Prudence Crandall

Based on Wikipedia: Prudence Crandall

The Schoolteacher Who Went to Jail

In 1833, a thirty-year-old schoolteacher in Connecticut was arrested and spent a night in jail. Her crime? Teaching Black girls to read.

Prudence Crandall could have posted bond immediately. She refused. She wanted the public to see exactly what their laws meant in practice—a woman locked in a cell for the offense of education. A Vermont newspaper ran the story under the headline "Shame on Connecticut."

What makes Crandall's story remarkable isn't just her courage. It's how her journey from quiet Quaker schoolmarm to nationally celebrated abolitionist began with something as simple as a newspaper subscription and a single question from a young Black woman named Sarah Harris.

An Education in Two Parts

Prudence Crandall was born on September 3, 1803, in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, to a Quaker family. Quakers—formally known as the Religious Society of Friends—were among the earliest organized opponents of slavery in America. Their faith emphasized the "Inner Light" present in every person, which made the institution of human bondage particularly abhorrent to their theology.

But growing up Quaker didn't automatically make someone an active abolitionist. As Crandall herself later admitted, she wasn't particularly acquainted with many Black people or with the organized antislavery movement. She had absorbed the general Quaker sensibility that slavery was wrong, but she hadn't yet been moved to action.

Her father, Pardon Crandall, moved the family to Canterbury, Connecticut, when Prudence was about ten years old. He had little regard for the local public school, so he paid for her to attend the Black Hill Quaker School in Plainfield, about five miles away. Her teacher there, Rowland Greene, was openly opposed to slavery—a fact that would matter years later.

At twenty-two, Crandall attended the New England Yearly Meeting School, a Quaker boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduating, she taught at a school in Plainfield. In 1830, she converted to the Baptist faith—a significant shift that would later provide her with unexpected allies.

The Canterbury Female Boarding School

In 1831, at the request of Canterbury's most prominent families, Crandall and her sister Almira purchased a large house—the Elisha Payne house—to establish a school for young women. The Canterbury Female Boarding School opened to great local acclaim.

The curriculum was impressive for its time. With the help of a maid, the two sisters taught about forty girls subjects ranging from the expected—reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar—to the more advanced: chemistry, astronomy, rhetoric, and French. Geography and history rounded out an education designed to produce cultured, well-rounded young women.

The school flourished. Prudence Crandall was praised throughout the community for her ability as an educator. Canterbury's elite families were pleased with their investment in bringing quality education to their town.

Then Crandall started reading a newspaper that would change everything.

The Liberator

William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, was one of the most important abolitionist publications in American history. Garrison founded it in 1831 with a famous declaration: "I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard."

Crandall learned about the paper through her housekeeper, described as "a young black lady" whose fiancé was the son of the paper's local agent. She began reading it regularly, and the articles and essays transformed her understanding of what was happening to Black Americans throughout the country.

As she later recalled, reading The Liberator caused her to "contemplate for a while, the manner in which I might best serve the people of color."

She wouldn't have to wait long for an opportunity.

Sarah Harris Knocks on the Door

In the fall of 1832, a twenty-year-old woman named Sarah Harris approached Prudence Crandall with a request. Harris was the daughter of a free Black farmer who lived near Canterbury. She wanted to attend the boarding school so she could prepare to become a teacher herself.

Crandall liked Sarah Harris. But she was uncertain about what admitting her would mean for the school—for herself, for her sister, for the white families who had asked her to establish the academy in the first place.

According to Crandall's own account, she consulted her Bible, which fell open to Ecclesiastes 4:1:

So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.

She admitted Sarah Harris.

With that single decision, Prudence Crandall created what historians consider the first integrated classroom in the United States.

The White Families React

The prominent citizens of Canterbury were furious. They put immediate pressure on Crandall to dismiss Harris from the school. She refused.

Interestingly, the white students themselves didn't openly oppose Sarah's presence. The objections came from their parents. One by one, families began withdrawing their daughters. The message was clear: accept segregation or lose your livelihood.

