The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  The board had written the original school constitution in 1846, a year after they had first started working to create the school. The preamble started, “Whereas a number of benevolent Men and Women, have given land and contributed money and goods for the purpose of building up and sustaining a Manual Labor School, principally for the benefit of that class of the population whom the laws of Indiana at present preclude from all participation in the benefits of our public school system.” There were a number of guidelines and rules that followed, which they titled articles. Article 7 stated that the board would hold a general meeting once a year at which “all interested as Teachers, Benefactors, contributors, whether male or female, shall have equal privileges in discussing and voting on all matters and questions that may come before them.” This was a startling governing statement. When it was written most African American men did not have the vote in the United States, and not a single woman did. It would be two years before the first convention on women’s rights would be held at Seneca Falls, New York.5

  But the board was not finished. Its members wanted their school to reflect who they were. They were trying to live a reality that they dreamed of for their nation—one in which all were truly equal. So Article 8 stated, “There shall never be tolerated or allowed in the Union Literary Institution, its government, discipline or privileges, any distinction on account of Color, Rank or Wealth.” This was revolutionary in the truest sense of the word. Article 8 was based on the first, best ideals of the United States, moving justice forward at a time when it seemed to be moving backward.6

  This provision was sure to enrage many prejudiced whites. But the board knew that those whites had been enraged long before the Union Literary Institute’s founding. This prejudice that was sweeping the nation, this passion for injustice that they were trying to defend children against, was indeed moving things backward. If African Americans being educated was enough to cause this ire, schools would have been burning for decades.

  The board probably did not know of all the schools that had been started and successfully run by African Americans and whites to teach children of all colors during those early years of the republic. They rose so quickly.

  The earliest even predated the Revolution. One of the earliest known was the Bray School in Williamsburg, Virginia. Between 1760 and 1774, Ann Wager, a white woman, educated roughly three hundred to four hundred free and enslaved African American children.7

  And then there was Anthony Benezet’s school. Anthony had been born in France, and his family had been refugees from their government’s persecution of the religious group they belonged to. They had moved to various countries in Europe when he was a child, trying to find a home. In the end they settled in Philadelphia around 1731, when Benezet was eighteen years old. By that time he had already converted to Quakerism and developed a passion for equality and justice.8

  When he arrived, Philadelphia was a rapidly growing town of about 10,000 people in the colony of Pennsylvania. Benezet would become a transforming force within that city, teaching in and founding schools that reflected his vision of equality. By 1750 he was teaching classes to people of African descent, many of them enslaved. In 1754 he founded a school for girls, and in 1770 he founded a school for people of African descent.9

  Of course, in the colonies and the early republic, educated families most commonly taught their children themselves, with wealthier families hiring tutors. After the United States was formed, there was not automatically a system of public schools put into place and policies to go with them. The commitment to educate children differed hugely from region to region, sometimes even between cities in the same state. But there was a movement to create schools, and African Americans were often at the forefront of that movement, attending, teaching in, and founding schools.10

  After the Revolution, the colonial belief that children of African descent should be educated separately—segregated—proved difficult to shake. Often, white parents did not want their children educated alongside children with a different skin color. Responding to such discriminations, African Americans in Boston founded a school to educate their children in the late eighteenth century.11

  And in 1794 the white leaders of the New York Manumission Society invested their time, energy, and money in the goal of educating African American children in New York City when New York was still a slave state.12

  Advances were being made in other slave states as well. In 1807, when the White House was only fifteen years old, two African American men in Washington, DC, who had purchased their own freedom, invested their resources in founding a school for African American children.13

  Just a year later John Chavis founded his popular and well-respected school in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808. The African American Chavis was highly educated at a time when few whites were even literate. Although blocked from fully integrating his school, he refused to compromise his vision of education for all Americans, teaching his white students during the day and his African American students (or “children of Color,” as he called them in 1808) in the evening. His school thrived for decades, educating some of the most elite and powerful whites in the state.14

  Then, around 1812, the African American pastor Daniel Coker started a school in Baltimore, which taught both boys and girls. Meanwhile, Ann Marie Becraft started the first school for African American girls in Washington, DC, in 1820, when she was about fifteen years old. It quickly became a thriving girls’ seminary school supported by the local Catholic Church. And by 1819 African Americans, some aided by the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, had started schools in and around Charleston, South Carolina.15

  While their true numbers may never be known, during this period right after the Revolution there was a blossoming of educational opportunities for people of African descent, as newly freed people worked to give themselves and their children all of the opportunities liberty could offer in their new nation, from New Orleans to Boston.16

  But then schools started being shut down, started being attacked, started being burned.

