When he galloped up to Perkins on his black stallion, Samuel Gridley Howe seemed like the perfect knight, come to rescue Julia Ward from her enchanted castle. Eighteen years her senior, almost a foot taller, educated at Brown and Harvard Medical School, he was acclaimed as a national hero for his exploits in the Greek Revolution and his pioneering work in the education of the blind. He was internationally admired as a philanthropist, humanitarian, and friend of the unfortunate or oppressed. Always celebrated in chivalric images—Coeur de Lion, the Red Cross Knight, Bayard, Paladin—Howe seemed almost too heroic to be true.
He was also a very handsome man. Both men and women commented on his good looks. In college, in medical school, in war, and as a veteran, Samuel Howe attracted admiring attention. A Brown classmate recalled him as “erect, agile, and elastic in movement. With fine features, a fresh, pink complexion, a keen blue eye, . . . with open, frank, and genial manners, he could not fail to win the kind regard of his youthful contemporaries.”1 His customary black horse, always named Breeze or Blast, and wearing a crimson saddle-cloth, added to his romantic image. His friend Franklin Sanborn called Howe “an Arab in figure and in horsemanship” with “a manner that bespoke energy.”2 A Boston matron confided to his daughter Laura Richards many years later that “your father was the handsomest man I ever saw. When he rode down Beacon Street on his black horse . . . the girls ran to the window to look after him.”3
Drawing upon such comments, her own memories, and paintings of her father as a young man, Richards described him with veiled phallic suggestiveness; he had “the lithe, erect figure, the noble head with its profusion of black hair, the eyes of blue fire which were yet the tenderest in the world, the whole presence like the flash of a sword.”4 Everything about him signaled masculine power. As Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, a distinguished medical colleague, summed it up, “I have always considered Samuel G. Howe the manliest man it was my fortune to meet in this world.”5
But for Bostonians, noticing Sam Howe’s attractiveness and calling him “manly” did not imply that he was virile or seductive. In mid-nineteenth-century America, manliness implied honorable self-restraint rather than sexual enterprise, as well as daring, hardiness, and self-confidence.6 Despite his flashing eyes and erect bearing, Samuel Howe was no womanizer; the girls of Boston might hang out their windows seven days a week, and he would scarcely notice them. A tireless workaholic, he was unaware of the dramatic impression he created. He was fortunate to keep his thick dark hair and his youthful looks for most of his life, but he did not trade on his physical assets, vain as he might sometimes appear.
Howe was the breakout star of a respectable and unadventurous Boston family. His father, Joseph Neal Howe, was a prosperous rope and cordage maker; his two brothers chose careers in business and seamanship; his four sisters were good domestic women. He adored his sympathetic mother, who died when he was a young man, and based his ideas of the devoted wife and tender mother on her example. But from his youth until his death, Sam was a rebel, a risk taker, and a romantic, a “black swan” among the “steady, intelligent, plodding” Howes.7
Joseph Howe hoped that at least one of his sons would enter a profession, and as the most academically gifted, Sam was sent to Brown University, where he ungratefully distinguished himself only for undergraduate pranks, such as taking the president’s horse onto the top floor of the main building. In the spring and summer of 1819, he was “rusticated”—suspended and sent away from the college to study with a worthy Protestant minister in rural Massachusetts. He read some books and attended some lectures but had no strong intellectual, philosophical, or political interests, although he loved poetry and especially Byron, whose poems he could still recite to his children decades later. Nonetheless, while young Julia was confined to home and restricted to the companionship of her relatives, young Sam had the opportunity to form close friendships with his classmates. Among the lifelong friends he made at Brown was Horace Mann, two years ahead of him, who grew up to become a pioneer in education and an ally in Howe’s reformist projects.8
By the time he went to Harvard Medical School in 1821, he had matured academically. Like many bright young men, he could be a diligent and driven student when he was interested in the subject matter. Nevertheless, when he graduated as an MD in 1824, he did not want to settle into the profitable monotony of a humdrum medical practice. In a letter to his friend William Sampson, he explained himself: “Shall I toil away my best days in amassing a fortune? And are the lists worth entering, when the only goal is gold? I know I shall never be rich, for I do not set sufficient value upon money.”9 At the time when he should have been starting his medical career, he announced, to the horror of his family and friends, that he was going to Greece to offer his services as a surgeon to the Greek army in their fight for independence from the Turks. Although he did not know a word of Greek, and had never had any military training, he had no doubts about his decision or his ability to cope with the rigors of life in a foreign war. In the year that Julia Ward lost her mother and entered her long years of confinement in The Corner, Sam Howe boldly broke free from his home, his country, and his culture, and took a heroic journey to the other side of the world.