Most people in Crandall's position would have reluctantly asked Sarah Harris to leave. The school represented years of work. The community had specifically requested it. Her reputation and her sister's future were at stake.

Crandall made a different calculation entirely.

If White Girls Won't Come, Black Girls Will

Rather than capitulate, Crandall traveled to Boston to meet with two of the most prominent abolitionists in America: Samuel J. May, a Unitarian minister, and William Lloyd Garrison himself.

May and Garrison were enthusiastic supporters. They gave her letters of introduction to prominent Black families throughout the Northeast—in Boston, Providence, New York, and Philadelphia. If the white families of Canterbury wouldn't send their daughters to her school, she would recruit Black students instead.

Crandall temporarily closed the school and began a recruitment campaign. On March 2, 1833, Garrison published advertisements in The Liberator announcing that on the first Monday of April, Crandall would open a school "for the reception of young Ladies and little Misses of color." Tuition was twenty-five dollars per quarter, half paid in advance. Her references included Garrison, May, and the wealthy New York abolitionist Arthur Tappan.

On April 1, 1833, twenty African American girls arrived at Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. They came from Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and surrounding areas of Connecticut.

It was the first school of its kind in the United States—a boarding school specifically designed to educate Black girls, led by a white woman, with a curriculum identical to what white girls received at elite academies.

Andrew Judson and the Politics of Colonization

Leading the opposition to Crandall's school was her neighbor Andrew Judson. Judson was Canterbury's most prominent politician, having served in both the Connecticut House and Senate. He would soon be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Judson wasn't just a local bigot—he was part of a national movement. He supported "colonization," the idea that freed slaves should be sent to Africa rather than integrated into American society. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, had established the colony of Liberia for exactly this purpose.

Colonization was considered a moderate position at the time. It acknowledged that slavery was problematic while avoiding the more radical implication that Black Americans should live as equals alongside whites. Many otherwise respectable people supported it.

Judson made his position explicit: "We are not merely opposed to the establishment of that school in Canterbury; we mean there shall not be such a school set up anywhere in our State. The colored people can never rise from their menial condition in our country; they ought not to be permitted to rise here. They are an inferior race of beings, and never can or ought to be recognized as the equals of the whites."

He predicted that if Crandall's school succeeded, it would destroy the town.

Moses Had a Black Wife

A committee of four prominent white men—Rufus Adams, Daniel Frost Jr., Andrew Harris, and Richard Fenner—visited Crandall to convince her that her school would be "detrimental to the safety of the white people" of Canterbury.

Frost made his concern explicit: the boarding school would encourage "social equality and intermarriage of whites and blacks."

This was the real fear underlying the opposition. It wasn't just about education—it was about what educated Black women might become, whom they might marry, what position they might occupy in society. The entire architecture of white supremacy depended on keeping Black Americans ignorant and subordinate.

Crandall's response was characteristically direct: "Moses had a black wife."

She was referring to Numbers 12:1, where Moses marries a Cushite woman—Cush being the biblical term for the region we now call Ethiopia or Sudan. When Moses's siblings Aaron and Miriam criticized him for this marriage, God punished Miriam with leprosy. It was a devastating scriptural rebuttal to the idea that interracial marriage was against divine will.

The Black Law

Unable to shut down the school through social pressure alone, Canterbury's citizens turned to the law.

Town meetings were held "to devise and adopt such measures as would effectually avert the nuisance, or speedily abate it." The response escalated from warnings to threats to acts of violence.

On May 24, 1833, the Connecticut legislature passed what became known as the "Black Law." This statute prohibited any school from teaching African American students from outside the state without explicit permission from the local town government.

Think about what that means. Connecticut didn't ban educating Black children outright—that would have been too obviously unjust. Instead, it gave local communities veto power over schools that enrolled Black students from elsewhere. Since Crandall's students came from Boston, Providence, New York, and Philadelphia, her school was now illegal.

