clear with Sarah and simply refuse her request, Crandall remained silent, conflicted, perhaps hoping that Sarah would not persist.
Mariah Davis continued to share copies of the Liberator with Prudence Crandall. In the summer and fall of 1832, articles appeared regarding the rights of women. William Lloyd Garrison wrote that advocates of immediate emancipation often overlooked the ability of women to assist in the cause. Garrison wrote that the cause of humanity is “the cause of woman,” and women “undervalue their own power.”40 Without the assistance and hard work of women, Garrison wrote, social progress would be “slow, difficult, imperfect.”41
An essay by Maria Stewart in the Liberator encouraged activism that combined religious faith with the fight against prejudice and discrimination. “It is that holy religion, which is held in derision and contempt by many, whose precepts will raise and elevate us above our present condition … and become the final means of bursting the bands of oppression.”42 Stewart noted that black men and women lacked the opportunity to receive an education, and called for change. “It is high time for us to promote ourselves by some meritorious acts,” Stewart said. “And would to God that the advocates of freedom might perceive a trait in each one of us, that would encourage their hearts and strengthen their hands.”43
In September, Maria Stewart delivered a lecture at a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, at Franklin Hall in Boston. Garrison published her speech in the Liberator. Stewart said that black women lacked opportunity because employers feared “they would be in danger of losing the public patronage” if they hired blacks. “Such is the powerful force of prejudice. Let our girls possess whatever amiable qualities of soul they may; let their characters be fair and spotless as innocence itself; let their natural taste and ingenuity be what they may; it is impossible for scarce an individual of them to rise above the condition of servants. … Owing to the disadvantages under which we labor, there are many flowers among us that are ‘born to bloom unseen, and waste their fragrance on the desert air.’”44 Mariah Davis and Sarah Harris read the Liberator throughout the summer and fall of 1832, as did Prudence Crandall.45
Sarah did not let the matter drop. After she waited for what she considered a reasonable amount of time without receiving an answer, she made “a second and more earnest application” to Prudence.46 This time, Crandall gave her a definitive answer. “Her repeated solicitations were more than my feelings could resist,” Crandall said. “I told her if I was injured on her account I would bear it—she might enter as one of my students.”47
Prudence Crandall’s decision to admit a black student to her school was part of a growing and uncertain transformation in America. Black writers such as David Walker and Maria Stewart demanded an end to slavery and championed civil rights and citizenship for all free blacks. The first national antislavery convention of those who favored immediate emancipation was held in Philadelphia in December 1833. William Lloyd Garrison wrote that blacks were entitled to the same rights and privileges as whites and deserved equality in American society. Those views were far outside the mainstream of public opinion in the 1830s, but a perceptible shift was under way.
At the end of 1829, David Walker published a book that created a fierce debate about the role of blacks in the effort to end slavery. Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World created great interest in the black community and a firestorm of protest elsewhere; it also influenced those who worked with Prudence Crandall, including William Lloyd Garrison. What caught the public imagination was Walker’s sensational call to arms; he said slaves should take up weapons and fight for their freedom just as American colonists fought for their independence from Great Britain. “Kill or be killed,” Walker said.48 One Boston newspaper noted the popularity of the Appeal in the black neighborhoods of Boston. “They glory in its principles as if it were a star in the east, guiding them to freedom and emancipation.”49 The editors of the Boston Daily Evening Transcript did not believe that a black man wrote the Appeal and speculated that the author was “some fanatical white man.”50 The Niles Register summarized Walker’s book as “fanaticism, tending to disgust all persons of common humanity.”51 The Richmond Enquirer called it “the most wicked and inflammatory production that ever issued from the press.”52
In the Appeal, Walker attacked a movement that had gained widespread popularity in the 1820s and purported to solve the problems of slavery and discrimination. Many of Prudence Crandall’s supporters, including William Lloyd Garrison, initially supported the American Colonization Society (ACS) and its goals. The ACS was formed by a group of white citizens in 1817, including Senator Henry Clay, Reverend Robert Findley, and Francis Scott Key. The ACS sought to slowly liberate and “colonize” blacks in the United States by sending them back to Africa to the newly created country of Liberia. The ACS proposed a gradual end to slavery with an undetermined end date in order to placate the South and preserve the union of the states. Colonization gained significant support throughout the 1820s and 1830s.53
The ACS won supporters in both the North and South. Slave owners understood that removing the free black population would strengthen the institution of slavery by eliminating a competing source of cheap labor, thereby increasing the value of slaves. Slave owners successfully shifted the focus of colonization from ending slavery to sending free blacks back to Africa. They helped transform a movement that began as a means to free slaves into an enterprise that suited the needs of both slavery opponents and slave owners.54
The fierce opposition to colonization by David Walker and other black leaders, however, gave William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists reason to question the ACS. Walker equated colonization with banishment and surrender to the idea that those of a different race could never expect equality in America. “Will any of us leave our homes and go to Africa? I hope not,” Walker wrote. “Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country.”55 Walker’s direct influence on Prudence Crandall is uncertain. She had access to some of his writings through the Liberator, but she most likely would have disagreed with Walker’s willingness to embrace violence. Crandall’s views, however, mirrored Walker’s regarding the pursuit of equality through education. “For coloured people to acquire learning in this country makes tyrants quake and tremble on their sandy foundation,” Walker wrote. “The bare name of educating the coloured people scares our cruel oppressors almost to death.”56
Crandall drew on her Quaker roots and her new Baptist fervor to do God’s will when she agreed to enroll Sarah Harris as a student. She considered whether Christians should “treat one with unkindness and contempt, merely to gratify the prejudices of the rest.”57 The articles and essays in Garrison’s Liberator helped refine and stimulate Crandall’s sense of right and wrong pertaining to racial prejudice.58 Crandall acknowledged that the Liberator strongly influenced her decision to admit Sarah. She specifically noted how it exposed the “deceit” of the American Colonization Society’s plan to return blacks to Africa, and convinced her of the wisdom of immediate emancipation of the slaves.59 Crandall concluded, “Education was to be one of the chief instruments by which the condition of our colored population is to be improved.”60
Maria Stewart likely influenced Crandall in her decision to admit Sarah Harris. “Shall it any longer be said of the daughters of Africa, they have no ambition, they have no force? By no means,” Stewart wrote. “Let every female heart become united, and let us raise a fund ourselves; and at the end of one year and a half, we might be able to lay the corner stone for a building of a High School, that the higher branches of knowledge might be enjoyed by us; and God would raise us up …”61
In addition to the considerations of faith and equality, Crandall truly liked Sarah Harris as a person. Crandall wrote that Sarah was “correct in her deportment … pleasing in her personal appearance and manners.”62
