Life of Horace Mann

Dedication

I DEDICATE this work to THE YOUNG. Those who were young when Mr. Mann first entered upon his educational work in Massachusetts, and who are now men and women, love to call themselves his children. " My eighty thousand children " was a favorite expression of his own ; and those words alone expressed the sentiment he felt towards them. They were to him the next generation, whose culture must tell upon society for good or for evil ; and it was a /delightful task to help them to a better one than was then enjoyed by the people at large.

In his later life, other young people came under his direct personal influence, who were old enough to love him with enthusiasm, and to labor cordially to diflfuse the views and purposes of life which he so earnestly inculcated upon them. I know they will love to read the record of his growth, of his affections, and of his success ; and they can also sympathize with his trials. If he had been less ardent, he would have suspended the gigantic efforts he made for success in his last enterprise to a period when he could have obtained more co-operation ; but his zeal in the cause blinded him to the extent of his own

physical powers, and he fell as by a mortal blow.

Introduction

It has been more difficult than was anticipated to write a memoir of a life from so near as point of view. I am conscious of my disabilities as well as of my advantages for the grateful task. One tends to idealize a character, which, during many years of the closest intimacy, was never swayed by unworthy motives, or acted upon secondary principles, and over which the beauty of sacred affections poured an indefinable charm. I am aware, that, where others see faults, I see only virtues. When his is called a " rugged nature," because he could not temporize, and because he made great requisitions of men upon whom were laid great duties, I see only his demand for perfection in others as well as in himself; and no man ever made greater requisitions of self. He could forget his own interests when he worked for great causes ; and he sometimes wished others, who had not his moral strength, to do likewise. But the very requisition often evolved self-respect to such a degree as to bring forth the power to do the duty, as many a man who has come under his influence can testify ; and what greater honor can we do to our fellow-man than to expect of him the very highest of which he is capable ? It is true of him, that he had not much charity for those who sinned against the light; but it is equally true, that his tenderness for the ignorant and the oppressed was never found wanting, and that the first motion of repentance in the erring melted his heart at once. Love of man was so essentially the impelling power in him, that it cost him no effort to exercise it ; but he had no self-appreciation which made him feel that he could do what others could not if they would. Perhaps the most remarkable trait in his character was his modest estimate of himself. He measured himself by the standard he wished to attain, and not by comparison with others ; and, when he was lauded

6 INTRODUCTION.

for wliat he had accomplished, his unaffected humility made him uncomfortable because the act was not more worthily and adequately performed : for, at every stage of his progress, he was as far from his own ideal excellence as before. By nature, he craved the sympathy and approbation of his fellow-men, — not of the populace, but of those whom he respected and loved ; yet even this craving did not deflect him from the path of rectitude, or blind him to the deroands of duty. Principles were more to him than even friends ; which is no light praise of one who loved so tenderly, and felt so keenly every suspicion of his motives. He rarely unbosomed himself ; for his sensibilities were of exquisite delicacy : the musician who has the acutest ear for harmony is not more sensitive to a discord than he was to the slightest jar of feeling. He was too earnest a man to be able to sustain superficial relations with other men ; and this often made him solitary when he would fain have been social, and made his intimate circle a small one. Friendship meant more to him than to most men : it implied not only pleasant social relations, but a oneness of sentiment and principle, without which the deUcate links of the magic chain would soon part. He could not give his affections to those who did not share his love of humanity or his moral insight ; for both his conscience and his intellect must consent before the bond could be cemented. But, when he did vinfold his heart, the surrender was entire ; and he became again a child in his confidence, and dependence upon affection. In those crises of his life when divergence of principle separated him, as was inevitable, from many whom he had loved, and of whom he had hoped all noble things, a woman could not weep bitterer tears over the disappointment. This tenderness of his character can only be equalled by the moral force with which he assailed whatever he saw to be wrong in the world. It was a conscientious act with him to battle with evil wherever he saw it. Man was endowed with his destructive and combative powers for this end alone, as he thought ; his only legitimate enemy being evil. The men who were the victims of it were the objects of his solicitude ; the men who made evil their good, the objects of his attacks, if only so could he lay the spirit that marred creation. Still, evil was, in his estimation, only relative ; the absence of good, one of the conditions of imperfection and of growth.

