took control of the general assembly in 1817.89
As a more seasoned politician, Judson became involved in the creation of the state constitution in 1818. He regarded drafting the Connecticut Constitution as the most important achievement of the Toleration Party. At the end of 1819, the state’s attorney for Windham County, William Perkins, died, and Judson secured the plum patronage position. “There is perhaps no point in my life to which I can turn with more propriety, and say this is the most important,” Judson later said.90 The office of state’s attorney became an elected office with a two-year term in 1821; Judson served a total of twenty-five years in that post.
Andrew Judson had great political ambitions and sought numerous offices during the next two decades. While serving in the legislature in 1829, he competed with State Representative Thomas S. Williams for an appointment to a judgeship. “The Hon. Thomas S. Williams and myself were opposing candidates for a seat on the bench … and he was successful, which I did not much regret,” Judson later wrote, “and this session closed all in good humor.”91 Judson won election to the state senate in 1830 and lost in a bid for reelection in 1831. He expressed interest in the U.S. Senate seat in 1832—at that time senators were elected by a vote of the state legislature instead of the public. After three ballots, Judson—who had changed parties again and was affiliated with supporters of Andrew Jackson in the Jackson Party—lost to Republican Nathan Smith.92 Judson returned to the state legislature as a member of the house in 1833.93
Andrew Judson and his wife Rebecca did not have any children. In 1822, however, they took in Charles Ames, a ten-year-old boy whose mother recently had died and whose sea captain father, Isaac, either was deceased or was forced to give up his son because of time away on merchant ships. Andrew and Rebecca cared for Charles until he turned eighteen in 1830, just one year before Prudence Crandall started her school across the street from Judson’s home. When Charles left Canterbury for New York and life on his own, Judson provided him with a “certificate of good moral character,” documenting his good behavior and fitness as a young man.94 Charles Ames loved Andrew and Rebecca Judson and was grateful for their care. Ames married in 1837; when he celebrated the birth of his first child in 1838, he named his son Andrew Judson Ames.
As the controversy concerning Prudence Crandall’s school for “young ladies and Misses of color” intensified, Andrew Judson organized the opposition. Judson saw Crandall’s plan as an attack on all he and others had done to improve Canterbury and Windham County. Crandall had benefited from Judson’s good will and the help of other town leaders when she launched her school; now she turned away from her original supporters and embraced the abolitionists from Boston and New York. Judson called the abolitionists “dictators” and was offended by their opposition to the Colonization Society.95 Judson believed Crandall’s new antislavery friends cared nothing for Canterbury.
23. Andrew T. Judson, initially a supporter of Crandall, became her chief antagonist and prosecutor after the admission of the black student Sarah Harris.
Andrew T. Judson. Collection of the Prudence Crandall Museum, Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development.
The two meetings between town leaders and Prudence Crandall failed to resolve the controversy, so Judson called for a formal town meeting. Word quickly circulated concerning a meeting at the Congregational Church, and George W. Benson read the news in the Liberator while in Providence. On Saturday, March 2, 1833, Benson decided to travel to Canterbury to offer his help. He arrived at Crandall’s schoolhouse on Sunday morning and found her “calm and undaunted” in the face of increasing opposition.96 Crandall told him about the meetings with the town fathers.97 Later that Sunday morning, and just before the start of services at the Congregational Church, Benson watched as Andrew Judson walked from the church to the town signpost across the street where official notices were displayed. As Judson posted a notice for the March 9 town meeting for the purpose of denouncing Crandall’s school, Benson thought it was hypocritical for Judson to take this official action on the Sabbath.98
The letters that Prudence Crandall wrote at the end of February, pleading for help, were delivered in early March. On receiving Crandall’s letter, Samuel May contacted his friend George Benson, who was visiting his family in Brooklyn. When May learned that Benson had already met with Crandall the previous day, he convinced Benson to go with him to Canterbury again that afternoon so that he could meet Crandall and offer his help.99 Arnold Buffum learned that Crandall had requested his help. Buffum told Garrison he could not go to Canterbury given the increasingly volatile situation. “I am informed that the excitement is so great that it would not be safe for me to appear there,” Buffum wrote.100
On arriving in Canterbury, townspeople warned May and Benson that if they proceeded to Crandall’s school they might face physical attack because of the “furious” opposition to Crandall’s school.101 May and Benson learned that Crandall’s decision to teach black women surprised everyone in town, including her friends and supporters. A man who otherwise thought the town reaction to Crandall’s decision was a “dreadful outrage” said she had not acted “judiciously” in her decision to admit Sarah Harris.102 James Monroe, a Canterbury resident who years later taught political science at Oberlin College, complained about the “suddenness” of Crandall’s action.103 Despite the warnings, May and Benson proceeded to the schoolhouse and met with Crandall. They found her “resolved and tranquil” in the midst of controversy.104 Their discussion focused on the town meeting and Crandall’s dilemma—as a woman, she could not go to the meeting and speak for herself. Crandall turned to Samuel May, a man she had just met, and asked him to serve as her representative and defender at the town meeting. “Certainly, come what will,” May replied.105
Crandall told May that he should explain why she chose to change her school. She did not wish to dismiss her white students, but did so only after parents threatened to withdraw their daughters. Crandall wanted May to explain that she could not expel Sarah Harris and deeply wound “the feelings of an excellent girl” and add “to the mountain load of injuries and insults already heaped upon the colored people.”106 Crandall knew, however, that those explanations would not end the controversy. At May’s suggestion, Crandall agreed to offer to move the school to another location in Canterbury. As May recalled, “She seemed determined only upon this point—to maintain her right to teach colored pupils. … She claimed that she had a right to do this, on her own premises, in Canterbury.”107 Crandall told May she did not wish to offend her neighbors and “was perfectly willing to accede to any fair proposals for a removal to some more retired situation.”108 She told May he could extend this offer at the town meeting.109
As the week progressed, Crandall learned that Arnold Buffum planned to deliver a lecture twenty miles south in Norwich, Connecticut. She left her sister Almira in charge of the school and traveled to meet Buffum and implore him to come to the Canterbury town meeting.110 George Benson invited his brother, Henry Benson, to attend the meeting and wrote to Garrison to inform him of the new developments. Garrison said Crandall’s school “must be sustained at all hazards.”111 Keeping in mind the earlier failure to create a school for black men in New Haven, Garrison told Benson that Crandall’s school must succeed. “If we suffer the school to be put down in Canterbury, other places will partake of the panic, and also prevent its introduction in their vicinity,” Garrison wrote. “The New Haven excitement has furnished a bad precedent—a second must not be given, or I know not what we can do to raise up the colored population in a manner which their intellectual and moral necessities demand.”112
Garrison knew that Benson’s trip to Canterbury to see Prudence Crandall on March 3 was physically costly to Benson; Benson suffered frostbite on all of his fingertips on both hands, causing him great pain and discomfort.113
