that “the obvious tendency of this school would be to collect within the town of Canterbury, large numbers of persons from other States, whose characters and habits might be various and unknown to us, there-by rendering insecure the persons, property, and reputation of our citizens,” and that they would oppose the school “at all hazards.”
These resolutions were conveyed to Miss Crandall. They produced no effect whatsoever. She remained peaceful and kind at all times, but her purpose never wavered. She dismissed her white pupils and reopened the school to colored girls only, with a small group of students from relatively prosperous families in Boston, New York, Providence, and Philadelphia.
Thereupon she and her pupils became the targets for the strongest sort of opposition. First, the selectmen submitted an appeal for help to the American Colonization Society, in which they castigated the members of the Anti-Slavery Society who, they said, “wished to admit the Negroes into the bosom of our society” and to justify “intermarriages with the white people.” Then the citizens, at another town meeting, resolved that “the establishment of the rendezvous falsely denominated a school was designed by its projectors as the theatre, as the place to promulgate their disgusting doctrines of amalgamation, and their pernicious sentiments of subverting the Union.”
Meanwhile the school was subjected to all kinds of meannesses and harassments. The well was filled with stable refuse. Stones and rotten eggs were thrown through the windows. The village store refused to sell groceries for the school’s use. Miss Crandall’s father was threatened with mob violence and legal action when he brought her food. She and her pupils were stoned on the streets. Doctors refused to treat her when she was ill. The local authorities dusted off an old vagrancy law and invoked it against one of the girls, Ann Eliza Hammond. Under the terms of this enactment, Miss Hammond had “forfeited to the town $1.62 for each day she had remained in it, since she was ordered to depart; and that in default of payment, she WAS TO BE WHIPPED ON THE NAKED BODY NOT EXCEEDING TEN STRIPES, unless she departed within ten days after conviction.” This brutality was avoided only when abolitionists of the vicinity managed to raise $10,000 to meet the financial demands of the obsolete law.
Meanwhile, Andrew Judson introduced a so-called “Black Law” into the General Assembly, which enacted it in the spring of 1833. Its preamble read as follows: “Attempts have been made to establish literacy institutions in this State for the instruction of colored persons belonging to other States and countries, which would tend to the great increase of the colored population of this State, and thereby to the injury of the people.” The act went on to provide that “every person, who shall set up or establish any school, academy, or literary institution, for the instruction or education of colored persons who are not inhabitants of Connecticut; or who shall teach in such school, or who shall board any colored pupil of such school, not an inhabitant of the State, shall forfeit one hundred dollars for the first offence, two hundred dollars for the second, and so on, doubling for each succeeding offence, unless the consent of the civil authority, and selectmen of the town, be previously obtained.”
With the passage of this measure, Canterbury was triumphant. Miss Crandall was arrested at once, imprisoned overnight while May and others collected the necessary bail, and eventually brought to trial before Judge Joseph Eaton and a jury at Brooklyn on August 23, 1833. Judson, appearing as prosecutor for the state, attacked Miss Crandall’s school as “a scheme, cunningly devised, to destroy the rich inheritance left by your fathers. The professed object is to educate the blacks, but the real object is to make the people yield their assent by degrees, to this universal amalgamation of the two races, and have the African race placed on a footing of perfect equality with the Americans.” He further contended that Negroes were not citizens of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution, and that therefore they could not enjoy the “privileges and immunities of white citizens.” W. W. Ellsworth, for the defense, maintained the precise opposite: that citizenship was a matter of birth or naturalization, not of color; that Negroes born in this country were therefore citizens; and that as such they were entitled to all the privileges of citizenship, including education, “the first and fundamental pillar on which our free institutions rest.” The jury, divided between these two points of view, could not agree. The case then went before Judge David Daggett of the State Supreme Court for retrial.
Daggett, a sometime professor of law at New Haven, had been among the more active opponents of Jocelyn’s proposed Negro school there. Now, in his charge to the jury, he categorically denied the citizenship of colored persons: “God forbid that I should add to the degradation of this race of men; but I am bound to say, by my duty, that they are not citizens.” Miss Crandall was convicted. On appeal to the Court of Errors, the verdict was set aside on technical grounds and she went free. The constitutionality of Connecticut’s Black Law was not called into question.
Having thus failed to stop Miss Crandall by legal means, the opponents of her school now had recourse to violence. First an attempt was made to set the building on fire. Then a mob came by night and broke out every window and window frame in the place. Miss Crandall had just been married, to the Reverend Calvin Philleo; at his insistence, she now closed the Canterbury school permanently, yielding the battle to her enemies. The battle, but not the war; for with her husband she removed to northern Illinois, where she was engaged in the education of Negroes for the rest of her active life.
The pattern of anti-Negro, anti-abolitionist violence set in the Crandall affair was repeated on a lesser scale in many parts of the state during the next years. In 1834 a mob raided an abolitionist meeting at the First Presbyterian Church in Norwich, drummed the parson out of town, and threatened him with tar and feathers if he returned. The following year saw a serious riot in Hartford, when a group of white roughs attacked Negroes on their way home from church.8 In Middletown, Cross Street was reported to be “crowded with those worse than southern bloodhounds.”9 In Meriden, when Reverend Henry Ludlow came to the Congregational church to deliver an abolitionist lecture, an infuriated crowd stoned the building, battered down the locked door, and pelted the congregation with rotten eggs and trash. Even in the birthplace of John Brown, Torrington, in 1837 the organization meeting of a new county abolition society was attacked by a proslavery mob, whose members had “elevated their courage with New England rum”; blowing horns, yelling, and beating on tin pans and kettles, they surrounded the un-heated barn where the meeting was held and broke up the gathering “by brute force.”10 Outbreaks of similar nature were reported during the 1830’s in other towns as well— New Haven, New Canaan, and Norwalk among them.11
Most of these outrages appear to have been of more or less spontaneous nature—a matter of a few ringleaders surrounding themselves with a hastily gathered group of roughs who perhaps cared little about slavery one way or the other but who, warmed by liquor and hot words, were easy prey to the mob spirit and not at all averse to throwing eggs, destroying property, and pushing people around. The Danbury riots, however, bespoke greater purpose and more careful organization. Danbury was already a center for hat manufacturing, and the Southern trade had been important to it at least since 1800; indeed it was said to have “gained its growth largely by developing the Southern market.” Many of its citizens, therefore, sympathized with Southern views and had no patience with abolitionists. To this town, in 1837, came an itinerant anti-slavery lecturer, the Reverend Nathaniel Colver, who was scheduled to speak at the Baptist church. When the hour arrived for him to do so, a blast of trumpets was heard from near the courthouse; then immediately men charged into the streets from every direction, arranged themselves in military formation, and marched like an infantry regiment to the church. The congregation scattered at once; some of its members, along with two constables, hurried Colver to a private house. The rabble churned around outside for a while but finally dispersed. Colver was not easily scared off, however. He returned to the church, determined to deliver his message. Now the mob’s action was decisive; masked men blew up the building with gunpowder.12
Behind all these rowdy demonstrations, perhaps not condoning their violence and lawlessness but certainly sharing the same attitude toward abolitionists, there was a large segment of Connecticut’s