Why did he make such a reckless decision? Initially, Howe was swept up in the international humanitarian movement called “philhellenism,” the fervor to save Greece for the world. The Greek war for independence from the Turks and the Ottoman Empire, a long and bloody battle with many casualties and atrocities on both sides, had a base in the efforts of various Greek leaders to establish a unified government in a fragmented, impoverished tribal society. It was sometimes portrayed as a crusade of Christians against Muslims, and often heralded as a war of liberal Western values against barbaric Eastern oppression. Although the rhetoric of the war had parallels to today’s “conflict of civilizations” in the Middle East, it was not a religious war or an uprising that came solely out of the people’s grievances against the Turks, who had ruled them for four centuries. Indeed, the populations were so mixed that many Turks living in Greece could no longer speak Turkish, and many Greeks had converted to Islam.
Nonetheless, a generation of young men in the United States and Europe who had been imprinted by a classical education became obsessed with the liberation of Greece. This generation of romantic revolutionaries were ardent believers in pagan Greece as the Cradle of Civilization, the source of democracy, art, philosophy, science, and all that was noble in human history. The Greece they imagined and lauded, a country few of them had ever seen, was a fictional patchwork of mythology and epic, of remembered school days and proudly declaimed lines of verse, where Odysseus and Plato, Socrates and Hercules, Demosthenes and Homer gathered still in groves of olive and laurel. With such anachronistic and heady sentiments to guide them, and a youthful passion to change and repair the world, philhellenes wrote the kind of stirring slogans that future generations would repeat in other places and other times, from Spain and Berlin to Rwanda and Kosovo. The British Romantic poets were especially identified with the cause. “We are all Greeks,” proclaimed Shelley in the preface to “Hellas,” while Byron’s Don Juan stands on the plain of Marathon and dreams “that Greece might still be free.”
The media too played a key role in stirring up the emotions of idealistic young men. In London, Madrid, Leipzig, Paris, and St. Petersburg, small groups of Greek expatriates described the sufferings of their people and created a powerful image of a desperate Hellenic nation crying out for freedom. The Greek Committees they founded with local philhellenes were skillful pressure groups; they deluged the press with stories of Turkish atrocities and massacres of the innocent and raised funds from public subscription, private donation, and all kinds of fairs, bazaars, and charitable events. With visions of tearing down the walls, driving away the oppressors, and winning glory for themselves, young men set off, ill prepared, unequipped, and often outlandishly dressed, in search of Aegean glory.
Byron was among the first, and by far the most famous, of these pilgrims. Bearing gifts to the Greek army from the London Greek Committee, and also prepared to spend thousands of pounds of his own on weapons, ships, supplies, and Albanian mercenaries, Byron was on the scene by 1821. Despite his reputation for hyperbolic ecstasy and poetic rhapsody, he was a practical, clear-sighted witness of the revolution on the ground. He was quickly disillusioned by the greed and infighting of the different factions of Greek leadership, and he realized that fundamental change would have to come before they were ready for democracy and self-government. Still, he stayed on. On April 19, 1824, reports of his tawdry death in Missolonghi from a fever exacerbated by the primitive bleedings and leechings of his doctors made him a martyr to the Greek cause throughout the world. After his death, Byron was refused burial at St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey by English clerics scandalized by gossip about his sexual behavior and radical politics; but he was sanctified and eulogized by his friends and companions. He was also honored by a statue in the garden of war heroes in Missolonghi, where he stands out by virtue of his youth and absence of a mustache.10 In his lonely and inglorious death, Byron became the international symbol of philhellenism as a courageous sacrifice for liberty.
In the United States, classical scholars, politicians, statesmen, and poets joined the chorus of philhellenism and argued for humanitarian intervention in the fighting. At a fund-raising dinner in Cincinnati, an American general opined that “the Star-Spangled Banner must wave in the Aegean.”11 President James Monroe, in the pompous and bloodless rhetoric with which American presidents endorse faraway wars, said, “the emancipation of Greece fills the mind with the most exalted sentiments, and arouses in our bosoms the best feelings of which our nature is susceptible.”12 Boston, which had long styled itself the Athens of America and had been the center of a Greek revival in architecture, was especially drawn to philhellenism, although there were groups in cities as un-Athenian as Cincinnati, Charleston, South Carolina, and Louisville. In 1823, Edward Everett, the twenty-nine-year-old Eliot Professor of Greek at Harvard, appealed in the North American Review for young American men to enlist in the war of the cross against the crescent. At the beginning of a brilliant career that would take him to Congress, the governorship of Massachusetts, and the Court of St. James, Everett became the official voice of the Greek cause in the United States. Nevertheless, Everett’s call did not find passionate classicists eager to volunteer. Even at Harvard, James Freeman Clarke remembered, “We were expected to wade through Homer as though the Iliad were a bog, and it was our duty to get along at such a rate per diem.”13 In the end, only a handful of Americans went to wave the flag in the Aegean, and Samuel Howe, no classicist, no patriot, and not especially religious (“I pray with my hands and feet,” he said) became the most celebrated among them.14 In the summer of 1824, he met the other New England recruit, Jonathan Peckham Miller, a farmer from Vermont, who was astonished to hear that this city boy who “looked more like a doll than a soldier” was going to fight in Greece. Sam told him that he been taking fencing lessons and invited him home for a duel with sword, masks, and gloves.15 Miller won, but he was impressed by Sam’s grit and guts.