" If I believed in total depravity, I mast, of course, believe in

INTRODUCTION. 7

everlasting punisliment," he would say; "but I consider both unworthy of Grod." To hunt evil into its corner, therefore, was the first step towards turning it into food for growth. He could bear, for himself and others, present pain, however acute, in order to redeem as much of this life as possible for truth and heaven, whose enjoyment is entered whenever the spiritual element is made to take precedence of the earthly one in our double nature. Painful early impressions of his heavenly Father cast a cloud over much of his religious life ; for persons of sucb delicate organization do not easily recover from impressions made upon their nerves in childhood. He could have said with another remarkable man who emerged from the gloom of Orthodoxy into the hght and life of religious liberty, " My heart is Unitarian ; but my nerves are still Calvinistic." But his faith in endless progress grew stronger with every experience, till his very aspect was irradiated by it. All nature became full of revealin2;3 to him, — revealino-s of beneficent laws, of overflowing love : nothing in it seemed trivial to him ; for every thing had been an object of divine thought, from the humblest flower, or even stone, to the most distant star. And, while he loved with an unutterable love the beauty God had made, the revelations of science were scarcely less sacred to him than the revelations of moral truth ; and they were illustrative of each other in his teachings. This conception of the universe was not given to his childhood ; but he wished it to remain the birthright of all who came under his influence, rather than that it should be wrested from their experience as it had been from his own.

But not the less earnestly did he continue to labor to put the weapons of strength into the hands of the young, or less sturdily do battle against the enemies that assail us from within ; and he learned to look with more pity than indignation upon tbose who abused Grod's gifts, when they should only have used them. In reproving the young, whicb it became his duty to do, he was often moved to tears ; and the more obdurate the subject, the more deeply he was affected. But one of those who responded most genially and naturally to his inspiring touch said of him, that " it was heaven to look into his face."

Those who loved him are consoled by the thought that he did not live to see the terrible struggle of his beloved country ; for he was keenly susceptible to every form of suffering, and had forelived it

8 INTRODUCTION.

all by his realization of the relations of cause and effect. His clear moral convictions would have saved him from any doubt that this is a necessary war of pm-ification ; yet he had allowed himself to hope for a more peaceful solution of our national evil through the milder forms of industrial and commercial interests. Like the great souls of all times, he wished beneficent changes to come to pass through reflection rather than through violence.*

* Since the above was written, the glorious advance in public sentiment, which has resulted in the death-blow given to the cause of all our woe, might well make his friends wish that he could have lived to share the universal joy. Yet who can doubt that all is open vision to those who have vanished into other spheres from spheres below scarcely less divine ?

LIFE OF •HORACE MANN.

Chapter I

HORACE MANN was born in Franklin, Mass., on the 4th of May, 1796. His father, who died when he was thirteen, was a farmer, and a man who left in his family a strong impression of moral worth, and love of knowledge ; but he had not the means to give his children any better advantages of education than this inheritance. His mother, with whom Horace remained till he was twenty years of age, was the object of his most profound respect and tender affection ; but, in those days, a certain reserve and distance existed between parents and children, which constituted a great barrier to freedom of intercoin^se. His habits of reserve were such, that, by his own account, he never told even his mother of personal physical sufferings until they revealed themselves by their own intensity ; and of his mental emotions he never thought of any thing but to keep them to himself. In our day, when enlightened parents make it such a point to secure the personal confidence of their children by sympathizing in their least joys and sorrows, we can hardly reconcile a sterner rule with the idea of true affection, or estimate the depressing effect of such puritanical manners upon a sensitive child. He was obliged to work out all his problems alone, and retained only painful recollections of the whole period which ought to he, with every child, a golden age to look back upon. But, even at that time, his lively affections and naturally joyous nature bubbled up irrepressibly when in company with those of his own age. He was full of practical fun and witty repartee ; playing his native logic on all half-thinkers, but never unkindly. If any opportunity had been offered him for artistic culture, he might have excelled in it ; for he sometimes tried his wings in secret. But there was a repressing influence upon all such " foolish waste of time;" and he said of himself, that, in his younger days, he was accustomed to regard the cultivation of the imagination in the light of a snare to virtue rather than as a legitimate enjoyment of God-given powers. It has been well said of him by a sagacious friend, that " his causality was an inspiration." It was all that saved him in those dark days, as may be seen by his own testimony. His modesty, however, being as striking a trait as his logical power, his heart was long influenced by the social views around him, even after he suspected their fallacy. In a letter to a friend, he says, —

