American philanthropist, born at Hanover, NJ, on the 17th of February 1806; graduated at Middlebury in 1827; commissioned teacher of midshipmen in the United States navy in 1829; purchased Edgehill School, Princeton, NJ, in 1832; was professor of languages in the Philadelphia High School in 1838; and purchased a classical school at Burlington, NJ, in 1844. He was licensed to preach in 1849; was pastor of Congregational churches at Cornwall, VT, and East Hampton, Long Island; became professor in Washington College in 1853; and president of the St. Louis City University in 1859. He was chosen secretary of the New York Prison Association in 1862; in 1870 organized the National Prison Association, by which he was unanimously elected secretary. As a member of a commission, appointed in 1871 by the New York legislature, he wrote a report on the relations between prison and free labor, strongly denouncing the maintenance of convicts in idleness. Appointed by President Grant United States commissioner to organize an international penitentiary congress, he assembled in London, July 4, 1872, delegates from twenty-six nations; and was chosen honorary president at the next congress, convened in 1878, in Stockholm. He received the degree of doctor of divinity from Middlebury College in 1853, and doctor of laws from Washington College in 1857. Among his many works on theological and educational subjects and on prison reform the more important are Hints on Popular Education (1838); Commentaries on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews (1852); and The State of Prisons and Child-Saving Institutions (1880). He died at Cambridge, MA, on the 10th of December 1879.—His son, Frederick Howard, a clergyman, born in Philadelphia on the 9th of April 1838; graduated at Washington College in 1857, and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865, having served as hospital chaplain in the United States Army during the war. He became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Springfield, IL, in 1865, and secretary of the Illinois State Board of Commissioners of Public Charities in 1869, effecting the organization of similar boards under the name of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, of which he was president in 1883. As a result of his observations at the International Penitentiary Congress of 1887, when he was the delegate from Illinois, the hospital for the insane at Kankakee was built. Besides many reports and pamphlets, he is the author of Punishment and Reformation: An Historical Sketch of the Rise of the Penitentiary System (1895). He died in 1912.
