Chapter 1: A Happy, Joyous Child

The sound of snapping fingers crackled through the schoolroom air. Master Cole of the Marblehead Academy was chastising a culprit; his big fingers flicked sharply at the boy's ears, once, twice, and still again. The master was a severe man and a devout believer in the rod, promptly and generously applied. Here in this Massachusetts whaling town with the nineteenth century just under way, he managed his school with a puritanical eye toward potential evil in the young.

He glared down at the current offender, a frail boy of six or seven surrounded by evidence of patent guilt; tiny paper fish the lad had fashioned and tried to catch with a bent pin on a piece of string.

For the boy, the fishing expedition had stemmed from sheer desperation—something, anything to do. Crammed into a hard bench with the other boys for the past three years, young Samuel Joseph May had been allowed down only once, and that for five minutes' recitation in reading and spelling.

The rest of the time he had sat immobile on the bench. Nothing to read. Nothing to do. Nothing to think about except how hard it all was. So he had scattered his fish and bent his pin.

"You naughty boy!" thundered the master, towering suddenly over him. "I'll teach you how to behave better in school time!"(1) The cruel fingers flashed toward Sam's head.

Passion expended, crushed, but he brooded over the injustice for days and years. Sixty years later he could still remember the dour look of Master Cole, the pain of the punishment, the hatefulness of it all. "He taught me what he little intended," May recalled, "to regard and fear him as a harsh cruel man. I felt . . . that he ought to have given me something to do, or else let me occupy myself as best as I could."

Young Sam's experience was far from novel. Education in those first years of the nineteenth century was a thing to be ground in grimly, devoid of joy or pleasure. Master Cole of Marblehead was a typical example of schoolmasters all over New England who taught lessons by sing-song rote, kept small children perched on backless benches for hours at a time, and punished the tiniest infraction with a touch of the rod. This was the way the average New England boy learned his letters, at the end of the switch and the cutting edge of the ferule.(2)

But Sam fumbling about in his misery felt ill-used. It was typical of the boy to feel, even gropingly at seven, that the system must be at fault, not himself. To that traumatic moment in Marblehead he dated the beginning of a life-long conviction that education should be gentle and creative, flowering from a child's own interests rather than imposed from above. Such a conviction would eventually help put children in new settings, produce schoolhouses that were spacious, airy and comfortable, and help create teachers who could persuade instead of punish. New methods of teaching, education for all even into the fantastic levels of high school and college—these were the revolutionary ideas May would promote through a lifetime devoted to educational reform.

May did not develop a towering original mind; the germinal ideas of educational reform in America were postulated first by such pioneers as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard. But these men found in May a sort of educational John the Baptist, one who had cried in the New England wilderness for educational reform a decade before they came on the scene. When they did appear, he embraced them and their ideas, supporting and nourishing them with all his eager optimism, promoting them wherever he went with the force of his personality and his pen.(3)

His own qualities proved ideal for this life-long mission. Warm-hearted, indefatigable, endearing, May was able to take some of the acid edge from reform, to sweeten some of its vinegary pronouncements, to make change more palatable as well as more understandable to the common man.

A Boston gentleman, he conferred a gentleman's prestige on reform.(4) Sublimely self-confident, he charged happily into battle with conservatism and reaction, challenged giants, and emerged from the worst battles wreathed in smiles and confident of final victory.

Like a good many of his contemporaries, May spread himself generously and all too thinly among burgeoning reforms of the day: women's rights, abolition, temperance, reform of prison, asylum and school. Unlike many other nineteenth century meliorists who dipped into school reform and quickly gave up because it proved slow and unexciting, May clung to his interest in education. For him, education was the heart and soul of all the other reforms. Educate every child of the republic properly and no other reforms would be necessary; slavery, prostitution, alcoholism and all the other results of ignorance and cruelty would melt away. Man would find himself in the utopia that was his natural heritage.(5)

* * *

Samuel Joseph May was born in Boston on September 12, 1797, tenth child of his parents, Colonel Joseph and Dorothy Sewell May. It was not an auspicious time to be born. The city selectmen had just warned the citizens that the season of contagious disorders was advancing; fever, dysentery and whooping cough were carrying off babies on every hand. (6) No one needed to warn the Mays of the dangers threatening the young; of their ten children born thus far, they had already lost four, and a fifth child would die on September 17, just five days after Samuel Joseph was delivered. (7)

