Samuel Gridley Howe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 10, 1801, the son of Joseph Neals Howe and Patty Gridley. He graduated from Brown University in 1821 and earned a degree from Harvard Medical School in 1824. After briefly practicing medicine in Boston, he traveled to Greece, where he fought in the Greek War of Independence until around 1831. That year, he returned to Boston, where he helped establish several schools for blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled children. Howe also became a prominent abolitionist and edited the anti-slavery Boston newspaper, the Daily Commonwealth . After the Civil War, he briefly traveled to Greece to help supply Cretan rebels during a revolt against Turkish rule, and he served as part of a U. S. commission to assess the desirability of annexing the Dominican Republic as a United States territory in the late 1860s. On April 27, 1843, he married activist Julia Ward, and they had six children. Samuel Gridley Howe died on January 9, 1876.
From the guide to the Samuel Gridley Howe letters, Howe, Samuel Gridley letters, 1840-1849, 1840-1841, (William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan)
