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² “Our Country and the London Fair,” Evening Transcript, 14 June 1851; Elliott, Maude Howe and Hall, Florence Howe Laura Bridgman: Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her (Boston, 1903); Lamson, Mary Swift Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, the Deaf Dumb, and Blind Girl (Boston, 1881; New York, 1975); Schwartz, Harold Samuel Gridley Howe: Social Reformer, 1801–1876 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), ch. 6.Google Scholar

³ “Our Country and the London Fair,” Evening Transcript, 14 June 1851.Google Scholar

⁴ Kaestle, Carl Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983), chs. 6–7; Katz, Michael The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), part 1.Google Scholar

⁵ Culver, Raymond B. Horace Mann and Religion in the Massachusetts Public Schools (New Haven, Conn., 1929). In nineteenth-century debates over school reform, the controversy over the religious content of the curriculum was integrally connected to the controversy over pedagogical reform. Both were expressions of a more fundamental and irreconcilable debate over human nature itself. However, in this essay I am concentrating on the issue of pedagogical reform, setting aside some of the theological controversies sparked by Dr. Howe's education of Laura Bridgman. For a discussion of these, see Ernest Freeberg, “‘An Object of Peculiar Interest’: The Education of Laura Bridgman,” Church History 61 (June 1992): 191–205.Google Scholar

⁶ Howe, Samuel Gridley Sixth Annual Report of the Trustees of the New England Institution for the Education of the Blind (Boston, 1838), 10–11. Howe's annual reports are hereafter cited with shortened titles.Google Scholar

⁷ Mann, Horace “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 15 May 1843, 146; ibid., 16 May 1842, 145.Google Scholar

⁸ “Julia Brace,” Religions Magazine and Family Miscellany (Aug. 1847); Elliott, and Hall, Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil, 38.Google Scholar

⁹ Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe, 68–69; Howe, Samuel Gridley Ninth Annual Report (Boston, 1841), 23–25; Howe, Samuel Gridley “Laura Bridgman,” Barnard's American Journal of Education (Dec. 1857), 383–400.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Howe, Samuel Gridley Eighth Annual Report (Boston, 1840) 17–18.Google Scholar

¹¹ Howe, Sixth Annual Report, 6; Sears, John F. Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989). Sears discusses the Perkins Institution as an antebellum tourist attraction.Google Scholar

¹² Howe, Eighth Annual Report, 14.Google Scholar

¹³ Ibid., 6; Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 34; Lamson, Life and Education, 135–38.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Teachers’ Journals, 16 and 9 June, 20 Aug., 27 July 1841, Laura Bridgman Papers, Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, Mass. Published excerpts of these journals are included in Lamson, Life and Education. Google Scholar

¹⁵ Katz, Irony, 131–38, discusses the reformers’ interest in “object learning.”Google Scholar

¹⁶ Swift, Mary Teachers’ Journals, 26 July 1843, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Howe, Jeanette to Howe, Samuel Gridley 14 Oct. 1843, Samuel Gridley Howe Papers, Perkins School for the Blind; Teachers’ Journals, 12 Apr. 1842, 20 Aug. and 28 June 1841, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Howe, Eighth Annual Report, 15.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Teachers’ Journals, 31 Dec. and 15 June 1841, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

²⁰ Howe, Samuel Gridley Seventh Annual Report (Boston, 1839), 9.Google Scholar

²¹ Howe, Samuel Gridley Tenth Annual Report (Boston, 1842), 19; Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 39.Google Scholar

²² Teachers’ Journals, 5 Oct. 1841, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

²³ Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 11 Apr. 1844, Bridgman Papers. In spite of Swift's misgivings about exposing Laura to historical examples of human cruelty, by July the child was reading a story about a battle between two African tribes, which described “the Tuaricks killing the Tibbors.” As Swift predicted, Laura, “was horror-struck & did not seem to know what to say. She never before has heard that there is such a thing as man's killing man—in this world.” Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 8 July 1844, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

