Chapter X: Epilogue—Saint Before His Time

Viewed as a whole, the life of Samuel Joseph May seems a helter-skelter thing, a hodgepodge of enthusiasms and undertakings of the wildest variety. All in one morning Sam could sit down to read the latest tract on woman's rights, interrupt himself to tend to an Indian wanting a hand-out at the door,(1) compose a fund-raising appeal for Horace Mann's failing college at the west, entertain a set of elderly ladies hoping to convert him to trinitarianism, and give it all up in behalf of a walk downtown to put a notice for an antislavery meeting in the papers.(2) On hand at any one time he was sure to have at least a dozen worthy projects, all competing for his interest and his energy and his slender funds. No wonder some of his parishioners complained hi. sermons were dull.(3) Who had time to write sermons?

Nevertheless one can trace a single thread running through the many-splendored pattern of the fabric of his life, a thread of a continuous and sober interest in the education of the young. This interest provided the coordinating factor, the steadying influence, the single continuing devotion that helped to bring unity to his most varied undertakings.

For Sam, education was the heart of all the other reforms, the one that would eventually render the others unnecessary and obsolete. “Valuable as are many of the plans benevolence has devised for the melioration of the human condition,” said he in his most terse description of the relationship, “no one is comparable in importance to that which proposes the education of the whole people. This goes to the foundation of individual and social well-being.”(4)

Educate a child properly and he would never need to be desperately poor; educate him properly and he would never hold another human being in bondage, fall prey to drink or vice, victimize a child or a woman, abuse the criminal or the idiot or the insane. In a republic of perfectly educated citizens, the need for all the other reforms would melt away.

This Utopian dream was ever before May; he became rare among other reformers for his lifelong adherence to this ideal. Education for most nineteenth century enthusiasts involved too long a process. They would far rather indulge in the excitements of addressing meetings, standing against mobs, or being hung in effigy.(5)

May had his taste of mobs and effigies and violence—in 1835 he was mobbed repeatedly by proslavery enthusiasts in Vermont,(6) in 1851 he helped rescue the Negro, Jerry, from federal marshals in the midst of one of the wildest mob scenes Syracuse had ever seen,(7) and in 1861 he found himself hung and burned in effigy by Syracuse southern sympathizers in the city's Hanover Square(8) —but he always returned to his abiding interest and continuing dream.

His interest in education as well as in the other reforms stemmed from a deep but essentially uncomplicated religious faith. Religion for May was no sedentary thing. Near the end of his life he succinctly assessed his beliefs:

The worship of the true God is not a service of the lips, or rites and ceremonies. It is not a service that requires us to be so much upon our knees as on our feet, busily engaged in useful employments, in labors of love.(9)

Love of God meant to May service to his fellow human being; faith in God and man meant confidence in reform. Schools, he told Horace Mann, are the way God has chosen for reformation of the world.(10) "The more I have to do with the various reforms, to which Christianity would lead," he wrote Henry Barnard, "the more sensible am I made of the need of good instruction, mental and moral culture, to begin with."(11)

May's faith in education as the God-given key to all the world's ills typified nineteenth century perfectionism. The twentieth century, in its disillusionment and its neo-Calvinistic fears of the evil latent in every man, would look back with envy as well as condescension to the confidence and glowing optimism of the nineteenth.

* * *

May won fame in his own day. His name appeared frequently in newspapers in many parts of the country, and figured largely in the diaries, memoirs and personal histories of his time. His death brought glowing obituaries in such leading newspapers as the New York Tribune.(12) A "memoir" of his life—a book-length collection of letters, stories and reminiscences plus an autobiographical fragment—received admiring reviews both in the United States and in England after its publication in 1873.(13) The impact of his life was most evident in his adopted city of Syracuse. A city-wide centennial celebration of his birth held in Syracuse in September of 1897, more than a quarter century after his death, absorbed the energies and attention of Syracusans for a week and brought his old friends from many parts of the country to pay tribute to his memory.(14) In 1921, fifty years after his death, he was still ranked first in an all-time "Syracuse Hall of Fame," selected by the mayor and a group of leading citizens.(15)

Elsewhere, however, his fame faded, and his name dropped from text to footnotes in the histories of reform, there to be frequently confused with that of his less distinguished cousin, Samuel May, Jr., of Leicester, Massachusetts.(16)