I regard it as an irretrievable misfortune that my childlioocl was not a happy one. By nature I was exceedingly elastic and buoyant ; but the poverty of my parents subjected me to continual privations. I believe in the rugged nursing of Toil ; but she nursed me too much. In the winter time, I was employed in in-door and sedentary occupations, which confined me too strictly ; and in summer, when I could work on the farm, the labor was too severe, and often encroached upon the hours of sleep. I do not remember the time when I began to work. Even ray play-days — not play-days, for I never had any, but my play-hours — were earned by extra exertion, finishing tasks early to gain a little leisure for boyish sports. My parents sinned ignorantly ; but Grod afiixes the same physical penalties to the violation of his laws, whether that violation be wilful or ignorant. For wilful violation there is the added penalty of remorse ; and that is the only difference. Here let me give you two pieces of advice which shall be gratis to you, though they cost me what is of more value than diamonds. Tiain your children to work, though not too hard ; and, unless they are grossly lymphatic, let them sleep as much as they will. I have derived one compensation, however, from the rigor of my early lot. Industry, or diligence, became my second nature ; and I think it would puzzle any psychologist to tell where it joined on to the first. Owing to these ingrained habits, work has always been to me what water is to a fish. I have wondered a thousand times to hear people say, " I don't like this business;" or, "I wish I could exchange for that;" for with me, whenever I have had any thing to do, I do not remember ever to have demurred, but have always set about it like a fatalist ; and it was as sure to be done as the sun is to set.

What was called the love of knowledge, was, in my time, necessarily cramped into a love of books ; because there was no such thing as oral instruction. Books designed for children were few, and then' contents meagre and miserable. My teachers were very good people ; but they were very poor teachers. Looking back to the schoolboy-days of my mates and myself, I cannot adopt the line of Virgil, —

I deny the bona. With the infinite universe around us, all ready to be daguerrotyped upon our souls, we were never placed at the right focus to receive its glorious images. I had an intense natural love of beauty, and of its expression in nature and in the fine arts. As " a poet was in Murray lost," so at least an amateur poet, if not an artist, was lost in me. How often when a boy did I stop, like Akenside's hind, to gaze at the glorious sunset, and lie down upon my back at night on the earth to look at the heavens ! Yet, with all our senses and our faculties glowing and receptive, how little were we taught ! or, rather, how much obstruction was thrust in between us and Nature's teachings ! Our eyes were never trained to distinguish forms and colors. Our ears were strangers to music. So far from being taught the art of drawing, which is a beautiful language by itself, I well remember that when the impulse to express in pictures what I could not express in words was so strong, that, as Cowper says, it tingled down to my fingers, then my knuckles were rapped with the heavy ruler of the teacher, or cut with his rod, so that an artificial tingling soon drove away the natural. Such youthful buoyancy as even severity could not repress was our only dancingmaster. Of all our faculties, the memory for words was the only one specially appealed to. The most comprehensive generalizations of men were given us, instead of the facts from which those generalizations were formed. All ideas outside of the book were contraband articles, which the teacher confiscated, or rather flung overboard. Oh ! when the intense and burning activity of youthful faculties shall find employment in salutary and pleasing studies or occupations, then will parents be able to judge better of the alleged proneness of children to mischief. Until then, children have not a fair trial before their judges.

Yet, with these obstructions, I had a love of knowledge which nothing could repress. An inward voice raised its plaint forever in my heart for something nobler and better ; and, if my parents had not the means to give me knowledge, they intensified the love of it. They always spoke of learning and learned men with enthusiasm and a kind of reverence. I was taught to take care of the few books we had, as though there was something sacred about them. I never dogs-eared one in my life, nor profanely scribbled upon title-pages, margin, or fly-leaf; and would as soon have stuck a pin through my flesh as through the pages of a book. When very young, I remember a young lady came to our house on a visit, who was said to have studied Latin. I looked upon her as a sort of goddess. Years after, the idea that I could ever study Latin broke upon my mind with the wonder and bewilderment of a revelation. Until the age of fifteen, I had never been to school more than eight or ten weeks in a year.

