Samuel Gridley Howe

American educator and social reformer

• Born: November 10, 1801
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: January 9, 1876
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Howe was a universal reformer who made his greatest contributions to the education of the blind, the deaf-blind, and the mentally disabled. His monumental efforts significantly enhanced social concern for persons with disabilities in the United States.

Early Life

Samuel Gridley Howe was the son of Joseph Howe and Patty Gridley Howe, both of old New England stock. His father was a cordage manufacturer and steadfast Jeffersonian Republican. A man of principle, as his son was to be, he accepted government bonds in payment for purchases during the War of 1812 and suffered serious financial losses. Samuel attended Boston Latin School and was frequently harassed for his father’s politics. The only one of three brothers to attend college, Samuel entered Brown, rather than Federalist-dominated Harvard, in 1817. Young Howe excelled at campus pranks, but his academic performance was mediocre. As a Unitarian among Baptists, Howe once again learned to appreciate the position of the underdog—a useful trait for a future philanthropist.

Being graduated in 1821, Howe enrolled at Harvard Medical School and began to apply himself, enjoying especially anatomy and dissection. After commencement, however, he decided against a traditional practice. Stirred by the Greek War of Independence, a popular cause of the time, Howe left for the Peloponnisos, arriving in early 1827. In Greece he played many roles with distinction. As a physician, he served Greek forces on land and sea. As the agent of American relief committees, he distributed emergency rations, briefly returning to the United States to raise additional funds. Once back in Greece, he developed and ran sizable work relief programs. For his exertions, Howe was knighted by the Greek king as a Chevalier of the Order of the Holy Savior. With the war all but over, Chev, as his friends now called him, returned to Boston in April, 1831. Tall, dark, and handsome, not yet sporting the beard of later years, Howe was a knight-errant seeking a new cause to uplift humanity.

Life’s Work

As luck would have it, the projected New England School for the Blind, incorporated in 1829, needed a director in order to become a reality; the trustees of the school offered Howe the job. Excited by the challenge, he accepted immediately and sailed for Europe to study current techniques for educating the blind. Howe soon became convinced that European efforts were either too intellectual or too mechanical. A more balanced curriculum, he believed, including physical education and greater encouragement of self-reliance, was required. After imprisonment in Prussia for assisting Polish refugees, Howe returned to Boston in July, 1832. During the following August, the first school for the blind in the nation opened its doors with seven students and three staff members.

As director, Howe tried to tailor the curriculum—reading, writing, mathematics, geography, music, physical education, and manual training—to the needs and abilities of the individual student. He fashioned letters of twine and glued them to cards for reading instruction; he invented an improved method of raised printing that significantly lowered costs of manufacture. (Braille was not yet in use.) Howe trooped his students before legislative committees and popular audiences to secure funds, went out into the country to recruit students, and traveled to other states to promote more schools for the blind. As a result of his strenuous activity, the school, renamed Perkins Institution, soon required larger quarters.

In 1837, Howe heard of Laura Bridgman, an eight-year-old who, at the age of two, had lost her sight and hearing through scarlet fever. Howe, who believed in phrenology and innate mental dispositions, was confident that the child could be taught, despite near-universal opinion that the deaf-blind were completely uneducable. He induced her parents to enroll Laura at Perkins.

For several tedious months, Howe tried to get Laura to match raised words with physical objects and make words of letters. Suddenly one day, Laura understood that here was a way to communicate her thoughts to other minds; her face “lighted up with a human expression.” This was the greatest single moment in Howe’s career. John Greenleaf Whittier proclaimed that Howe was “the Cadmus of the blind.” Charles Dickens, who met Laura Bridgman in 1842, lionized Howe’s accomplishment in American Notes (1842). Howe soon became a world-renowned figure.

Howe’s international stature certainly aided his election as a Whig to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in November, 1842. Though only a freshman legislator, he chaired the committee on public charities. Working closely with Dorothea Lynde Dix, Howe personally wrote the bill reforming care of the mentally ill, which passed by overwhelming margins in March, 1843.