In July 1833, Prudence Crandall was arrested.

A Night in Jail

When Crandall was brought to the county jail, supporters offered to post bond immediately. She refused.

This was a calculated decision. Crandall understood that her power lay not in staying out of jail but in making the injustice visible. If she quietly posted bond and went home, the story would be a footnote. If she spent the night in a cell—a respectable white woman, a schoolteacher, jailed for the crime of education—the story became impossible to ignore.

She was right. The Vermont newspaper headline "Shame on Connecticut" captured the reaction of many Northerners who found the imprisonment of a schoolteacher embarrassing to the state's reputation.

The next day, Crandall was released under bond to await her trial.

The Siege of Miss Crandall's School

What followed was a sustained campaign of harassment designed to make the school's operation impossible.

Under the Black Law, townspeople refused to sell goods or services to Crandall or her students. Shopkeepers closed their doors. Meeting houses refused them entry. Stage drivers—the Uber drivers of 1833—wouldn't provide transportation.

Most cruelly, the town doctors refused to treat the students if they became ill.

The school's well was its only water source. Someone poisoned it with animal feces. When Crandall tried to obtain water from other sources, the townspeople blocked her.

The harassment extended to Crandall's family. Her father was insulted and threatened by Canterbury's citizens.

But Crandall found allies. Her Baptist church in neighboring Plainfield welcomed the students when Canterbury's churches would not. The Baptist connection—her 1830 conversion—proved unexpectedly valuable.

And the abolitionist network rallied. One of Crandall's students, a seventeen-year-old named Ann Eliza Hammond, was arrested. Samuel J. May helped her post bail. Supporters raised some ten thousand dollars through collections and donations—an enormous sum for the time.

The Trials

Arthur Tappan, the wealthy New York abolitionist, donated ten thousand dollars specifically to hire the best lawyers to defend Crandall throughout her legal battles.

The first trial opened at the Windham County Court on August 23, 1833. Crandall's lawyers challenged the constitutionality of the Black Law itself. Their argument was elegant: African Americans were citizens in other states, so there was no reason they should not be considered citizens in Connecticut. Therefore, the law violated the rights of Black students under the United States Constitution.

The prosecution countered by denying that freed African Americans were citizens anywhere. This was fifteen years before the Fourteenth Amendment would settle the question, and twenty-four years before the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision would rule that Black Americans could never be citizens.

The jury couldn't reach a decision.

A second trial in Superior Court went against the school. Crandall's lawyers appealed to what was then called the Supreme Court of Errors—now the Connecticut Supreme Court.

In July 1834, the high court reversed the lower court's decision. But they did so on a technicality: the prosecution's paperwork hadn't properly alleged that Crandall established her school without permission from local authorities. The charge was "fatally defective."

The court never addressed the fundamental question of whether free Black Americans had to be recognized as citizens.

The End

Crandall had won her case. The school could continue operating.

The citizens of Canterbury were enraged.

In January 1834, while the trials were still ongoing, vandals set the school on fire. The building survived.

On September 9, 1834—less than two months after the legal victory—a group of townspeople attacked the school with heavy iron bars, smashing nearly ninety window panes.

The next day, Prudence Crandall closed her school forever.

She could not guarantee the safety of her students, her family, or herself. The law might be on her side, but the town clearly was not. Continuing would mean putting young Black women in physical danger.

It had been seventeen months since Sarah Harris first asked to be admitted.

After Canterbury

In August 1834, just before the final attack on the school, Crandall married Calvin Philleo, a Baptist minister in Canterbury. William Lloyd Garrison had introduced them.

The couple fled Connecticut—Crandall would never live in the state again. They moved through Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Illinois over the following years. Crandall became involved in the women's suffrage movement and ran a school in LaSalle County, Illinois.

The marriage was unhappy. Philleo's physical and mental health deteriorated, and he became abusive. Crandall separated from him in 1842, though divorce was not easily obtained in the nineteenth century. He died in Illinois in 1874.