How does a biographer account for such dwindling renown? The nature of May’s personality and the role he elected to play may provide at least part of the answer. As the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier once said, everyone loved Sam May at first sight.(17) The power of his personality was such, wrote one historian; that "even his opponents were unconsciously influenced by his sentiments and spirit, and soon became co-workers with him for the common good of humanity."(18) The young Unitarian minister chosen to edit May's "memoir" declared he had been drawn to May "by a mighty magnetism."(19)

May's cousin, Samuel Sewall of Boston, recorded that ". . . everyone who met him was drawn toward him."(20) Mary Peabody Mann, that sometimes forbidding New Englander, found herself along with everybody else "involuntarily" calling him "dear Mr. May."(21) To Theodore Parker he was always "dear Sam Jo."(22)

Such glowing references may be charged in part to Victorian sentimentality or to what one orthodox newspaper described tartly as "the Unitarian genius for eulogy."(23) Nonetheless the evident goodness, geniality, and sweetness of the man's personality are enough to make any biographer despair. Where are his weaknesses? The most vitriolic verbal assaults on May almost invariably dealt with his unconventional views, not with his nature. He was occasionally accused of gullibility in allowing himself to be "imposed on, through the very excess of his philanthropy,"(24) but almost the only really disparaging comment extant comes from a great-grand nephew of May's, Walter D. Edmonds, hinting at a family tradition involving May' s "kind of personal sternness in dealing with his immediate family," and parsimony in denying his wife a. "second candle for the mountain of family sewing."(25)

In general, the power of May's personality seemed to overshadow his other qualities. Intellectually, May had few peers, said one old friend, but he was never given proper credit because the "intellect seems to have been . . . overshadowed by the affections."(26) May's personality at first hand appeared irresistible; put down on paper, however, it dwindled off into a string of overworked adjectives. History may have difficulty in evaluating such men whose effectiveness depends so heavily on their own charisma and so much less on what can be recorded by or about them.

Such an endearing personality as Sam's may also have lacked precisely the firmness or even the abrasiveness that would attract the kind of notice necessary to preserve his name. May could never have written as Garrison did, "I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD."(27) He could never have brought himself to characterize the constitution as a "covenant with death and an agreement with hell."(28) May did not agree with many of Abraham Lincoln's actions, but he would not have called the president, as did Wendell Phillips, "the slave-hound of Illinois."(29). He was not to attain the kind of immortality won by Horace Mann with his unequivocal injunction, "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.(30) His colleagues in reform, fairly or not, were long remembered for their extreme views embodied in such catch-phrases and commands, while May, the mild-mannered and moderate, dropped from sight.(31)

Though May did take well-defined positions in controversial areas, and though he could differ in pronounced fashion with the views of another, he could not seem to entertain or express such unsettling emotions as distrust or hatred of an opponent’s personality. May rarely indulged in personalities; personal rancor in an exchange made him uneasy. If he could not: bring an antagonist around to his point of view, he usually could establish rapport with him on a personal basis. .At the end of eleven, long, furiously contested debates on the subject of the trinity between May and a Methodist parson in 1854, for example, May informed the Rev. Luther Lee that he thought Lee’s Methodist opinions unscriptural, irrational, and inconsistent. However, he cherished Lee as a man and a Christian. May said, because he knew Lee abounded in love and good works.(32). The two shook hands warmly and animosity vanished.

In the presence of an overbearing antagonist who refused to be won over by May charm, however, Sam was not above withdrawing from the field, as he did after the unpleasant encounter with General Lawrence at the teachers' convention of 1845.(33) He could not seem to reply in kind, even to maintain a firm conviction.

Another personal factor, a mixture of self-confidence and humility in his own opinion of himself, may also have helped keep May in the ranks of the secondary figures in the reports of historians to come. Born to the Boston purple, May usually conveyed a feeling of quiet confidence in what he was and where he came from, a sense of security which rendered unnecessary any self-promotion. A May of the Boston Mays and Sewalls needed no advertisement and produced none. . He rarely showed interest in glory or high position. As a protégé of Channing, he might have pushed for a more prominent pulpit and gone on to achieve high position in the ranks of the Unitarian clergy; he went instead to Connecticut, a land without another Unitarian minister. In 1845 he could have stayed on in Boston and in education at Howe's invitation; he chose instead to retreat to what seemed to any proper Bostonian the frontier of upstate New York.

