The school, however, was never established owing to the violent hostility of the citizens, who with the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council resolved in public meeting to “resist the establishment of the proposed college in this place by every lawful means.”

The free people of color were derided because of their ignorance by their persecutors, but when they and their friends proposed a plan to reduce that ignorance, their persecutors bitterly opposed its execution.  New Haven piety and philanthropy, as embodied in the Colonization Society, were not bent on the education of this class but on its emigration to the coast of Africa solely.  In such sorry contradictions and cruelties did American prejudice against color involve American Christianity and humanity.

This outrage was perpetrated in 1831.  Two years afterward Connecticut enacted altogether the most shameful crime in her history.  There lived in the year 1833, in the town of Canterbury, in that State, an accomplished young Quaker woman, named Prudence Crandall.  Besides a superior education, she possessed the highest character.  And this was well; for she was the principal of the Female Boarding School located in that town.  The institution was, in 1833, at the beginning of its third year, and in a flourishing condition.  While pursuing her vocation of a teacher, Miss Crandall made the acquaintance of the Liberator through a “nice colored girl,” who was at service in the school.  Abhorring slavery from childhood, it is no wonder that the earnestness of the Liberator exerted an immediate and lasting influence upon the sympathies of the young principal.  The more she read and the more she thought upon the subject the more aroused she became to the wrongs of which her race was guilty to the colored people.  She, too, would lend them a helping hand in their need.  Presently there came to her a colored girl who was thirsting for an education such as the Canterbury Boarding School for young ladies was dispensing to white girls.  This was Miss Crandall’s opportunity to do something for the colored people, and she admitted the girl to her classes.  But she had no sooner done so than there were angry objections to the girl’s remaining.

“The wife of an Episcopal clergyman who lived in the village,” Miss Crandall records, “told me that if I continued that colored girl in my school it would not be sustained.”

She heroically refused to turn the colored pupil out of the school, and thereby caused a most extraordinary exhibition of Connecticut chivalry and Christianity.