By Jennifer Rycenga and Nick Szydlowski

The saga of Prudence Crandall, principal of the Canterbury Female Academy, and the intrepid Black students who, despite legal attacks and vigilante violence, attended the school in 1833–1834 is a fascinating chapter in Connecticut history. The 31 Black students and their 4 white teachers persisted in learning together, and in doing so, they garnered the sympathy of many in the North. As they withstood stones through the windows and epithets in the street, their actions were amplified by Connecticut’s first newspaper to call for immediate abolition. This newspaper, The Unionist, was established amid the Canterbury crisis, providing a vital account of the time. The Unionist Unified, a digital humanities website that seeks to restore a complete version of The Unionist, brings this forgotten piece of journalism into the light.

A few months after the Canterbury Female Academy reopened in April 1833, some of Crandall’s allies realized that the local newspapers’ bias against the school created the false perception that the public was unanimously opposed to it. The best way to break the media monopoly, they believed, was to launch a newspaper of their own. Wealthy New York City abolitionist Arthur Tappan agreed to fund the venture. Samuel J. May, a local abolitionist leader, Unitarian minister, and strong school supporter, knew just the man to be editor.

Charles Calistus Burleigh of Plainfield was chosen to lead The Unionist. His father, Rinaldo, was a teacher, and Charles had studied law in Massachusetts and dabbled in anti-Masonic journalism. But it was only through his association with the controversial academy in Canterbury that Charles launched a long career as one of the most stalwart speakers and editors in the immediate abolition movement. His long-haired appearance always drew attention, but the logic of his arguments against oppression won the day.

Those who study Connecticut’s Canterbury tale are familiar with The Unionist and how it evoked public sympathy for Crandall and the school’s students. However, only five complete issues of The Unionist have survived. There are bits and pieces of The Unionist scattered in other newspapers that reprinted its eyewitness coverage of the Canterbury kerfuffle. The Unionist Unified project aims to combine these excerpts with the extant issues to fill in our picture of the academy and The Unionist itself. (The many recent projects digitizing 19th-century newspapers facilitated finding such reprints; while The Unionist would become a popular moniker for newspapers during and after the Civil War, only one newspaper was so named in 1833–1834!)

William Henry Burleigh (1812-1871), co-editor of The Unionist and co-teacher with Prudence Crandall at the Canterbury Female Academy. Undated photograph from the 1840s, included in Bowen’s History of Woodstock Connecticut, v. 1 p. 377.

This bronze statue by New York Artist Gabriel Loren depicts Prudence Crandall and one of her students. Located in Connecticut State Capitol, it was dedicated in October 2008. photo: Elizabeth J. Normen

Making The Unionist Unified into a collection approximating a museum exhibit preserves the integrity and order of each issue, providing photographs of every page of the extant issues and interpolating the reprints. Users can peruse the site guided by their questions and interests: a reader can digest all content in chronological order, look for themes, or search by the name of a single individual. Another key feature of The Unionist Unified is its infinite expandability if and when additional reprints or issues of The Unionist are found. Adding materials as they become available demonstrates the democratization of knowledge. As Lydia Maria Child, the great white abolitionist, wrote in An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, “Of all monopolies, a monopoly of knowledge is the worst. Let it be as active as the ocean—as free as the wind—as universal as sun-beams!” (Allen and Ticknor, 1833; emphasis in the original)

Method

Crowdsourced projects like The Unionist Unified use new technologies to provide opportunities for public interaction with repositories of knowledge. To have performed the same reconstruction in print would be tedious, even for scholars accustomed to dusty tomes. By putting the restoration of The Unionist into a digital framework, with visuals for context and searchable text, we have enabled users of every type to do everything from garnering highly specific information (“Was my ancestor involved in this struggle?”) to taking a general browse through the history of this time and place (“What sort of merchants advertised in an abolitionist newspaper?”). We also invite readers to inform us of discoveries of The Unionist content that can fit into the puzzle.

The masthead for the April 10, 1834 issue of The Unionist. Note that it lists William Burleigh as a co-editor, and includes the ending – and thus the acquittal – of Frederick Olney.

Bringing history online is never straightforward. We used an approach sometimes called “minimal computing.” In their 2022 Digital Humanities Quarterly article, “The Questions of Minimal Computing” (vol. 16, no. 2), Roopika Risam and Alex Gil write that this approach uses “only the technologies that are necessary and sufficient” for a particular project (emphasis in the original). Going minimal has several advantages, but one of its most alluring promises is increasing the chance that the project can be preserved and used in the future. Producing a web project with fewer “moving parts” typically means eliminating external dependencies and making sure there is as little as possible going on behind the scenes. Think of the difference between a manual Foley food mill and a smart blender you control with your phone—the fewer moving parts, the fewer things that can break.

We used software called Wax, a tool for creating digital exhibits based on minimal principles. Wax is an extension of another popular tool called Jekyll, which generates static websites. A static website does not require a database or other software to run in the background. If a typical website is like a theatrical production, supported by elaborate stagecraft, a static site is more like a traveling troupe of actors—it is easy to pack up and move to a new location so that the show can go on.

This minimal approach to technology did not dictate any particular approach to the graphic design of The Unionist Unified. Indeed, this project takes advantage of the visual nature of the web by pairing visual material and text. Every article in The Unionist is accompanied by at least one image that provides context, commentary, or, in some cases, humor. The search for appropriate images to illustrate an article about a famous person or an advertisement for a book or periodical was straightforward. But what to do with jokes or poems? These selections provide a flavor of the era and opportunities for visual whimsy (and even the occasional 21st-century meme). For instance, it seems something approximating the dad joke existed in the 1830s, given this wordplay published in The Unionist: “Can a leopard change his spots?—Yes, if he does not like one spot, he can go to another.” We illustrated this with a 21st-century equivalent.

