With the passage of this measure, Canterbury was triumphant. Miss Crandall was arrested at once, imprisoned overnight while May and others collected the necessary bail, and eventually brought to trial before Judge Joseph Eaton and a jury at Brooklyn on August 23, 1833. Judson, appearing as prosecutor for the state, attacked Miss Crandall’s school as “a scheme, cunningly devised, to destroy the rich inheritance left by your fathers. The professed object is to educate the blacks, but the real object is to make the people yield their assent by degrees, to this universal amalgamation of the two races, and have the African race placed on a footing of perfect equality with the Americans.” He further contended that Negroes were not citizens of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution, and that therefore they could not enjoy the “privileges and immunities of white citizens.” W. W. Ellsworth, for the defense, maintained the precise opposite: that citizenship was a matter of birth or naturalization, not of color; that Negroes born in this country were therefore citizens; and that as such they were entitled to all the privileges of citizenship, including education, “the first and fundamental pillar on which our free institutions rest.” The jury, divided between these two points of view, could not agree. The case then went before Judge David Daggett of the State Supreme Court for retrial.
Daggett, a sometime professor of law at New Haven, had been among the more active opponents of Jocelyn’s proposed Negro school there. Now, in his charge to the jury, he categorically denied the citizenship of colored persons: “God forbid that I should add to the degradation of this race of men; but I am bound to say, by my duty, that they are not citizens.” Miss Crandall was convicted. On appeal to the Court of Errors, the verdict was set aside on technical grounds and she went free. The constitutionality of Connecticut’s Black Law was not called into question.
Having thus failed to stop Miss Crandall by legal means, the opponents of her school now had recourse to violence. First an attempt was made to set the building on fire. Then a mob came by night and broke out every window and window frame in the place. Miss Crandall had just been married, to the Reverend Calvin Philleo; at his insistence, she now closed the Canterbury school permanently, yielding the battle to her enemies. The battle, but not the war; for with her husband she removed to northern Illinois, where she was engaged in the education of Negroes for the rest of her active life.
The pattern of anti-Negro, anti-abolitionist violence set in the Crandall affair was repeated on a lesser scale in many parts of the state during the next years. In 1834 a mob raided an abolitionist meeting at the First Presbyterian Church in Norwich, drummed the parson out of town, and threatened him with tar and feathers if he returned. The following year saw a serious riot in Hartford, when a group of white roughs attacked Negroes on their way home from church.8 In Middletown, Cross Street was reported to be “crowded with those worse than southern bloodhounds.”9 In Meriden, when Reverend Henry Ludlow came to the Congregational church to deliver an abolitionist lecture, an infuriated crowd stoned the building, battered down the locked door, and pelted the congregation with rotten eggs and trash. Even in the birthplace of John Brown, Torrington, in 1837 the organization meeting of a new county abolition society was attacked by a proslavery mob, whose members had “elevated their courage with New England rum”; blowing horns, yelling, and beating on tin pans and kettles, they surrounded the un-heated barn where the meeting was held and broke up the gathering “by brute force.”10 Outbreaks of similar nature were reported during the 1830’s in other towns as well— New Haven, New Canaan, and Norwalk among them.11
Most of these outrages appear to have been of more or less spontaneous nature—a matter of a few ringleaders surrounding themselves with a hastily gathered group of roughs who perhaps cared little about slavery one way or the other but who, warmed by liquor and hot words, were easy prey to the mob spirit and not at all averse to throwing eggs, destroying property, and pushing people around. The Danbury riots, however, bespoke greater purpose and more careful organization. Danbury was already a center for hat manufacturing, and the Southern trade had been important to it at least since 1800; indeed it was said to have “gained its growth largely by developing the Southern market.” Many of its citizens, therefore, sympathized with Southern views and had no patience with abolitionists. To this town, in 1837, came an itinerant anti-slavery lecturer, the Reverend Nathaniel Colver, who was scheduled to speak at the Baptist church. When the hour arrived for him to do so, a blast of trumpets was heard from near the courthouse; then immediately men charged into the streets from every direction, arranged themselves in military formation, and marched like an infantry regiment to the church. The congregation scattered at once; some of its members, along with two constables, hurried Colver to a private house. The rabble churned around outside for a while but finally dispersed. Colver was not easily scared off, however. He returned to the church, determined to deliver his message. Now the mob’s action was decisive; masked men blew up the building with gunpowder.12
Behind all these rowdy demonstrations, perhaps not condoning their violence and lawlessness but certainly sharing the same attitude toward abolitionists, there was a large segment of Connecticut’s most respectable citizens. One abolitionist paper went so far as to say that the troubles around Norwalk were sparked by “ministers, magistrates, lawyers, doctors, merchants and hatters.”13 Undoubtedly there were many ordinary persons who agreed with Mrs. Frances Breckenridge of Meriden: “Some of the sympathy for the slave might as well be given to the owner. Let any Northern housekeeper select the most idle, insolent, thievish and exasperating servant she ever knew or heard of and multiply by a dozen or two and she will have a faint idea of one of the trials of the Southern housekeeper.”14 Or with the two men who, having worked on a Southern plantation where there were slaves, came back to report that they “didn’t think niggers wuz fit fer ennythin but ter be made ter wuk fer white folks.”15
All during the decade, indeed, the Connecticut Colonization Society continued to preach its gospel of salvation-through-separation. One of its leading spokesmen was Willbur Fisk, president of the newly established Wesleyan University in Middletown, who declared in 1835:
African Colonization is predicated on the principle that there is an utter aversion in the public mind, to an amalgamation and equalization of the two races; and that any attempt to press such equalization is not only fruitless, but injurious… . Hence this society lifts up the man of color, at once from his connections and disabilities; and places him beyond the influence of the shackles of prejudice.16
Other colonizationists set forth the view that no good would befall the escaped slave in Canada, that Africa was his only hope. As one of them phrased it:
A few months since I was traveling near to Canada, and desiring to see the result of freedom, as they found it in their northern flight, with their eyes fixed on the pole star … I inquired about them, and I found that when they first came there they were docile and full of hope, but soon their appearances changed, they lost their buoyancy of spirits,—became indolent, unwilling to submit to the restraints of society which the whites submit to, and as a necessary consequence, a large number of them were in the penitentiary, and others are in the greatest state of want and wretchedness… . There is no advantage gained by going to Canada. Go and sit with the colored man, and ask him where do you find your best friends? And he will tell you among the colonizationists.17
But the free Negroes of Connecticut were saying no such thing. Hartford’s colored inhabitants adopted a resolution that the Colonization Society was “actuated by the same motives which influenced the Pharaoh when he demanded that the male children of Israel be destroyed.” Those of New Haven declared that they would “resist all attempts made for their removal to the torrid shores of Africa, and would sooner suffer every drop of blood to be taken from their veins than submit to such unrighteous treatment by colonizationists.”18 From the free Negroes of Lyme came “the sincere opinion that the Colonization Society was one of the wildest projects ever patronized by enlightened