Even Howe struggled to explain why instead of earning a comfortable living as a doctor in Boston, he embarked on such a reckless odyssey. In 1857, reflecting (in a letter to Horace Mann) on his reasons for going to Greece, Howe brushed away political or religious conviction and gave an explanation that both emphasized his lack of financial ambition and blamed his youthful impulsiveness. “Thoughtless indifference, perhaps ignorance of what course would have been profitable to me. Lacking prudence & calculation, I followed an adventurous spirit.”16 Elsewhere he hinted sentimentally at a broken romance. But Howe stayed in Greece for six years, under conditions of extreme hardship and continual danger. It is obvious that something in the experience was deeply profitable to him in discovering where his talents and inclinations lay. Certainly these six years changed and formed him forever. He would come back as a different man, with a different destiny, even a different name.
In November 1824, Sam boarded the Triton for Malta and Greece, carrying Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage among his few belongings. When he arrived in Navarino, on the Peloponnesian coast, he met up with Miller, who had gone native—shaved his head, put on Greek costume, and stuck a dagger in his belt—and a much more experienced American philhellene, George Jarvis, who spoke fluent Greek and helped him get oriented. He quickly realized that there was no Greek army as such, but guerrilla warfare, brigands, and tribal insurgencies, with a few strong leaders who had to be sought out and convinced of the volunteer’s seriousness and capability.
The chaos and uncertainty suited his idealism, dislike of routine, and penchant for “frenetic activity.”17 Initially, he improvised, traveling with guerrilla fighters, sleeping on the ground and in caves, supporting himself by practicing medicine, amputating a hand one day, removing a facial tumor the next. He found the Greek insurgents tough and brave but completely undisciplined and individualistic. They had no esprit de corps, no sense of military authority, no high-minded motives, no willingness to obey orders or take risks. By March 1825, he was beginning to speak some Greek; the first words he understood came overhearing a Greek comrade describe him: “What a handsome youth!” It says a lot about Howe’s sexual innocence that he was not alarmed to overhear the compliment.
He lost his naïveté as he witnessed the atrocities of Turkish raids and attacks, and saw perversity unimaginable in Boston. In the village of Palio Kormis in July 1827, he saw a ten-year-old girl vaginally mutilated with a knife and raped; and described the “unnatural crimes” the Turks carried out against “women, men & beasts.” “Not content with serving women in the way God meant, they search for men & boys and even the jackasses and sheep do not escape. Nor is this a matter of concealment with them: as soon as they take any Greeks prisoners they abuse the men in this way and then kill them or keep them as slaves; unless someone is very young and beautiful, then he is kept for the embraces of some high officer.”18 The Greeks were equally capable of brutality in massacres and torture of Turkish soldiers. “The Greeks,” Howe concluded in 1825, “are most abominably selfish and most cruelly unfeeling,” and “the women are if anything worse.”19 He scorned Greek doctors as conceited, unprincipled, superstitious, and stubbornly reluctant to try modern methods of treatment. Often he had to overrule them in caring for patients.
Throughout his years in Greece, Howe participated in virtually every aspect of the fighting, on land and on sea, in every kind of terrain, in every season, often under the worst imaginable physical conditions. While he was never wounded, he had a long bout of “swamp fever,” or malaria, the effects of which may have permanently weakened his system. Despite plagues of fleas and lice, he sometimes went for two months without changing his clothes; only a “smoke bath,” he wrote, would kill the bugs. At least once, at the siege of Athens, he shot a Turkish soldier and found the reality of killing a man more disturbing than he expected: “I hardly know whether pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall.”20Throughout these ordeals, he never lost confidence in his own capacity to make the right decisions and form the correct judgments. As the scattered Greek leadership realized the extent of his surgical skills, they gave him paid positions of responsibility, as physician to the Greek fleet at Crete, director of the military hospital at Nauplion, and finally surgeon on the military ship Karteria.
Howe’s vivid, colloquial, and graphic letters about the Greek campaign were also his first chance to try his hand as a writer. With a sense for the ridiculous as well as the shocking aspects of war, and an unquenchable optimism about the justice of the cause, he found an eager audience for his eyewitness accounts of the campaign. Like his journal, they displayed his gifts for narrative and exposition, along with imagery and suspense. The Boston critic John Jay Chapman was among those who understood and appreciated the almost novelistic quality of Howe’s literary style. “Before I had read this journal,” he wrote in 1910, “I did not know that the United States had ever produced a man of this type, the seventeenth-century navigator, whose daily life is made up of hair-breadth escapes and who writes in the style of Robinson Crusoe.” He quoted Howe’s zest for battle when passing a pirate ship: “If vessels only knew what cowards these pirates are, they would never be robbed, for the least resistance will keep them off. Give me a vessel with moderately high sides, two light guns, and twelve resolute men, and I would pledge my all on sailing about every port of the archipelago and beating off every vessel which approaches.”21 Sam’s father and Edward Everett saw to it that these exciting missives were published in Boston newspapers, from which they were picked up by papers around the country.
