The Manliest Man

Samuel G. Howe and the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform

James W. Trent

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781558499591, 9781558499584
• eBook ISBN: 9781613762318
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

A native of Boston and a physician by training, Samuel G. Howe (1801–1876) led a remarkable life. He was a veteran of the Greek War of Independence, a fervent abolitionist, and the founder of both the Perkins School for the Blind and the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Children. Married to Julia Ward Howe, author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," he counted among his friends Senator Charles Sumner, public school advocate Horace Mann, and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Always quick to refer to himself as a liberal, Howe embodied the American Renaissance's faith in the perfectibility of human beings, and he spoke out in favor of progressive services for disabled Americans. A Romantic figure even in his own day, he embraced a notion of manliness that included heroism under fire but also compassion for the underdog and the oppressed. Though hardly a man without flaws and failures, he nevertheless represented the optimism that characterized much of antebellum American reform.

The first full-length biography of Samuel G. Howe in more than fifty years, The Manliest Man explores his life through private letters and personal and public documents. It offers an original view of the reformer's personal life, his association with social causes of his time, and his efforts to shape those causes in ways that allowed for the greater inclusion of devalued people in the mainstream of American life.

CHAPTER ONE

“A Respectable, If Ordinary Boyhood”

On 22 November 1801, a Sabbath day at the Brattle Street Church in Boston, the Reverend Peter Thacher baptized the third son and fourth child of Joseph Neals How and Martha Gridley How. Named for his maternal grandfather, Samuel Gridley, the twelve-day-old boy born in his family’s Pleasant Street home had the dark black hair and blue eyes of his mother’s side of the family. In 1806, eight months before the boy’s fifth birthday, Joseph How petitioned a Massachusetts court to add an e to the end of the family name, changing its spelling to Howe. Among the ten children born to the Howes, seven lived to be adults. Some, like the oldest child, Joseph Neals Howe Jr., had the light reddish hair of their father, but most, like Samuel, had their mother’s dark hair. Besides his parents, the child’s paternal grandfather, Edward Compton How, and his second wife, Abigail Harris How, attended the service, as did his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Harris Gridley. His grandfather Samuel Gridley had died only a week before the boy’s birth. Likely also present on that Sabbath were some of the Brattle Street congregation’s prominent families. Nathan Hale, a nephew of the Revolutionary War hero, was a member, as were Amos and Abbott Lawrence, the textile manufacturers and their extended family and the families of the China trader Thomas H. Perkins and the businessman and politician Harrison Gray Otis.¹

Congregational since its founding in 1699, the Church in Brattle Street was known, even in 1801, as a theologically liberal church where reason and control blended with confidence in human nature. Thacher had led the congregation since 1784. In the early days of his ministry, he was known as “rigidly Calvinistic,” but he “gradually became more and more Arminian.” At Thacher’s funeral service in December 1802, the Reverend William Emerson, the father of Ralph Waldo and pastor of the First Church Boston, said of Thacher: “In the state he was the uniform and influential supporter of rational liberty. Equally a foe of licentiousness and oppression, he employed his talents as opportunity presented in defeating the machinations of the wicked, and supporting the measures of upright and consistent rulers.”²

The Reverend Joseph S. Buckminster, “the melodious preacher … who had read his Greek Testament at five,” assumed the congregation’s pastorate in 1804. Over the next decade, under Buckminster’s leadership the congregation moved toward Unitarianism. A gifted scholar and an able speaker, Buckminster died from epilepsy in 1812 at the age of twenty-eight. In that year his successor, the twenty-year-old Edward Everett—future Massachusetts governor, U.S. representative and senator, minister to Great Britain, and the “other” speaker at Gettysburg in 1863—guided the church just long enough to solidify its liberal direction before he sailed to Europe in 1815 to prepare for his appointment as professor of Greek at Harvard University. In Europe he met English and German Romantics and studied the classics at the University of Göttingen. The same day, 12 June 1815, that Everett and his traveling companion, George Ticknor, met with Lord Byron, the English Parliament heard Lord Elgin’s request for the purchase of (some would later claim, the theft of) the Greco-Roman statuary that would eventually bear Elgin’s name. Everett was a gifted preacher and orator; it was said that on more than one Sunday morning young Ralph Waldo Emerson would slip away from his father’s church to hear Everett preach at the Brattle Street Church. Everett, Samuel Howe’s pastor in his early adolescence, likely planted the seeds of classical Romanticism during Howe’s young life, and he would continue to influence Howe—sometimes in ways that led to contention—for the next forty years.³