In Syracuse he stayed the rest of his life. Syracuse gave him what he needed—opposition, stimulation, excitement—and he never seemed to want to move back to Boston where more resounding titles might have waited. The achievement of enduring national fame seemed to have no place on the May agenda.

If he appeared quietly confident of his status, he also possessed an honest humility about his own gifts. "I have had ability given to me to do nothing in my day worth remembering," May once said to Theodore Parker. "If I have begotten children who may live after me . . . why should you covet them, seeing that your name in virtue of your own mental and moral strength . . . is to outlive mine."(34) In this letter May was obviously comforting a childless friend, but his estimates of his own prospects seem realistic and sincere.

May's actions often confirmed this self-estimate of his own abilities. "I had some thought of sending you for your Journal a sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Art of teaching Idiots . . . " May once wrote Barnard, "but I have just obtained from Dr. Edw. Seguin a memoir, with which I am so pleased, that I hasten to send it to you instead. . . . Dr. Seguin is a remarkable man. . . ."(35). And thus vanished any chance May might have had to achieve national notice as an expert in this new and exciting field.

This self-chosen role as promoter and facilitator of the efforts of others gave May warm and affectionate notice in the memoirs of the great, but did little to preserve his own renown.

In addition, his very versatility and his boundless interest in everything under the sun kept him from the concerted drive in one field that helped bring fame to Garrison, for example, in antislavery, or Anthony in woman's rights. All the reformers dabbled widely, but the famous usually managed to channel their primary energies in one direction.

May, on the other hand, could barely see one project through to the beginnings of success before taking off after another. He had a pretty shrewd idea of his own tendencies in this respect. He was willing to work at the woman's rights movement until it became popular, he told the ladies at the National Woman's Rights Convention in Syracuse in 1852; then, he would "go at something else."(36) He acted this way toward education, too, but he managed to return to it more frequently over a longer period of time than to any of the others. The Harvard undergraduate who assumed as his first public position the teaching of a country school took as his last the chairmanship of a city board of education.

The actual role May played in the educational system also provides a clue to the ephemeral quality of his reputation in this field. His position outside the operating hierarchy for most of his years in education gave him an invaluable rostrum from which to preach reform and criticize the activities of the working educators; it did not provide him with the position of actual power he needed to put his own name on the reforms he sought. Only for a brief period as president of the Syracuse board of education did he hold the kind of power necessary to impose reforms for which he personally could take chief credit.

Even in 1848 when his resolutions resulted in the establishment of a free, racially integrated, school system in Syracuse, he achieved the result because of his position in the power structure of the community, not of the educational system itself. At that unique point in the history of Syracuse when it paused in transition between village and city, the citizens were making the rules for the school system, a prerogative they subsequently relinquished to their new school board. At that point in time, an influential clergyman could turn his ideas into action. May's ideas closely paralleled and sometimes anticipated those of Horace Mann as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and of Henry Barnard in a similar position in Connecticut. May did not have the executive authority within the system of Mann or Barnard; their fame lasted while his did not.

In some respects, May does not deserve this obscurity. He was an innovator both in education method and in ways of enlisting public support of educational reform. In the 1820's when interest in the common schools was just beginning to revive, he pioneered in opening the field of teaching to women and called the nation's first convention of citizens to consider the schools. In 1829 as one of the early contributors to William Russell's pioneer educational journal, May advocated new and exciting teaching methods at a point in time when Mann was still rustling legal briefs, Alcott had barely emerged on the Boston scene from the Connecticut hills, and Barnard was still an undergraduate at Yale.

In the 1830s and 1840s May was one of the most vocal in the advocacy of the Pestalozzian methods and philosophies which pre-figured many of Dewey's reforms. These methods resembled Progressivism in that they were designed to teach children only what they could understand, to make use of actual objects as learning material rather than to cite vague abstractions, and to banish fear and artificial rewards and punishment from the classroom.(37) May believed that educators should appeal first to the natural interests of the child. and lead him or her on to further discoveries from that first vital contact. May also emphasized. as did progressive educators, the importance of the school experience in preparing a child for life. in teaching him how to get long with his fellows, and in giving him a working vocation.(38)

The work of May helped bring into the school system many children who had previously been excluded. For this wide variety of children. twentieth century progressivists were to redesign the school system and redefine its objectives. "If everyone were to go to school, the methods and meaning of education in the twentieth century would have to change." asserted a later educational historian.(39) May helped make this change necessary.