I said we had but few books. The town, however, owned a small library. When incorporated, it was named after Dr. Franklin, whose reputation was then not only at its zenith, but, like the sun over Gibeon, was standing still there. As an acknowledgment of the compliment, he offered them a bell for their church ; but afterwards, saying that, from what he had learned of the character of the people, he thought they would prefer sense to sound, he changed the gift into a library. Thougli this library consisted of old histories and theologies, suited, perhaps, to the taste of the "conscript fathers" of the town, but miserably adapted to the " proscript " children, yet I wasted my youthful ardor upon its martial pages, and learned to glory in war, which both reason and conscience have since taught me to consider almost universally a crime. Oh ! when will men learn to redeem that childhood in their offspring which was lost to themselves ? We watch for the seedtime for our fields, and improve it ; but neglect the mind until midsummer or even autumn comes, when all the actinism of the vernal sun of youth is gone. I have endeavored to do something to remedy this criminal defect. Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat-field.

More than by toil, or by the privation of any natural taste, was the inward joy of my youth blighted by theological inculcations. The pastor of the church in Franklin was the somewhat celebrated Dr. Emmons, who not only preached to his people, but ruled them, for more than fifty years. He was an extra or hyper-Calvinist, — a man of pure intellect, whose logic was never softened in its severity by the infusion of any kindliness of sentiment. He expounded all the doctrines of total depravity, election, and reprobation, and not only the eternity, but the extremity, of hell-torments, unflinchingly and in their most terrible significance ; while he rarely if ever descanted upon the joys of heaven, and never, to my recollection, upon the essential and necessary happiness of a virtuous life. Going to church on Sunday was a sort of religious ordinance in our family ; and, during all my boyhood, I hardly ever remember staying at home. Hence, at ten years of age, I became familiar with the whole creed, and knew all the arts of theological fence by which objections to it were wont to be parried. It might be that I accepted the doctrines too literally, or did not temper them with the proper qualifications ; but, in the way in which they came to my youthful mind, a certain number of souls were to be forever lost, and nothing — not powers, nor principalities, nor man, nor angel, nor Christ, nor the Holy Spirit, nay, not God himself — could save them; for he had sworn, before time was, to get eternal glory out of their eternal torment. But perhaps I might not be one of the lost ! But my little sister might be, ray mother might be, or others whom I loved ; and I felt, that, if they were in hell, it would make a hell of whatever other part of the universe I might inhabit ; for I could never get a glimpse of consolation from the idea that my own nature could be so transformed, and become so like what God's was said to be, that I could rejoice in their sufferings.

Like all children, I believed what I was taught. To my vivid imagination, a physical hell was a living reality, as much so as though I could have heard the shrieks of the tormented, or stretched out my hand to grasp their burning souls, in a vain endeavor for their rescue. Such a faith spread a pall of blackness over the whole heavens, shutting out every beautiful and glorious thing ; while beyond that curtain of darkness I could see the bottomless and seething lake filled with torments, and hear the wailing and agony of its victims. I am sure I felt all this a thousand times more than my teachers did ; and is not this a warning to teachers ?

What we phrenologists call causality, — the faculty of mind by which we see effects in causes, and causes in effects, and invest the future with a present reality, — this faculty was always intensely active in my mind. Hence the doom of the judgment-day was antedated : the torments which, as the doctrine taught me, were to begin with death, began immediately ; and each moment became a burning focus, on which were concentrated, as far as the finiteness of my nature would allow, the agonies of the coming eternity.

Had there been any possibiHty of escape, could penance, fasting, self-inflicted wounds, or the pains of a thousand martyr-deaths, have averted the fate, my agony of apprehension would have been alleviated ; but there, beyond effort, beyond virtue, beyond hope, was this irreversible decree of Jehovah, immutable, from everlasting to everlasting. The judgment had been made up and entered upon the eternal record millions of years before we, who were judged by it, had been bom ; and there sat the Omnipotent upon his throne, with eyes and heart of stone to guard it ; and had all the beings in all the universe gathered themselves together before him to implore but the erasm-e of only a single name from the list of the doomed, their prayers would have been in vain.

