The Prudence Crandall Affair

By James P. Walsh

The Crandall affair began innocently enough in 1831 when Prudence Crandall, a Quaker from Rhode Island, opened a school for young ladies on the Canterbury Green. The town raised no objection to her school, and she received every encouragement from the town fathers. In 1833, however, she admitted a young black girl, thereby outraging the town. The reason for such a strong reaction is unclear. The girl belonged to a local family and had attended a local district school. Whether the outcry would have died down in time is now impossible to know because of Miss Crandall's response. She decided, after consultation with abolitionists in Connecticut and elsewhere, to exploit the controversy by exposing the racism of Northern whites. She therefore dismissed all of her white pupils and announced that her school would enroll only black girls, even though most of them would have to be from outside Connecticut.

The citizens of Canterbury redoubled their opposition to the school, and most of the people of Connecticut supported their efforts to have it closed. The General Assembly very quickly passed a law in 1833 that prohibited the education of out-of-state blacks in private schools. Despite the fact that the law was aimed directly at her, Prudence Crandall defied it and continued to operate her school. She was then arrested and spent one night in jail before posting bail. The state made every effort to convict her even after losing twice before juries. The Superior Court did find her guilty, but the State Supreme Court reversed that decision on a technicality.

In the meantime, the authorities in Canterbury were threatening to have Miss Crandall's students whipped as vagrants. The people of the neighborhood had polluted the school's well and refused to sell food to Miss Crandall. This campaign of mean and petty harassment was climaxed in September 1834 by a mob attack on the school building that left it significantly damaged. Miss Crandall then gave up and left Connecticut.

To say that the people of Connecticut were racist in the nineteenth century is true, but it should be pointed out that racism differs subtly from time to time. The people of Connecticut did not prohibit blacks from attending local schools, but Miss Crandall's school was different. It was what we today would call a "finishing" school. Perhaps what most whites feared was the prospect of a black girl being educated as a "lady." In a society where equality was supposed to have become a reality, distinctions of rank were always resented. It was bad enough to know that the sons of rich fathers were better educated and had better manners, greater refinement, and brighter prospects than the average man could ever hope for, but the possibility of a black becoming their social superior must have been intolerable for the plain people of Connecticut.

For Further Reading

There is a good treatment of this episode in Edmund Fuller, Prudence Crandall: An Incident of Racism in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut (Middletown, Connecticut, 1971).

* Entry under revision.