Congressman Horace Mann, March 1, 1851

NEW YORK, March 1, 1851.

I had a call this morning from a man who wishes to get a grant from Government, and so he is civil to me. It gave me just the feeling I used to have at the selfish civilities of many Boston men, when I was in our Legislature, who used to coax and pet and flatter me, and tell me what fine speeches I made, and make me dine, and force me to drink their wine (for I had not then the full grace of a teetotaler); but as soon as I left that presidency, and became an educationist, they knew me no longer.

The ice on the Susquehanna seemed perfectly strong, and I was not afraid to go where I saw the baggage-cars go. I wished you could have been clairvoyant enough to see me when I stepped on the hither shore; but we suffer in this life for our short-sightedness.

SYRACUSE. — I trust you will now be at ease about me; for here I am in Mr. May's home, and I am to remain here until Monday. He came to the hotel yesterday morning, and, like a true Hopkinsian theologian, made his free grace irresistible, and took me up here. He has a beautiful place, — as beautiful as ours: so I feel quite restored to old comforts again.

We had about ten speeches, and at least six of them were very brilliant. There was an air of boldness, of defiance even, against the crime, and its abettors and promoters, which augurs well for the cause.

Neal Dow, the moral Columbus, was there, — a small, innocent-looking, modest man of middle age, who looks as though he must have felt infinitely surprised, when, as Byron says, he waked up one morning, and found himself famous.

A mighty audience last night, I was told, — not less than five thousand people. I had only a music-stand to put my lecture upon, and was obliged to stand one side of it, a rascally arrangement! Had I not had your plain handwriting, I could not have got along at all: so I thought of you continually, as you helped every sentence out of my mouth. I think of that cough of George's. Do I hear it? or is it imagination?

The temperance camp is all astir. I have just been invited to deliver another temperance lecture before I leave the city.

Dear H. and G., — did I hear my little boys speaking last night with singing voices like birds, and showing glad eyes and smiling faces? or was it a dream?

SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 347-8

Congressman Horace Mann to Reverend Samuel J. May, August 4, 1851

WEST NEWTON, Aug. 4, 1851.

REV. S. J. MAY, — . . . Webster has debauched the country, not only on the subject of slavery, but of all decency and truth. Well, I have no doubt who will come out right ten years hence.

Very truly yours, &c.,

H. MANN.

SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 350

Congressman Horace Mann to Reverend Samuel Joseph May, September 21, 1850

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 1850.

MY DEAR SIR,— . . . You have seen how Websterism overrides everything in Boston. A large portion of the voters in my district belong in Boston, and have no sympathies or interests but in Boston, and only come out into the country to sleep and vote. They are exciting an opposition to me, to the extent of their influence and Webster's money. Were it not for this, I should long ago have positively declined to be a candidate again. The posture of affairs may compel me to withhold the execution of this purpose. . . . I have no heart to write a word on the course of things in Congress this session. The slaveholders have overthrown principles, and put them to rout as Napoleon did armies.

Yours very truly,

HORACE MANN.

SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 331-2

Samuel Gridley Howe to Congressman Horace Mann, May 30, 1852

Boston, May 30th, 1852.

My Dear Mann: — I was equally surprised and disappointed by hearing of your Hegira (to Washington). I was in hopes of seeing you and talking with you fully about your plans. I have a sort of conviction that we must lose you here: that you will go West; and I try in all ways to reconcile myself to it. You are, much more than you suppose, necessary to the new college — while it is not necessary to you. There is a radical fault in your organization which prevents you from feeling your own worth and power and acting upon the feeling. Your self-esteem is too small; so small that it does not know it is small. You have a sort of intellectual perception of your talents and virtues — but these intellectual perceptions never do the duty of the feelings. Old Dan sees with his intellect the beauty and the glory of virtue, right and truth — but how poorly does this intellectual perception supply the place of the normal sentiments, which should engender, feel and embody virtue and goodness.

By the by — I heard old Dan¹ last Saturday, and was most painfully impressed by the melancholy spectacle which he presented. I do not say that he was drunk, but he appeared like a man who was nearly drunk — or else half paralyzed. I am told that most of the Methodist clergy got the impression that he was very drunk — and were indignant. One thing is certain — most certain; not a fifth part, perhaps not an eighth part could make out what he said; and yet they sat, patient and open-mouthed, waiting for words of power and beauty. Oh! what an awful reckoning it would be if that man had to answer for the hundred talents which were committed to him! Would be? It is now awful — how he suffers and how the world suffers, if we consider that when we do not have what we might and ought to have we suffer positive loss. . . .

If you were going to a clime ten degrees further south and on the west slope of the Alleghanies, I should be strongly tempted to pull up stakes and follow you. There is a degree of self-conceit and intolerance [in Boston] that makes it seem a pitiful place. Then the prospect for the future is not good. The American population is getting crowded out of town and the houses filled up with Irish. By the by, do you remember the beautiful mansion formerly inhabited by P. C. Brooks, in Atkinson Street, and more recently by Samuel May? Well, it is now a colony of Irish, where they pig in sixteen in a room. So long as these poor creatures came to us only fast enough to be leavened by the little virtue there was in us, so long we welcomed them; but if they are to pull us down instead of our pulling them up we may well cry hold off! However, I suppose that this evil is only local: as a whole the process may be good for humanity, and we have no right to partition off God's earth and say here shall be Saxon and here shall not be Celt. . . .

I shall write you again in a day or two; meanwhile I am, dear Mann,

Ever yours,

S. G. Howe.

_______________

¹ Webster's last speech in Boston.

SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 378-380