In April, 1843, Howe married Julia Ward, who was of a prominent New York family. Their marriage was frequently tempestuous; their personalities did not mesh well. Prideful, demanding, and eighteen years her senior, Howe never approved of Julia’s literary aspirations. He normally placed his many reform interests ahead of his wife and his eventual family of six children.

After returning to work in September, 1844, after a European honeymoon, Howe immediately joined his friend Horace Mann, secretary of the state Board of Education, in a battle to reform the Boston grammar schools. In 1845, Howe turned to education of those with mental impairments, undertaking an extensive, two-year training program that he followed up with a comprehensive report to the legislature. Once again, the lawmakers followed his bidding and established in 1848 the Massachusetts School for the Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, another first in American history. Howe served as superintendent of that institution as well as of Perkins until his death in 1876.

Although Howe disapproved of slavery, he remained aloof from agitation until the admission of Texas drew him into the fray. During the Mexican War, Howe became a Conscience Whig, running unsuccessfully for Congress in 1846; in 1851, he helped orchestrate the election of his close friend Charles Sumner to the U.S. Senate. In response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Howe moved toward radical abolitionism.

In 1854, Howe was an organizer of both the New England Emigrant Aid Company and the Massachusetts Kansas Aid Committee, the latter formed to obtain guns for antislavery settlers. In January, 1857, John Brown visited Howe and other Boston supporters (the “Secret Six”), obtaining money from the committee and several token guns from Howe personally. In March, 1858, the group gave Brown additional funding to liberate slaves, a plan that culminated in the Harpers Ferry raid of October, 1859. When authorities uncovered Brown’s correspondence, Howe fled, panic-stricken, to Canada on the flimsy pretext that he was promoting education of the blind. Involvement of the nation’s foremost humanitarian in Brown’s scheme further unnerved the South and increased sectional tensions.

During the Civil War, Howe returned to less violent philanthropy. He helped to establish the United States Sanitary Commission in June, 1861, serving on its board for the duration. The commission made important recommendations for “preserving and restoring the health of the troops,” which doubtless reduced fatalities. Howe was also a member of the three-man American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission set up in 1863 to investigate the condition of free blacks and make proposals for their future welfare. The commission laid the foundations for the later Freedmen’s Bureau.

In 1863, Massachusetts governor John Andrew named Howe chairman of the new Massachusetts Board of State Charities, created to coordinate eleemosynary institutions and programs. After the war, Howe, who strongly disagreed with the sign language system used at the American Asylum in Hartford, sought a charter for a school for the deaf that would teach finger spelling and articulation. The legislature again complied, incorporating Clarke Institution at Northampton in 1867.

Although in declining health after the war, Howe embarked in 1871 on his last crusade. President Ulysses S. Grant, manipulated by speculators, favored annexing Santo Domingo. The Senate rejected the treaty, in part because of Charles Sumner’s virulent opposition, but Grant named an investigative commission in hopes of recouping support. Despite his long friendship with Sumner, Howe agreed to serve and after a visit to the island became converted to annexation. Howe apparently had hopes of concluding his career as a territorial governor who in philosopher-king fashion would reform Santo Domingo into a tropical paradise. Such dreams were doomed by continuing Senate opposition.

After the disappointing conclusion of the Dominican affair, Howe’s health steadily deteriorated. In constant pain and severely depressed, he collapsed on January 4, 1876, and died five days later. Several hours before the end, Laura Bridgman (symbolically on behalf of all those who had or would benefit from his tireless philanthropy) kissed the unconscious Howe farewell.

Significance

Samuel Gridley Howe lived in an optimistic age, in a city and state seething with the ferment of reform; not only was he in harmony with the spirit of his times, he was a symbol of the age as well. In those heady days, true heroism was seen by many as victory over social evil and human suffering. As the foremost philanthropist in the nation, Howe was, in the words of John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Hero.”