Though a frail and sickly thing, he managed to cling to life and an entrancing one he shortly found it. The day before Sam's birth, one George Claghorn had the honor to inform his fellow citizens that "the Frigate CONSTITUTION is to be launched into her destined Element on Wednesday the 30th Instant . . . ." in the Boston harbor.(8) The city in which Sam and the famous frigate appeared that September furnished an exciting environment for a growing boy. He could roam the wharves, sniffing tar and rope and good salt air and listening to wild tales from imaginative seamen home from Indies or orient. In winter there was snowball fighting on the Commons and coasting on Beacon Hill. Sledders of daring disposition could keep right on going at the bottom of the hill, amid the clattering hoofs and rattling chaise wheels of Washington Street.(9) Boys who daily braved such hazards grew up; strong minded and independent. It was an independence fostered by stout Boston parents and Colonel May was no exception. Every man, the colonel insisted, should stand on his own feet, rely on his own resources, and supply his own wants. That parent does a child no good who refuses to permit such independence.(10)

Sam drew in this kind of an attitude with his mother's milk, grew up to be strong-minded, aggressive and extroverted with a decidedly nonconformist turn of mind. He had plenty of company. His Boston swarmed with free-thinkers, eccentrics, and social misfits destined to play major roles in the reforms to come. Amid this rough-edged throng, however, Sam had one distinguishing characteristic, an almost magical ability to remain affable, outgoing and affectionate toward the people he opposed, even while launching the most bitter attacks on their views. A quality like this could prove unsettling to anyone who tried to differ with him very long. Here was a man who could present the most enraging views, and then disarm his opponents completely with his easy unselfconscious warmth toward them as individuals. Who among all the reformers, wondered one of his contemporaries, "so combined sweetness and firmness, mildness and courage, fine tact, winsome ways, and stern faithfulness as he?"(11)

It took supreme self-confidence, this ability so love a man though you hated his opinions, the kind of self-confidence that saw no threat in contrary views. The quality was bred early into Sam, brought up by a mother conscious of an impeccable Boston ancestry. It was true that Sam's father, while providing competently enough for his family as the secretary of a large marine insurance firm, nevertheless had come from no particularly distinguished stock in the history of Boston. Sam's paternal grandfather had been a carpenter and builder. But Sam's mother was a Sewall springing from Quincys and claiming relationship to Hancocks, and oh, what fine old New England names those were! The Sewell connection commanded particular respect. Sam's uncle, the Honorable Samuel Sewell, served as chief justice of the entire commonwealth. Sam's great-grandfather had been the famous Chief Justice Samuel Sewall who had repented with chagrin his part in the Salem witch hangings.(12) Thus Sam's mother had come to a comparatively modest marriage, quietly secure in her heritage, and able to make her son properly conscious of his. When the time came, he could move out into a larger world with the easy bearing of a born Boston aristocrat.(13)

Such supreme faith in himself must also have been nurtured in a home remarkable for its tenderness and warmth. Both parents desperately wanted him. The Mays had lost two other sons, both named Samuel Joseph, before this third Samuel Joseph was able to survive. When Sam was four, his six-year-old brother Edward, a winsome, affectionate child, died in a tragic accident. After that, his parent's affections and concern were turned even more strongly on young Sam. At the age of nine, he could confess a small theft, a truly "heinous crime" in such a household, and receive not only the expected parental admonishment, upbraiding and dire warnings about a life of crime, but also compassion and understanding from two people who understand his misery.

"I was a very happy, joyous child," May recalled without self-consciousness of braggadocio. "I had many friends, and was rather a favorite among them."(14)

All this petting and indulgence, however, was tempered with a strong admixture of stiff New England discipline. Any well-brought up Boston boy was hedged about with a covey of restrictions, and laced into a proper character by unending exhortations to prudence and goodness and charity. A city that fined its citizens ten shillings for riding at a canter or walking too rapidly around a corner was not one to tolerate uninhibited boyish enthusiasms.(15) Young Sam's idea of heaven was a place where children could sit down at the breakfast table. He and his sister Eliza, as a proper part of discipline for the young, were required to stand at breakfast while their parents and the older children sat and enjoyed their coffee and toast.(16)

Boston elders readily spouted useful admonitions, happily indulging in this predilection even with other people's children. The Boston sage, William Ellery Channing, whose Federal Street home was just around the corner from the Mays' house at Number One Federal Court, frequently exercised this prerogative. When Sam was only six or seven he would trot round to call on Dr. Channing in his study. Channing made a pet out of him, as did everybody else, showed him colored pictures and loaded his pockets with tea cakes; but the doctor never missed a chance to impress Sam properly with the duty of kindness to the poor and miserable, outlining in graphic detail how much more Sam would enjoy his own life if he made others happy.