Embracing Wax and a minimal approach made it easier for the project team to implement the pairing of images and text, allowing the project to proceed at pace from its inception in early 2022 to launch in May 2023. San José State University celebrated the launch with a continent-spanning virtual event, where speakers such as Lou Turner from the University of Illinois and Joan DiMartino, curator of the Prudence Crandall Museum in Canterbury, joined the project team to provide their perspectives on The Unionist.

Highlights and Opportunities

Everything in The Unionist is primary material for scholars and students of Crandall’s academy. In her forthcoming book Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Academy for Black Women (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Jennifer Rycenga, coauthor of this article, argues that the saga of the Canterbury school is an event of primary importance in American history because it integrated Black women’s initiative, white women’s response to that initiative, and the able cooperation of Black and white abolitionist men in supporting women. In a tale with particular resonance for today, the abolitionists had to figure out how to communicate across lines of race, gender, class, age, religion, and politics. The Canterbury incident was one time when they succeeded, and The Unionist shows how they did so through a combination of philosophical reflection, clear rhetoric, adaptability, mutual support, and willingness to listen and learn from one another.

Among the most important findings in the pages of The Unionist concerns the trial of Frederick Olney, a Black man who lived in New London but often visited the Canterbury Female Academy and was friends with many of the students, their families, and Crandall’s endorsers. In January 1834, he was fortuitously present when someone attempted to set fire to the schoolhouse. He led the successful efforts to suppress the blaze but then was arrested for having set the fire! There was no evidence to support this outrageous charge, and the all-white jury quickly acquitted him. The trial transcripts in The Unionist illustrate the bravery of the Black students, staff, friends, and family, as well as the courage of the white teachers, lending an illuminating dimension to this story of structural racism in the criminal justice system from the distant past. One of the students, Amy Fenner, presented key testimony. After detecting smoke, she asked Olney, “What is the matter? What does this mean? She pointed Olney to the corner of the room—he put down his ear, and said he heard it roar—then immediately called for an axe—witness was very much scared.” Despite her well-founded fear, Fenner remained steadfast in her testimony under cross-examination.

Sarah Harris Fayerweather (1812-1878), the first African-American student who asked to be admitted to Crandall’s school, in an undated photograph from 1860-70s, courtesy of Prudence Crandall Museum Collections, Department of Economic and Community Development, State of Connecticut.

Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. (1786-1840) was one of the Black clergymen who endorsed Prudence Crandall’s Academy, and was a friend to Frederick Olney. Courtesy of New York Public Library (1232094).

We can conclude that the Canterbury students were reading The Unionist because, according to Elizabeth McHenry in Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Duke University Press, 2002), it was an established practice in Black schools to use abolitionist journalism as reading material. Students were reading the latest in nonviolent theory in the works of the English Quaker philosopher Jonathan Dymond, whose writing is featured as a front-page article, and watching the story of their academy unfold on The Unionist’s pages.

In this, they were joined by The Unionist coeditor, William Henry Burleigh. He taught at the academy with Crandall, her sister Almira, and his sister Mary Frances Burleigh. His everyday contact with the academy’s students confirmed his antiracist convictions, and he impressed the students with the consistency of his ideals. The pages of The Unionist include the story of how white authorities and vigilantes in Canterbury decided to target him during the last few months of the school’s life. He was pelted with rotten eggs and arrested for defying Connecticut’s 1833 Black Law, which required a town’s permission to allow a school to educate out-of-state Black students.

After The Unionist, Burleigh edited newspapers and poetry anthologies for antislavery and other reform causes in Schenectady, Pittsburgh, New York City, and Washington, DC. His most notable editorial task, however, was in the 1840s when he coedited The Charter Oak—the newspaper of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society—along with his youngest brother, the abolitionist and transcendentalist poet George Shepherd Burleigh. Thus, The Unionist was the genesis of much of Connecticut’s abolitionist journalism and the place where the Burleigh brothers first learned the power—and the drudgery—of editing a radical newspaper.

Conclusion

The Unionist Unified capitalizes on the unique opportunities of the digital age to make the precious manuscripts of The Unionist more widely available. This digital humanities project incorporates a cornucopia of all things Crandall, including the reading material for the Black students at the Canterbury Female Academy, the dramatic courtroom story of Frederick Olney’s acquittal, and the launch of the Burleigh family’s antislavery careers—soon to be chronicled in a companion digital project.

Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), Abolitionist author who supported Crandall, photograph of her reading, c. 1860–70. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-54178)

While some, both at the time and later, tried to dismiss the Canterbury academy as a publicity stunt by the abolitionists, The Unionist Unified enables us to understand The Unionist at a granular level and evaluate its accomplishments on its own terms. The project thus becomes another contribution to preserving the tapestry of the past. We are working on a puzzle, fully aware that many pieces are missing, yet hoping more will be discovered. We are proud to have launched this approximation of the whole picture. The Unionist Unified is an example of searching together for historic gems—especially ones related to marginalized people. Lifting these stories to visibility is something we owe to our past—and our future, too.

Jennifer Rycenga is professor emerita of comparative religious studies and humanities at San José State University. Nick Szydlowski is the digital scholarship librarian at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library at San José State University.

Learn More!

Jennifer Rycenga, Nick Szydlowski, and Sharesly Rodriquez, The Unionist Unified: Connecticut’s First Immediate Abolitionist Newspaper, sjsu-library.github.io/unionist. To trace the course of the Frederick Olney trial, place his name in the search function; the transcripts from his trial are included in the March 13 and April 10, 1834, issues.