Prudence Crandall’s Legacy: The Fight for Equality in the 1830s, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education

9 Romantic Revolutionaries

[ 148 ] N ewspapers throughout the United States and across the Atlantic in England reported on the progress of Prudence Crandall’s October trial.1 Fear of “amalgamation of the races” and the rights of free blacks—the subtexts of Crandall’s trial—made for sensational reading. One man took a personal interest. Calvin Philleo, minister of the First Baptist Church in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, read about Crandall’s school for black women.2 The relationship between the antislavery movement and religion interested Philleo; the temperance movement and revivalism had helped fill his evangelical church with members. In just three months in 1829, Philleo baptized more than seventy new parishioners at the First Baptist Church.3 At a time when ministers of wellestablished churches avoided the divisive issue of slavery, others, including Philleo and fellow Pawtucket minister Ray Potter, saw the potential for both virtue and increasing church membership. One extra detail in the Crandall story, however, caught Philleo’s attention. Prudence Crandall , the persecuted headmistress of the school for black women, was not married. A sudden family tragedy recently had created turmoil in Calvin Philleo’s life and threatened his personal and financial security. Born on July 4, 1787, on his father’s farm near the town of Dover, New York, Calvin had experienced adversity early on in his life—during his childhood he helped his parents with the desperate chores of survival. “I can hardly describe the poverty and baldness of the life I saw at his house,” one relative wrote. “A rude log hut, earthen floor, a life entirely barren of any refinement.”4 The Philleos lived hand to mouth. Over time, his father Enoch created apple and peach orchards and grew other crops.5 9 : Romantic Revolutionaries Romantic Revolutionaries [ 149 ] Calvin’s father was “a good talker” and enjoyed bantering with his wife about religion and her Baptist faith.6 Enoch Philleo served in the Continental Army and fought in a number of battles against the British; he survived the terrible winter of 1778 with George Washington’s army at Valley Forge.7 Calvin remembered his father telling stories about the war with his brother-in-law William Bradshaw , who sided with the British against the Americans. After the war, Bradshaw bragged about Great Britain providing him with three hundred acres of land in Nova Scotia. “Often have I heard them tell their war stories together,” Calvin Philleo wrote. “He (Bradshaw) was well paid for his treachery while my father received only worthless Continental money.”8 As a young man, Calvin Philleo yearned for a more prosperous life and apprenticed with a blacksmith; however, Calvin soon gave up the blacksmith trade to pursue the ministry. He shared his father’s gift of speech and his mother’s Baptist faith. Calvin preached for a time in Amenia, New York, and was ordained in 1816.9 Philleo impressed parishioners with his “vivid imagination and remarkable descriptive powers, which he used to great advantage.”10 Philleo married ElizabethWheeler; they had three children—Emeline, Elizabeth, and Calvin.11 As his family grew, so did Calvin’s career in the ministry. A congregation in Suffield, Connecticut, called him to their church in 1824, where he was “emphatically a revival preacher, eccentric, impulsive, and enthusiastic.”12 Calvin Philleo barnstormed throughout New England during the Second Great Awakening. “He was a remarkable man and his power over audiences was almost unequaled,” Calvin’s daughter Emeline remembered . “In his person was combined the minister and the choir. He possessed a voice remarkable for clearness and sweetness, with an ear so true he seldom erred in the pitch.”13 Based on his reputation for expanding the congregation in Suffield, the First Baptist Church in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, called him to their church in 1830. Emeline and her sister took care of the children in the vestry during the church services.14 Calvin and his wife Elizabeth worked as a team, and they each had important responsibilities within the church and their family. Calvin could not travel and build his reputation as a revival minister without his wife [ 150 ] Prudence Crandall’s Legacy caring for their children and managing church business. Philleo succeeded in expanding the congregation. After two years in Pawtucket, however, the world Calvin and his wife created changed dramatically. In December of 1831, a sudden illness struck Elizabeth; she died the day after Christmas . Suddenly Calvin was a widower with three children...