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9 CHAPTER ONE “A Respectable, If Ordinary Boyhood” On 22 November 1801, a Sabbath day at the Brattle Street Church in Boston, the Reverend Peter Thacher baptized the third son and fourth child of Joseph Neals How and Martha Gridley How. Named for his maternal grandfather, Samuel Gridley, the twelve-day-old boy born in his family’s Pleasant Street home had the dark black hair and blue eyes of his mother’s side of the family. In 1806, eight months before the boy’s fifth birthday, Joseph How petitioned a Massachusetts court to add an e to the end of the family name, changing its spelling to Howe. Among the ten children born to the Howes, seven lived to be adults. Some, like the oldest child, Joseph Neals Howe Jr., had the light reddish hair of their father, but most, like Samuel, had their mother’s dark hair. Besides his parents, the child’s paternal grandfather, Edward Compton How, and his second wife, Abigail Harris How, attended the service, as did his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Harris Gridley. His grandfather Samuel Gridley had died only a week before the boy’s birth. Likely also present on that Sabbath were some of the Brattle Street congregation’s prominent families . Nathan Hale, a nephew of the Revolutionary War hero, was a member, as were Amos and Abbott Lawrence, the textile manufacturers and their extended family and the families of the China trader Thomas H. Perkins and the businessman and politician Harrison Gray Otis.1 Congregational since its founding in 1699, the Church in Brattle Street was known, even in 1801, as a theologically liberal church where reason and control blended with confidence in human nature. Thacher had led the congregation since 1784. In the early days of his ministry, he was known as “rigidly Calvinistic,” but he “gradually became more and more Arminian.” At Thacher’s funeral service in December 1802, the Reverend William Emerson , the father of Ralph Waldo and pastor of the First Church Boston, said of Thacher: “In the state he was the uniform and influential supporter of rational liberty. Equally a foe of licentiousness and oppression, he employed ( 10 Chapter One his talents as opportunity presented in defeating the machinations of the wicked, and supporting the measures of upright and consistent rulers.”2 The Reverend Joseph S. Buckminster, “the melodious preacher . . . who had read his Greek Testament at five,” assumed the congregation’s pastorate in 1804. Over the next decade, under Buckminster’s leadership the congregation moved toward Unitarianism. A gifted scholar and an able speaker, Buckminster died from epilepsy in 1812 at the age of twenty-eight. In that year his successor, the twenty-year-old Edward Everett—future Massachusetts governor, U.S. representative and senator, minister to Great Britain, and the “other” speaker at Gettysburg in 1863—guided the church just long enough to solidify its liberal direction before he sailed to Europe in 1815 to prepare for his appointment as professor of Greek at Harvard University. In Europe he met English and German Romantics and studied the classics at the University of Göttingen. The same day, 12 June 1815, that Everett and his traveling companion, George Ticknor, met with Lord Byron, the English Parliament heard Lord Elgin’s request for the purchase of (some would later claim, the theft of) the Greco-Roman statuary that would eventually bear Elgin’s name. Everett was a gifted preacher and orator; it was said that on more than one Sunday morning young Ralph Waldo Emerson would slip away from his father’s church to hear Everett preach at the Brattle Street Church. Everett, Samuel Howe’s pastor in his early adolescence, likely planted the seeds of classical Romanticism during Howe’s young life, and he would continue to influence Howe—sometimes in ways that led to contention—for the next forty years.3 Everett’s successor in 1818 was the twenty-one-year-old John Gorham Palfrey. Palfrey assumed his pastorate shortly after his graduation from Harvard Divinity School and, after 1825, took the Brattle Street Church, like many other Congregational churches in Boston, into formal Unitarianism. Like Everett, he influenced Howe in his adolescence. But because Palfrey and Howe later shared antislavery, free-soil loyalties, that influence never had contentious results. Palfrey’s face, according to Frank Gatell, “suggested his character, with blunt features and close-set eyes, indicating a forceful man of action (he would later be elected to Congress) and a high, broad forehead...

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