Horace Mann - Leadership of Antioch College and Last Years

Leadership of Antioch College and Last Years

In September 1852, he was nominated for governor of Massachusetts by the Free Soil Party, and the same day was chosen president of the newly established Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio. Failing in the election for governor, he accepted the presidency of the college, in which he continued until his death. There he taught economics, philosophy, and theology; he was popular with students and with lay audiences across the Midwest who attended his lectures promoting public schools. Mann also employed the first woman faculty member to be paid on an equal basis with her male colleagues, Rebecca Pennell, his niece. His commencement message to the class of 1859 to "be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity" is repeated to the graduating class at each commencement.

Antioch College was founded by the Christian Connexion which later withdrew its financial support causing the college to struggle for many years with meager financial resources due to sectarian infighting. Mann himself was charged with nonadherence to sectarianism because, previously a Congregationalist by upbringing, he joined the Unitarian Church.

He collapsed shortly after the 1859 commencement and died that summer. Antioch historian Robert Straker wrote that Mann had been “crucified by crusading sectarians.” Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented “what seems the fatal waste of labor and life at Antioch.” Mann’s wife, who wrote in anguish that "the blood of martyrdom waters the spot," later disinterred his body from Yellow Springs. He is buried in the North Burial Ground in Providence, Rhode Island, next to his first wife, Charlotte Messer Mann. (Charlotte Messer Mann was the daughter of Asa Messer, an early president of Brown University.)