Moved by this advice on one occasion, young Sam decided to act on it, and gave away some of the Channing tea cakes to a ragged little boy he met on his way home. He went confidently back to Channing, eager to recount his virtuous act and restock his supply. Channing commended Sam's charity, praised his generosity, and sent him home. No more cake. Good Bostonians not only lived by their own moral precepts, but managed, when they could, that everyone else should too.

Colonel May, Sam's father, had as a young man established a reputation for high moral tone and unimpeachable honesty. When he was 38 his career as a merchant came to a disastrous halt in the midst of what his biographer called an "ill-advised speculation."(17) After days of deep depressions, the colonel resolved to give up all his property to satisfy his creditors, "even to the ring on his finger,"(18) but never again to try to become rich. Refusing several offers of partnership, he took a safe, secure position with the insurance firm, divested himself of all his business worries, and devoted the rest of his life to his family,(19) to numerous charities, and to the delights of reading and contemplation.(20) May's children grew up surrounded by books, On the May shelves were the colonel's favorites: the classic historians, the poets Pope and Addison, and the philosophers Paley and Priestley.(21)

Disenchanted with the search for wealth and enamored of the intellectual life, Colonel May determined that the best legacy he could give his children would be the finest education his remaining money could buy. He dispatched the young Mays to the private schools enjoying the best reputation among the Brahmins; no May would have set foot in a common school at that low point in the history of public education in Massachusetts. Sam went off at five to the ma'am schools; at eight, to a series of schools kept by men, including the authors of famous geography and a well-known text in arithmetic. Despite these erudite instructors, however, Sam came to be known more for good behavior than for scholarly achievement. Dull lessons bored him and until he reached his teens poor health plagued him. The worried Mays resorted to taking him out of school and sending him on trips to the country in hopes of helping the headaches, nausea and lassitude that assailed him in airless city schoolrooms. (On one of these trips to visit his uncle, Chief Justice Sewell, he encountered the infamous Master Cole. On another he studied with a minister in Stoughton. The minister proved a poor teacher and Sam was desperately homesick. The experience, however, left him with a love for the outdoors that lasted a lifetime.) At length Sam turned 13, his health improved, and his parents set about the serious business of preparing him to enter Harvard College. Such an entrance was, of course, a foregone conclusion to the ambitious educational program Colonel May had outlined for his son.

A supreme effort was indicated. Colonel May joined with some of the city fathers, apparently disenchanted with the Boston Latin School, in importing a scholar of considerable repute to establish a private school designed especially to prepare their boys for Harvard. There were Otises, Eliots, Parkers, and Parsons on the patrons list when Master Elisha Clap arrived to set up a select school for 25 boys in the basement of the First Church in Chauncy Place. He charged one hundred dollars a year for each student, a tuition exceeding that charged by any other master, and began Sam's preparation for his destiny across the Charles.

If Colonel May expected a high-priced education to turn Sam into a scholar, he must have been disappointed. Sam never had a scholarly disposition, and the Latin and Greek duly learned were more for the schoolmaster's approbation than his own delight. He managed to squeak into Harvard without conditions, and the Mays must have drawn a familial sigh of relief.(22)

Oddly fragmented as it was, Sam's education did prepare him in its own peculiar way for his life of nonconformity and reform.

Exposed to a variety of people and places, Sam grew up with an easy acceptance of diversity, having rubbed off a little of his native provincialism even before he entered college. There was the little Black boy who went to one of the ma'am schools, more witty than any of the others, the best in reading, spelling and counting, and the equal of any of the rest on the playground too. Apparently Black boys could be born with brains.

There were the wives of sailors and sea-captains in Marblehead, used to taking charge and managing their own affairs while their men were at sea—a self-sustaining and independent lot—giving a small boy the idea that a woman's role might conceivably differ from that of the submissive females he saw at home on Beacon Hill.(23)

Then there were his good friends, Judah, Catherine and Slowey Hays, children of the only Jewish family in Boston. Colonel May and Moses Michael Mays had struck up a fine friendship; Colonel May took dinner with the Mays family every Saturday and presently he was taking Sam along. Sam would sometimes stay on, visiting for weeks, and watching the Hebrew fastings and prayers and charities. Instead of acquiring the more typical Bostonian hatred and fear of Jews, he managed to grow up without prejudice against the house of Israel or indeed any other religious group.(24) Later in life he could even join hands with the hated Catholics in common projects when his fellow Protestants were beginning to fear that the roaring wave of European immigrants might engulf and destroy some cherished beliefs and traditions.(25)

Possibly the most important feeling to develop in Sam as a result of this strange educational mosaic proved to be an increasing dissatisfaction with the system itself. Young Sam could not put it into words, even if he would. Over the formative years, however, an impressionable child had accumulated an increasing number of reasons for unhappiness with the increasing number of reasons for unhappiness with the school system—the dullness of the everlasting reading, writing and recital of the catechism at Mrs. Wallcut's ma'am school; the suffocating atmosphere of hot, stuffy classrooms in dank church basements, the sterility of Master Clap's rigid approach to learning.

