Grace Lanson, a seventeen-year-old African American indentured servant from New Haven, Connecticut, had apparently learned of the Canterbury Female Seminary. She labored at the Litchfield, Connecticut, residence of Benjamin Tallmadge, a white politician and military officer who had served with George Washington in the American Revolution. In August 1833 Grace ran away, and Tallmadge placed an advertisement in the Columbian Register reporting her escape and explaining as her reason for fleeing “to attend some new boarding school.”41 Whether she ever reached the Canterbury Female Seminary, returned to the Tallmadge residence, or remained missing is unknown. On the one hand, Tallmadge’s advertisement registered white anxiety about African American women’s education: Grace forfeited her indenture to attend school; on the other hand, it reveals that at least one African American girl put herself at great risk to pursue knowledge.
Very few institutions existed in early 1830s Connecticut for African American children and youth seeking advanced study. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the town of Colchester earmarked funds to build a school for formerly enslaved children. A unique educational initiative, this school, located adjacent to the prestigious Bacon Academy, welcomed approximately forty African American children.42 Prince Saunders, a mixed-race man from New England, taught at the school while taking courses in Latin and Greek at Bacon Academy. Such an arrangement was an early example of the hyperlocal nature of schools. Indeed, there appears to have been no recorded objections to Saunders’s presence at Bacon Academy or the existence of a school for African American children, for that matter. This school did, however, close in 1840. Prudence’s African American female seminary was thus truly one of a kind.
When Prudence shifted her school’s female student body from white to African American, her decision was so politically significant—and, to some, dangerous and offensive—precisely because it affirmed African American women’s capacity for and pursuit of learning. As Prudence traveled the eastern seaboard, personally meeting with prospective female scholars, the Liberator carried an advertisement for the school. It resembled the old advertisement for her all-white boarding school, except for two key differences: rhetoric was no longer listed as a course offering, and black and white abolitionists replaced white town leaders in the list of boosters. The advertisement was less a recruitment tool than a declaration in support of African American women’s learning.43 It represented the seminary’s aim to show that young African American women were refined and elegant ladies, with a right to learn and the potential to excel at it.
Of the fifteen male boosters who acted as references for the seminary, at least six were African American, including three New York City clergymen, Peter Williams, Theodore S. Wright, and Samuel Cornish; two Philadelphia businessmen, James Forten and Joseph Cassey; and one Connecticut clergyman, Jehiel Beman. In addition to commending this educational endeavor, these boosters vouched for Prudence as a teacher and helped to recruit students. Cornish boldly claimed, “Every measure for the thorough and proper education of colored females is a blow aimed directly at slavery. As such it is felt by slave-holders at the south, and their friends and abettors at the north.”44
African American female enrollment at the seminary was small at first but steadily increased. In April 1833 Prudence had only “two boarders and one day scholar,” Sarah Harris and likely the Hammond sisters.45 A month later as many as thirteen African American girls and women had enrolled, including Sarah’s younger sister, Mary.46 Another sibling pair were the Glasko sisters from Griswold, Connecticut: twenty-two-year-old Eliza and thirteen-year-old Miranda, the daughters of Isaac Glasko, a successful blacksmith, and his wife, Lucy Brayton Glasko.47 Fourteen-year-old Mary E. Miles, who grew up in a Quaker family in Rhode Island, also attended the seminary.48 Sixteen-year-old Theodosia deGrasse came from a fairly well-known family in New York. Her father, George, was a Hindu man born in Calcutta and adopted by the white French admiral Count de Grasse; George deGrasse petitioned for U.S. citizenship, which was granted in 1804. Theodosia’s mother, Maria, was probably a mixed-race woman descended from Abram Jansen Van Salee, the son of a Moroccan woman and Jan Jansen Van Haarlem, a Dutchman.49 During the seventeen-month period that the seminary remained open, as many as twenty-five students may have passed through its doors.
While some of the students at the seminary came from middle-class and elite free black families who could afford the $25 tuition per quarter, others did not. Fifteen-year-old Harriet Rosetta Lanson performed domestic work at the school to offset her tuition costs. Adopted by Simeon Jocelyn, a white pastor from Connecticut and an engraver by trade, Harriet attended both public primary and Sabbath schools and was particularly interested in studying the Bible. Jocelyn noted that Harriet possessed a “love of study and habits of observation.”50 At least one student from New York was supported financially not by her mother but by a former slave woman whom she knew. Another student’s father was a former slave. One editorialist pointed to the diverse backgrounds of these young women as proof of their ambition: “Where can we find such thirsting for knowledge among our white population?”51
Whether learning from their teachers or each other, these girls and women were knowledge seekers. One anonymous student dispelled the myth of black intellectual apathy while also calling attention to African American women’s collective ambition in an address delivered on behalf of her peers who had finally “begun to enjoy what our minds have long desired; viz. the advantages of a good education.”52 At the Canterbury Female Seminary, African American female scholars proved that their minds were neither weak nor empty and, within an openly hostile local environment, asserted an educated identity that defied racist antebellum stereotypes.
African American women’s education gained broader public attention thanks to Prudence’s seminary, as African American women activists praised the students who had enrolled and encouraged more to attend. Under the penname Zillah, Sarah Mapps Douglass published a letter in the antislavery newspaper Emancipator urging young African American women “who promised to become Miss Crandall’s pupils, to go forward.”53 Her public letter may have been inspired by her own advocacy of women’s education, not to mention that her cousin, Elizabeth Douglass Bustill, may well have attended the seminary.54 In her letter, Douglass asked prospective students to be active, courageous, and resilient—essentially, to be purposeful women. The very act of pursuing advanced study was a form of activism that opened up new opportunities. She did not deny the challenges ahead; rather she counseled the students to endure the inevitable “insults, wounds, and oppressive acts” for the sake of an education.55
Just as African American religious and political associations became sites of abolitionist protest, so too did educational institutions.56 Four white abolitionists taught at this seminary, including Prudence’s sister, Almira; Samuel J. May, a minister and educational reformer in Connecticut; and William Burleigh, the brother of Charles Burleigh, a journalist and abolitionist, from nearby Plainfield. May believed that “education is one of the primal, fundamental rights of all the children of men,” a declaration that must have felt empowering to students.57 Teachers and students conversed on subjects such as religion and slavery, making it a vibrant, intellectual, and politically engaging space. In an essay published in the Liberator, one student described slavery as an “awful, heaven-daring sin” and condemned slaveholders and their defenders for contradicting both God’s will and biblical teachings.58
Given the wide age range of students, spanning some thirteen