America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Tubman was extraordinarily cool in a crisis. On one occasion, when she saw a former owner coming toward her, she turned loose several chickens at a market and pretended to be chasing after them as she scurried by unnoticed. Another time, when she realized she had been tracked to a railroad station, she calmly boarded a southbound train, guessing correctly that no one would suspect a black woman traveling deeper into slave territory. She usually began her expeditions on Saturday night, giving her an extra day before the aggrieved owner could advertise his loss in the Monday papers. “I was the conductor of the underground railroad for eight years and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger,” she said.

  When the Civil War began, Tubman left her home in Auburn, New York, and served as a spy and a scout for the Union Army, bringing back reports from black informants on the other side of the Confederate lines. “Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy’s country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying commissary, stores, cotton and lordly dwellings,” stated a report at the time. After the war she married a Union veteran and lived on her Auburn farm, where she took in orphans and old people who had no other homes. Harriet was “a woman of no pretensions, indeed a more ordinary specimen of humanity could hardly be found among the most unfortunate-looking farm hands of the South,” wrote William Still, an African American leader in Philadelphia. “Yet in point of courage, shrewdness and disinterested exertions to rescue her fellowman, she was without equal.”

  “STOMP DOWN FREEDOM TODAY”

  The slaves who lived closest to the battle lines during the Civil War were the most keenly aware of what was at stake. “The news went from plantation to plantation and while the slaves acted natural and some even more polite than usual they prayed for freedom,” said Mary Anderson of North Carolina. “In a day or two every body on the plantation seemed to be disturbed and master and missus were crying. Master ordered all the slaves to come to the great house at nine o’clock. Nobody was working and slaves were walking over the grove in every direction. At nine o’clock all the slaves gathered at the great house and master and missus came out on the porch and stood side by side. You could hear a pin drop everything was so quiet…. Then master said, ‘Men, women and children, you are free. You are no longer my slaves. The Yankees will be here soon.’”

  After emancipation actually occurred, many slave communities took some time to come to grips with what had happened. “I remember the first Sunday of freedom,” said Charlotte Brown. “We was all sitting around resting and trying to think what freedom meant and everybody was quiet and peaceful. All at once old Sister Carrie who was near about a hundred started in to talking:

  ‘Taint no more sellin’ today

  Taint no more hirin’ today

  Taint no pullin’ off shirts today,

  It’s stomp down Freedom today.

  Stomp it down!’

  “And when she says ‘Stomp it down’ all the slaves commence to shouting with her:

  ‘Stomp down Freedom today—

  Stomp it down,

  Stomp down Freedom today.’

  “Wasn’t no more peace that Sunday. Everybody started in to sing and shout once more. First thing you know they done made up music to Sister Carrie’s stomp song and sang and shouted that song all the rest of the day. Child, that was one glorious time!”

  8

  Women and Abolition:

  White and Black, North and South

  THE NORTH

  “THEN LET IT SINK. I WILL NOT DISMISS HER.”

  Prudence Crandall came to Canterbury, Connecticut, as a career move. In 1831, the twenty-seven-year-old teacher was working in the town of Plainfield when the more upscale residents of Canterbury invited her to start a school for their daughters. Owning a school for young ladies of means was just about the pinnacle of achievement and financial security for a single woman in Crandall’s class. She invested what money she had in a large, handsome house in the center of town and soon her “genteel female seminary” was an established success.

  At that point, Sarah Harris applied. “A colored girl of respectability…called on me some time during the month of September and said, in a very earnest manner, ‘Miss Crandall, I want to get a little more learning, enough if possible to teach colored children, and if you will admit me to your school, I shall be under the greatest obligation to you,’” the teacher remembered later. The girl’s father, a farmer, was active in the antislavery movement, and she probably had a pretty well-informed idea of what local reaction to her enrollment might be. “If you think it will be the means of injuring you,” Sarah added, “I will not insist on the favor.”

  Crandall was a Quaker, who opposed slavery and believed in educating freed blacks. She was also capable of being extremely hardheaded—when the Canterbury proposal first came up, her brother worried how long Prudence could manage to stay on the good side of her students’ self-important parents. But the school was her home and her income, and she hesitated for a while before finally agreeing.

  Sarah Harris had gone to the local public school and had attended classes there with some of the students in Crandall’s much superior establishment. She probably hoped that as a known quantity, she would be accepted without much fuss. “There could not have been a more unexceptionable person than Sarah Harris, save her complexion,” wrote Samuel Joseph May, one of Crandall’s loyal supporters. But once word spread, it became obvious that people weren’t going to cooperate. A delegation of women, led by the Episcopalian minister’s wife, warned that unless the black girl was sent away, the school would be ruined. “Then let it sink. I will not dismiss her,” Prudence retorted. Pressed against the wall, her response was true to type and bore out all her brother’s worries about her stubbornness. When the white students threatened to leave, she decided to start a school for African American girls—or, as she advertised in The Liberator, “for young Ladies and little Misses of color.” The curriculum would be the same as before, including the teas and piano recitals.