Hundreds of other New England boys were suffering through a similarly arid education. They were growing up stout and satisfied merchants, clergymen, and lawyers, and assuming without qualm or question positions in Boston counting house, pulpit or bar. Their fathers' education was sufficient for them. Yet in that New England wilderness a few others were building impressions that must have paralleled those of young May. Back in the Connecticut hills a boy called Amos Bronson Alcott hated school and was to leave it forever, at 13.(26) Over in Franklin, Massachusetts, a farmer's son was growing up at hard work in the fields, never getting more than ten weeks schooling a year until he was 16. (27) His name was Horace Mann. A toddler called Henry Barnard was still in petticoats.

Grown into men, they were to change the whole face and course of American education, and Samuel Joseph May was to leap in enthusiastically to help them do it.

All that was yet to come. At the moment young May was emerging officially from childhood at 16—generally happy with himself and all mankind—and looking over into Cambridge where the future lay.

Footnotes

(1) The details of this episode together with the quotations and the account of Sam's feelings and recollections come from an autobiographical fragment written by May and included in the memoir of his life published two years after his death. Thomas J. Mumford (ed.), Memoir of Samuel Joseph May (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), pp. 13, 14.

(2) For further discussion of corporal punishment in the schoolroom, see below Chapter IX.

(3) For a discussion of May's role in the promotion of educational reform, see below, Chapter VII.

(4) See, for example, Merrill, against wind and tide: "although part of Garrison's personality demanded expression, another part sought respectability, and he wanted to be associated with reformers of good family like Quincy, [Samuel J,] May, Sewell, Rogers." p. 173.

(5) See below, Chapter X, for further discussion of May's concept of education in relationship to the other reforms.

(6) Boston Gazette, September 11, 1797.

(7) Samuel May, Jr., A Genealogy of the Descendants of John May who came from England to Roxbury in 1610 (Boston: Franklin Press, 1878), p.115.

(8) Boston Gazette, September 11, 1797.

(9) Especially graphic in describing Boston boyhoods of this period is Van Wyck Brooks' The Flowering of New England (New York: E. P. Dutton and Cp., Inc., 1936), Chapter I. Also see David Donald's Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1960) p.4.

(10) F. W. P. Greenwood, A Good Old Age, A Sermon. . . on the Death of Joseph May, Esq. (Boston: S. N. Dickenson, 1841), p.12.

(11) C. D. B. Mills, Syracuse Daily Journal, September 20, 1875.

(12) Mumford, May Memoir, pp. 2-4.

(13) By the third sentence of his autobiography, Sam is discussing his Sewall connections and his relationship to Josiah Quincy and John Hancock "of Revolutionary memory." Ibid., pp. 2 and 3.

(14) Ibid., pp. 4-12, 17-19.

(15) Boston Gazette, September 11, 1797.

(16) Mumford, Memoir, p. 24.

(17) Greenwood, A Good old Age, p. 12.

(18) Ibid., p.12.

(19) Dorothy May's twelve pregnancies resulted in six living children, but the Colonel adopted two more along the way. May Genealogy, p. 115.

(20) Sometimes his reading had an inhibiting effect on his charity. When he read Malthus he grew discouraged about helping the poor. Obviously; all they could do was multiply. He decided it was better to prevent poverty than relieve it, and went about making helpful suggestions about hard work and economy to those he judged in need of such advice. Greenwood, A Good Old Age, pp. 12-19.

(21) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 2.

(22) Ibid., pp. 22-28.

(23) Ibid., pp. 14, 15.

(24) Ibid., pp. 15-17.

(25) History of the Diocese of Syracuse, W. P. H. Hewitt, ed. (Syracuse: Catholic Sun Press, 1909), p. 56.

(26) Odell Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, the Life of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1937), p. 10.

(27) Louise Hall Tharp, Until Victory: Horace Mann and Mary Peabody (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1953), p. 24.