Although he was repelled by the Greek tribal women, whom he found coarse, illiterate, and ugly (moreover, he wrote primly, they did not wear stays), Howe probably had his first sexual experiences in Greece. He occasionally admitted in his journal that he had been aroused by seeing the body of a young camp follower, “a most elegant young creature,” and even confessed to getting involved with a woman while he was doing relief work in Corinth, although the Greek government, unsurprisingly, “treated the matter liberally.”22 Despite many opportunities, however, Howe was not looking for sexual adventures. He was much more enthusiastic about the adventures of foraging for food—a huge boiled beet, sorrel, snails, wasps “roasted to a crisp and strung on a straw like dried cherries,” donkeys or goats hacked into small pieces and eaten half-raw.23
In 1828, he published his hastily written Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution and returned home to raise funds for Greek relief. Tanned, handsome, passionate, he was a charismatic speaker, collecting $60,000 plus clothes and toys. Returning with the loot to Corinth, he found a village of fifty families and built them a wheelbarrow, the first wheeled vehicle they had ever seen. Welcomed like a divinity bearing gifts from the heavens, he led his villagers in constructing a harbor. These were the months he recalled as the happiest time of his life. “I was alone among my colonists, who were all Greeks. They knew I wanted to help them, and they let me have my own way . . . I labored here day and night, in season and out, and was governor, legislator, clerk, constable, and everything but patriarch.”24 Naming the little village Washingtonia, he also set up a school, where the children could be heard “repeating ‘Alpha, beta, gamma, delta,’ as they run about, and when out of school they play at making letters in the sand.” The school became his sanctuary, the center of his reformist dreams and “when any petty Greek trick, or any attempt to impose upon me, has ruffled my temper, I retire there, and immediately all my disgust is gone, and all my hopes and anticipations are revived.”25
He delighted in giving orders and following his own intuitions about how to get things done, and he came away convinced that his plan was the best one and should be obeyed. His dictatorship was benign; he harbored no secret desires to rule over Corinth forever or to exterminate the Greek brutes, but his benevolence would always have a darker side. Not yet thirty years old, he was already very sure that his way was the right way. In the future, his missionary convictions of saving the oppressed could easily turn to frustration and rage when his schemes failed, and he would always blame other people for the failure, rather than admit the weaknesses of his own plans.
At last in 1831, Howe packed up his baggage and headed slowly home. Among the treasures he was carrying was Byron’s helmet, which he had bought at an auction in Poros. The helmet says much about Byron’s epic concept of the revolution, and the glorious role he expected to play in it, and much about Howe’s investment in that myth. Byron himself had designed the helmet before he left for Greece, following descriptions of Hector’s armor in the Iliad, with his own family coat of arms and motto, “Crede Biron,” on the front. He designed equally elaborate and heavy helmets for his friends Edward John Trelawney and Count Pietro Gamba, and had them made by a craftsman in Genoa. With a huge curved appendage, edged with blue plumes, bending over the face, Byron’s helmet was an absurd object, as unsuitable for guerrilla fighting in Crete as a top hat.
Not for another six months, after yet more bloodshed among the tribes, did British, French, and Russian diplomats convene in London in May 1832 and decide that a monarchy was the best option for the Greeks. In an unheroic conclusion to the years of freedom fighting, they selected Prince Otto of Bavaria as the new king. One of his first acts as monarch was to establish an order of merit for Greek citizens who had fought in the War of Independence, and foreigners and heads of state who had rendered outstanding service to the cause. The first head of state to be thus honored was Otto’s father, King Ludwig I of Bavaria.
Despite the numerous opportunities he had had to perfect his surgical skills in the field in Greece, Howe knew when he went back to Boston that he still did not want to practice medicine as a profession. He had discovered how much he liked being in charge, creating a colony out of nothing and ruling it wisely. Moreover, he was a restless man, always on the lookout for new causes, experiences, and responsibilities. No sooner did he win acclaim for mastering a difficult task than he was looking for a harder one, or at least a different one, as much an “errant”—a wanderer—as a knight. In letters to his Boston friend William Sampson, he admitted his fears that he might be sacrificing his own domestic happiness by giving up a lucrative medical career, since “I cannot marry a poor girl, and will not marry to be supported by a wife.”26 On the other hand, such a quandary meant that he could postpone marriage indefinitely.
