Howe arrived in Greece in January 1825.

During his first two years in the country, he worked

in the capacity that he had intended: as a physician treating wounded and sick Greek armed

forces. Besides medical duties, he occasionally saw combat. After one skirmish he recorded in

his diary the killing of a Turk, “[He] held his head out long enough for me to take aim at it

and level him with a rifle-ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know whether

pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall.”i Even before the armada of

England, France, and Russia destroyed the fleets of the Turkish and Egyptian navies at the

Battle of Navarino in October 1827, Howe’s duties had begun to shift from the work of a

physician to what his contemporaries called a philanthropist and today we would likely call a

social worker. In various forms, the new role would occupy Howe for the remainder of his

life, beginning in 1832 as the first director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind and in 1846

as the first superintendent of the Massachusetts School for the Education of Idiots, both in

South Boston.ii Providing food, clothing, shelter, and employment to dispossessed, war-weary,

widowed, orphaned, and sometimes starving Greeks, Howe developed skills for social

amelioration.

At the insistence of Greek authorities, in November 1827 Howe left Greece to return

to the United States. He arrived in New York in January and began a seven-month North

American speaking tour, during which he raised money and supplies for the newly

independent, but thoroughly disorganized post-war Greek nation. Despite his busy schedule,

he also managed to write and then publish his history of the Greek war, An Historical Sketch

of the Greek Revolution. By November of 1828, he had returned to Greece with provisions

that he dutifully distributed. With that work accomplished, he hired 400 unemployed and

landless workers to begin the construction of an orphanage at on the island of Aegina. Many

of these workers were refugees from Athens, who could not, or would not, return to their

homes and their previous lives. After the completion of the orphanage in late December, he
launched a more challenging public-works project: the draining and the reconstruction of

Aegina’s long-neglected harbor. To accomplish this second task, he added to his labor force

100 women, most of whom were widows.iii

With work on the port completed in March, and with the support of Greek authorities,

in April 1829 Howe established a colony of landless Greek refugees at Hexamilia, a small

village on the Isthmus of Corinth. Calling the colony sometimes Washingtonia and other times

Columbia, Howe devoted the next year (his last year in Greece) to the development of the

colony. The Washingtonian colony was an experiment in land reclamation and refugee

resettlement. Not knowing the first thing about farming, Howe hired a Swiss farmer to

educate the colonists in the agricultural arts and to oversee their labors. Like Howe, the

colonists knew little about farming, most having worked in pre-revolutionary occupations tied

to the sea, rather than to the land.iv

Howe developed skills as a social reformer alongside of Trinitarian missionaries who,

like Howe, found themselves drawn to Greece during and shortly after its revolution. Under
the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,
Congregationalist missionaries like Josiah Brewer, Rufus Anderson, Eli Smith, and Jonas
King came to Greece to preach forms of American Protestant Christianity to a people, who
had followed the Christian faith for centuries. Each of the missionaries was a graduate of the
Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, a theological school founded by
Congregationalists in 1807 after Harvard University’s Divinity School moved toward
Unitarianism. Likewise, each of the clergymen shared Calvinist doctrines, evangelical zeal,
and a predetermined distrust for an Eastern Orthodox Church that, as they saw it, justified
itself more by iconic symbols, ritualistic practices, and superstitious habits than by scripture
i Laura E. Richards, ed. Letters and Journal of Samuel Gridley Howe, Greek Revolution (Boston:

Dana, Estes, 1909), 209.

ii Besides Howe’s supervision of these two residential schools, he was an active member of the

Boston Prison Discipline Society. He championed the earliest work of Dorothea Dix for services to

Massachusetts’s “insane” in local poorhouses and jails. He worked with his college friend, Horace

Mann, on public school reforms. In the late 1840s, he became associated with anti-slavery activities.

During the Civil War, he served on board of the United States Sanitary Commission and was a

representative of the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. During the last decade of his life, he served

on the Massachusetts State Board of Charities.

iii Samuel G. Howe. An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution (New York: White, Gallaher &

White 1828). On Howe in Greece, see James W. Trent Jr. The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe and

the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform (Amherst: University of Massachusetts

Press, 2012), 34-55.

iv Trent, 44-49.