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

13 Family Trials and Tragedies

[ 226 ] O ne of Prudence Crandall’s students, Julia Williams , refused to let go of her dream of obtaining an education.1 Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, Julia’s family lived in Boston and knew William Lloyd Garrison. After Crandall’s school closed, Julia traveled to Canaan, New Hampshire. Two months before the final attack on Crandall’s school, friends of Prudence Crandall and William Lloyd Garrison successfully petitioned the New Hampshire legislature to grant a charter for a school. Inspired by Crandall, the trustees agreed that the school “should be open to all pupils without distinction of color.”2 The supporters of Noyes Academy, named for local farmer and Revolutionary War veteran Samuel Noyes, included David Lee Child of Boston; Rev. Samuel H. Cox, the minister of the Laight Street Presbyterian Church of New York; and attorney Samuel Sewall of Boston. Julia Williams enrolled at Noyes Academy. She joined twenty-eight white men, fourteen black men, and by the end of October 1834, twenty women scholars.3 At Noyes, Julia met Henry Highland Garnet, another black student. Henry’s family had escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1824 when he was nine years old. Julia and Henry later married in Troy, New York, in 1848. Both led activist lives; Julia taught black children in Boston and Jamaica and attended numerous antislavery conventions; Henry became a prominent black minister and abolitionist, and he published a new edition of David Walker’s Appeal with a biographical sketch of Walker based on information Garnet had obtained from a conversation with Walker’s widow.4 Garnet wrote that “there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood.”5 Garnet’s time at Noyes Academy helped him under13 : Family Trials and Tragedies Family Trials and Tragedies [ 227 ] stand the depth of the racism that existed in the North; for Julia Williams, Noyes repeated her experience at Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury . The townspeople in Canaan did not react well to the newly integrated school. They held a town meeting and resolved that blacks must not mix “with our own free white population.”6 They opposed equality for blacks “for the purpose of having Black Presidents, Black Governors, Black Representatives, (and) Black Judges . . .”7 The Noyes trustees responded by asking, “What greater punishment can there be, what greater degradation, than to deprive the soul of its proper sustenance, the knowledge of divine and human things?”8 At dawn on Monday, August 10, 1835, men led teams of oxen and wagons filled with chains to Noyes Academy. The men tore down a fence that surrounded the school. Other men attached chains to the school building and the teams of oxen and attempted to pull the building off its foundation and onto wooden runners. The first few attempts succeeded only in breaking the chains and tiring the animals. After doubling and redoubling the chains, they succeeded in pulling the school building onto the runners , and “ninety-five yoke of cattle” dragged the building into the street, where they left it until the next day.9 On Tuesday, the men returned with larger cables and pulled the building down the road to the town common. Henry Highland Garnet and two of his black classmates, Thomas S. Sidney and Alexander Crummell, retreated to a local boarding house. Garnet obtained a shotgun and barricaded himself and his friends in his room.When someone rode past the boardinghouse and fired a single shot, Garnet returned fire with a shotgun blast.10 The shot injured no one, and the black students quickly left Canaan. The Boston Daily Atlas compared Noyes Academy to Prudence Crandall’s school and condemned any attempt to introduce “a more free and intimate intercourse between the white and black population.”11 Two years after Noyes Academy closed, Henry Highland Garnet returned to Canaan to speak at the Congregational Church. Many townspeople , including some who had opposed the school, apologized to Garnet .12 In 1839 the abandoned building—a shuttered reminder of Canaan’s stand against equal rights for blacks—burned to the ground. The years immediately following the closure of Prudence Crandall’s Canterbury school were not kind to the Crandall family. Prudence and Calvin Philleo moved to Boonville, New York, in 1835. Calvin’s younger [ 228 ] Prudence Crandall’s Legacy brother, Bonaparte, a doctor, lived there and helped lead local temperance and antislavery efforts.13 The economy in Boonville, a remote...