²⁴ Teachers’ Journals, 22 Mar. 1842, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

²⁵ Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 23 and 27 Aug. 1843, 27 Apr. 1842, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

²⁶ Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 9 June 1843, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

²⁷ Howe, Samuel Gridley “Education of the Blind,“ North American Review 37 (July 1833): 20–55.Google Scholar

²⁸ Howe, Sixth Annual Report, 8; Howe, Tenth Annual Report, 16.Google Scholar

²⁹ Combe, George Constitution of Man: Considered in Relation to External Objects (Boston, 1834; Delmar, N.Y., 1974), 51–52; Schwartz, Harold “Samuel Gridley Howe as Phrenologist,” American Historical Review 57 (Apr. 1952): 644–51. Howe despaired of ever reaching Laura's faculties of “Tune” and “Colouring,” but he devised exercises to test her organ of “Time.” He reported that the child could correctly maintain time when striking the keys of a piano, thus proving that “the capacity of perceiving and measuring the lapse of time is an innate and distinct faculty of the mind.” Howe, Eighth Annual Report, 18.Google Scholar

³⁰ Whorton, James C. Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, N.J., 1982), discusses antebellum ideas about physical and mental exercise. See also Wishy, Bernard The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia, 1968), ch. 4. Greven, Philip The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago, 1977), part 3, discusses the ideal of physical, mental and spiritual balance among those Greven calls “moderates.”Google Scholar

³¹ Combe, Constitution of Man, 54; Howe, Seventh Annual Report, 3.Google Scholar

³² Howe, Sixth Annual Report, 8; Lamson, Life and Education, 157.Google Scholar

³³ Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 7.Google Scholar

³⁴ Howe, Eighth Annual Report, 20; Lamson, Life and Education, 69.Google Scholar

³⁵ Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 35.Google Scholar

³⁶ Mann, Horace “Means and Objects of Common School Education,“ Lectures on Education (Boston, 1855; New York, 1969), 20.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ibid., 22.Google Scholar

³⁸ Mann, Horace “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 1 Feb. 1841.Google Scholar

³⁹ Mann, Horace “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 16 May 1842, 146.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Mann, Horace “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 15 May 1843, 146–47.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe, 120–36; Glenn, Myra C. Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany, N.Y., 1984), 103–11; Rev. McClure, George “Laura Bridgman,” Christian Observatory, Mar. 1847, 12.Google Scholar

⁴² Howe, Samuel Gridley “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 15 Oct. 1846, 316; Humphrey, Heman New England Puritan, 29 Oct. 1846. Wishy, Child and Republic, Part I, explains Humphrey's theory of pedagogical reform. As a supporter of Mann's reforms and a member of the State Board, Humphrey may have found it politically convenient to criticize Mann's sectarian excesses indirectly, by attacking Howe's sentiments rather than Mann's. Humphrey may have had an additional incentive for taking aim at Howe. In 1837, Howe publicly criticized “the President of Amherst College” for promoting evangelical revivals on his campus. In an address to the Boston Phrenological Society, Howe scolded Humphrey for “the fanatical excitement, the terror, the agony, the intense cerebral action which he was exciting in youths committed to his care.” Howe, Samuel Gridley Discourse on the Social Relations of Man: Delivered before the Boston Phrenological Society (Boston, 1837), 34.Google Scholar

⁴³ Mann, Horace “Note by the Editor,“ Common School Journal, 1 Feb. 1847, 48.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Humphrey, Heman New England Puritan, 29 Oct. 1846.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Howe, Samuel Gridley Eighteenth Annual Report (Cambridge, Mass., 1850), 47; Teachers’ Journals, 29 June 1842, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 7 June 1843, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Teachers’ Journals, 19 Aug. 1841, 16 Aug. 1843, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Teachers’ Journals, 6 Oct. 1841, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Glenn, Corporal Punishment, 145–46; Kaestle, Pillars, 87–88, 180; Katz, Irony 152–53; Wishy, Child and Republic, 22–23.Google Scholar