I shall not now enter into any theological disquisition on these matters, infinitely momentous as they are. I shall not stop to inquire into the soundness of these doctrines, or whether I held the truth in error ; my only object here being, according to your request, to speak of my youth biographieally, or give you a sketch of some of my juvenile experiences. The consequences upon my mind and happiness were disastrous in the extreme. Often, on going to bed at night, did the objects of the day and the faces of friends give place to a vision of the awful throne, the inexorable Judge, and the hapless myriads, among whom I often seemed to see those whom I loved best ; and there I wept and sobbed until Nature found that counterfeit repose in exhaustion whose genuine reality she should have found in freedom from care and the spontaneous happiness of childhood. What seems most deplorable in the retrospect, all these fears and sufferings, springing from a belief m the immutability of the decrees that had been made, never prompted me to a single good action, or had the slightest efiicacy in detening me from a bad one. I remained in this condition of mind until I was twelve years of age. I remember the day, the hour, the place, the circumstances, as well as though the event had happened but yesterday, when, in an agony of despair, I broke the spell that had bound me. From that day, I began to construct the theory of Christian ethics and doctrine respecting virtue and vice, rewards and penalties, time and eternity, God and his providence, which, with such modifications as advancing age and a wider vision must impart, I still retain, and out of which my life has flowed. I have come round again to a belief in the eternity of rewards and punishments, as a fact necessarily resulting from the constitution of our nature ; but how infinitely different, in its effects upon conduct, character, and happiness, is this belief from that which blasted and consumed the joy of my childhood !

As to my early habits, whatever may have been my shortcomings, I can still say that I have always been exempt from what may be called common vices. I was never intoxicated in my life ; unless, perchance, with joy or anger. I never swore : indeed, profanity was always most disgusting and repulsive to me. And (I consider it always a climax) I never used the "vile weed" in any form. I early formed the resolution to bo a slave to no habit. For the rest.

my public life is almost as well known to others as to myself; and, as it commonly happens to public men, " others hnow my motives a great deal better than I do.''''

A recent letter from a friend, touching upon the same topic, deepens the impression just given : —

. . . Yes, it is true that Mr. Mann spoke to me often of his boyhood, chiefly of its sorrows. One of these was the death of a brother, who was drowned at twelve years of age. He said he was a charming boy, and that his death immediately brought home to his heart the terribleness of the theological views in which he was educated. He had been in the habit of hearing logic chopped upon the scheme of the universe, the federation of the race in Adam, the plan of redemption by Christ's atonement, &c. ; and there was a certaia entertainment to his mind in this intellectual gymnastic, so that he became a very expert theologue himself, and could refute the Arminian and Arian theories with great acumen. But there were certain things that did not feel good to his heart which he often heard from the pulpit ; such as, that ' ' the smoke of the damned was the enjoyment of the blessed," and "the punishment of the wicked one of the special glories of God." He had none of the canonical evidences of being in a state of grace himself: and a strange fascination used to impel him, Sunday after Sunday, to find in Watts's hymn-book, and read over and over again, a certain verse, which must be eliminated from modern editions, for I cannot find it ; but it depicted the desolation of a sohtary soul in eternity, rudderless and homeless.

He had a strong impression, that, if he should die, he should personate the " solitary souF' therein depicted. But when his darling brother died, having not yet experienced the orthodox form of conversion, his agonized heart stimulated his imagination to clothe it in his brother's form and feature. He thought he could see in his mother's face a despair beyond the grief of losing the mortal life of her son ; and when, at the funeral. Dr. Emmons, instead of suggesting a thought of a consoling character, improved the opportunity to address a crowd of young persons present on the topic of " dying unconverted," and he heard his mother groan, a crisis took place in his experience, similar to that described in Mrs. H. B. Stowe's story of the "Minister's Wooing," when Mrs. Marvin hears of her son James' death, without knowing whether he was converted or not. His whole being rose up against the idea of such a cruel Creator, and declared hatred to him ! He would hate Infinite Malignity personified, if he must suffer eternally in consequence. The childish image, familiar to his mind, of a crystal floor covered with angels and saints playing on harps and enjoying the fruits of the tree of life, in the New Jerusalem, as described in the book of Eevelation, — under which scene, in full sight, was the hell so often emphatically described by Dr. Emmons, — recurred to his imagination ; and deliberately, with all the tremendous force of his will, he chose to suffer with the latter, rather than make one with the selfish immortals who found happiness in witnessing torture.

But to put himself at odds in this way with what he still thought was Infinite Power produced a fearful action upon his nerves. His imagination was possessed by the idea of a personal Devil, to whom he had no attractions, whatever was his repulsion from Grod ; and he was yet too young to get behind all these forms, in which the depraved imagination of men had clothed the great realities of the spiritual life. Nature seemed to him but the specious veil in which demons clothed themselves. He expected the foul Fiend to appear from behind every hedge and tree to carry him off.