Seeing how matters stood with her in these circumstances, Prudence Crandall conceived the remarkable purpose of devoting her school to the education of colored girls exclusively.  She did not know whether her idea was practicable, and so in her perplexity she turned for counsel to the editor of the Liberator.  She went to Boston for this purpose, and there, at the old Marlboro’ Hotel, on Washington street, on the evening of January 29, 1833, she discussed this business with Mr. Garrison.  This visit and interview confirmed the brave soul in her desire to change her school into one for the higher education of colored girls.  It was expected that a sufficient number of such pupils could be obtained from well-to-do colored families in cities like Boston, Providence, and New York to assure the financial success of the enterprise.  When Miss Crandall had fully matured her plans in the premises she announced them to the Canterbury public.  But if she had announced that she contemplated opening a college for the spread of contagious diseases among her townspeople, Canterbury could not possibly have been more agitated and horrified.  Every door in the village was slammed in her face.  She was denounced in town meetings, and there was not chivalry enough to cause a single neighbor to speak in her defence.  Samuel J. May had to come from an adjoining town for this purpose.  “But,” says Mr. May, “they would not hear me.  They shut their ears and rushed upon me with threats of personal violence.”

As there was nothing in the statutes of Connecticut which made the holding of such a school as that of Miss Crandall’s illegal, the good Canterbury folk procured the passage of a hasty act through the Legislature, which was then in session, “making it a penal offence, punishable by fine and imprisonment, for any one in that State keeping a school to take as his or her pupils the children of colored people of other States.”  But the heart of the young Quaker woman was the heart of a heroine.  She dared to disregard the wicked law, was arrested, bound over for trial, and sent to jail like a common malefactor.  It was no use, persecution could not cow the noble prisoner into submission to the infamous statute.  In her emergency truth raised up friends who rallied about her in the unparalleled contest which raged around her person and her school.  There was no meanness or maliciousness to which her enemies did not stoop to crush and ruin her and her cause.  “The newspapers of the county and of the adjoining counties teemed with the grossest misrepresentations, and the vilest insinuations,” says Mr. May, “against Miss Crandall, her pupils, and her patrons; but for the most part, peremptorily refused us any room in their columns to explain our principles and purposes, or to refute the slanders they were circulating.”  Four or five times within two years she was forced into court to defend her acts against the determined malignity of men who stood high in the Connecticut Church and State.