Howe

second wife and other liberals and, it is reported,
by the careful study of James Yates's Vindi-
cation of Unitarianism (1816). Howe's first
wife died in 1811, leaving two children. In Octo-
tober 1813 he married Sarah Lydia Robbins,
the daughter of Lieutenant-Governor Edward
Hutchinson Robbins of Milton, Mass,, by whom
he had five children.

[Rufus Ellis, Memoir of the Hon. Samuel Howe
(1850) ; Susan I. Lesley, Memoir of the Life of Mrs.
Anne Jean Lyman (1876) ; Isaac Parker, Address to
the Bar of the County of Suffolk at a Meeting . . . for
the Memory of the Late Hon. Samuel Howe (1828);
J. M. Williams, Sketch of the Character of the Late
Hon. Samuel Howe, Delivered at the Opening of the
Court of Common Pleas (1828); D. W. Howe, Howe
Geneals. , . . John Howe of Sudbury and Marlborough,
Mass. (1929); the Christian Examiner, May-June
1828.] L.C.H,

HOWE, SAMUEL GRIDLEY (Nov. 10,
i8oi~Jan. 9,1876), champion of peoples and per-
sons laboring under disability, was born in Bos-
ton, Mass., to sturdy, middle-class parents. He
was a descendant of Abraham How or Howe
who settled in Roxbury, Mass., about 1637. His
mother, handsome Patty Gridley, came from a
martial family. Through her he probably inherited
his love of adventure and his soldierly bearing,
as well as his beauty of person. His father, Jo-
seph Neals Howe, was notably businesslike and
frugal. Deciding to send but one son to college,
he chose Sam. because he read aloud the best
from the big family Bible; and Brown Univer-
sity, because it was less under Federalist influ-
ence than Harvard. The boy graduated in 1821,
being more noted for pranks and penalties than
for scholarship. He had, however, according to
a college contemporary, a mind that was quick,
versatile, and inventive, and he saw intuitively
and at a glance what should be done (Julia Ward
Howe, Memoir, post, p. 83). In 1824 he re-
ceived the degree of M.D. from Harvard. Be-
ing allured by the romantic appeal of Greece,
then battling against the Turk, like a crusader
he set sail for that land, where, as fighter in its
guerrilla warfare, surgeon in its fleet, and helper
in reconstructing its devastated country and in
ministering to its suffering people, he spent six
adventurous years, during one of which he
rushed home to plead for help and went back
with a shipload of food and clothing. These sup-
plies he distributed wisely, giving them outright
to the feeble, but requiring the able-bodied to
earn them through labor on public works. This
procedure was the index of his future career; his
chivalric zeal had become practical. His idea of
real charity then and always was far in advance
of his time and, together with much else that was
momentous and permanently useful in his later

Howe

life, seemed to spring full-fledged from his active
and original brain.

Meanwhile, in 1829, Massachusetts had incor-
porated a school for the blind and in 1831 Howe
was engaged to open it and carry it on. He went
again to Europe and inspected such schools there.
Incidentally, for bringing American aid and
comfort to Polish refugees in Prussia, he was
held six weeks in prison, secretly, and under har-
rowing conditions which profoundly affected
him and explain some things in his after career.
Returning home, he started the school (August
1832) in his father's house, with six pupils. He
is said to have gone about at first blindfolded, the
better to comprehend their situation. Having
trained them by instrumentalities created by
himself and according to his maxim, "Obstacles
are things to be overcome/' he exhibited their
accomplishments, thereby obtaining funds and
the gift of the Perkins mansion, whence the name
Perkins Institution was derived. Never there-
after did he fail to win friends to his cause or
money for his work and for the embossing of his
books, which were in the "Boston line" (Roman
letter) or "Howe" type. He showed the world
that the young blind both could and should be
brought up to be economically and socially com-
petent. His annual reports—philosophic com-
mon-sense put into clear, pure, and forcible lan-
guage—were widely read. Succeeding educators
must needs recur to them for re-inspiration.
Horace Mann, one of his board of trustees, al-
lowed himself to say in 1841: "I would rather
have built up the Blind Asylum than have writ-
ten Hamlet" (Letters and Journals of Samuel
Gridley Howe, post, II, 107). In the forty-four
years of Dr. Howe's directorship of his school
he visited seventeen states in behalf of the edu-
cation of the blind, and in the 1870*8 he gener-
ously released several of his best teachers to
further the American principles of training, then
being introduced under Francis Joseph Camp-
bell [q.vJ] in London. He awakened the deaf-
blind child, Laura Bridgman, to communication
with others, educating her to usefulness and hap-
piness—at that time an astounding achievement
which, done in the face of general disbelief, be-
came of vast importance to human psychology,
education, and hopefulness.

His knight-errantry was extended into many
fields. He supported Horace Mann in his fight
for better public schools and for normal schools;
promoted the use of articulation and of the oral,
as against the sign method, for instructing the
deaf; so pioneered in behalf of the care and
training of children then called idiots that Dr.
Walter K Fernald, one of his successors at the

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