Goldsborough Sappington Griffith

• Goldsborough Sappington Griffith
• Born: November 4, 1814
• Died: February 24, 1904

Prison reformer and philanthropist, was born near Havre-de-Grace, Maryland, the only child of James Griffith, a soldier in the War of 1812, and Sarah (Cox) Griffith. He was less then a year old when his father died from exposure while serving in the field. His mother remarried and had several more children, and in 1826 the family moved to Baltimore.

At the age of twelve Goldsborough Griffith took a job in the tobacco manufacturing industry to provide financial support for his family. He disliked the work, and after a few months quit and became a wallpaper hanger. He was a shrewd businessman and saved his money, so that by the age of twenty-one he was a partner in an upholstery and wallpaper hanging business. Several years later he was able to buy his partner out and become sole owner. In 1854 he sold this business and concentrated his energies on a carpet warehouse he had purchased several years earlier.

Commercial activities occupied only a small portion of his time, and he devoted much of his energy and money to numerous philanthropic and religious organizations. He married Elizabeth Durst, daughter of Swiss immigrants, on May 30, 1839. They had no children. Elizabeth Griffith was a member of the German Reform Church, and after the wedding Goldsborough Griffith became an active member of that church. He was selected as the American delegate to the Evangelical Alliance conventions in L beck, Germany, in 1856 and Berlin in 1857. Griffith became an elder in the First Reformed Church of Baltimore and represented his church at local, state, and general synods. He also taught Sunday school and in 1863 helped to reorganize the Maryland Sunday School Union, serving as its president for more than thirty-one years. During his time in office he set up over 1,500 Sunday schools, many of them for black youths, and in 1881 he was a delegate to the International Sunday School Convention in London. Additionally, he was the manager of the Maryland Tract Society; a member of the Board of Foreign Missions and the Board of Home Missions of the Potomac Synod; and president of the Board of Publications of the Reformed Church of the United States.

When the Civil War began, Griffith was the main organizer of the Baltimore Christian Association (established in May 1861) and was chosen president; this association was created to care for the religious and material welfare of wounded and ill soldiers, both Union and Confederate, in the border state of Maryland. The following November the association became part of the United States Christian Commission. For the next four years Griffith worked to provide medical supplies, clothes, food, and religious instruction to more than 60,000 soldiers. After the war he helped to form the Maryland Union Commission, serving as its president; this group assisted thousands of refugees in Maryland and worked to reconstruct the devastated South.

Goldsborough Griffith’s most notable work was in penal reform, and he was one of America’s first professional penologists. His religious work took him into Maryland’s prisons in the year 1834. He became convinced that prisoners could be reformed and educated to reenter society as useful citizens. To further the goal of rehabilitation, he worked for such reforms as the establishment of prison schools and libraries; a program of industrial activities wherein prisoners would be employed in useful work; the building of new prisons to relieve overcrowding and improve sanitary and living conditions; central inspection and control of state prisons; liberal mail privileges; separate facilities for the mentally disturbed; a commutation system; and parole boards.

Griffith organized the first American prison Sunday school in 1859. The following year, with two other leading citizens of Baltimore, he founded a children’s aid society, whose aims were to prevent delinquent children from becoming hardened criminals and to care for homeless children. Griffith was also responsible for the establishment of the Maryland’s Prison Aid Association in 1869 and was chosen its first president. For the association he toured and inspected the state’s penal facilities. He publicly criticized abuses, including poor hygiene, lack of exercise facilities, and poor food, and he worked for the passage of state legislation to rectify these problems, especially to relieve overcrowding, and to cut the costs of running prisons. He also founded the Maryland House of Correction and the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Boys. By 1899, largely as a result of his efforts, Maryland had one of the best prison systems in the country.

Griffith traveled extensively in the southern United States, examining prison conditions. He became a member of the board of directors of the National Prison Association, which had been organized in 1870, and was Maryland’s delegate to many national and international prison conferences, including those held in London in 1872 and Stockholm in 1877. He also toured Europe, inspecting prisons and charitable institutions, and was a corresponding member of the Société Générale des Prisons de France and the Howard Association in London.

Griffith was an active worker in the temperance movement and a member of the YMCA. Additionally, he helped to establish the Union Orphan Asylum, the Society for the Protection of Children from Cruelty and Immorality, the Asylum and Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, and the Industrial School for Colored Girls.

Despite his limited formal education, most of which had been acquired as an adult at night and Sunday schools, Griffith frequently contributed articles on prison reform, church issues, and temperance to Baltimore newspapers and to religious journals. He published several pamphlets, including Arguments on the Contract Labor System and the Reformation of Convicts (187?) and Report on the Penal and Reformatory Institutions of the State of Maryland (1872).

During his lifetime he gave more than $200,-000 from his personal income to charities. Griffith continued to work until his death at the age of eighty-nine in Baltimore.

Goldsborough Griffith’s writings include The Prison Systems of the South (1897). There is no modern biography; his life must be pieced together from various sources. The most detailed accounts are to be found in the sketches in the Dictionary of American Biography (1931); the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography; and G. H. Nock, The Story of a Great Life (n.d.). See also Biographical Cyclopaedia of Representative Men of Maryland and the District of Columbia (1879) and J. T. Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County (1881). For his prison work see B. McKelvey, American Prisons: A Study in American Social History Prior to 1915 (1968). Obituaries appeared in The Baltimore Sun and the Baltimore American, February 25, 1904.