American Statesman and Educator, born at Franklin, Mass., May 4, 1796; was graduated at Brown university, Providence, and commenced the study of law. Elected to the legislature of Massachusetts in 1827, his first speech was in favor of religious liberty, and his second a plea for railways. He was an advocate of temperance, and a founder of the state lunatic asylum. Removing to Boston, he was elected, 1836, to the state senate, of which he became president. After editing the revised statutes of the state, he was for eleven years secretary of the board of education. He gave up business and politics and devoted his whole time to the cause of education, introduced normal schools and paid committees, and, in 1843, made a visit to educational establishments in Europe. His report was reprinted both in England and America. For eleven years he worked fifteen hours a day, held teachers’ conventions, gave lectures, and conducted a large correspondence. In 1848 he was elected to Congress as the successor of ex-President John Quincy Adams, whose example he followed in energetic opposition to the extension of slavery. At the end of his term he accepted the presidency of Antioch college at Yellow Springs, Ohio, established for the education of both sexes, where he labored with zeal and success until his death Aug. 2, 1859. His principal works are his educational reports, and “Slavery Letters and Speeches.”

Personal

  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 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.

Educator

  There is not a town nor a school district in Massachusetts, where his influence has not been felt; there is not one which has not largely profited by the spirit which he has excited, and by the improvements which he has introduced.

  I honor beyond all common names of respect the distinguished gentleman (Horace Mann), who for twelve years has devoted the uncommon powers of his mind, and the indomitable energy of his character, to this noble cause. He will be remembered till the history of Massachusetts is forgotten, as one of her greatest benefactors.

  The record of his life is that of a great thinker and an heroic and indefatigable worker for the mental and moral well-being of the youth of America. His mind was pure and lofty and far ahead of his time; his devotion to the cause of learning and self-abnegation in his work was such as became rather an angel of light than a creature of earthly mold…. Horace Mann was a hero. He set a herculean task before himself and did it. He gave his life to the youth of America and we are all his debtors. The work which he did is imperishable. He lifted a nation upon his Atlantean shoulders and broke open the locked doors to hidden stores of wisdom. He built “monuments more enduring than brass” in uncounted thousands of young lives. He did for America what Froebel and Pestalozzi earlier did for western Europe. But Horace Mann was no saint, though he did a saintly work. His nature was delicately attuned and the sharp raspings of the world often struck out anything but heavenly melody.

  No other college president ever had before him a more susceptible body of students; and no other body of students ever had over them a more honored president, or one with greater power to impress himself. Those six years were years of sacrifice, filled with many petty annoyances and grievous disappointments to Mr. Mann; but at the same time they were years of great victory for the causes for which he was laboring. In those six years he did more for the higher education and for the elevation of women, than any other man, in any other place, ever did in a quarter of a century. In those six years he demonstrated to the world that men and women can be educated together with mutual advantage to both intellect and morals. In those six years he did more than any other man in a generation to demonstrate that women have equal intellectual capacity with men. In those six years he showed how a college can be Christian in the best sense in which that word can be used, and at the same time not sectarian. In those six years he did much to prove that conduct and character, rather than opinion, are the essential things in this life. In those six years he impressed his high ideals upon hundreds and hundreds of young people in such a way as to change the entire character of their after lives. His power to inspire was phenomenal. In those six years, outside college walls, in educational meetings and on the lecture platforms, in Ohio and other western states, by his magical power as a speaker he stimulated thousands of people to nobler thinking and higher living. In those six years he imbued Antioch college with a spirit that still pervades it; which stimulates to higher aims and nobler purposes everyone who is brought within the influence. Those six years were religious climax to one of the grandest lives this world has ever known.

  In conclusion I suggest again the thought of Mr. Mann as a character inspired with missionary zeal to reform society by means of the school system. It was this missionary zeal that led him to advocate in the Massachusetts legislature the first insane asylum, and secure its establishment—to favor the establishment of asylums for deaf, dumb, and blind; to secure normal schools, humane school discipline, methods of instruction that appeal to the child’s interest and arouse him to self-activity, and finally to devote the evening of his life to the Antioch college experiment. It is this missionary zeal for the school that works so widely and in so many followers to-day. What enthusiastic teacher is not proud to be called a disciple of Horace Mann?

