Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

It was a matter of accident that the blind should have engrossed Howe’s attention earlier than the feeble-minded, for whom he began his labors in 1846, and for whom a State school was, through his efforts, established in Massachusetts, in 1852. This institution was quite as exclusively Howe’s creation as was the School for the Blind, and over it also he extended his domestic influence. “He passed like light through the rooms. Charley Smith, gentlest of fifty-year-old children, would leave his wooden horse to run to him. They loved him, the children whom he had rescued from worse than death. When he died they grieved for him after their fashion, and among all the tributes to his memory, none was more touching than theirs: ‘He will take care of the blind in heaven. Won’t he take care of us too?’”

It is not because of any one thing that he has done or said that Howe is important. It is because he was by nature endowed with an unconscious, spontaneous vision of truth in regard to the defective classes. When dealing with them, he sees society as a whole and these classes as parts of it. He saw that the whole of society must be used in order to work out this problem. The state and the individual, the influence of Christ and the value of money; in fact all social factors are, in Howe’s mind, viewed as elements in that solid mesh and transparent unity of suffering force—humanity. When he deals with an institution, or a theory of criminal reform, he deals with it as an agent of the invisible. It is to him no more than a device or a symbol. Now, when we remember that he was, above all things, a practical man, a man of means to ends, a man of experience and of the counting house, we are prepared to realize the magnitude of his intellect.

It was, however, only when Howe was thinking and scheming over the fate of the dependent classes that his mind worked in this transcendent way. In other matters he was an ordinary man, a man of headaches and irritability, a man of doubts and errors.

I know of nothing that so marks the inscrutability of human nature as does the history of Dr. Howe’s relation to the slavery question. That question had been in active eruption ever since 1830. Dr. Howe, one of the most sensitive philanthropists known to history, lived in daily contact with the question for many years before he became effectively interested. Here was a dependent class indeed—the slaves: here was a question of human suffering compared to which the sorrows of his deaf-mutes and half idiots were trifling accidents, the inevitable percentage of pain that fringes all civilization. Compared to the horrors of slavery the evils which excited Dr. Howe’s compassion were imperceptible. Hardly ever have more telling exhibitions been unrolled before benevolent people than those which were within the daily repertory of the abolitionists, after Garrison had begun his work. Nevertheless, for Dr. Howe the hour had not yet struck.

At last he became drawn into the slavery question and, in fact, almost killed himself over it. There remains a great difference, however, between his slavery work and his other work. When it comes to slavery, Dr. Howe’s devotion is the same, his labors are the same; but his genius is not the same. It was not given to any man to understand the slavery question in the way that Howe understood the cause of the blind or the idiotic. Indeed, slavery was not a question, but a condition, an atmosphere, a thing so close and clinging, so inherent and ingrown that, like the shirt of Nessus, it brought the flesh with it when it was removed. Poor or great, sinner or saint, every man stood on an equality before the moral problems of slavery, and underwent either conversion or corruption when the wave smote him.

It was not until 1846 that Dr. Howe’s conversion took place. For seventeen years the abolitionists had been dancing like dervishes before him; and as late as February 3, 1846, he wrote a note declining Dr. H. I. Bowditch’s invitation to an anti-slavery meeting, in such terms of polite deprecation as might have been employed by George Ticknor:—“My duties at home will prevent my joining you at eleven o’clock....

“I carefully cultivate my few social relations with slave-holders, because I find I can do so, and yet say to them undisguisedly that slavery is the great mistake, as well as the great sin of the age. Now, do what they may, they cannot prevent such words from a friend making some impression upon their hearts, which are as hard as millstones to denunciations from an enemy. It is not enmity and force, but love and reason, that are to be used in the coming strife.”...

Then comes a sudden illumination, a break, a discovery, a cry of anguish, and the curse of slavery has leaped like a wild-cat upon the conscience of Dr. Howe. He runs up and down with pain:—“Indeed, I for one can say that I would rather be in the place of the victim whom they are at this moment sending away into bondage—I would rather be in his place than in theirs! Ay! through the rest of my earthly life I would rather be a driven slave upon a Louisiana plantation than roll in their wealth and bear the burden of their guilt.”... “I feel as though I had swallowed a pepper corn, when I think that no one dares to be made a martyr of in the cause of humanity.”... “Government must be regarded as a divine institution! Ay! and so must right and justice be regarded as divine institutions; older, more sacred, more imperative; and when they clash, let the first be as the potsherd against the granite.”... “O! for a man among our leaders who fears neither God, man nor devil, but loves and trusts the first so much as to fear nothing but what casts a veil over the face of truth. We must have done with expediency; we must cease to look into history, into precedents, into books for rules of action, and look only into the honest and high purposes of our own hearts; that is, when we are sure we have cast out the evil passions from them.”... “Would to God I could begin my life again or even begin a new one from this moment, and go upon the ground that no fault or error or shortcoming should ever be covered up from my own eyes or those of others.”...

His words, just quoted, are the words of a prophet; and yet he was destined, in practical politics, to become an adherent of half-measures, and a make-weight for self-seekers. It was as the result of one of the fugitive slave cases and in the year 1846 that Dr. Howe became immersed in the anti-slavery cause. He helped to edit the “Commonwealth,” the organ of the Conscience Whigs: he ran for office, and he became the head of a vigilance committee, whose activity continued down to the outbreak of the war. Now, as everyone knows, vigilance committees are called into being in cases when law has broken down. The object of such committees is to do things which are necessary, but illegal; hence their doings are secret. It was one of the strange features of the life of that period that the most beautiful natures of the age, the most tender, the most unselfish, the most romantic, felt called upon to do violent, lawless and bloody work. To threaten bad men with condign punishment, to organize the rescue of prisoners, to condone theft, perjury and manslaughter when committed by their own partisans—such were the duties of a vigilance committee.