “Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States,” Adams said. “I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in … abhorrence.”30
Many of America’s founding fathers professed opposition to slavery. “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” said George Washington in 1786.31 In an address to the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Benjamin Franklin described slavery as “an atrocious debasement of human nature.”32 John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court said, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. … To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”33 At the Virginia State Convention of 1788, concerning the adoption of the federal Constitution, Patrick Henry described the conflicts slavery presented: “Slavery is detested. We feel its fatal effects—we deplore it with all the pity of humanity. … But is it practicable, by any human means, to liberate (the slaves) without producing the most dreadful and ruinous consequences?”34
The founding fathers failed to outlaw the practice of slavery in their midst. Jefferson,
