Samuel June Barrows

• Samuel June Barrows
• Born: May 26,1845 April 21, 1909
• Died: 1909

Clergyman, journalist, and prison reformer, was born in New York City, the third son and third of four children of Richard Barrows and Jane (Weekes) Barrows. After his father’s early death, his mother supported herself and four children by making and selling boot polish. At the age of eight Barrows became an office boy in the factory of his father’s cousin Richard Hoe, inventor of the rotary press, where he worked ten hours a day and then attended night school. He learned telegraphy at twelve when Hoe’s friend Samuel F. B. Morse installed America’s first private telegraph wire in the Hoe factory. At eighteen Barrows became a self-taught stenographer. Reared a Baptist, he was known as the “boy preacher,” who roamed the docks urging sailors to repent. He became a Unitarian shortly after his majority.

Rejected by army doctors when he volunteered for the Civil War, due to an old eye injury and general infirmity from overwork, Barrows took a job at a Dansville, New York, sanitarium to regain his health. While there he met a young widow, Isabel Hayes Chapin, who was studying to become a medical missionary. They were married June 28, 1867, and she continued her medical studies while Barrows worked as a reporter on The New-York Tribune. In 1868 he became secretary to Secretary of State William H. Seward and remained in the State Department until 1871. For a time Barrows endured considerable privation so that his wife might study in Vienna for a year, specializing in diseases of the eye. She returned to become the first ophthalmologist in Washington, D.C., and a professor at the Howard University College of Medicine, also taking in students as boarders.

Isabel Barrows’s income enabled her husband to complete his own professional training, and in 1871 he enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School, receiving his bachelor of divinity degree in 1874. Throughout this time he worked intermittently for the Tribune, reporting on Louis Agassiz’s natural science lectures from Cambridge and serving during summers as a correspondent with the army fighting the Indian Wars on the Great Plains. In 1875-76 he went to Germany to study at the University of Leipzig, and in the autumn of 1876 became minister of the First Church in Dorchester, Massachusetts. In 1877-78 he edited the Unitarian Review and in 1880 resigned his pastorate to become editor of the Unitarian weekly, the Christian Register. This post, which he held until 1896, enabled him to travel widely and participate in a variety of reform movements and other activities that were generated by his religious convictions.

A staunch advocate of education for blacks and native Americans, Barrows was an early champion of Tuskegee Institute and a frequent participant at the annual Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian. He espoused temperance, woman suffrage, and international arbitration. He was a founder of the Massachusetts Prison Association and helped to develop the state’s probation system. An eager student of biblical and classical cultures, he wrote many magazine articles on Assyriology and mythology. While spending a year in Greece he helped the German archeologist Dörpfeld excavate what was then believed to be Homeric Troy. He was a gifted linguist who spoke French, German, and modern Greek, read Dutch and Portuguese, and at the time of his death was teaching himself Spanish. A good musician, he was a member of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston and the Oratorio Society in New York. He was a skilled worker in copper and brass and the fastest horseman in the Fifth Regiment, the Massachusetts militia of which he was chaplain for over a decade.

The last thirteen years of his life were the great period of Barrows’s public service, beginning with a single term in Congress, to which he was elected in 1896 (while on a trip abroad), a Republican in the heavily Democratic district of Massachusetts, to replace a corrupt incumbent. In Congress he got permission to send a relief ship to famine victims of India, opposed to the last minute the declaration of war against Spain, and worked for civil service reform and a probation system for federal prisoners. Appointed by President Grover Cleveland to the International Prison Commission, he represented the United States at congresses in Paris and Brussels, and in Budapest, where he was elected president of the commission in 1905. His fifteen reports to the commission are among the classics of penological literature.

From 1900, when he moved from Massachusetts to Staten Island, till his death Barrows worked for progressive penal legislation in New York State, as corresponding secretary of the New York Prison Association. He opposed capital punishment and supported the movements to establish juvenile courts, reformatories, and industrial schools. His last great fight was to make the county sheriffs office a salaried one, thus abolishing the notorious system whereby the income of sheriffs derived from fees paid by the state for prisoner maintenance. He drafted New York’s first probation law and helped push it through the legislature around 1901. His efforts helped to make New York a model for nationwide reform, and in 1907 he was asked to draft the penal code for the recently admitted state of Oklahoma.

For years Barrows was interested in the technical aspects of prisons, and as a member of New York’s Commission on New Prisons, charged with replacing the antiquated and disease-ridden Sing Sing, he visited eight European countries for advice and spent his last months laboring to get the highest standards adopted for the new jail. In this campaign, as in the fight against sheriffs’ fees, Barrows encountered entrenched political opposition from both parties; only after he died were these final battles won.

At the time of Barrows’s collapse and death from pneumonia, in New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital, his wife was on her way to Russia to beg for the release of a prominent female political prisoner. The couple had shared deep commitment to this cause and Barrows himself had made a similar trip. Knowing that her husband would wish it, Isabel Barrows completed her mission before returning to the United States.

Samuel Barrows was a man of genial temperament whose wrath was always directed against institutions rather than people. In spite of his heavy work schedule he found time to lead an active family life with his wife, his daughter Mabel Hay (born in 1873), and his wife’s nephew William Burnet (born in 1884), whom he adopted. Hundreds of friends and associates visited the family’s summer camp on Lake Memphremagog, in lower Quebec, where Barrows was known to the many children as Uncle June.

Barrows’s family life is treated in The Shaybacks in Camp (1887), of which he was coauthor with his wife. His theological writings are in the files of the Christian Register. Other writings included A Baptist Meeting House (1890); The Doom of the Majority of Mankind (1891); and The Isles and Shrines of Greece (1898). He was a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly, and in 1908 wrote a series on temperance for Outlook. His reports to the International Prison Commission were separately published. A Sunny Life (1913), a biography by I. C. Barrows, contains a full bibliography. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1943). C. R. Henderson, ed., Correction and Prevention, vol. 1 (1910) contains a biographical tribute by P. U. Kellogg.