Baptist Church during this time on the town line between Canterbury and Plainfield. For Packer, the church represented an opportunity to bring civility to a community he believed had deteriorated. Packer wanted to rid the region of newly developed “bad elements,” including drinking, horse racing, loose morals, and general vice that wreaked havoc with his workforce.138 A search for a minister resulted in the selection of Reverend Levi Kneeland, a graduate of the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution in Hamilton, New York.139 Kneeland became the church’s first full-time minister in 1828. During the first eight months of Kneeland’s ministry at Packerville, church membership quadrupled.140 Kneeland baptized three hundred people during his six years at the Packerville Baptist Church.141
Prudence Crandall attended a number of Baptist revivals and started worshipping regularly at the Packerville church. On July 3, 1830, Crandall and a group of parishioners traveled by wagon to the banks of the Quinebaug River. Rev. Kneeland, Crandall, and a few of the church elders waded into the cool water. The current of the river was not strong in July, and they proceeded into the river until they were all waist deep. Holding Crandall’s arm with one hand and placing his other hand on her head, Rev. Kneeland baptized Crandall as she plunged underwater—fully immersed in the river—three times in acknowledgment of the Holy Trinity.142
Prudence’s interest in revivals and the “dunkers” as the Baptists were sometimes called, worried her younger brother Reuben, who practiced medicine in Peekskill, New York. Reuben believed her religious activity and attendance at revivals interfered with her responsibilities at the school. In the summer of 1831 he advised her in a letter to stop wasting time at revival meetings.143 “Do you, all hands, run off three to four days to meeting?” Reuben asked. “If you, the principal, or your assistants do, I shall have a very poor opinion of the principal or her assistants.”144 This became an ongoing source of disagreement between brother and sister. “I said enough when I was home, and I presume you think by this time I have said enough on any of these subjects,” Reuben wrote.145 Prudence did not let the opinion of her younger brother change her course. Her faith played a significant role in her decisions regarding the school, and Levi Kneeland served Crandall as a spiritual leader and friend.
Another reform movement—the temperance cause—gained great popularity throughout New England. The ravages of alcohol abuse destroyed families and lessened productivity. During the 1820s and 1830s, community leaders and businessmen formed temperance societies in nearly every city and town with the goal of eradicating alcohol use.
“Every neighborhood had its death-roll of victims,” historian Ellen Larned wrote, “its shocking casualties—drunken men and women frozen and burnt to death; children starved, women beaten and murdered, promising young men brutalized and lost.”146 In the late 1820s William Fisher, a foreman at a factory in Killingly, Connecticut, became alarmed when his three young sons did not return home after their last day of school. He did not know that teachers and students celebrated the end of the school year with generous toasts of alcoholic beverages—even the youngest students were expected to drink up. Fisher found his sons at the school, intoxicated; his youngest son was unconscious.147
The temperance movement swept through eastern Connecticut; the first temperance society was organized on August 25, 1828, in Canterbury.148 Those who joined pledged to abstain fully from the use of “ardent spirits” as well as refrain from providing drink to friends or employees. Prudence Crandall joined the Canterbury Temperance Society and supported the temperance cause for the rest of her life.
The spring and summer of 1832 brought continued success for the Canterbury Female Seminary. Prudence Crandall had what most women of her time could never have—a professional career in a position of leadership, financial independence, and a life increasingly filled with the promise of security and stature. Crandall’s family supported her work, and her sister Almira worked full time at the school teaching and managing its affairs. The community continued to embrace the school and assisted in its growing enrollment.
8. Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, Connecticut, site of Prudence Crandall Museum.
Prudence Crandall’s School in Canterbury, Connecticut. Collection of the Prudence Crandall Museum, Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, State of Connecticut. Photographer: Dennis Oparowski.
At the end of the school’s busy first year the daughter of a local black farmer approached Prudence Crandall. The young woman knew one of the hired girls at the school and often visited during classes. She asked Crandall if she could enroll as a student; her father earned enough from his farm to pay for her tuition. This simple request likely triggered conflicting thoughts and considerations for Crandall. State law did not require segregation in schools or elsewhere, but social custom assumed separation of the races at most gatherings and functions. Many in the North opposed slavery, but few believed in true equality for blacks.
Crandall understood that if she granted the young woman’s request she might offend her neighbors and supporters. She knew the admission of a black student could threaten the future of her school. Answering the woman’s question required Crandall to reconcile her desire to meet the expectations of her community with the principles she had learned from her family, her faith, and the Friend’s School. As Crandall met the gaze of the anxious, young black woman, she did not have an answer.
2 : Liberators
In the fall of 1831 a young writer sought out William Lloyd Garrison at his Boston office of the Liberator. Maria W. Stewart sat patiently as Garrison read her essays. The first concerned religious faith and “devotional thoughts and aspirations.”1 Garrison’s interest grew as he read other essays by Stewart that called for an end to slavery and revealed the “intelligence and excellence of character” of an exceptional writer.2 Garrison told Stewart he would print some of her essays in the Liberator—and publish the entire collection of her work as a short book.
Maria Stewart’s book likely was the first political manifesto written by a black woman in America.3 “Ye daughters of Africa, awake!” Stewart wrote. “No longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties.”4 Garrison published Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality: The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build in 1831, and promoted Stewart’s book in the Liberator. “The production is most praiseworthy,” Garrison wrote, “and confers great credit on the talents and piety of its author.”5
Stewart found a unique collaborator in Garrison, a white man willing to publish the opinions of a black woman at a time when the views of women of any color, on any serious subject, were not considered worthy of space in a newspaper.6 Even the progressive Garrison, however, had difficulty in 1831 considering women as journalistic equals. He printed Stewart’s essays in a separate “Ladies Department” section of the Liberator.7
Stewart wrote a brief biography of her life in the introduction to her book. Born in 1803 in Hartford, Connecticut, Maria Miller became an orphan at the age of five and lived with a minister’s family. She helped with household chores and learned scripture, but longed for a more formal education.8 At fifteen, she left the minister’s family and supported herself through various domestic servant jobs. “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles,” Maria wrote.9 During those years she attended church schools and developed an advanced ability to read and write.
She traveled to Boston and met James W. Stewart.10 James was forty-four when he married twenty-three-year-old Maria Miller