  He was the contemporary and equal of Charles Sumner. In fact, there was no man, with the exception of Daniel Webster, in Massachusetts, who, in prospects, stood ahead of Horace Mann. Everything in the way of fame and fortune was easily within his grasp. The question with him was, should he give up all these brilliant prospects and take up a cause that seemed lost and almost hopeless—that of the common schools? He accepted the position at one thousand dollars a year, and threw himself into his work with all his might and main.

  The supreme work of Mr. Mann was the remodeling of the school system of Massachusetts. He introduced many of the features which are now widely accepted as invaluable elements of the school systems of the U. S., and to him as much as to any one person is due the founding of the normal schools in the U. S.

  No educational institution in America has a more prophetic story than Antioch. Here Horace Mann came in the zenith of his power, and his great heart flamed through a period of six years in the interest of his ideals. Here for the first time in the history of the world was the bold venture undertaken of establishing an institution of higher learning where the discriminations of sect, sex and race were to be of no value. It was an ideal worthy of the greatest prophet of education the United States has ever known. It was an ideal worthy the democracy dreamed of in the Declaration of Independence, in the minds of the Adamses and Jefferson. Back of him was the tide of prophecy, the rising interest in science, the growing freedom of thought, surely a backing that would seem to be inadequate, but in front of him were the stumps and the malaria, the crudeness of bigotry that still survived under the most promising pretensions, and Horace Mann fell at his post.

  He was a great constructive pedagogist, a wise educational statesman, an eloquent tribune of the common school. He called upon the people of all classes, as with the voice of a herald, to raise their estimate of public instruction, and to provide better facilities by which it could be furnished. He devised or adopted new educational agencies, and persuaded the people to use them. He organized public opinion, and influenced the action of legislatures. He gave men higher ideas of the work and character of the teacher at the same time that he taught the teacher to magnify his office. He heightened the popular estimate of the instruments that are conducive and necessary to the existence of good schools. He elevated men’s ideas of the value of ethical training, and made valuable suggestions looking to its prosecution.

  Mr. Mann’s reputation for scholarship and zeal gave his opinions greater weight than those of almost any other man in the country. As a result, the most radical educational ideas were received from him with respect; and he carried forward the work of giving a practical embodiment to co-education, non-sectarianism, and the requirements of practical and efficient moral character, as perhaps no other educator could have done. His influence among people and the aspirations which he kindled in thousands of minds by public addresses and personal contact, did for the people of the Ohio valley a work, the extent and value of which can never be measured.

  Horace Mann is by general consent the greatest educator that this Western hemisphere has produced. He was not the greatest scholar, was not the greatest teacher, was not the best beloved by the teachers of his day, yet he is everywhere known as the first among American educational leaders.

General

  To know him as a thinker, we must read his speeches made in Congress, his articles in The Common School Journal, and his reports as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. These show the cumulative nature of his thought. To convince men was his purpose, not merely to illustrate his ideas, and to this end he was not satisfied with crushing opposition with the weight of his arguments, he would also bury it with their bulk…. He was not a seer, but a sayer and a doer. He was not a first-rate man. He was an organizer. The men who organize are always second-rate. He originated nothing, and did not pretend to do so. His test of truth was portability. He liked phrenology on this account, because it was so practical and business-like. He left other men to seek new truth. For himself, he went to work to see if he could embody some of that which was already in the world.

  The writings of Mann are full of good sense and apt illustration, and are clear, and often elegant in style.

  Horace Mann’s reports as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education rank with legislative documents, yet they are really eloquent treatises, full of matter, but of matter burning with passion and blazing with imagery.

  A great educator like Horace Mann left behind him no standard treatise on pedagogy, but a vitalizing influence in American schools. Literature got little from him; the nation much.

  Horace Mann does not walk by the sole light of political or social experience; his pedagogy is inspired by higher principles. This man of action, so positive in his views and in his methods, has his philosophy; and it is no amateur philosophy, good to charm a leisure hour. He lives in it, feeds upon it, applies it in everything; it is his inspirer and his mistress. All his teaching, his whole scheme of education, is penetrated with it, and does but translate it. Horace Mann is not a professional philosopher, no more than he is a systematic pedagogue; but he is still less an empiric, led solely by a happy instinct, by present and variable necessity, by isolated observations; he has his fixed star, his general ideas of the order of nature and of destiny.

  Mr. Mann wrote with power and eloquence, but there was a want of chasteness and finish in his style.

  Every word that Horace Mann has written can be read to-day by every teacher with the greatest profit.