She opened her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in April, 1833, and was at once subjected to the bitterest persecution conceivable. It was all well enough to hold theories about the equal rights of all mankind; well enough to abuse the institution of slavery in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Georgia, or in Louisiana; but actually to start “a nigger school” in Canterbury, Connecticut, was monstrous. The town-meeting promptly voted to “petition for a law against the bringing of colored people from other towns and States for any purpose, and more especially for the purpose of dissemination of the principles and doctrines opposed to the benevolent colonization scheme.” “In May an act prohibiting private schools for non-resident colored persons, and providing for the expulsion of the latter, was procured from the legislature, amid the greatest rejoicings in Canterbury, even to the ringing of church-bells.” The most vindictive and inhuman measures were adopted against the offender; the shops and meeting-houses were closed against her and her pupils.[72] It was not at the South, but at Canaan, New Hampshire, that on August 10, 1835, the building of the Noyes Academy, open to pupils of both colors, in pursuance of a formal town-meeting vote that it be “removed,” was dragged by one hundred yoke of oxen from the land belonging to the corporation, and left on the common, three hundred yeomen of the county participating. The teacher and colored pupils were given a month in which to quit the town.[73] Throughout New England, less than thirty years before the promulgation of the emancipation proclamation abolitionists encountered not only opprobrium but violence. When George Thompson, the English abolitionist, went throughout the North in 1835, his windows were broken in Augusta, Maine, where a State anti-slavery convention was in progress, and a committee of citizens requested him to leave town immediately under pain of being mobbed if he reëntered the convention. At Concord, New Hampshire, he was interrupted with missiles while addressing a ladies’ meeting. At Lowell, Massachusetts, on his second visit, in the town hall a brick-bat thrown from without through the window narrowly escaped his head, and in spite of the manliness of the selectmen a meeting the next evening was abandoned in the certainty of fresh and deadly assaults.[74] It is stated in a letter from Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that Thompson had a narrow escape from the mob at Concord, and Whittier was pelted with mud and stones.[75] At a convention in Lynn, George Thompson was stoned. The next evening he was mobbed by three hundred men.