Everett’s successor in 1818 was the twenty-one-year-old John Gorham Palfrey. Palfrey assumed his pastorate shortly after his graduation from Harvard Divinity School and, after 1825, took the Brattle Street Church, like many other Congregational churches in Boston, into formal Unitarianism. Like Everett, he influenced Howe in his adolescence. But because Palfrey and Howe later shared antislavery, free-soil loyalties, that influence never had contentious results. Palfrey’s face, according to Frank Gatell, “suggested his character, with blunt features and close-set eyes, indicating a forceful man of action (he would later be elected to Congress) and a high, broad forehead, indicating intellect and cultivation (he edited the North American Review).” Palfrey remained with the congregation until 1831 when, like Everett before him, he took an endowed chair at Harvard and eventually became the dean of the Harvard Divinity School. He was later elected to the U.S. Congress.⁴

The Brattle Street Church might have been known for its liberal theology, but the social standing of its membership hardly reflected broadmindedness. John Adams once quipped that the church was “the politest congregation in Boston.” It was polite because its membership was homogeneous in class and status. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the congregation claimed many of Boston’s wealthiest families and several of its most influential politicians. The theology, wealth, and influence, however, were not incompatible. Drawing on their Puritan ancestry, the members integrated their Calvinism with what they regarded as their Yankee ingenuity. They saw themselves as chosen, elect, and blessed but also rational, scientific, and self-confident. Their wealth reflected God’s affirmation not only of their salvation but also of their ingenuity. Even by 1801, the congregation’s Yankee initiative was displacing its Puritan traditions. So by the time that the Brattle Street Church formally identified itself with Unitarianism around 1826, it had rejected Calvinistic notions of predestination, original sin, and eternal damnation for the fallen. By rejecting this long-accepted wisdom, the church substituted the image of a loving and benevolent God who rewarded prudent people like the well-to-do members of the Brattle Street congregation. Nearly four decades later and long after his youthful enchantment with Edward Everett had ended, Ralph Waldo Emerson called their theology “the best diagonal line that can be drawn between Jesus Christ and Abbott Lawrence.”⁵

Samuel Howe’s father, Joseph Neals Howe, was unlike most of his Brattle Street Church contemporaries in that he was not a Federalist but a “Democratic Republican” who supported Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and President Madison’s War of 1812. Joseph’s father, Edward Compton How, had shown his revolutionary proclivities by participating in the Boston Tea Party as one of the “Indians.” And family legend held that the Howe radicalism went back to a distant relative, Elizabeth How of Ipswich, who had been hanged as a witch in 1692.

During James Madison’s second term of office, Joseph had become one of the vice presidents of the Boston Jeffersonian party, a position he would hold for a decade. On the day of Madison’s second inauguration, 4 March 1813, he celebrated the party’s victory at a public dinner at Boston’s Concert Hall with other prominent Democratic Republicans who raised their glasses in patriotic toasts and showed “rational conviviality, hilarity and glee … untarnished by the slightest infringement of decency or decorum.”⁶ That same year, Joseph Howe became a director of the Boston State Bank and a trustee of the Massachusetts Charitable Society and the Boston Humane Society—all institutions supported by Boston Jeffersonians. In January 1814, after a fire destroyed large sections of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he contributed two hundred dollars—a generous sum at that time—for the city’s relief. In 1819, when Samuel was seventeen years old, Joseph ran unsuccessfully for the Massachusetts legislature as a Jeffersonian anti-Federalist, and during the same year, he served as vice president of the Republican Institution, a group of Boston Jeffersonians who purchased a building to use as a political-social enclave for Democratic Republicans in Federalist Boston.⁷

