ment 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.

Seeing how matters stood with her in these circumstances, Prudence
Crandall conceived the remarka