49th Issue: The Canterbury Female Boarding School

Today’s issue of the newsletter is about a school for young girls in the mid 1800s in Canterbury, Connecticut. A local Quaker teacher, Prudence Crandall, was asked by the local families to start a school for girls in town, and she agreed. She bought a school right in the middle of town (it is now a museum), which was next door to a friend of hers, town clerk Andrew T. Judson, who soon became her enemy. The school opened in 1831, and for the first year, everyone was happy. Miss Crandall taught reading, writing, math, geography, history, chemistry, astronomy, and philosophy. Tuition and room and board was twenty five dollars per quarter, and students could pay extra to get drawing, piano, or French lessons. Miss Crandall had enough money to pay off her mortgage on the school building at a year. There were 24 students total.

 

 

Eventually Miss Crandall hired a servant, a young black girl named Mariah Davis. Her fiancé Charles Harris worked for an abolitionist Boston newspaper called The Liberator. Mariah read it and loaned it to Miss Crandall, who also read it and was interested in the contents. Mariah even sometimes sat in on classes. Mariah introduced Miss Crandall to her sister in law, Sarah. Sarah wanted to go to the Canterbury school, to learn so that she could become a teacher to black students. At first Miss Crandall hesitated, but then agreed to allow her to attend as a day student despite outside pressure. When the wife of a clergyman said that if she kept Sarah in her school it would not stay afloat, Miss Crandall said, “That it might sink, then, for I should not turn her out!”. She liked Sarah Harris.

The people of Canterbury were not pleased. Black and white students could not be educated together. Miss Crandall refused to budge when the townspeople tried to persuade her, saying, “Moses had a black wife.” The parents of the white students began to take their daughters out of school. Miss Crandall realized that if she wanted to keep her school alive she’d have to do something, fast. So she converted her school into one that she advertised as accepting “young Ladies and little Misses of color”, the first such school in the entire United States. She knew she would need support, so she went to Boston to meet with Sarah’s brother’s newspaper owner, David Garrison, who ran The Liberator. He hooked her up with other leading black families in the area, and that is how she got students to attend.

The town panicked. They believed that Canterbury would now become a ‘colony of free blacks’ and would take over their town. I don’t think I need to go over why they thought black people were so bad. They were racist. That is enough. Miss Crandall said that she could move the school out of the town square, but her neighbor, Judson, who I mentioned earlier, did not want the school in Canterbury or even in the entire state. He wanted to send black people ‘back to Africa’. Below is a picture of Miss Crandall.

 

 

The school opened again with about eleven girls from prominent black families, and soon grew to have 24 students, just as it had when it was for white girls. Students came from all over the Northern states, and Miss Crandall taught them the same curriculum she had taught the white girls. In 1833, Judson drafted a law which the Connecticut General Assembly enacted, that prevented anyone from having a school that taught black people from any state outside of Connecticut without the town’s permission.

The townspeople made Miss Crandall and her students’ life difficult by insulting and annoying her, dumping manure in her well, and refusing to sell to her. Miss Crandall had to rely on whatever supplies her father and brother could bring them from the family farm. The town doctor and church both refused to treat any of Miss Crandall’s family or her students for anything they needed.

Miss Crandall was eventually arrested, and spent one night in jail. This led to publicity in the newspapers. She was freed the next day, but she was put on trial on August 23^rd in 1833. She pled not guilty and the jury could not find a verdict. This was appealed to the Connecticut Supreme Court, which found her guilty, but that was appelaed again and they could not convict her. Miss Crandall continued to run her school, but the townspeople did not give up. They smashed the windows and terrorized the students, and worried about the safety of her students, Miss Crandall closed the school and left Connecticut entirely. The whole affair was widely publicized and hardened abolitionists commitment to end slavery. It raised issues about the rights of free Northern black people, which was different. Judson, Miss Crandall’s friend turned enemy, ended up losing his bid for reelection that year.

Sarah Harris, Miss Crandall’s student, ended up marrying a mixed-race blacksmith named George Fayerweather, and had eight children. The family supported racial equality and joined the Anti-Slavery Society. Sarah kept in touch with Miss Crandall, and corresponded with Frederick Douglass as well, continuing to subscribe to The Liberator newspaper.

Julia Williams, another student of Miss Crandall’s school, was 21 years old when the school closed down. She moved to the Noyes Academy in Canaan New Hampshire, and finished her education at the Oneida Institute in New York. She was an abolitionist and also supported racial equality. Julia married Henry Highland Garnet, who also went to the Oneida institute. They ended up travelling to Jamaica as missionaries where Julia opened a school for girls. Then they returned to the United States where Henry became a minister and Julia worked with freed black men after the Civil War.

When reading about Julia, I of course was interested in the other two schools she went to, because schools that admitted black girls at this particular time period were pretty rare. So I looked into the Noyes Academy, located near Dartmouth College. The school was begun as an integrated school in March 1835, with 28 white students and 17 black students. The white students were local, but the black students travelled far to attend as there were limited educational opportunities for them where they came from.  A lot of locals opposed the school, talking about the possibilities of racial mixing and interracial marriage, obviously being extremely hyperbolic and unrealistic in their racist objections. In July of the same year, the town voted to remove the Academy.

Three hundred townspople assembled, and destroyed the Academy building entirely. The black students left that night, going along with the school founder to Alton, Illinois which became a new center for abolitionist activity. Four of the students (including Julia Williams and her future husband Henry Garnet) moved on to Whitesboro New York to enroll in Oneida Institute, the first college to admit black and white students on equal terms. At the site of Noyes Academy, the white townspeople created the Canaan Union Academy which was restricted to white students only.

Of course reading about this I wanted to learn about the Oneida Institute. After Julia’s time at two separate schools that were then abolished, she finally made it to a place she could finish her education. The Oneida Institute was founded in 1827 by George Washington Gale, and soon there were several hundred students. The school was connected with the Presbyterian Church in Whitesboro.

Oneida Institute was one of the first examples of a college where study was supplemented with exercise and manual labor, such as working in “the farm, the carpenter, trunk and harness-making shops, a printing shop”. In the second year of the school, the students produced “fifty cords of wood, thirty barrels of cider, seven hundred bushels of corn, four hundred of potatoes, one hundred of oats, twenty-five of beans, thirty tons of hay, and eighty bushels of onions”. The school was also quite religious, and there were often revival meetings on campus. When in 1833 some of the students created a colonization society, other students made an anti-slavery society. The school was getting divided, which was not what the founder intended. There was a mass walk-out, and some of the students left for Oberlin. Gale left Oneida, leaving financial issues behind him.