At heart, Mann was an idealist, always on the lookout for good causes. He attended Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures and heard the sermons of the well-known Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, as well as those of Edward Taylor, the prototype for Father Mapple in Moby Dick. While a member of the state House of Representatives and later as the president of the Massachusetts Senate, Mann learned how to craft legislation. John Quincy Adams would later write that Mann’s eulogy was “of splendid composition and lofty eloquence.” Before a large crowd, which included Adams’ son, President John Quincy Adams, Mann praised Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence and Adams as a prophet and peacemaker. In Dedham, the town leaders asked Horace Mann to prepare an address. When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the Fourth of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, towns all over America solemnly took note of this amazing coincidence and paid tribute to the last of the Founding Fathers in the weeks following. After graduation, Mann studied law in Litchfield, Conn., moved to Dedham, Mass., and was later elected to the state legislature. As valedictorian in 1819, he delivered a commencement-day oration titled “The Gradual Advancement of the Human Species in Dignity and Happiness,” a speech that reflected his growing interest in humanitarian causes. He came to love books and revere knowledge. To prepare for Brown, he studied Greek, Latin, and mathematics and in 1816 entered as a sophomore. Bitterly, Mann turned against Calvinism and adopted a lifelong antipathy toward ministers who preached a punishing God.Īs a teenager, Mann decided that only nearby Brown University could offer an escape from a life of farming. Stephen had been swimming on Sunday according to the Calvinist minister Nathanael Emmons, he desecrated the Sabbath and in his unconverted state would go to hell. His father died of tuberculosis, and his brother Stephen died four years later, in 1810, when Horace was 14 years old. ![]() As a boy, he read Noah Webster’s Grammar and some of the 116 books Ben Franklin had donated to the town. ![]() “Industry, or diligence became my second nature,” he later wrote. From an early age, Mann cut wood, raked hay, and pounded flax. Horace Mann grew up on a farm just outside the small town of Franklin, Mass., a town named after Benjamin Franklin.
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