Opposition and Cruelty in Windham County

The white opposition in Canterbury was led by Andrew Judson, a member of the Connecticut Assembly; he received steadfast support from lawyer Rufus Adams and other Select Men of Canterbury. When Black students started to arrive in early April 1833, these white men tried to enforce old vagrancy laws, even threatening to whip one of the young women students. But then they decided instead to pass a new law – now known as the Connecticut Black Law – making it illegal to teach free Blacks from out-of-state. The Black Law was a serious challenge to the existence of the Academy, but Crandall and her allies decided to defy and oppose it. This resulted in Crandall being arrested; she spent a night in jail. This incident is referred to in many places in The Unionist. As the Abolitionists prepared for Crandall’s trial under the Black Law, they were increasingly aware of an information gap – what today we would lament as a glut of “fake news.”. The Norwich Courier, the influential Columbian Register of New Haven, and pre-eminently the local Windham County Advertiser in Brooklyn, Connecticut – the town just north of Canterbury – were all virulently anti-Abolitionist, pro-Colonizationist, and vociferously opposed to the advanced education of Black women in Canterbury. There were no major dissenting voices in the local press. All three of these papers would engage with The Unionist in editorial exchanges and ripostes.

For Further Reference

• Judson, Andrew. “A Short Sketch of My Own Life,” written ca. 1847. Manuscript, Mystic Seaport Collections and Research Center, Collection 247, Box 1.
• May, Samuel J. Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict. Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Company, 1969 (1869).
• Rycenga, Jennifer. Schooling a Nation: Students and Teachers at Prudence Crandall’s Female Academy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2024.
• Strane, Susan. A Whole-Souled Woman: Prudence Crandall and the Education of Black Women New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990.
• Williams, Donald E. Jr. Prudence Crandall’s Legacy: The Fight for Equality in the 1830s, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2014.
• Yacovone, Donald. Samuel Joseph May and the Dilemmas of the Liberal Persuasion, 1797-1871. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Above: Mastead of the Norwich Courier at the beginning of the Canterbury kerfuffle

Above: Masthead of the Windham County Advertiser. This issue came prior to the launch of The Unionist, in the midst of the Canterbury crisis in May of 1833. The American Antiquarian Society holds this copy.

Above: This drawing of Crandall in prison portrays her as being Quaker (which she no longer was), as being alone (Anna Benson was with her), and with her hair cut as if she was going to be beheaded! But it was exactly this sort of outrage that fueled many of the articles in the compendium that follows - the imprisonment of a woman for the crime of teaching, struck a deep chord of disbelief and indignation.