  The idea of young black women being educated in a manner appropriate for upper-class whites enraged people further. Catharine Beecher thought it was terrible and the Norwich Republican accused Crandall of trying “to foist upon the community a new species of gentility, in the shape of sable belles…to cook up a palatable morsel for our white bachelors…. In a word, they hope to force the two races to amalgamate.” The fear of mixed marriages was the greatest of white anxieties, but when one of her neighbors brought it up to Crandall, she retorted: “Moses had a black wife.”

  A town meeting, led by Andrew Judson, a lawyer, politician, and Crandall’s next-door neighbor, warned the school would “collect within the town of Canterbury large numbers of persons from other States whose characters and habits might be various and unknown to us, thereby rendering insecure the persons, property and reputation of our citizens.” As a woman, Crandall was not permitted to attend the gathering. Her male representatives, who came bearing an offer to move the school to a less conspicuous spot in town, were not allowed to speak and were met with “fists doubled in our faces.”

  Meanwhile, fifteen very brave African American students arrived in April 1833. They came from Philadelphia and New York and Boston as well as Connecticut. Some were the daughters of slaves. One, whose mother was too poor to pay the $25-per-quarter tuition, was supported by another woman, a childless ex-slave who had saved up the money by working as a servant. The ride in on the stagecoach gave the girls some idea of what they would be up against. One was dumped off at a town six miles from Canterbury. She shouldered her baggage and walked.

  The local shops refused to sell food to the school. The village doctor and druggist boycotted Crandall’s students. Someone threw manure into the well and smashed the school windows. When the girls went out to take their daily walk, people blew horns, fired pistols, and threw chicken heads at them. Town o
fficials arrested a seventeen-year-old student from out of state on vagrancy laws and were threatening to whip her “on the naked body” when supporters arrived to put up bond for her release. On May 24, the Connecticut state legislature passed a “Black Law” making it illegal to establish a school for the instruction of out-of-state black children. “Joy and exultation ran wild in Canterbury,” wrote one of Crandall’s students. “The bell rang and a cannon was fired for half an hour. Where is the justice? In the midst of all this Miss Crandall is unmoved.”

  A month later, Prudence Crandall was arrested. “I am only afraid they will not put me in jail,” she told her supporters. She slept in a cell whose former occupant had been a murderer before she would allow her supporters to post bail. She went on trial in August, with the prosecution led by her neighbor Andrew Judson. Despite the judge’s obvious prejudice against the school, the jury could not reach an agreement. But a second panel, after having been instructed by the judge that free African Americans were not actually citizens, convicted her of violating the Black Law. While Crandall appealed, her school went on. Abolitionists from around the world began visiting Canterbury to deliver presents and support.

  But there were signs that the Quaker schoolmistress was beginning to falter. Most notably, she became engaged to a visiting minister who her friends regarded as dubious husband material. She may have realized, deep down, that her position was hopeless and reached out to matrimony as a lifeline. After an appeals court threw out her conviction on technical grounds, Canterbury citizens slit the neck of a cat and hung it on the school gate, then tried to set the building on fire. In the middle of the night on September 9, 1834, men smashed the school’s downstairs windows with clubs and iron bars. While the girls huddled upstairs in terror, the mob destroyed the house beneath them. Crandall’s own wavering confidence infected the students, who already had good reason to wish they were someplace else. They returned to their homes, and the school was closed for good.

  The short-term finale to Crandall’s story is not particularly cheerful. She had, indeed, married the wrong man. Much later, she said he “would not let me read the books that he himself read.” (Prudence-like, she read them anyway.) When he died, she moved to Kansas where her brother had a farm. A regiment of black Union soldiers discovered her living in poverty and raised a fund to present to her. “My whole life has been one of opposition,” she told an interviewer in 1886. “I never could find anyone near me to agree with me.”

  But over the long run, there was a happy ending. Sarah Harris did become a teacher, as did some of the other girls who endured that traumatic time in Canterbury. After the war, Connecticut voted to give its black citizens the right to vote, with Canterbury’s Windham County leading the way. Crandall had not been able to carry through her plan to educate young black women, but as her old friend Samuel May said, she had been successful in teaching her neighbors. The state legislature repealed the Black Law and voted to give Crandall a pension for life, “mindful of the dark blot that rests upon our fair fame and name, for the cruel outrages inflicted upon a former citizen of our Commonwealth.” One of the first signatures on the resolution was that of Andrew Judson’s nephew. While her opponents have faded into total obscurity, remembered only in their role of villains in this story, Prudence Crandall is one of the heroes of Connecticut history. And the big house in the middle of Canterbury is now a museum and a National Historic Landmark.