Back in Boston, he started writing for the New England Magazine. He met with the American Polish Committee, which was raising money for Polish revolutionaries against Russian rule—a possible repeat of his Greek triumphs. He applied for positions as a newspaper editor and as the director of a Liberian colony of repatriated slaves. He got himself in trouble in New York when he demanded to examine Chang and Eng, the “Siamese twins” then being exhibited as freaks by their agent, James W. Hale. Hale refused, Howe insinuated that the twins were a fraud, and Hale sued him for slander. Howe won the case eventually, but his self-importance and bumptiousness had increased. When he was unemployed, he was a loose cannon. Fortunately, fate intervened. The Massachusetts legislature had voted to establish a school for the blind, the first in the United States, and the trustees were looking for a director. As the family legend told it, in July 1831, three of the trustees encountered the doctor walking on Boylston Street and realized on the spot that their search was over. “Here is Howe!” said Dr. John Fisher. “The very man we have been looking for all this time.”27 Less dramatically, Fisher, his Brown classmate, offered him the job.
Howe knew nothing about educating the blind or running an asylum school, but the job mightily appealed to his humanitarian interests, and he immediately negotiated funding from his employers for a lengthy sojourn in Europe to study existing schools in England, France, and Prussia. Before he departed, he met with the American Polish Committee, which gave him funds to deliver to the revolutionaries in Paris. For five months there, he studied the methods at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles and visited other asylums. Meanwhile, the Polish fighters had surrendered to the Russians and sought refuge in Prussia. Making his way to Berlin to visit their school for the blind, Howe was arrested in his hotel by Prussian police and held without charges in solitary confinement for almost a month. Released by the intervention of friends in Paris and Washington, he returned to his studies, although he would never recover from the claustrophobia and fear of imprisonment the experience produced.28
While he dismissed European methods of education for the handicapped as outdated, obtuse, and inhumane, the time abroad gave him broad familiarity with asylums and their principles. He returned to Boston after a year away, convinced that the perils of total institutionalization, especially helplessness and passivity, had to be eliminated, and that blind boys especially must be encouraged to be hardy and self-sufficient. Parents needed to be tough with their blind sons in order to prepare them for adulthood; it was essential not to protect them by “excessive indulgence” and “undeserved preference over others,” but to allow them to stumble and fail in order to develop “courage, self-reliance, generosity, and manliness.”29
John Jay Chapman saw this phase of Howe’s career as a continuation of his knightly quest. “The early history of the Boston Blind Asylum is like a great medieval romance—voluminous, glowing, many-sided. That history is recorded in multitudinous documents and papers, letters, arguments, reports, anecdotes—the whole mass of them being illumined by the central figure of Howe, who looms through the story like Launcelot or Parsifal.”30 In one sense, it was a quest for romance, like the search for the Grail. Howe believed that the blind should be educated to take their place alongside other citizens and were fully capable of work, love, and independence. These beliefs, along with many others, would be tested and undermined by his experience, but his ardor, energy, determination, and dedication were permanent.
The beginnings of the project, however, were slow and thorny. He had spent all the money allotted for the school on his year in Europe and had to scramble to persuade Massachusetts legislators and philanthropists to support the enterprise, to find a building, identify suitable pupils, and convince their families to entrust their children to him. Since his father and stepmother had moved to Milton, he took over their house in Boston as a site for the asylum, with his sisters Lizzie and Jennette as matrons. The educator Elizabeth Peabody saw him in 1833, making maps, schoolbooks, and mathematical diagrams. “He had gummed twine, I think, upon cardboard, an enormous labour, to form the letters of the alphabet. I shall not, in all time, forget the impression made upon me by seeing the hero of the Greek Revolution . . . wholly absorbed and applying all the energies of his genius to this apparently humble work.”31 In France, Louis Braille was experimenting with an alphabet of dots for blind readers, but the news had not reached Howe, who formed the standard letters. His first blind pupils were little girls—the sisters Abby and Sophia Carter of Andover, whom he taught the alphabet, numbers, punctuation, and map reading, using raised letters and shapes. To formalize the opening of the Institution, Howe had his portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart’s daughter Jane. He was thirty years old.
The shipping magnate Colonel Thomas Perkins donated his house and garden on Pearl Street as a school, and having lobbied the Boston legislature for funding, and raised $61,000 through contributions and bazaars in Boston and Salem, Howe moved into the house on August 18, 1833, with seven children and two blind male teachers from Europe. He found a printing press he could adapt to use raised type, and started to print books, beginning with a hymnal and the New Testament. Davy Crockett stopped by in 1834 to hear a blind girl read from the books.
