Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/352

 

 Prudence Crandall—Eloquent Reformers—Petitions for Suffrage—The Committee's Report—Frances Ellen Burr—Isabella Beecher Hooker's Reminiscences—Anna Dickinson in the Republican Campaign—State Society Formed, October 28, 29, 1869—Enthusiastic Convention in Hartford—Governor Marshall Jewell—He Recommends More Liberal Laws for Women—Society Formed in New Haven, 1871—Governor Hubbard's Inaugural, 1877—Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican—Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford, Chaplain, 1870—John Hooker, esq., Champions the Suffrage Movement.

Connecticut has always been celebrated for its puritanical theology, political conservatism and rigid social customs, it was nevertheless the scene of some of the most hotly contested of the anti-slavery battles. While its leading clergymen and statesmen stoutly maintained the letter of the old creeds and constitutions, the Burleighs, the Mays, and the Crandalls strove to illustrate the true spirit of religion and republicanism in their daily lives by "remembering those that were in bonds as bound with them."

The example of one glorious woman like Prudence Crandall, who suffered shameful persecutions in establishing a school for colored girls at Canterbury, in 1833, should have been sufficient to rouse every woman in Connecticut to some thought on the basic principles of the government and religion of the country. Yet we have no record of any woman in that State publicly sustaining her in that grand enterprise, though no doubt her heroism gave fresh inspiration to the sermons of Samuel J. May, then preaching in the village of Brooklyn, and the speeches and poems of the two eloquent reformers, Charles C. and William H. Burleigh. The words and deeds of these and other great souls, though seeming to slumber for many years, gave birth at last to new demands for another class of outraged citizens. Thus liberty is ever born of the hateful spirit of persecution. One question of reform settled forever by the civil war, the initiative for the next was soon