The Canterbury Female Academy, Prudence Crandall, and the Black Women Students
The abolitionist activism of the seven siblings, as well as their parents, emerged in the fulcrum of a famed school, the Canterbury Female Academy. Between April 1833 and September 1834, this educational venture featured a white woman as head teacher, Prudence Crandall, joined by her sister Almira, and two of the Burleigh siblings, William and Mary. In July of 1833 Charles C. Burleigh undertook to publish The Unionist, joined later by his brother William; this paper was started to provide a clear abolitionist voice in defense of the Canterbury Academy. It therefore became Connecticut's first Abolitionist newspaper.
Numerous local anti-slavery societies sprung up in support of the school. Mary and her mother Lydia joined the Brooklyn Female Anti-Slavery Society from its inaugural meeting in 1834, while John, Charles, William, and their father Rinaldo were all active in the Plainfield Anti-Slavery Society. William and Mary Burleigh were subject to the heinously racist Black Law that the Connecticut legislature had passed in an attempt to close Crandall's school. Mary testified in trials, while William was hounded by the white elite of Canterbury, who sought his arrest.
This signal event - which featured the work of women and men, Black and white - shaped the Burleigh family. Even the brothers who were too young to take an active part - Lucian, Cyrus, and George - all wrote about the Academy in their later years. For Charles and William, especially, their work during the Canterbury crisis became the bedrock of their antiracism and the touchstone for their careers. The Unionist was the only project on which these two outstanding brother-editors collaborated.
The Role of the Burleighs in Maintaining Local Memory of the Academy
Lucian Burleigh helped retain the memory of the contrasting religious responses to the students at the Canterbury Female Academy. He spoke often of the role played by Packerville Baptist Church - the church with which he was affiliated, that had ordained him an evangelist - in support of Crandall's Black women students, even indicating that this stance had made that church attractive to him even before he joined it formally:
"I remember that 'nigger pew' up at the corner of the gallery [at the Canterbury Congregationalist Church] — indeed two of them, one for colored males in one corner, and one for females in the other corner. It made an abolitionist of me when I saw a Christian church refuse the use of the unoccupied slips along side of the 'nigger-pew' to intelligent and well-behaved young ladies merely because they had colored blood in their veins; and I gave my voice for human rights, till by the stern arbitrament [sic] of war, Slavery went down in a sea of blood. I ever honored the church in Packerville, for opening their church doors to those wronged and abused pupils of the 'colored school'."
"At the close of the afternoon service, acting on the suggestion of Brother Burleigh that the beautiful flowers decorating the church be used to decorate the grave of our first pastor, Rev. Levi Kneeland, led by him the church members and many visiting friends went in procession, bearing the beautiful flowers and with deep emotion decorated the grave of the beloved and lamented Kneeland.
References
Allen B. Lincoln, editor. A Modern History of Windham County Connecticut: A Windham County Treasure Book (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1920), v. 1, p. 589.
Packerville Baptist Church, Records 1828-1928. Three Volumes. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, acquired 1933. Volume II: Obituaries 1848, 1849, 1865; Church Meetings 1849-1900; Ministers 1881-1885; Historical Sketches 1828-1878.
George Shepard Burleigh's contribution came near the end of the saga, when there was an effort to obtain a pension for Prudence Crandall in her old age. One of Burleigh's local friends and fellow temperance advocates, John Staples Smith, jump-started the initiative. The Connecticut assemblyman from Canterbury, Thomas G. Clarke, was related to the most dogged and unrepentant of Crandall's opponents, Andrew Judson. But Clarke, and white Canterbury as a whole, were repentant. Smith thought it would be an elegant idea to have the Canterbury petition composed by a bona fide poet from the same family as Crandall's most ardent defenders. And thus, fifty years after the Canterbury Female Academy came this petition, authored by George Burleigh:
PETITION OF CITIZENS OF CANTEBURY AND OTHERS FOR AID FOR MRS. PRUDENCE PHILLEO
HOUSE PETITION No. 48
January 20, 1886
Presented by: Canterbury’s State Representative, Thomas G. Clarke
Written by: George Burleigh of Plainfield
We the undersigned citizens of the State and of the town of Canterbury, mindful of the dark blot that rests upon our fair fame and name for the cruel outrages inflicted upon a former citizen of our Commonwealth, a noble Christian Woman (Miss Prudence Crandall, now Mrs. Philleo) at present in straightened [sic] circumstances and far advanced in years, respectfully pray your Honorable Body to make such late reparation for the wrong done her as your united wisdom, your love of justice and an honorable pride in the good name of our noble State, shall dictate.
It will be remembered that she stands in the Records of the Court as a convicted criminal for the offense of teaching colored girls to read and suffered unnumbered outrages in person and property for a benevolent work that now to its great honor the general government is joined in.
We respectfully suggest that you make a fair appropriation in her behalf which shall at once relieve her from any anxiety for the future and from the official stigma that rests upon her name and purge our own record from it’s [sic] last remaining stain in connection with the colored race.
And your petitioners will ever pray.
References
Rycenga, Jennifer. Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Female Academy for Black Women. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2025.
Rycenga, Jennifer. ““Be Ashamed of Nothing But Sin”: Prudence Crandall, Levi Kneeland, and Connecticut Baptists.” American Baptist Quarterly, 34:3-4 (Fall-Winter 2015): 324-342.
Strane, Susan. A Whole-Souled Woman: Prudence Crandall and the Education of Black Women. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990.
Rycenga, Jennifer; Nick Szydlowski; Sharesly Rodriquez. The Unionist Unified - website gathering all known content from The Unionist, as well as comments and criticisms of this first-ever Abolitionist newspaper in Connecticut.
Williams, Donald E. Prudence Crandall's Legacy: The Fight for Equality in the 1830s, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2014.
