[6] He engaged in many practical jokes and other high jinks and, years later, Howe told his children that he regretted that he hadn't more seriously applied himself to his studies.

[6] One of his classmates, Alexis Caswell, future doctor and president of Brown University described Howe as the following: "he showed mental capabilities which would naturally fit him for fine scholarship.

In 1824, shortly after Howe was certified to practice medicine, he became fired by enthusiasm for the Greek Revolution and the example of his idol, Lord Byron.

Howe fled the memory of an unhappy love affair and sailed for Greece, where he joined the Greek army as a surgeon.

Howe's bravery, enthusiasm, and ability as a commander, as well as his humanity, won him the title "the Lafayette of the Greek Revolution.

"[10] Howe returned to the United States in 1827 to raise funds and supplies to help alleviate the famine and suffering in Greece.

[11] Howe's fervid appeals enabled him to collect about $60,000, which he spent on provisions, clothing, and the establishment of a relief depot for refugees near Aegina.

[13]: 31 Samuel Gridley Howe brought many Greek refugee children back with him to the United States to educate them.

He later wrote a memoir about these events, The Greek Exile, Or, a Narrative of the Captivity and Escape of Christophorus Plato Castanis (1851).

A committee organized by Fisher proposed to Howe that he direct establishing a New England Asylum for the Blind at Boston.

[21] Returning to Boston in July 1832, Howe began receiving a few blind children at his father's house in Pleasant Street.

Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a prominent Boston trader in slaves, furs, and opium, donated his mansion and grounds in Pearl Street as a location for the school in perpetuity.

Howe was director, and the life and soul of the school; he opened a printing-office and organized a fund for printing for the blind — the first done in the United States.

So all our lives turn on what I may call moral or personal fiction ...[27]At one point Samuel requested a legal separation, but Julia refused.

[28] While Howe was in many ways progressive by the standards of the day, he did not support the idea of married women having any work other than that of wife and mother.

[33] Florence later took up her mother's mantle as a committed suffragette, making public speeches on the subject and writing the book, Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement (1913).

[34][35] Howe entered publicly into the antislavery struggle for the first time in 1846 when, as a "Conscience Whig", he was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress against Robert C.

With Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, George Luther Stearns, Theodore Parker, and Gerrit Smith, he was interested in the plans of abolitionist John Brown.

Although he disapproved of the attack upon Harpers Ferry, Howe had funded John Brown's work as a member of the Secret Six.

[37] According to later accounts by Howe's daughter, Florence Hall, the Howes' South Boston home was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In May 1854, Howe, along with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, and other abolitionists, stormed Faneuil Hall in order to try to free a captured refugee slave, Anthony Burns.

Austin Bearse and his brother, Howe rescued an escaped slave[40] who had entered Boston Harbor from Jacksonville, Florida, as a stowaway aboard the brig Cameo.

[41] Violating the Fugitive Slave Act, the Boston Vigilance Committee helped the man evade slave-catchers and reach freedom.

The Freedmen's Bureau was to help house, feed, clothe, educate, and provide medical care to newly-freed slaves in the South after the Civil War.

[46][47] In some instances, Bureau staff helped freedmen to locate and reunite with relatives who had either fled north or who had been sold away during slavery.

[48] Howe also helped establish the Massachusetts School for Idiot and Feeble-Minded Youth,[1][49] the Western Hemisphere's oldest publicly funded institution serving mentally disabled people.

[49] Howe was opposed to this reasoning, arguing that mentally disabled people had rights and that segregating them from the rest of society would be detrimental.

In 1865, Howe openly advocated a progressive tax system, which he referred to as a "sliding scale of taxation proportionate to income.

[54] Grant was so enraged at having his plans thwarted that he arranged to have Sumner removed from his chairmanship as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote a "stirring lyric" about Howe, as did John Greenleaf Whittier ("The Hero").