The second decade of the nineteenth century was not a propitious time to be a Jeffersonian Republican in Boston. Although Massachusetts Republicans had secured the governorship and controlled the General Court in 1806, the embargo placed on shipping as a result of the war had incurred the wrath of Boston’s business interests, especially those associated with shipping. The ensuing economic downturn had caused a resurgence of the Federalist Party. By 1814 these frustrated Federalists were threatening state succession. Being an adolescent during much of this decade proved to be difficult for Samuel Howe. His children recalled Howe’s recounting stories about the abuse he received from his peers because of his family’s loyalty to the party of Jefferson and Madison.⁸

Though his politics were unusual for a man of his social standing in Boston, Joseph Howe’s occupation was ordinary. Like many other members of the Church in Brattle Street, he was a successful businessman. Following the trade of his father, Howe during his lifetime owned various rope-making businesses. Crucial to the shipping and trading ventures of early nineteenth-century New England, these businesses, known as rope walks, involved trade in hemp (the principal component of rope) and the manufacture of large and long ropes that secured and stabilized much of the nation’s merchant and military sailing vessels. The shipping business had always had its ups and downs, and since the years after the American Revolution, the rope-making businesses of Edward and Joseph Howe had experienced good and bad times. But the first decade of the new century had been a time of growth in commerce, in trade, and hence in rope making. By 1810, Joseph Howe controlled one of the largest cordage businesses in Boston. Nearly a decade later, he could boast the manufacturing of the USS Columbia‘s twenty-four-inch cable of one hundred fathoms in nine hours, and its successful laying up in ten minutes. With sales offices extending from Mouton Street to the Mystic River on the long wharf and manufacturing not far from the Howe home on Pleasant Street, the business made the Howe family not rich but certainly well-to-do.⁹

In an 1857 letter to Horace Mann, who at the time was the president of Antioch College, Samuel Howe described his boyhood. Mann, one of Howe’s closest and oldest friends, had asked Howe for biographical information for the New York educator Henry Bernard, who planned to do a piece about Howe for his American Journal of Education, and for Mann himself, who hoped to deliver a chapel sermon about Howe to his students at the new Ohio college. Howe had avoided the request for over a year, but Mann had persisted. In the letter, Howe says of his father: “He was wealthy during my childhood and boyhood, & I lacked that inestimable advantage which children in indigent families have of habits of prudence and economy. My father had a large and luxurious home, with servants, horses, etc., at command.”¹⁰

A member of one of Boston’s most prominent churches, a supporter of civic and philanthropic associations, and a successful businessman, Joseph Howe had also married prominently. Martha Gridley was nineteen years old when she married the twenty-two-year-old Joseph on 11 September 1794 at the Federal Street Church. The presiding minister was the socially prominent pastor and historian Jeremy Belknap. Her parents, Samuel and Elizabeth Harris Gridley, were delighted to have their daughter, whom they called Patty, married into the How family, whose revolutionary loyalties and business successes paralleled those of the Gridley family. Samuel Gridley had been a captain and an artillery commander with the Massachusetts colonial militia in its 16–17 June 1775 battle at Bunker Hill, and his brother Richard was an engineer who helped to fortify the colonists’ position in the same battle. A generation before the American Revolution, their ancestor Jeremy Gridley had been the attorney general of the royal province of Massachusetts Bay. As superintendent of the Boston Glass Manufactory, Martha’s paternal grandfather had prospered supplying window panes for Boston’s postwar housing boom.¹¹

Martha Gridley Howe died on 26 March 1819 at the age of forty-four, giving birth to her tenth child, who would die unnamed. Samuel Howe was then a junior at Brown University. Later, in an 1831 diary entry, he referred to his mother as “our sainted and ever beloved and lamented mother.”¹² When his father married Rebecca Thayer Calef of Milton in 1825, Samuel, in Greece at the time, resented the marriage as much for what he expressed as his father’s disloyalty to his mother’s memory as for what he saw as the bad treatment his stepmother was giving his younger sisters. What little information about Martha Gridley Howe survives suggests that her son Samuel grew to be more a Gridley than a Howe.¹³ Ironically, Samuel Howe disliked his middle name and never used it when signing his name. He became known as Samuel Gridley Howe only after his death when his widow, Julia Ward Howe, began the tradition of identifying him by all three names.

