Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Miss Elizabeth Peabody, the sister-in-law of Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in an article written after my father's death, describes a visit to the "infant institution" in 1833.

"When we first became acquainted with Mr. Mann, he took Mary (afterwards Mrs. Mann) and me to a small house in Hollis Street" (Miss Peabody's memory fails her here; it was in Pleasant Street), "where, in the simplest surroundings, we found Dr. Howe, with the half-dozen first pupils he had picked up in the highways and byways. He had then been about six months at work, and had invented and laboriously executed some books with raised letters, to teach them to read, some geographical maps, and the geometrical diagrams necessary for instruction in mathematics. 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, who had narrowly missed being that of the Polish Revolution also; to see this hero, I say, wholly absorbed, and applying all the energies of his genius to this apparently humble work, and doing it as Christ did, without money and without price."

We have it also on Miss Peabody's authority that before beginning his work for the blind, my father spent some time with bandaged eyes, that he might acquire the view-point of his future pupils.

My father's forty-third Report, from which I have quoted the account of the birth of the "infant institution," is so filled with his own spirit, that I should like to incorporate it bodily in this work, and then say, "Behold the man!" Since this may not be, I trust I shall be pardoned for quoting somewhat freely from it.

"Nearly half a century ago," (he says,) "circumstances made me feel a special interest in the blind as a class, and called me to work in their behalf. During this time I have striven to call public attention to their condition and wants; to show that the nature and consequences of their infirmity have not been generally understood; that they have been regarded in all ages and countries as hopelessly dependent, and have been ministered to in a spirit of mere pity, and humiliated by being assigned the beggar's post, and by the reception of alms. I have claimed for them a full share of the essential characteristics of humanity, and have maintained that they merely lack certain accidentals, and are therefore fully entitled to receive, with other youth, the advantages of a kind of education by which the consequences of those accidentals should be reduced to their minimum. I have shown that there are certain compensations by which the disadvantages arising from their infirmity may be lessened; that by special culture of the remaining senses they can attain such excellence as almost to compensate for the lack of one. I have pointed out their equality with other men in all moral attributes and capacities; and have acknowledged my indebtedness to some of them who have been to me exemplars of patient resignation under misfortune, of a courageous struggle against difficulties, and of a feeling of tender interest in the welfare of friends, and warm desire for the promotion of human happiness. I hope and trust that I am better for the acquaintance of some such blind persons.

"But while advocating their claim to special advantages in the matter of education, and to certain social privileges, as matters of right and justice, not of pity or indulgence, it has sometimes been my duty to express opinions concerning the blind as a class, which jostle and offend that peculiar sensitiveness and large self-esteem which are unduly developed in many of them by mistaken kindness. I have been constrained to speak of them as they have ever been, and ever must be, as one of the defective classes of society; to show that their lack of one important sense does necessarily, and in spite of compensations, imply bodily inferiority, which is almost necessarily followed by deficiencies in the force and variety of mental faculties and capacities."

In an article in the New England Magazine, published in 1833, my father gives some account of the first months of the school's existence.

"The infant Institution crept on all fours for six months, entirely unknown to the public. In January, 1833, the trustees found that they had expended all their funds, and were several hundred dollars in debt. . . . They then prepared to exhibit the result of the six months' instruction upon the children, -- confident that they would plead for their blind brethren in irresistible language. Accordingly Dr. Howe (4) gave an exhibition of the pupils before the Legislature, which made such a powerful impression as to induce the two houses to vote, almost by acclamation, the sum of six thousand dollars per annum to the Institution, on the condition that it should educate and support twenty poor blind from the State gratuitously.