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

15 The Civil War

[ 268 ] S hortly before the end of the 1850s, Prudence Crandall Philleo had moved from her farm in Troy Grove to a home in the newly developed town of Mendota, Illinois, where two Illinois railroad lines intersected.1 Prudence moved there to be closer to the shops, churches, and transportation and also to get away from her erratic husband. In April 1861, however, life in Mendota and America changed dramatically. After the attack on Fort Sumter, war fever gripped the country. Communities in Illinois and other northern and western states held spontaneous Union rallies. Prudence watched as the sons of her neighbors gathered at the local music hall to hear the details of the fall of Fort Sumter. The news “created the most intense feeling, and without distinction of party our citizens came together with cheeks burning with shame that our national flag had been insulted .”2 Nearly one hundred Mendota recruits gathered at the train depot to leave for Springfield on April 19, 1861. “People came flocking into town from all the surrounding country and villages, with flags flying, to see the soldiers start off for the war,” one young Mendota recruit recalled . “The streets were crowded with people who came to bid us the last goodbye. Flags were unfurled and speeches made in honor of our departure.”3 Eastern Connecticut men held a massive rally at the Windham County Courthouse in Brooklyn on April 22, 1861. Former Governor Chauncey F. Cleveland presided; he had prosecuted Prudence Crandall in the same courthouse twenty-eight years earlier. After numerous fiery speeches, more than sixty men volunteered for the army. William H. Chandler of Thompson offered a donation of five hundred dollars for the war effort, and others quickly followed. Those gathered pledged to “expend their last 15 : The Civil War The Civil War [ 269 ] dollar and exhaust the last drop of their blood ere they would submit to a disruption of the Nation.”4 The Civil War tested William Lloyd Garrison, who, on pacifist grounds, did not want his sons to participate. The sons of many abolitionists, however , did join the army. While neither Prudence Crandall Philleo nor her brother Hezekiah had sons who could serve in the war, many Crandall relatives volunteered for duty. George Washington Crandall of Pennsylvania enlisted in the army. George and Prudence Crandall shared the same great-great grandfather. When the war began in 1861, George was thirty-four years old; he and his wife, Mary, had four children. George rose to the rank of captain of the newly formed Company C of the One Hundred and Fifty-first Pennsylvania Volunteers and proceeded to the battlefields of Virginia.5 Emeline Philleo Goodwin, Prudence’s stepdaughter, closely followed the war. She had raised two daughters and two sons—LeBaron and Frank—while living in Massachusetts. When her husband died in 1845, Emeline sent seven-year-old LeBaron to Illinois to live with Prudence Crandall Philleo.6 LeBaron helped with the chores of the farm, learned lessons of finance and responsibility—Prudence and LeBaron had bought two horses together—and received a basic education from Prudence.7 Emeline and Prudence feared for the lives of LeBaron and Frank when both young men marched off to war. Most but not all of the Crandall relatives fought on the side of the Union. Henry E. Crandall had grown up in Palmyra, New York, near Rochester and Lake Ontario; he was related to both George Washington Crandall and Prudence Philleo. In his teens, Henry had learned the printing trade. Because of the poor economy in upstate New York, in 1853 he joined his brother in Tennessee and secured a job at the Memphis Appeal. When the Civil War began in 1861, Henry Crandall did not immediately volunteer for service, but as the war intensified he joined a Confederate cavalry company in 1862 to fight with the First Division of General Joseph Wheeler’s Cavalry Corps.8 He was twenty-nine. While traveling from Tennessee to Georgia, a Union soldier shot Henry’s horse out from under him, but Henry was not injured.9 In Alfred, New York, about one hundred miles south of Palmyra where Henry Crandall was born, lived another offshoot of the Crandall family. Alonzo Crandall was twenty-four years old when he enlisted in the Union [ 270 ] Prudence Crandall’s Legacy army. His regiment, the One Hundred and Thirty-sixth New York Volunteer Infantry, known...