In 1835, Howe was at last officially recognized as one of the foreign heroes of the liberation and awarded the title of Chevalier of the Order of St. Saviour from the King of Greece. He never wore the silver star-shaped medal—it would have looked ridiculous on Beacon Street. He kept it with his Turkish pipes and other souvenirs in a place his children called the “picknickle and bucknicle” drawer, and he allowed them to play with it, just as they played dress-up with his fancy uniform. But the award marked a significant moment in his life. From then on, he was known to his family and friends as “Chev,” an affectionate American abbreviation of his knightly title, and a tribute to his gallant image. He always signed his personal letters with this new name.
An ardent believer in the pseudoscience of phrenology, Chev was thrilled to meet the preeminent Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe, who was in residence in Boston from 1838 to 1841. He revered Combe as one of the leading thinkers of the century and believed his writings were among the great works of the ages. Combe would become one of his trusted friends. For his leisure time in Boston, Chev also turned to the company of the Five of Clubs, a group of ambitious, intellectual, and convivial young professional men, the lawyers Charles Sumner and George Stillman Hillard; the poet and Harvard professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; the teacher Henry Russell Cleveland; and the Harvard professor of Greek Cornelius Conway Felton. They were so close that Bostonians called them “the Mutual Admiration Society.” Chev liked them all, but his closest tie was with Summer, who soon became his “alter ego, the brother of his heart.”32
Chev and Charlie Sumner had much in common. Ten years younger, Sumner had found his calling at Harvard Law School, where he was an outstanding student and a tireless researcher. He launched his practice in Boston in partnership with Hillard. But like Chev rejecting a medical career, Sumner discovered that he did not actually like the practice of law. In December 1837, despite the disapproval of his Harvard professors, mentors, and friends, he decided to spend some time in Europe, allegedly to expand his legal expertise. Like Chev, Sumner had a strong Puritanical streak and resistance to pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. When he arrived in Paris, he was shocked by the gambling halls and roulette, and alarmed by the whores wandering among the tables. “It is a perfect Sodom,” he wrote to Hillard, “without religion and without any morality between the sexes.”33 Although he went to the opera, theatre, and art museums, he spent his days mastering French and studying Continental law.
After six professionally profitable months, Sumner moved on to London, where he found himself unexpectedly popular. He was given a seat at the Court of Common Pleas and the Queen’s Bench and was admitted to both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Socially, he became an honorary member of several exclusive male city clubs, including the Garrick, the Travellers’, and the Athenaeum, where he met aristocrats and authors from Carlyle to Macaulay. “My acquaintance is most extensive—extensive beyond my most sanguine anticipations,” he boasted to a friend in the US.34
When he returned to Boston in the spring of 1840, with an elegant London wardrobe and a much more sophisticated aptitude for conversation, Sumner was in demand. But under the European polish, he was still eccentric and raw. Six feet two inches tall, and weighing only 120 pounds, he was an awkward giant, uninterested in games, art, poetry, or sports, and without a sense of humor. His friends in the Five of Clubs loved to tease him to hear his literal-mindedness. According to Sumner’s biographer, “Oliver Wendell Holmes exaggerated only a little when he declared that if one told Sumner that the moon was made of green cheese, he would say: ‘No! it cannot be so,’ and proceed to give weighty reasons to the contrary.”35
Chev, however, liked Sumner’s seriousness and especially his high-mindedness about women. Sumner too was uncomfortable with women and cherished romantic ideals of marriage. Marriage might work, he lectured his fourteen-year-old sister Jane, if the wife knew “a female’s place is at home”; her finest quality should be “to listen intelligently.”36 Nothing could jibe better with Chev’s prudery, idealism, and love of an admiring audience. In an emotional letter to Horace Mann, he explained his adoration of innocent virginity and his horror of a woman with sexual feelings: “As there is nothing in nature so beautiful as the fresh young heart of the guileless girl, so there is nothing as hideous as the passions of a depraved woman.”37 Chev and Charlie had many opportunities to reinforce each other’s ideas about ideal marriage and the exemplary wife. As Sumner wrote to a college friend, “Both have been wanderers, and both are bachelors, so we are together a good deal; we drive fast and hard, and talk—looking at the blossoms in the fields, or those fairer in the streets.”38 They looked at women, and did not pursue them.