May's major significance to a later age, however, lies in his early identification of issues and controversies that continued unabated for decades and in the liberal stands he took in these controversies. He was one of the first to fight for the Negro's right to education and to call segregated educational facilities for Negroes inherently unequal. He ranked among the males who first took to the rostrum in behalf of higher education for women. He pioneered in the battle to socialize the American school system. Though he believed that a child could learn virtue and morality in school through contact with virtuous and moral teachers, he was among the first to urge the removal of all sectarian influences, such as Bible reading, from the schools lest the rights of religious minorities and the nonreligious be violated.

The perceptive among his contemporaries recognized that the primary significance of May's life lay in his ability to anticipate issues and to take courageous positions for what he felt was the good of generations to come. May was, as his successor in the Unitarian pulpit of Syracuse pointed out, always pushing "into advance fields of thought and action, away beyond the masses of the people."(40) The Rev. Mr. Calthrop had pronounced an excellent epitaph.

* * *

On a September afternoon in 1875, the people of Syracuse met to honor the memory of Samuel Joseph May and to dedicate a bust of their most distinguished fellow townsman, a piece of sculpture that was to remain forever in the high school May had built. People had brought offerings of flowers and vines and evergreens to deck the platform in front of the building. The grass was still damp from rain, but people overflowed the lawn and the sidewalks. Carriages and wagons and buggies filled the street. In the audience prominent citizens, lawyers, doctors, and teachers mingled with artisans and laborers. A scattering of Negroes edged the crowd.

Syracuse had never claimed one whose fame was so widespread as that of Dr. May's, Andrew D. White told his fellow citizens as he climaxed a series of long, laudatory speeches by accepting the bust in behalf of the board of education. May's face had gone abroad, White said, as the companion of Whittier, Sumner, and Emerson. The beloved Unitarian pastor would long stand as the apostle of education in the first rank of reform.

The president of Cornell University had been eloquent; it was left, however, to a modest Syracuse bookkeeper once ordained to the ministry, the Rev. C. deB. Mills, to pronounce his old friend's most appropriate eulogy.

"It needs yet a finer age), said. the Rev. Mr. Mills, "justly to apprehend and fully to appreciate this soul. . . . There were plans of his for human amelioration that must wait for a riper age to be welcomed and realized. In a future day when life shall be set to a higher key . . . then shall Samuel J. May be more thoroughly studied, felt, and known."(41)

Sam would have loved the whole affair. He would have enjoyed the performance of the high school chorus. He might have smiled over the choice of that back-slidden Unitarian, the Rt. Rev. Frederic Dan Huntington, Episcopal bishop of Syracuse to offer the official prayer. He most certainly would have relished the final touch, an audience rendition of the "Doxology" with its resounding endorsement of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Being human, however, Sam would have basked in all the warm and loving praise; being optimistic, he would have taken heart from the predictions of success for his reforms; and as for the day when his life would be more thoroughly studied, felt and known; well, he would wait.

Footnotes

(1) May's family tried to protect him against these intrusions when he was in his study. They complained he always got to the door before they did. Mumford, May Memoirs, p. 269.

(2) May's diaries are the best sources for his varied occupations. In them he carefully noted a wide variety of undertakings, but rarely revealed his own feelings or reactions.

(3) William P. Tilden, "He Was A Good Man," Services in Honor of Samuel Joseph May. Boston: George H. Ellis Press, 1886, p. 13.

(4) May, "Importance of Our Common Schools," American Journal of Education, IV, p. 225.

(5) Relatively few of the radical reformers continued their devotion to the cause of improved education, says Cross in his Burned Over District, p. 235. “Formal education was a slow process compared with lecturing and publishing."

(6) May, Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict, pp. 152-153.

(7) Ibid., pp. 374-379.

(8) Ibid., pp. 394-395.

(9) "Theater Service—Rev. Mr. May's Sermon," Syracuse Daily Standard, May 4, 1869.

(10) Quoted in Mann to May, September 22. 1848. Mann, Horace Mann, p. 271.

