Howe, Samuel G.

Born: 1801-11-10 Boston, Massachusetts

Died: 1876-01-09 Boston, Massachusetts

Flourished: Boston, Massachusetts

Samuel G. Howe, physician, educator, reformer, and abolitionist, graduated from Brown University in 1821, and earned a medical degree from Harvard University three years later. Howe briefly practiced medicine in his native Boston before travelling to Greece to participate in the Greek war of independence. Following his return to Boston in 1831, he accepted the directorship of what became the Perkins Institute for the Blind and was an early leader in efforts to establish formal education for blind people in the United States. Howe subsequently worked to improve education for deaf people and people with mental disabilities. Among other reform efforts, Howe was involved in the anti-slavery movement. Howe and his wife, Julia Ward Howe, were editors of abolitionist newspaper The Commonwealth (Boston) from 1851 to 1853. He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was a leader in the Kansas Free-Soil movement, serving as chairman of the Boston Aid for Kansas Committee. He attended the 1856 convention in Buffalo, New York which established the National Kansas Committee, and was appointed general financial agent for the organization. Howe was one of the so-called “Secret Six” who financially supported and raised funds for John Brown. After Brown’s 1858 raid on Harper’s Ferry, Howe testified before a committee of the U.S. Congress that he had known nothing about the raid before it occurred, and he escaped prosecution. During the Civil War Howe campaigned for emancipation, called for the creation of a bureau of emancipation, and served in 1863 on the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission to study the situation of formerly enslaved people. In politics, Howe was first a Whig and was elected as such to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1842. Four years later, he was a reluctant candidate for the Free Soil Party or “conscience Whigs” for the U.S. House of Representatives. Upon the dissolution of the Whig Party, he was active in the organization of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s. Samuel G. Howe and Julia Ward married in 1843 and the pair had six children.

Kenneth Stuckey, “Howe, Samuel Gridley,” American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11:342-43; Harold Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe: Social Reformer, 1801-1876 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), esp. 100, 160-63, 221-46, 256-67; Historical Catalogue of Brown University, 1764-1914 (Springfield, MA: F. A. Bassette, 1914), 104; Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Harvard University, 1636-1890 (Cambridge, MA: University Press, 1890), 220; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ward 6, Boston, Suffolk County, MA, 423; Ralph Volney Harlow, “The Rise and Fall of the Kansas Aid Movement,” The American Historical Review 41 (October 1935), 15, 16, 19; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Ward 12, Boston, Suffolk County, MA, 84; The Boston Daily Globe (MA), 10 January 1876, 4:2; Boston Evening Transcript (MA), 10 January 1856, 4:2; Gravestone, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Middlesex County, MA.