Fighting for Freedom and Reform in Nineteenth-Century America

On July 9^th, 1861, the wife of noted poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow accidentally set her dress on fire. Her husband suffered burns as he rushed to his wife's assistance. Fanny died the following day, shortly before their eighteenth wedding anniversary. In The Manliest Man, James W. Trent Jr. recounts this tragic incident in order to illuminate why Samuel Gridley Howe, a renowned reformer and close friend of the Longfellow family, was so committed to improving society. Fanny's death and Henry's grief led Howe to muse on the brevity of life. Each human being, he wrote, passes quickly from the world stage: "the individual actors disappear & are of no account, but the great drama of life goes on . . . while we are as nothing." Rather than despair about this fact, Howe asserted that people must "live & work that others may be happier & better for what we have done" (p. 229).

The first scholarly biography of Howe published in many decades,¹ Trent's book makes excellent use of his subject's letters, journals, and published writings. Chronologically organized, this work weaves together the multiple strands of Howe's life to present a man who was relentless in his quest to improve the world. Howe's optimism about the perfectibility of humanity, rooted in his Unitarian faith, drove him to support all kinds of reform endeavors. He is now best remembered for his establishment of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston in 1832. There he mentored his most famous student, the blind and deaf Laura Bridgman. Howe also pioneered in educating the mentally disabled, founding in 1848 the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth. He also participated in the temperance, antislavery, and prison reform movements and campaigned against capital and corporal punishments.

Howe also supported various European independence movements, viewing them as struggles for liberty. A physician by training, he fought for Greek independence from Ottoman rule. In the mid-1820s Howe was a surgeon to the Greek fleet and later participated in efforts to rebuild postwar Greece. He also supported the liberation struggles of the Polish and Hungarian peoples. In the latter half of the 1860s, he aided Crete rebels seeking independence from Turkey.

Discussion of such multifaceted activism can be a daunting task. Fortunately Trent offers a coherent, compelling story of Howe's work. He persuasively argues that one overarching goal fueled his subject's participation in seemingly disparate reforms: a commitment to nurturing the abilities and defending the rights of all humans, including the disabled and enslaved. Although Trent obviously admires Howe, he has not written a hagiographic portrait of him. The Manliest Man includes thorough explorations of Howe's periodic failures to live up to his own professed commitment to human rights.

Trent highlights this theme when he discusses Howe's mistreatment of his wife Julia, a noted reformer in her own right and author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Samuel resented his wife's public activism, including her work on behalf of women's suffrage, a goal he professed to support. Like most conventional Victorian husbands, Howe wanted a wife whose life revolved around her husband and children. He bristled with anger and resentment when she left the sphere of domesticity prescribed for genteel women in antebellum America. In one October 1868 letter to Julia, for example, he claimed that her public speaking blighted his heart, shamed their family, and raised questions about the paternity of their children. Samuel invoked the memory of their dead son to convince Julia to restrain her "passion" and "indulgence" for public activism (p. 253).

Howe could be an insensitive reformer as well as an overbearing husband. He often failed to appreciate the aspirations of many of the groups he sought to help. His commitment to integrating the disabled into the mainstream of society, for example, led him to oppose deaf people's use of...