The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe and the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform

5. Private Lives, Public Causes

119 CHAPTER FIVE Private Lives, Public Causes In 1842 Samuel Howe’s closest friend was Horace Mann. The two men had known each other since they were both students at Brown University, where Mann had been the studious older tutor, and Howe (at least for the first few years) the ill-behaved undergraduate. After medical school and his years in Greece, Howe had renewed his acquaintance with Mann through their common interest in the blind school. Mann had been a legislative sponsor of the school’s charter in 1829 and one of its first trustees. By the early 1840s they had extended their friendship through their mutual support for the humane treatment of insane people, and for public school and prison reform. Working together for improvement, Howe, the physician organizer , and Mann, the attorney legislator and since 1837 the secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, made an effective team for social reform. Howe acknowledged to Mann, “I owe you much, very much—your influence & your example have gone very far towards forming what few & humble aspirations for true usefulness & real nobility I may have, & I’ll strive not to disappoint you & disgrace myself by ‘butterflying’ it before I have wings.”1 Besides Mann, Howe’s oldest acquaintance and dearest friend was the young lawyer Charles Sumner. Born, along with a twin sister, Matilda, in 1811, Sumner was a child of an ordinary, hard-working but not particularly prosperous Boston family. In 1826, his father, for whom he was named, was appointed sheriff of Suffolk County, the county in which Boston resides, allowing him the wherewithal to send Charles to Harvard University. Studious like Mann, Sumner was nevertheless not as outgoing as Howe’s older friend, and he was more given to self-doubt and worry. Howe and Sumner remembered first meeting when each man was drawn to the Broad Street riot on 11 and 12 June 1837. On that warm late spring day that followed by a month the start of the economic Panic of 1837, Protestant volunteer firefighters ( 120 Chapter Five coming from a fire in Roxbury confronted a march of Irish Catholic funeral mourners in the heart of the city. Before the day was over, fifteen thousand Bostonians had taken part in the riot, forcing Mayor Samuel A. Eliot to call for the state militia to halt the mayhem. Besides Howe and Sumner, Robert Winthrop, Abbott Lawrence, Josiah Quincy Jr., and Sumner’s father were among the group of citizens who attempted to stop the riot before the state militia arrived. Howe and Sumner deplored the growing hostility that native Protestant Bostonians were developing for Irish Catholics, whose numbers were increasing rapidly because of their immigration into the city. Howe and Sumner, along with their friend Horace Mann, would come to view the Broad Street riot as a foreshadowing of the vice, corruption, and irrational passion that threatened the social and moral stability of Boston society.2 Later that year, Sumner went to Europe, where for nearly three years he studied law and toured the continent, learning languages, meeting literary and political figures, and establishing himself among Europeans as an Horace Mann (ca. 1850). Library of Congress. 121 Private Lives, Public Causes exceptionally well-read and urbane American. On his return to the United States in 1840, he renewed his friendship with Howe, with his appointment to the board of trustees of the Perkins Institution and their mutual association with the Five of Clubs.3 In June 1841 Sumner described Howe to Francis Lieber, the German expatriate and their mutual friend: “He is the soul of disinterestedness. He has purged his soul from all consideration of self, so far as [a] mortal may do this; and his sympathies embrace all creatures. To this highest feature of goodness add intelligence and experience of no common order—all elevated and refined by a chivalrous sense of honor, and a mind without fear. . . . Both [of us] have been wanderers and both are bachelors, so we are together a good deal; we drive fast and hard, and talk—looking at the blossoms in the fields, or those fairer in the streets.”4 The Five of Clubs was actually made up of six members. Probably the founding member was the gregarious and shrewd professor of classical literaCharles Sumner (ca. 1860). Library of Congress. 122 Chapter Five ture and later president of Harvard University Cornelius (“Corny”) Conway Felton. Felton had known the second...