All of Chev’s energy was channeled into his work. By the late 1830s, he had formed the idea that a gifted deaf-blind child would be the best advertisement for his methods. Moreover, he wanted to find a pretty girl: “When the supposed sufferer is a child—a girl—and of pleasing appearance, the sympathy and interest are naturally increased.”39 In the summer of 1837, Chev found the perfect pupil: eight-year-old Laura Bridgman. The daughter of a farming family in Hanover, New Hampshire, Laura had been a bright, active toddler, but a month after her second birthday, she and her two sisters caught scarlet fever. The sisters died, but Laura survived, although with shriveled eyes and progressive loss of hearing resulting in total deafness. She had begun to speak at eighteen months, but when she lost her hearing, she also lost her speech. For a time she repeated “dark, dark,” but after a year’s convalescence, that stopped too. Her very last word, her mother reported, was “book.”40
Chev heard about her through a professor at Dartmouth Medical School, and in July he rode out to see her. Despite her severe handicaps, Laura was a pretty child. Chev persuaded her parents that she should be sent to his school, and in October 1837, she arrived in Boston. In her first few weeks at Perkins, she was frightened and wild, but she was calmed by the warm affection of the house-matron, Lydia Drew. Even more, she was tamed and disciplined by Chev’s firm authority. He took her hand and led her around the rooms, tightening his grip when she resisted. Through a combination of force and determination, Chev asserted control. Soon, one visitor observed, she “was very much under the command of the Doctor,” and she quickly came to depend on his approval and attention.41 Under his new title, “the Doctor” became the dominant presence in her life, more important than mother or father or teachers. She proved an even more gifted student than he had anticipated, quickly mastering raised letters, and then the manual alphabet, at which she became very adept. In Chev’s words, “her little hands were continually stretched out and her tiny fingers in constant motion, like the feelers of an insect.”42From the start he saw her as not quite human.
As Laura learned to express herself, she bombarded her teachers with questions, spelling them rapidly into their hands: “Why don’t fish have legs? Is the worm afraid when the hen eats him? Why do cows have two horns?” Once she had learned to write, she kept a daily journal, composed letters, a memoir, and even some poems of her own. Thinking of words quite literally, unaware of rhyme, or elevated poetic language, or traditional forms, Laura’s poems are startlingly modern, a kind of poetry of the future:
Light is sweet as honey, but
Darkness is bitter as salt, and more than vinegar …
Darkness is frosty.
A good sleep is a white curtain.
A bad sleep is a black curtain.43
Chev did not admire her poetry, but her attachment to him was passionate and absolute; he was her father, her teacher, her beloved. When he left the school on trips, she became frantic; during the summers, when she went back to Hanover to be with her family, she longed for him: “I think much about Doctor. I want to see him. I cannot wait until he comes. I am in hurry until Doctor come. Why did he go? Does he know I want to see him very much? I think Doctor does not love me, to goaway.”44
Laura’s eagerness to learn encouraged Chev to develop new techniques and hypotheses about the blind-deaf in general. Like Charcot’s Augustine or Freud’s Dora—the great female psychiatric patients and hysterics of the nineteenth century—Laura entered her doctor’s life at an intellectually formative time in his career, and she served as the founding case of his theoretical work. She needed the Doctor to teach her language; he needed her to galvanize and compress his thinking, to give him a cause and a philosophy, a theory of learning and perception. Like Charcot with his theatrical demonstrations of the contortions of hysterical young women at the leçons du mardi at the Salpêtrière in Paris (which Chev had visited), he exhibited Laura to visitors on Saturday afternoons and publicized her to the world at large. Through Laura, Doctor Samuel G. Howe was celebrated worldwide as the great teacher and emancipator of the blind and deaf.
By May 1839, the school had more than sixty students and had outgrown its original building; they moved into a newly built hotel in South Boston, which was also called the Perkins Institute in honor of the founding donor. Chev was proud of the generous space that allowed separate dormitories, classrooms, and dining rooms for boys and girls, and separate living quarters for staff, plus a bowling alley, gymnasium, and large interior courtyard. The building was close enough to Boston Harbor that the students could bathe in cold saltwater, which he felt was the most healthful of all therapies. Among the blind boys, there was always a risk of public masturbation, and frequent cold baths were remedies for such behavior. Chev also spoke to the boys about “the wickedness and mischief of masturbation,” and a few guilt-ridden boys came to his office afterwards to confess.45 Chev’s office had room for his large collections of skulls, plaster heads, and busts for phrenological study.
Three years after Laura had come to the school, Chev felt confident enough in her progress to write about her achievements in his widely read annual reports. By the 1840s, the case of Laura Bridgman was internationally known. One recent scholar called her “the most famous female in the entire world,”46 no small claim during the reign of Queen Victoria. It is obvious why the first deaf-blind person who had ever been taught the fundamental means of human communication would interest medical experts and pedagogical theorists, even philosophers. Howe succeeded in more than that; he made her a celebrity. Using his talents for narrative, he wrote about her in the language of sentimental fiction, stressing epiphanies of comprehension rather than the halting, imperfect steps by which she acquired language.
In order to make her life an appealing story, the Doctor also had to conceal her many oddities and misbehaviors from his readers. The other blind children did not like Laura; she was nasty to them; she hit her teachers; she bit Sumner. A budding feminist, she complained when Chev read her mail: “Doctor was wrong to open little girl’s letters. Little girls open theirself.”47 Even after learning the manual alphabet, Laura laughed, shrieked, growled, howled, and made special noises to “name” and greet each person at Perkins. Chev found her loud noises ugly and animalistic. Having tried unsuccessfully to get her to soften her voice, or control her outbursts, he added to her daily routine periods when she could go into a closet and make sounds. In the annual reports, however, he described her noises as charming cooings and hummings.