“I was an ordinary boy,” Howe says in his 1857 letter to Mann, “bashful to the last degree, fond of approbation, fond of adventure, given to fighting as the champion of smaller boys, though I think now, quite as much from the glory to myself, as the good of them.” He had, he says, “many mishaps, & hair breadth escapes from drowning, and from fire-arms,” adding, “I do not think I have any more than ordinary courage, though love of adventure carried me into many dangers. [I] have been habitually, and never-ceasingly aware of the presence of danger, & circumspect. I always have in mind the safest place … and am wary about getting into danger; though able to appear decently cool when it comes.”¹⁴ Even as a young man, Howe seems to have regarded manliness as a matter of reason and restraint of passions, as well as of daring and adventure.

Long after Howe’s death, Julia and the children recalled the stories Howe would tell about his youth. No doubt because they complemented his children’s image of a father who teased and “horsed around,” these tales of youthful adventure became family legend. Yet because they showed a different side of their “benevolent” father, the stories also became a source of contrast for the image of a serious philanthropist that much of his adult contemporaries insisted on making him. One story that his daughter Laura remembered his telling was of young Sam “running tiddledies,” a spring game that involved jumping among the loose ice sheets on Boston’s Back Bay (when it was still a bay). Boys would dare each other to exceed the number of “ice cakes” traversed by the previous contender. Determined to outdo the other boys, Sam Howe eventually slipped and landed in the cold water. Arriving at his father’s rope walk dripping wet and chilled from top to bottom, the boy got no sympathy from his father. The adult Samuel Howe would chuckle, inspiring great laughter in his children, as he repeated his father’s words, “Go home and tell your mother to whip you.” The story always ended with the statement, “I went home, but my mother never whipped me.”¹⁵

Howe felt that his early education had been poor. His father valued learning but beyond basic reading, writing, and ciphering had received little formal education. Howe wrote Mann about attending the Boston Latin School, where a cruel headmaster once threw him down steps onto School Street and where his family’s Jeffersonian sympathies left him a lone Republican among Federalists. In an address to the American Institute of Instruction at its 1842 annual meeting, Howe referred to his time at the Boston Latin School as “the period of my school imprisonment” and criticized the school’s teaching methods. He described a composition exercise to which, he said, “I looked forward in those days with fear and trembling, and upon which I now look back with mortification and regret.” And he recalled “standing up in a row” to read in unison words whose meaning was often unknown to him or to any other boy.¹⁶ Despite these memories, there is no indication in the records of the Boston Latin School that Howe ever attended the school. Perhaps, because of the intimidation and harsh treatment he describes, he attended for so short a time that that no record was made of his attendance.¹⁷

Howe spent a longer, more pleasant time at a college preparatory school run by the Reverend Joseph Richardson and his wife, Anne Bowers Richardson, in their home in Hingham, Massachusetts, south of Boston. In 1806, Joseph Richardson had succeeded the Reverend Henry Ware as pastor of the First Parish Church of Hingham. The previous year Ware had accepted the first Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard University. Richardson served the Hingham church until 1855 and died in 1871 at the age of ninety-three. He was a member of the Massachusetts General Court between 1821 and 1826, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served two terms. His contemporaries described him as “of a sanguine temperament, frank and decided in expression of his opinion.” Like many other clergymen of the time, Richardson supplemented his income by opening the school in his home. He and his wife had no children of their own, and so they took a keen interest in their pupils. Though not easily accessible, especially when heavy rains turned roads to mud, the Hingham school nevertheless attracted several Boston boys. Samuel attended the school with his younger brother Edward and about fifteen other boys.

Besides Latin and rudimentary algebra and geometry, the instruction Howe received at the school came from Richardson’s publication The American Reader, which first appeared in 1810, retail...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “A Respectable, If Ordinary Boyhood”
• 2. “Greece! Greece! … I thought no land … could ever look more sweetly”
• 3. “The Cadmus of the Blind”
• 4. A Phrenologist and a Superintendent
• 5. Private Lives, Public Causes
• 6. For Free Soil and Free Men
• 7. War, Freedmen, and Crete
• 8. Santo Domingo—the Perpetual Summer
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Back Cover