Just as slaveholders suggested that literacy would spoil a slave, so too did colonizationists marshal a form of false benevolence to argue that schooling African American women would ruin their lives. One anonymous writer, who claimed to be a colonizationist, wrote a letter to the editor of the Norwich Republican denouncing African American education and defending Canterbury opponents. The Canterbury Female Seminary, in the words of this writer, offered a “pernicious” kind of education in which African American women learned about “their own dignity and consequence” in a nation where they would “be met with spontaneous, unconquerable aversion of the white to the black.” The argument acknowledged only part of the seminary’s teachings. Prudence did affirm African American women’s respectability; she and her students believed that prejudice could be conquered by young women armed with education and thus empowered to advance themselves and their communities as they fought for their civil rights. In the writer’s estimation, however, the educational outcome would not be winning black rights or even, as some abolitionists predicted, a weakening of racial prejudice, but instead would leave African American women “angry” and “sink [them] into degradation and infamy.” This writer revealed his unwillingness to see educated and empowered African American women.75
By allying herself with her African American female scholars, Prudence forced, albeit briefly, a conversation about the virulence of racial prejudice in the North. She described white racism as “inveterate” and “the strongest, if not the only chain that bound those heavy burdens on the wretched slaves,” thus linking slavery and racial prejudice. This injustice motivated her to establish the Canterbury Female Seminary, whose mission was to “fit and prepare teachers for the people of color.”76 Preparing women for the teaching profession at female seminaries was hardly a new endeavor, though it had, until then, been one mostly reserved for white women. For instance, Ipswich Female Academy, founded in 1828 and run by Zilpah Grant, graduated twenty-seven female students between 1829 and 1830, all but two of whom immediately became teachers.77 Prudence’s words and actions thus forced her opponents to confront their prejudices. One editorialist confessed, “Will it be said that this is prejudice?—Be it so.”78
Prudence also faced sexist attacks, further demonstrating that white opposition was intimately tied to constructions of manhood and womanhood. Opponents smeared her, painting her as a crook who transformed her school only to make money, and as a champion of racial mixing. One editorialist from the United States Telegraph suggested that getting the “young lady [Prudence] a husband” would surely lure her away from her experiment—implying that Prudence suffered from her lack of a husband and was not genuinely committed to educating African American women.79 Judson went even further, accusing her of “step[ping] out of the hallowed precincts of female propriety” by betraying her original mandate and refusing men’s demands to return to it. Prudence’s opponents sought to reset the racial and gender order she had upset, restoring white women to their subordinate status to white men (and African American women excluded altogether).80
Opponents of the seminary employed various means to force its demise. Ann Eliza Hammond, the sixteen-year-old African American woman from Providence whose mother introduced Prudence to other families, became the first out-of-state student at the school. The sheriff of Windham County served a warrant, signed by Rufus Adams, against Ann Eliza, citing the Act for the Admission of Inhabitants in Towns, an eighteenth-century Connecticut law allowing local government officials to deport any nonresident in the state. If the person did not leave, he or she had to pay a fine of $1.67 per week, and if the person had not paid the fine and had not left after ten days, he or she was to be “whipped on the naked body not exceeding ten stripes.”81 The warrant was meant to put Ann Eliza in her place and also to put her out: out of Canterbury or, if colonizationists had their wish, out of the United States altogether. May advised Ann Eliza to “bear meekly the punishment, if they should in their madness inflict it; knowing that every blow they should strike her would resound throughout the land, if not over the whole civilized world, and call out an expression of indignation before which Mr. Judson and his associates would quail.” May need not have worried: Ann Eliza was “ready for the emergency” and responded to the challenge “with the spirit of a martyr.”82 However, Prudence disagreed with May’s idea about how to handle legal violence and refused to put Ann Eliza in harm’s way. Instead she decided to pay the first fine, which ended the matter.83 May’s depiction of a courageous Ann Eliza coupled with Judson’s “madness” prompted abolitionists to ask publicly, “Who are the savages now?”84 The Act for the Admission of Inhabitants in Towns echoed larger systems of violence against black bodies, particularly the African slave trade and slavery itself.
Some of Prudence’s students reacted to the sexist and violent attacks with both anger and sadness, though these emotions did not endure. Most viewed white opposition as a sign that white Canterbury residents needed Christian love. Harriet Rosetta Lanson wrote home to her adoptive guardian expressing dismay that she and her classmates were barred from attending the Congregational church in the village and had to travel to one in Packersville. But instead of dwelling on the inconvenience, Lanson pledged “to consecrate [to God] the little knowledge [she had] to his service.”85 Similarly, another student reminded her classmates that Prudence had taught them “not to indulge in angry feelings towards [their] enemies.” Quoting scripture on forgiveness (Romans 12:20) and loving one’s enemy (Luke 6:28), the student urged steadfast adherence to Christian principles of love and peace. She exhorted her classmates, “Feel at peace with all men; for we all know this is the spirit of the Christian, and this we must possess to support us through the trials we are called upon to pass in this life.”86 No matter what, Christian scriptures best governed human actions and behaviors, especially during trying times.
A strong commitment to Christian love did not preclude these young women from labeling the actions of white Canterbury residents unrighteous. As Christian women, they could, according to scripture (Romans 12:9), “abhor what is evil.” That evil was racial prejudice. In her address the same student explained, “We as a body, my dear school-mates . . . know . . . it is the prejudice the whites have against us that causes us to labor under so many disadvantages.” After all, African Americans’ pursuit of knowledge had actually inflamed prejudice and provoked white violence. This student stated matter-of-factly, “White people . . . put every obstacle they can in our way to prevent our rising to an equal.”87 She recognized the pattern of systematic oppression that inhibited black advancement. Her observations were valid: George Benson overheard one opponent confess that if the Canterbury Female Seminary flourished, then free blacks in Canterbury “would begin to look up and claim an equality with the whites.”88 Clearly the very idea of an educated African American woman terrified some residents. Racial prejudice was the disease that had to be named and cured precisely by fighting for African American education.
At the same time that Prudence’s students criticized their white opponents, however, the most radical dimension of their invocation of Christian love was its insistence that African Americans belonged to a universal Christian family. In a separate address, an anonymous student linked Christian love to the fight for racial equality. In the Christian imagination, this student explained, God was the father of humankind, which certainly included African Americans, and thus African Americans and whites shared a “common father.” Racial prejudice, then, made little sense, and all good Christians had an obligation to fight it. This student encouraged civic action and implored the public to “obey the voice of duty” and follow