He was also pleased that Laura, unlike many of the blind girls, was always immaculately dressed and groomed, of her own will. She had been trained to cover her eyes. In his Eighth Annual Report, he wrote: “It has become as much of a habit for her to put a clean green ribbon over her eyes when she dresses herself, as it is to put on her gown. When thus dressed, and her eyes shaded, her features are comely and pleasing; and the regular oval of her face, surmounted by her fine, glossy hair, makes her quite handsome.”48 The implication is that Laura’s eye sockets were unsightly or frightening or disfigured. Some scholars say that all the children at Perkins wore these ribbons, but pictures of Bridgman with a deaf-blind boy, Oliver Caswell, show him without one. Perhaps only girls were required to cover their eyes in order to present a more pleasing appearance and protect visitors from the unpleasant sight of their disfigurements. The green blindfold sashes that Laura wore have been preserved in the Perkins archives. After adolescence, though, she wore a close-fitting black blindfold cut like sunglasses, and as an adult, after 1870, she habitually wore opaque spectacles. Yet there is one late photograph of Laura without her blindfold, allegedly taken in Hanover after 1870, and she looks perfectly normal; her eye sockets are not scarred, her eyeballs not shrunken. Could the blindfold have been unnecessary all along, and something of a badge of strangeness and ghettoization, like the yellow star?49
Howe also claimed that he had never seen Laura in a position or an action “at which the most fastidious would revolt,” and that she was “remarkable for neatness, order, and propriety.” In other words, she was never seen blowing her nose, scratching herself, sitting with her knees spread or her skirts carelessly raised. He also believed that she was entirely unaware of sex and sexual feelings: “Laura is still so young, and her physical development is still so imperfect—she is so childlike in appearance and action, that it is impossible to suppose she has yet any idea of sex.”50 She would not even allow a man to touch her, he declared, would not sit on most men’s knees—except of course for those of Howe—and, in short, was “as pure and spotless as the petals of a rose.”51
In February 1841, Laura moved in with Chev and his sister Jennette. Chev’s own daughters would write that before they were born, she “was like a daughter to him, the pet of all the friends who visited him.”52 Late that summer, at the suggestion of Horace Mann, Chev commissioned Sophia Peabody—Elizabeth’s sister and the fiancée of Nathaniel Hawthorne—to sculpt a bust of Laura, which he could take on his journeys to display to the crowds of people eager to see her. Mann thought “it would do not a little towards keeping up, and indeed extending, the interest which the public now take in her.”53 Elizabeth even suggested that he might make extra money by selling plaster casts of the statue to visitors at Perkins. Sophia sculpted Laura with a blindfold, rather than a ribbon, over her eyes, her shoulders bare and draped with a marble scarf. Laura enjoyed the sittings, and called the ethereal and childlike statue her “white baby.”54 The marble bust was later copied for distribution to the leading American schools for the blind and deaf.
By the end of the summer, Chev had established a chaste pseudo-household, with an adoring surrogate family—Jennette as an undemanding housewife and Laura as a worshipful silent daughter. But he was beginning to be bored and impatient with the exhausting routine and mundane demands of life at Perkins. He analyzed his restlessness to Mann: “If I am good for anything it is as a pioneer in a rough, untrodden path. I want the stimulus of difficulty.”55 When he heard of an opening as ambassador to Spain, he applied for it. The fact that he couldn’t speak Spanish and knew nothing about the country made the prospect even more enticing; it was Greece again in the land of Don Quixote, another chance at his chivalric ideal. But he was turned down by President Jackson. Mann tried to comfort him by reminding him that the age of chivalry was over, and professional achievement entailed routine: “The nineteenth century is too late for your military knight-errantry. . . . You must tame your war-horse to work in common harness.”56
He was also uncomfortably reminded that he had not taken on the adult responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, and that time was going by. Longfellow had noticed that Chev was “painfully conscious of the passing of time, as if life itself were slipping from under his feet. At the asylum, a bell rings every quarter of an hour—a constant memento mori; and wherever he goes he hears this melancholy bell.”57 George Combe advised Chev to tame his war-horse by marrying a sedate middle-aged woman and thereby establish domestic tranquillity, and the “inexpressible charm . . . which relieves and cherishes the better faculties of the mind . . . and makes them wear longer.”58 A plain older woman was certainly the last kind of spouse Chev desired. Even his servants knew that “a plain woman was one of the things he liked least in life.”59 And Combe himself had married a pretty heiress six years younger than himself. Chev was also indignant in May 1840 when John P. Bigelow, the secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, spread rumors that he was having an affair with a married woman, an accusation both false and at odds with his horror of female sexual desire. At the age of forty, circumstances were forcing Chev to begin thinking of wedding bells.