Saturday, March 31, 2018

Samuel Gridley Howe to Horace Mann, 1848

Sunday, —1848.

My Dear Mann: — I have been much exercised in spirit about your position, but conclude that you find it necessary to maintain it.

I can understand how poignant must be your grief at the thought of leaving the field of your labours; but without allowing myself to look back I see much in the future to console me.

I could not say anything last evening, for Charlie1 talks faster and better than I can. May it not be that you will do even more for the cause of education out of the office of Secretary2 than in it? Will not the moral effect of your unofficial labours be greater than that of your official ones? Can you not attain a position in which you will bring even more official influence to bear upon your favourite subject?

Should you, as you may, put yourself at the head of the great anti-slavery (not abolition)3 party which is growing up here, you can become Governor or anything else that you aspire to. It is true that you will aspire to nothing but what will give you greater means of usefulness, but that very disinterestedness will promote your high ends. It appears to me that you should in the very outset, in the letter to the committee of nomination, take the high ground you will afterwards maintain.

It is absurd for me to reach up from my littleness to tender counsel to one so high as you, but my love for you is as great as though we stood face to face.

You can afford to trample all doctrines of expediency, all trimming, all manœuvering, all tactics under foot. If you have one fault it is over caution; you are not reliant enough upon your own powers, — and upon the power of the earnest, honest, noble purposes of your mind. I hope you will throw all calculations about effect to the winds, and speak right out to the electors what your heart prompts you. I hope you will not, as Sumner advises, try to write a letter to disarm the liberty party, but one that ought to do so whether it is likely to do so or not.

Oh! 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.

I believe you can write a letter that will ring through this land like a clarion, and proclaim that a champion is entering the political arena with vizor up and with no other arms than truth and honesty and courage. I know you will do so. I only want to warn you against the over activity of your caution. You are too much afraid of the Devil and his imps; you do not rely enough upon your own generous and high impulses. Believe me, you need no armour and should fear no open assaults or secret ambuscades.

However, I need not write any more; all I have said is nothing worth except to show you that I am ever and most sincerely yours.

S. G. Howe.
_______________

1 Charles Sumner.

2 Of the Board of Education

1 At this time the opponents of slavery formed two distinct parties, the Abolitionists, headed by Garrison and Phillips, who refused to vote or take office under a Constitution sanctioning slavery, and the more moderate Anti-slavery Party, who, working for the same end, the emancipation of the negro, believed that they could best do so by taking part in politics and working with the tools already provided.

SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 256-8

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