  By the early 1830s it was not just the largest cities of the North that bore the scourges of the mobocrats intent upon asserting the rule of prejudice through violence. Education was about citizenship. People of the early republic believed that it was the root of a democratic government, a place to prepare people for citizenship, a place to train them how to listen and speak, how to read and write, how to reason and discern. But prejudiced whites were attacking those roots so that no new fruit could ripen.17

  So Prudence Crandall knew that her decision would cause a fuss. She lived in the quiet village of Canterbury in rural Connecticut, and she was considering educating African American students. Some of the wealthiest local white families had hired her to teach and manage a white girls’ school in the early 1830s. Prudence Crandall was a well-educated woman of means, and she was able to purchase the almost 4,000-square-foot house on the central green of Canterbury. It was a beautiful building, its large windows gleaming, its chimneys rising high as smoke from all the cozy fireplaces inside drifted into the air above the crossroads. Everyone passing by could see what a fine school the white citizens of Canterbury had to educate their girls in.

  In 1832, Sarah Harris, a young African American woman, asked Prudence Crandall if she could also attend the school. It had only been open about a year, and Harris suspected that her attendance could cause problems, so she was cautious, telling Crandall, “If you think it will be the means of injuring you, I will not insist on the favor.” But Crandall decided to take the risk and open her school not just to Harris but to any African American girls who could afford to attend.18

  In some ways her plan was not that radical, for she would still be doing what she did best, educating and caring for young women in her boarding school. The girls would come from homes and families with a good income—families who could pay her for her teaching. The only difference would be the color of their skin.

  Crandall knew she would need
help to resist the coming backlash, so she contacted William Lloyd Garrison. She explained that in order to make a quick conversion of her school, she would need African American families and students willing to sign up and pay before it even reopened.

  Crandall could not have started her school alone. The feat required the courageous involvement of young women and their families, willing to risk much to be educated. And the daughters of some of the wealthiest African American families in Connecticut and the Northeast came to join Crandall’s school, their families willing to make this stand for equality with her.

  And they came, carrying their lovely clothes and fine bedding, their candle holders and shoes, their best bonnets and their books, all carefully packed into well-made trunks, ready to live with Crandall and get the best education that money could buy. But many of these girls, most in their teens, understood that they were coming as activists. Some came from well-off and well-connected families in New York and Philadelphia, where there were still schools for them, but they were committed to getting an excellent education from Crandall.

  The school reopened on April 1, but the resistance was worse than expected. First, the most powerful white men of the town began to demand to see Crandall. Dr. Andrew Harris told Prudence that her school was a danger because “the blacks of the town… would begin to look up and claim an equality with whites.”19

  By May 6, over nine hundred white people in the region had signed a petition asking that the Connecticut government pass a law to shut down Prudence Crandall’s school. And working with extraordinary efficiency, the politicians of Connecticut did just as they were asked. On May 24, less than two months after Crandall started teaching her students, the governor signed off on the law. The law not only shut down the school but ensured that no other Connecticut school could accept African American children from out of state and that opening a school for Connecticut African Americans would require the written “consent” of basically every powerful white man in a town.20

  But Crandall and her students stood strong. She refused to stop teaching them, and her students refused to stop learning, despite rising violence. Soon Crandall was arrested and jailed, charged with breaking the law written just for her, her county’s newspaper proclaiming, “She has stepped out of the hallowed precincts of female propriety and now stands on common ground, and must expect common treatment.”21

  Her case went all the way to the Connecticut Supreme Court. Some of the top lawyers of the time, including US senator William Ellsworth, defended Crandall. The son of a framer of the Constitution, Ellsworth still believed in his father’s vision of an America where all men had an equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

  Many people—both black and white—across the Northwest Territory states must have anxiously awaited news of that state supreme court trial, for if Crandall succeeded the suit would establish a precedent for overturning anti-immigration Black Laws throughout the region.

  Still, the local forces against equality were strong. The judges of the Connecticut Supreme Court let Prudence Crandall go on a technicality but refused to rule on the new Black Code, having neither the heart nor the inclination to make a just decision in favor of children. And those children, bravely making a stand for their rights in the village of Canterbury, were almost murdered by locals who tried to burn down the school while they were asleep inside of it.22

  To this day, broken glass from the lovely windows shattered during those attacks still lies in the earth all around the school, a sharp reminder of the battle against equality being waged against these northern girls trying to be educated in New England.

  Those who were willing to burn children for the cause of prejudice won their battle, forcing Crandall to close her school little over a year after she opened her doors to African American students.23

  Even while Prudence Crandall was fighting for her school’s survival, African Americans and their white allies were working with supporters in New Hampshire to create a school back in the hills of that region. They planned a manual labor institute that would be open to all.24

  A local white lawyer by the name of George Kimball encouraged Garrison and his supporters to build the school in his town of Canaan, New Hampshire. But none of the local residents knew just how radical this school would be, for in addition to being a labor institute, it would also be integrated—accepting both blacks and whites. It was to be called the Noyes Academy, and hopes ran high for its success as it neared its opening date in February 1835.25

  The Noyes Academy had an opening class of forty-five students, seventeen of them African American. All of them were men, except for Julia Williams, an African American student from Crandall’s school who had survived its attack and was still set on getting an education. Many of her fellow students had to make the long, slow journey through the mountains exposed to the weather, forced to ride on the outside of the stagecoach because of the color of their skin. When they finally arrived, Julia Williams and her fellow African American students were met with a warm welcome from Kimball and the other white abolitionists who welcomed them into their homes to board there until living quarters could be built for all of the students.

  Most of the town residents, however, were not so warm to the idea of an integrated precollegiate school in their community. There were months of protests and violence, the students and their teachers hanging on despite the growing danger. But in August it all ended. The school was attacked. A large group of whites brought in dozens of ox teams and, attaching chains to the school building, pulled it off its foundations and dragged it away.26

  The board members of the Union Literary Institute knew that while these attacks were growing against African American schools in the Northeast, there was a chance that the Northwest Territory states offered more space for such schools. They were all inspired by Oberlin College in Ohio, which had decided to integrate soon after Crandall’s school was shut down. Of course, there had long been a few African Americans educated at colleges around the United States, but that was in an earlier, less polarized time. When Oberlin made its move, it was in the face of a national backlash against equality, but by 1847 the college was still thriving and was now accepting female students as well. Members of the board of the Union Literary Institute had visited Oberlin and hired an Oberlin graduate, Ebenezer Tucker, as the institute’s first teacher.27

  But the board knew that this was a time when whites were making it dangerous to teach African Americans, even in some areas of rural Ohio. After all, they would have heard of what happened to Clarissa Wright and the African American farmers working with her.28

  It was just a few years before, in 1839, over in Portage County, Ohio, roughly thirty miles south of Cleveland and on the opposite side of the state from the Union Literary Institute. The settled and successful African American farmers in that county had organized and financed a lovely grammar school for their youngest children. Finding a teacher had been a challenge, but they finally found Clarissa Wright, a young white woman willing to come on her own to live with these farmers and teach their children.29

  Clarissa Wright knew exactly what she was getting into. She had been born and raised in Portage County, Ohio. Her father had been educated at Yale and come from Connecticut to Ohio in around 1810, founding a school called the Tallmadge Academy. Clarissa Wright and her siblings were educated there by their firmly antislavery father, who also was a proponent of equal education for boys and girls. One of those boys was the young John Brown, the fierce white abolitionist who would later lead the attack at Harper’s Ferry.30

  She and her brother, Elizur Wright, were committed advocates of freedom and equality. They had personally witnessed the war that had arisen in the cities of the North in the 1830s, from Cincinnati to New York. In 1833 Elizur Wright helped to create the national American Anti-slavery Society on the East Coast. But unlike some of his fellow white abolitionists, he was a staunch anticolonizationist, believing that African-descended people had a right
to freedom and full American citizenship.31

  While the school was in Portage County, it may have been far enough from her home that she needed a place to live nearby. In those days, teachers usually “boarded” with a family involved in the management of the school. In this case, it would have been an African American family.

  There should have been nothing upsetting about this. Education was supposed to be the firm foundation of the American republic, a pillar of a healthy democracy. Indeed, the men who wrote the founding document of the Northwest Territory—the Territorial Ordinance of 1787—considered education so important that they included specific mention of schools, noting in Article 3, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” And just as in the voting clauses in the ordinance, none of those instructions mentioned race or the exclusion of any group.32

  In this case African Americans and whites were merely working together on a common goal of education. But the intimacy of this situation alone was appalling to the prejudiced—people with different-color skin sharing meals together, using the same outhouse, and socializing with each other in the evening after the work was done. These prejudiced whites had an easily offended sense of their own identity, and they were quick to come to wrath when a case arose where the order they wished to impose on America—white men at the top and everyone else below—was challenged. The idea that a white woman would not only be equal to but dependent on wealthy African American farmers for her livelihood was not to be tolerated. And the fact that she was also helping the children of those farmers be educated, to have an equal opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, was not just an insult, it was a killing offense.

  First, a threatening letter was sent to the African American farmers who were running the school, informing them that if they did not fire Wright (whom they referred to as “your straggling stranger”) immediately, they would gather together the “citizens” of the area for a meeting to “consider the situation.” This was a threat, for everyone knew in those troubled times that when powerful white men gathered other white people for a “meeting,” they were planning violence.33