Samuel Gridley Howe (November 10, 1801 – January 9, 1876) His father, Joseph Neals Howe, was a ship-owner and rope manufacturer in Boston. The business was prosperous until he supplied the U.S. Government with ropes during the war of 1812 and was never paid. His mother Patty (Gridley) Howe was considered to be one of the most beautiful women of her day. Laura (Howe) Richards later wrote: "So far as I can remember, my father had no pleasant memories of his school days." He engaged in many practical jokes and other high jinks and, years later, Howe told his children that he regretted that he hadn't more seriously applied himself to his studies. After graduating from Brown in 1821, Howe attended Harvard Medical School, taking his degree in 1824.

thumb|Samuel Gridley Howe painted in the dress of a Greek soldier by [[John Elliott (artist)|John Elliott. Elliott married Howe's daughter Maud Howe.]]

Greek Revolution

Howe did not remain in Massachusetts for long after graduating. In 1824, shortly after Howe was certified to practice medicine, he became fired by enthusiasm for the Greek Revolution and the example of his idol, Lord Byron. Howe fled the memory of an unhappy love affair and sailed for Greece, where he joined the Greek army as a surgeon.

In Greece, his services were not confined to the duties of a surgeon but were of a more military nature. Howe's bravery, enthusiasm, and ability as a commander, as well as his humanity, won him the title "the Lafayette of the Greek Revolution." Howe returned to the United States in 1827 to raise funds and supplies to help alleviate the famine and suffering in Greece. Howe's fervid appeals enabled him to collect about $60,000, which he spent on provisions, clothing, and the establishment of a relief depot for refugees near Aegina. He brought back with him Lord Byron's helmet, which he later had on display in his house in Boston.

Samuel Gridley Howe brought many Greek refugee children back with him to the United States to educate them. Two who later gained prominence were John Celivergos Zachos, who became an abolitionist and activist for women's rights, and Christophorus P. Castanis. Castanis survived the Chios massacre. He later wrote a memoir about these events, The Greek Exile, Or, a Narrative of the Captivity and Escape of Christophorus Plato Castanis (1851). He mentioned both Dr. Howe and John Celivergos Zachos in this book.

Howe continued his medical studies in Paris. His enthusiasm for a republican form of government led him to take part in the July Revolution.

Work for the blind

In 1831, Howe returned to the United States. Through his friend Dr. John Dix Fisher, a Boston physician who had started a movement there as early as 1826 to establish a school for the blind, he had learned of a similar school founded in Paris by Valentin Haüy. A committee organized by Fisher proposed to Howe that he direct establishing a New England Asylum for the Blind at Boston. He took up the project with characteristic ardor and set out at once for Europe to investigate the problem.

thumb|Perkins School, prior to 1915

In America, he met with supporters of the Polish Revolution and was chosen to take money to revolutionaries in Europe. Thus he had two missions: to learn about schools for the blind and, as chairman of the American-Polish Committee at Paris, to support the Polish revolutionaries. The Paris committee had been organized by J. Fenimore Cooper, S. F. B. Morse, and several other Americans living in the city. By that time, the Poles had been defeated by the Russians and Howe was to give money to the many, particularly officers, who did not want to return home. They were harassed by some people of neighboring countries, but were given political refuge and crossed over the Prussian border into Prussia. Howe undertook to distribute the supplies and funds personally. While in Berlin, he was arrested and imprisoned, but managed to destroy or hide the incriminating letters to Polish officers. After five weeks, he was released due to the intervention of the United States Minister at Paris.

Returning to Boston in July 1832, Howe began receiving a few blind children at his father's house in Pleasant Street. He gradually developed what became the noted Perkins Institution. In 1837, Howe admitted Laura Bridgman, a young deaf-blind girl who later became a teacher at the school. She became famous as the first known deaf-blind person to be successfully educated in the United States. Howe taught Bridgman himself. Within a few years of attendance at Perkins Institution, she learned the manual alphabet and how to write.

Howe originated many improvements in teaching methods, as well as in the process of printing books in Braille. She was an ardent supporter of abolitionism and was later active in the cause of woman's suffrage. Ward composed the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" during the American Civil War.

They had a passionate and stormy marriage. Julia wrote in her diary of Howe (whom she referred to as "Chev"):

At one point Samuel requested a legal separation, but Julia refused. While Howe was in many ways progressive by the standards of the day, he did not support the idea of married women having any work other than that of wife and mother. He believed that Julia's proper place was in the home.