After his death, Crandall relocated with her brother Hezekiah to Elk Falls, Kansas, around 1877. Hezekiah died in 1881, leaving her alone.

A Woman of Opposition

In 1886, a visitor found the eighty-three-year-old Crandall living in Elk Falls—a woman "of almost national renown" surrounded by "a host of good books." She gave an interview that reveals much about her character:

My whole life has been one of opposition. I never could find anyone near me to agree with me. Even my husband opposed me, more than anyone. He would not let me read the books that he himself read, but I did read them. I read all sides, and searched for the truth whether it was in science, religion, or humanity.

She continued:

I sometimes think I would like to live somewhere else. Here, in Elk Falls, there is nothing for my soul to feed upon. Nothing, unless it comes from abroad in the shape of books, newspapers, and so on. There is no public library, and there are but one or two persons in the place that I can converse with profitably for any length of time. No one visits me, and I begin to think they are afraid of me. I think the ministers are afraid I shall upset their religious beliefs, and advise the members of their congregation not to call on me, but I don't care.

At eighty-three, she was still speaking publicly on temperance and spiritualism, still advocating for international arbitration. Still reading everything, regardless of whether her husband or anyone else approved.

I don't want to die yet. I want to live long enough to see some of these reforms consummated.

Connecticut Remembers

In 1838—four years after Crandall closed her school—Connecticut repealed the Black Law.

It took another forty-eight years for the state to do more.

In 1886, the Connecticut legislature passed an act providing Prudence Crandall with an annual pension of four hundred dollars—equivalent to roughly fourteen thousand dollars today. The legislation was prominently supported by Mark Twain, who was then living in Hartford and at the height of his fame.

Twain's involvement was characteristic. He was already known for his opposition to racism and imperialism, views that would become more pronounced in his later years. Supporting a pension for an elderly abolitionist schoolteacher fit perfectly with his public persona and private convictions.

Prudence Crandall died in Kansas on January 28, 1890, at the age of eighty-six. She and her brother Hezekiah are buried in Elk Falls Cemetery.

Legacy

Connecticut's recognition of Crandall didn't end with her death.

In 1969, the state acquired the Elisha Payne house—the building where Crandall ran her school—and converted it into the Prudence Crandall Museum. In 1991, the site was declared a National Historic Landmark.

In 1973, the Prudence Crandall Center for Women was founded in New Britain, Connecticut, to provide shelter for victims of domestic violence. The choice of name was deliberate—Crandall herself had experienced abuse in her marriage.

In 1995, more than a century after her death, the Connecticut General Assembly officially named Prudence Crandall the State Heroine of Connecticut.

What Sarah Harris Started

The school that Prudence Crandall opened lasted only seventeen months. It educated perhaps a few dozen students before violence forced it to close.

By any practical measure, it was a failure.

But history isn't only written in successes. Sometimes what matters is the attempt—the demonstration that another way is possible, even when the forces arrayed against it prove overwhelming.

Sarah Harris, the young woman whose simple request to attend school started everything, went on to become a teacher herself. She taught in Louisiana and later in Rhode Island. Her goal—to prepare herself to educate others—was achieved, if not at Crandall's school, then despite everything that happened there.

The story of Prudence Crandall illuminates a fundamental truth about American history: progress has never been smooth, never been easy, never been guaranteed. Every advance was contested. Every reformer faced opposition—sometimes from their own families, sometimes from their entire communities, sometimes from the law itself.

Crandall's school was the first integrated classroom in American history. It was also one of the first schools specifically designed to educate Black girls at an academic level equal to white students. That it was destroyed by a mob tells us something important about what it represented.

The mob knew what they were fighting against. They understood that an educated Black woman was a threat to the entire system of white supremacy—not because of anything she might do, but because of what she proved simply by existing.

Prudence Crandall understood that too. And she opened the door anyway.