A Whig in politics and a Unitarian in religion, Howe was a Yankee elitist who accepted the essential goodness of God and humanity and the inevitability of progress. A nineteenth century romantic, Howe rejected John Locke’s concept of knowledge drawn solely from the five senses for belief in innate mental dispositions. This thinking as well as Howe’s emphasis on self-reliance was clearly in line with that of his friend Theodore Parker and other Transcendentalists. Like many other Americans of the era, Howe was also strongly influenced by phrenology. This pseudoscience (which posited a body-mind unity) maintained that a balanced education, both intellectual and physical, could influence cerebral growth and skull dimensions. Howe’s phrenological and vaguely Transcendentalist assumptions frequently guided his reform endeavors. His temporary obsession with the abolitionist movement during the 1850’s was typical of most antebellum reformers.

Howe was involved in many causes, but his major impact on American society was in his efforts for the education of people with disabilities. He firmly believed that most people with physical and mental disabilities could become independent and productive citizens. His refusal to accept traditional prejudices concerning the capabilities of the blind, the deaf-blind, the deaf, and the mentally impaired led him to found institutions and develop instructional strategies still important today. Howe’s most enduring legacy may be his creation of a continuing public consciousness that disabilities can be surmounted, that, in the words of his life motto, Obstacles Are Things to Be Overcome.

Bibliography

Brooks, Van Wyck. Flowering of New England, 1815-1865. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936. A scholarly, readable description of the intellectual environment within which Howe thrived. Howe is not discussed in detail, but many of his acquaintances, including Theodore Parker, are.

Clifford, Deborah P. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Biography of Julia Ward Howe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. A well-researched biography quite favorable to Mrs. Howe. It illuminates Howe’s stormy marriage and the more disagreeable aspects of his personality. For Howe, reform did not include the liberation of married women.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. London: Chapman and Hall, 1842. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Though frequently critical of things American, Dickens was extremely impressed by Howe’s work. He quotes extensively from Howe’s annual Reports to the Perkins trustees concerning the education of Laura Bridgman, a source not readily available to the interested reader.

Freeberg, Ernest. The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. One of two recent books about Howe’s relationship with Bridgman. Although Gitter (see below) provides more biographical information, Freeberg focuses on Howe’s specific methods for educating Bridgman, describing how he was influenced by Unitarianism and phrenology. Howe, Freeberg maintains, sought to make Bridgman’s education a model of “moral discipline” so he could gain greater insight into human nature.

Gitter, Elisabeth. The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Describes how and why Howe educated Bridgman, explaining the social, intellectual and cultural context in which Howe and Bridgman transformed public perception of people with multiple disabilities.

Lamson, Mary Swift. Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl. Boston: New England Publishing, 1878. Lamson was one of Laura’s teachers. She quotes extensively from her own journal, those of other teachers, and from Howe’s Reports. A very personal account, it reveals the difficulties of working with Howe.

Richard, Laura E. Laura Bridgman: The Story of an Opened Door. New York: D. Appleton, 1928. A full-length biography, written by Howe’s daughter, who was Laura Bridgman’s namesake. Strong on the relationship between Howe and Bridgman. Includes source materials not readily available.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe. 2 vols. Boston: Dana Estes, 1906. Collection contains excerpts from Howe’s letters, journals, and annual Reports, connected by a running commentary. The period to 1832 is accorded the same weight as the rest of Howe’s life. Despite such unevenness, this is the closest thing to a printed collection of Howe’s papers.

Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin. Dr. S. G. Howe: The Philanthropist. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1891. The first scholarly biography, still worth consulting. The author, one of the Secret Six, is laudatory, but the book contains extensive, frequently revealing quotations from original sources. Strong on the antislavery days.

Schwartz, Harold. Samuel Gridley Howe: Social Reformer, 1801-1876. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. Based on extensive research in the Howe manuscripts in Houghton Library at Harvard. Places Howe solidly in his intellectual and social milieu. Notes influence of phrenology. A very balanced work.