CRAN'DALL ( PHILLEO ) , PRUDENCE ( 1303 901. An American educator and philanthropist. She was born at Hopkinton. H. I., of Quaker parentage; was educated at the Friends' School in Providence, H. T.; taught for a time at Plain field• Conn., and in 183] established a private school for girls in Canterbury. Early in 1833 she admitted a colored girl into the school, and thereby aroused the violent opposition of her neighl;ors. This led her to abandon her original plan, and to open her school unreservedly to "young ladies and little misses of color." Ac cordingly she issued an announcement to that effect iu the Liberator of March 2, and earl• in April received fifteen or twenty colored pupils. Her neighbors then began a systematic course of persecution, and endeavored by boycott, insult, and abuse, and by enforcement of an obsolete vagrancy law, to break up the school. Public meetings were called, petitions were circulated, and ou May 24 the celebrated 'Black Law' of Connectient was passed forbidding any one to "set up or establish in this State any school, academy, or literary institution for the instruc tion or education of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this State." or to instruct or
teach in any such school. For refusing to obey this law Miss Crandall was arrested, was im prisoned in the Canterbury jail, and in October was convicted, though the Court of Errors re versed the decision of the lower court on a teehnieality, in July, 1S34. Soon afterwards Miss Crandall's house was assaulted and partial ly destroyed. and she finally decided to abandon her project. The whole affair attracted much attention throughout the country and *erred to intensify the conflict between the abolitionist and anti-abolitionist elements among the North ern people. A short time after giving up her school Miss Crandall ma-rried the Rev. Calvin Philleo, and passed the rest of her life in New York, Illinois, and Kansas. Consult May, Recol lections of the Anti- Slavery Conflict (Boston, 1869).