(11) May to Barnard, January 8, 1847, Barnard Papers. May considered himself a Christian, though some members of the orthodox denied his claim to that appellation. After he died, the Syracuse "Sons of Temperance" haggled until sundown about the resolutions to be written in his memory. A Methodist clergyman had objected to using the term "Christian" to describe Mr. May. Undated, unlabeled clipping immediately after May’s death, S. J. May file, Onondaga Historical Association. Also Syracuse Daily Standard, October 24, 1897.

(12) "Samuel Joseph May," New York Tribune, July 7, 1871.

(13) Life and Letters of Thomas Mumford, pp. 101, 102.

(14) Syracuse Evening Herald, October 20, 1897.

(15) Syracuse Evening Herald, February 20, 1921.

(16) See Anna Mary Wells' Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963. Of four index references to "Samuel J. May," all without exception actually refer primarily to Samuel May, Jr., though the author is unaware of the existence of two Mays and confuses them gloriously.

(17) Quoted in a letter from R. L. Carpenter to Thomas J. Mumford, Life and Letters of Thomas Mumford, p. 101.

(18) Clayton, History of Onondaga County. p. 189.

(19) Life and Letters of Thomas Mumford, pp. vi-vii.

(20) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 40.

(21) Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 167.

(22) John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker. New York: Appleton and Co., 1864, I, pp. 143, 296, 318.

(23) The Advance, quoted in Life and Letters of Thomas Mumford, p. 197.

(24) Syracuse Daily Standard, July 3, 1871.

(25) Walter D. Edmonds to Richard N. Wright, November 9, 1956, Onondaga historical Association.. Otherwise a biographer is driven to inferring unattractive qualities more from a lack than a presence of positive evidence. It is possible, for example, that May took a typically .patronizing attitude toward those he helped. Many runaway slaves found refuge in his barn on their way to Canada ; there is no evidence they ever sat down with him at his family table.

(26) C. deB. Mills, Syracuse Daily Journal, September 18, 1875.

(27) The Liberator, January 1, 1831.

(28) Resolutions adopted by the New England Anti-slavery Society, January 27, 1843. May had little use for Garrison's excesses in speech. "I respect and love Mr. Garrison's fervent devotion to the cause of the oppressed, and his fearlessness in reproving the oppressors; but no one can disapprove, more than I do, the harshness of the epithets, and the bitterness of his invectives." May, Letters to Judson, p. 8.

(29) Quoted in David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, p. 20.

(30) Tharp, Until Victory, p. 310.

(31) One is tempted to quote the twentieth century moral philosopher, Leo Durocher, "Nice guys finish last." Leo Durocher and Edward Linn , "Candid Memories of Leo Durocher, Saturday Evening Post, 236, May 11, 1963, p. 53.

(32) Doctrine of the Trinity, p. 160. These debates intrigued the city and its editors. May had long "fulminated against orthodoxy with an arrogant confidence . . . . " thundered the Central New Yorker. This comment, said the Syracuse Daily Standard, was palpably unfair. After all, "Mr. May is the weaker party, theologically considered, in the proportion of three to one, and we protest against a powerful fellow like the Central New Yorker taking the part of his antagonist." Syracuse Daily Standard, February 17, 1854.

(33) See above.

(34) May to Theodore Parker, quoted in Galpin, "God's Chore Boy," p. 219.

(35) May to Barnard, February 19, 1856, Barnard Papers.

(36). Syracuse Daily Standard, September 13, 1852.

(37) See, for example, John Dewey, Experience and Education, pp. 5 and 6, as quoted in Paul Woodring, A Fourth of A Nation. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1957, pp. 16, 17. "If one attempts to formulate the [new] philosophy of education, we may, I think, discover certain common principles. To imposition. from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill is opposed acquisition of them as a means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world."

(38) Smith, History of Syracuse Schools, p. 142

(39) For discussions of the work of early nineteenth century educators as models for the twentieth century progressive movement, see Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School, pp. viii, ix, and x; also Curti, Social Ideas of American Educators, pp. 66 and 67. The quotation is from Cremin.

(40) The Rev. S. R. Calthrop, "Tribute to Mr. May," Syracuse Daily Journal, September 20, 1875.

(41) This quotation and the entire account of the dedication comes from the Syracuse Daily Journal, September 20, 1875.