The couple had six children: Julia Romana Howe (1844–1886), who married Michael Anagnos, a Greek scholar who succeeded Howe as director of the Perkins Institute; Florence Marion Howe (1845–1922), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who wrote a well-known treatise on manners and married David Prescott Hall, a lawyer; Henry Marion Howe (1848–1922), a metallurgist who lived in New York; Laura Elizabeth Howe (1850–1943), also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who married Henry Richards and lived in Maine; Maud Howe (1854–1948), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Florence later took up her mother's mantle as a committed suffragette, making public speeches on the subject and writing the book, Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement (1913).

Antislavery activities

Howe entered publicly into the antislavery struggle for the first time in 1846 when, as a "Conscience Whig", he was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress against Robert C. Winthrop. He was a prominent member of the Kansas Committee in Massachusetts.

With Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, George Luther Stearns, Theodore Parker, and Gerrit Smith, he was interested in the plans of abolitionist John Brown. Although he disapproved of the attack upon Harpers Ferry, Howe had funded John Brown's work as a member of the Secret Six. After Brown's arrest, Howe temporarily fled to Canada to escape prosecution. This is uncertain, but it is known that Howe vehemently opposed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required law enforcement even in free states to support efforts to catch fugitive slaves. Two incidents clearly demonstrate this. In May 1854, Howe, along with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, and other abolitionists, stormed Faneuil Hall in order to try to free a captured refugee slave, Anthony Burns. Burns was going to be shipped back to his slave owner in Virginia in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law. The abolitionists hoped to rescue Burns from that fate. Howe declared outside the hall that "No man's freedom is safe until all men are free." who had entered Boston Harbor from Jacksonville, Florida, as a stowaway aboard the brig Cameo. Violating the Fugitive Slave Act, the Boston Vigilance Committee helped the man evade slave-catchers and reach freedom. Life in Canada wasn't free from the bigotry that Freedmen and women rewrote for the northern states as well as the South, but Howe found that their lives as free people were much improved. He noted that they were enfranchised and their rights protected by the government. He submitted his report to the Secretary of War, and it became part of the commission's material for Congress. It contributed to passage of the law establishing the Freedmen's Bureau, considered needed to aid the Southern freedmen in transition.

Civil War and Reconstruction

During the American Civil War, Howe was one of the directors of the Sanitary Commission. Its goal was to raise funds to improve hygiene standards and prevent outbreaks of disease at Union camps. Because of the lack of sanitation, camps were breeding grounds for such illnesses as dysentery, typhoid, and malaria. In addition, the Commission provided supplies and medical services to troops.

At the close of the Civil War, Howe began to work with the Freedmen's Bureau. This extended his work as an abolitionist. The Freedmen's Bureau was to help house, feed, clothe, educate, and provide medical care to newly-freed slaves in the South after the Civil War. In some instances, Bureau staff helped freedmen to locate and reunite with relatives who had either fled north or who had been sold away during slavery.

Philanthropic activities

Howe also helped establish the Massachusetts School for Idiot and Feeble-Minded Youth, the Western Hemisphere's oldest publicly funded institution serving mentally disabled people. He founded the school in 1848 with a $2,500 (~$ in ) appropriation from the Massachusetts Legislature. "Idiot" was at that time considered a polite term for individuals with mental and intellectual disabilities. Howe was successful in his attempt to educate mentally disabled people, but this led to other problems. Some commentators argued that those with disabilities did so well in schools such as Howe's that they should permanently reside there.

Howe founded the State Board of Charities of Massachusetts in 1863, the first board of the sort in the United States. He served as its chairman from that time until 1874.

Howe made a last trip to Greece in 1866, to carry relief to Cretan refugees during the Cretan Revolution.

Final years and death

thumb|Grave of Samuel Gridley Howe in [[Mount Auburn Cemetery]]

Samuel Howe remained active and politically involved until the end of his life. In 1865, Howe openly advocated a progressive tax system, which he referred to as a "sliding scale of taxation proportionate to income." He said that the wealthy would resist this, but explained that the United States could not become a truly just society while the gap between rich and poor remained so cavernous. Emancipating the slaves and charity work alone were not enough, he insisted, to bridge the inequities,