  “WE ABOLITION WOMEN ARE TURNING

  THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN”

  Slavery became the all-consuming political question between 1830 and the Civil War. But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of slavery was different from other reform movements, partly because it drew women so clearly into politics, and partly because it drew them so near to genuine violence. Between 1834 and 1837, there were at least 157 anti-abolition mob actions in the North, and Prudence Crandall was far from the only stubborn woman who stood up against her angry neighbors. Speaking against slavery in a Maine church, Ellen Smith encountered an audience that responded by “howling, stamping, kicking, slamming…pew doors, and pounding…the pews with their fists.” Boys threw hymn books at her. When the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison—always a lightning rod—attempted to speak before a racially mixed group of women in Boston, the mayor begged the audience to disperse rather than incite a riot. The ladies declined. “If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere,” said Maria Weston Chapman, the wife of a wealthy merchant. She eventually led the audience out through the angry mob, in pairs, black and white together.

  The antislavery movement did a lot to liberate its female members as well as the slaves. (One Boston volunteer called the times “distressing and exciting.”) Northern society was still deep in the era of Catharine Beecher and the cult of domesticity, yet abolitionist women were not only signing petitions and going to political meetings, they also began speaking in public, to mixed audiences.

  “Confusion has seized us and all things go wrong,” wrote Maria Chapman mischievously.

  The women have leaped from “their spheres.”

  And instead of fixed stars, shoot as comets along,

  And are setting the world by the ears!

  …….….….……

  They’ve taken the notion to speak for themselves,

  And are wielding the tongue and the pen;

  They’ve mounted the rostrum, the termagent elves!

  And—oh horrid!—are talking to men!

  The first female antislavery lecturers were Angelina and Sarah Grimke of South Carolina. Their family was part of the slaveholding elite, and even though many of its members were high achievers, it’s still a mystery how the Grimkes produced such a unique pair of women. Virtually everything the sisters did was a first, unprecedented. Yet they seemed utterly unself-conscious, almost oblivious to their notoriety. Sarah, the older, was four when she accidentally witnessed the whipping of a slave, and the sight upset her so much that her nurse found her on the wharves, asking a ship’s captain to take her to a place where such things never happened. “Slavery was a millstone around my neck,” Sarah wrote later, “and marred my comfort from the time I can remember.” After her father died she flouted every convention of the South, where it was unacceptable for women to even travel alone, and moved to Philadelphia to live independently. Her family tried to avoid gossip by announcing they were sending Sarah on a trip for her health.

  In an age when women were supposed to be hypersensitive to the demands of social decorum, the Grimkes, earnest, humorless, and kindly, always seemed able to follow their own stars. In 1834, Angelina, who had followed her sister north, published Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States. In it, she urged Southern women to persuade their husbands and fathers “that slavery is a crime against God and man,” and to free, or at least educate, any slaves they owned. It was the only such document a white Southern woman would ever write, but its intended audience probably never saw it, since it was burned whenever it reached a Southern post office and Angelina was barred from ever returning to Charleston.

  Sarah and Angelina had been conducting “parlor talks” with Northern women interested in the slavery issue, and the American Anti-Slavery Society offered them jobs as the first female abolitionist lecturers in the United States. Soon they began speaking in churches, although friends warned them that lecturing before large groups would be seen as a “Fanny Wright affair.” But the Grimkes managed much better than Wright, possibly because of their impeccable personal lives and their high moral tone. Both men and women wanted to hear the Southern slaveholders turned abolitionists, so the organizers began opening the meetings to everyone. Angelina was the more gifted speaker, and Sarah, who tended to be rather flat and to lose track of the time while she was talking, adopted the role of helper and backup. The sisters spoke at five to six
meetings a week, each in a different town, traveling by stage, horseback, or wagon. They frequently had to skip meals and take their nourishment at the tea parties their admirers expected them to attend at every stop. The halls were almost always stuffy, and very crowded. At Worcester, they lectured to more than 1,000 people while hundreds of others stood outside. In Woonsocket Falls, the beams of the gallery began to crack under the crowd, and when no one would leave, Sarah had to close the meeting.

  The speaking tour ended when Angelina contracted typhoid fever. During her recovery, she fell in love with Theodore Weld, a dashing antislavery lecturer who had encouraged her speaking career. Friends did not expect much from the relationship, since Weld had pledged not to marry until slavery was abolished. But after a long, intellectual correspondence that dwelt mainly on things like religion and the importance of logical inquiry, Weld suddenly declared that “for a long time you have had my whole heart.” Angelina responded characteristically, in a letter that first rapturously announced they were “two bodies animated by one soul” and then swerved into a discussion of her plans to address the Massachusetts state legislature. In February 1838, Angelina submitted antislavery petitions to the Massachusetts House committee, and became the first woman ever to speak before a legislative hearing. She talked for two hours and then returned two days later to continue her remarks. At the second appearance, the room was so packed that she was asked to stand at the Speaker of the House’s lectern so the crowd could have a better look at her. Sarah, meanwhile, was seated in the Speaker’s chair. “We abolition women are turning the world upside down,” Angelina told her.

  Three months later, the first American woman to address a legislative body became the first American advocate of women’s rights to marry. Angelina had become as vocal about the subjugation of women as she was about slaves, and her supporters were thrilled by this demonstration that a woman who believed in female equality could nonetheless find a husband. The day after the wedding ceremony—at which nobody promised to obey and Theodore denounced the laws that gave husbands control over their wives’ property—they went to Pennsylvania Hall for the Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention.