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Introduction
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
{ 1 Introduction On July 29, 1860, Milo A. Holcomb of Granby, Connecticut, wrote to Republican presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln: “I am not hostile to your election though You are represented to be an abolitionest and in sentiment I am a pro Slavery man. I would if I could have my way, authorize Slavery in New England and the importation of African servants.” Holcomb went on to discuss Lincoln’s famous House Divided Speech, in which he had stated that the nation could not continue half slave and half free. Clearly tired of the battle over slavery, Holcomb wrote: “The agitating question of slavery as it Exists in these U. S. has distracted the counsels of this nation long enough, you are reported to have said that the country could not remain a united people one half Bound the other free, that all must be alike and I agree with your reported sentiment.” Holcomb’s conclusion about the future of slavery, however, was not in accord with Lincoln’s. For Holcomb , slavery was the future. Yet he was not opposed to allowing Lincoln to give abolition a shot: “I am willing You should try the experiment. I do not believe you can effect emancipation. If you can I have no obj[ection]. I only want all sections to be alike. I want the Experiment tried abolish Slavery if you can. If you find you cannot as I am sure you will do, then let us have the other as it will then be the last expedient.”1 Holcomb’s letter presents a problem for Connecticut. The state’s residents after all, were the “good guys” in the Civil War. Along with the rest of the North, Connecticut staunchly opposed slavery and rallied to not only halt the westward spread of the “peculiar institution,” but to defeat the Southern rebellion that had shaken the Union to its core. When considering Connecticut’s connection to slavery and the Civil War, many immediately think of the Amistad case, the state heroine Prudence Crandall , the underground railroad, John Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. These are certainly important and well-known events and people who, by today’s standards, reveal the best in enlightened, antislavery thought. We conclude, therefore, that Connecticut was always generously disposed toward abolition, with its yearning for black freedom and civic equality. The result of such forward-looking racial attitudes resulted in the state’s massive commitment to crushing the Southern rebellion. The reality, however, is far from the constructed memory that flowed 2 } Connecticut in the American Civil War forth in the many years and decades after the Civil War. The simple truth is that in the “land of steady habits,” one of the steadiest was a virulent racism. While New England was generally viewed as the national center of abolitionist thought, Connecticut stood apart. The famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison—outraged by attacks on Prudence Crandall’s school for black girls and the decision by the town of Canterbury and the state to close the school—derisively referred to Connecticut as the “Georgia of New England.”2 More than one historian has noted that of the New England states, Connecticut was “the most inhospitable” to abolition.3 It is not that abolition failed to have a foothold in Connecticut. Rather, support for abolition was not nearly as widespread as many today believe. Moreover, whatever the number of abolitionists, there were many more in the state who actively opposed the end of slavery and black equality. There existed within Connecticut a serious and formidable antagonism toward abolition and blacks. These attitudes can be seen throughout the antebellum period and well into the Civil War. In 1833, the Norwich Courier announced that abolition was “an insane project—one which no man in full possession and exercise of his faculties can contemplate as being practicable, or at the present desirable.”4 In the same year, Prudence Crandall attempted to educate black girls, and if we remember her as a hero, we must also remember that she was heroic in the face of her own neighbors, who threatened her, vandalized the school by breaking windows and dumping manure down its well, and ultimately forced Crandall to flee the state. The state General Assembly sided with those opposed to a black school by passing legislation making it illegal to import blacks from outside the state, announcing: “We are under no obligation , moral or political, to incur the incalculable evils, of bringing into our own State...