thorough a Quaker to regard the request of
bitter prejudice on the part of her other patrons to dismiss her
coloured pupil. But she did not wait for them to execute their threat to
withdraw their children. She sent them home. Then she advertised her
school as a boarding-school for young ladies of colour. The people felt
insulted, and held indignation meetings and appointed committees to
remonstrate with her. But she stood to her principles regardless of
their remonstrance. The excitement in that town ran high. A town meeting
was called to devise means to remove the nuisance.... Miss Crandall
opened her school against the protest of an indignant populace. Another
town meeting was called at which it was resolved, 'That the
establishment of a rendezvous, falsely denominated a school, was
designed by its projectors as the theatre to promulgate their disgusting
theory of amalgamation, and their pernicious sentiments of subverting
the Union. These pupils were to have been congregated here from all
quarters under the false pretence of educating them, but really to
scatter firebrands, arrows and death among brethren of our own blood.'"

In the darkest days the above would appear to reflect the popular
sentiment in regard to negro education even in the Northern States,
although there were still thousands of persons to be found who had no
manner of sympathy with such views. Neither the teacher nor her coloured
pupils were allowed to attend the ordinary religious service at the
Congregational Church; her parents were forbidden to visit Miss
Crandall; she was threatened with arrest as a criminal; her windows and
doors were destroyed with crowbars, and the house was set on fire. The
school had to be given up; but the example of the heroic teacher had not
been in vain. As Laura Haviland remarks, "her name became a household
word in thousands of Northern homes." A similar revolution for the
better will surely be brought about in the Southern States also, and is
even now in progress. We can hardly doubt that after some further
progress has been made there will be nothing within their power that the
good old families of the South will not do for the negroes when they
find that the coloured race is amenable to civilising influences, and
that commercially they will well repay for all the money and trouble
that may be expended upon them. At the outset of this reformation this
must have been the hope of General Armstrong; and it would seem