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F. B. Sanborn

Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, 1831 - 1917, Plainfield, New Jersey

Biographyfound: WWWA, v. 1, 1897-1942 (Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin; journalist and author, of Concord, Mass.)
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, (born December 15, 1831, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, U.S.—died February 24, 1917, Plainfield, New Jersey), American journalist, biographer, and charity worker.

A descendant of an old New England family (its progenitor first immigrating in 1632), Sanborn attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College (B.A., 1855). In 1855 he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, then an intellectual centre, and also became active in the abolitionist cause, becoming John Brown’s New England agent. He tried to dissuade Brown from attempting the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but he nevertheless aided the firebrand with funds. The U.S. Senate early in 1860 tried—through a summons and then orders for arrest—to get him to testify about his role, and for two months he was partly on the run, until the Massachusetts Supreme Court protected him from seizure.

Sanborn had already begun a career in journalism, and in 1863 he became an editor of the Boston Commonwealth; in 1867 he joined the staff of the Springfield Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), with which he remained until 1914. Concurrently, from 1863 to 1888 he served several times on the state board of charities, working for prison reform, care of the insane, and other welfare measures.

In his years at Concord, Sanborn came to know many of the luminaries of literary New England. Among his many writings are Henry D. Thoreau (1882), The Life and Letters of John Brown (1885), A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy, 2 vol. (1893; with W.T. Harris), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1901), Hawthorne and His Friends (1908), Recollections of Seventy Years, 2 vol. (1909), and The Life of Henry David Thoreau (1917). https://www.britannica.com/biography/Franklin-Benjamin-Sanborn accessed 10/23/2017

Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin (15 Dec. 1831-24 Feb. 1917), author and social activist, was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, the son of Aaron Sanborn and Lydia Leavitt, farmers. Sanborn was educated at Harvard College from 1852 to 1855. Those years also saw two events that would have a profound effect on him. The first was his ill-fated marriage on 23 August 1854 to Ariana Smith Walker, who had encouraged Sanborn to pursue a formal education. Already gravely ill, she died only eight days after the wedding. The second event was a ten-minute meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts, in July 1853. In late 1854 Emerson offered Sanborn the position of schoolmaster at the small private school in Concord where the children of the Emersons and other distinguished citizens of the town and its literary community would be his students. That association, in turn, formed the basis of his literary career as biographer and editor of Amos Bronson Alcott, Emerson, Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, and other authors associated with American Transcendentalism.

Sanborn was interested in abolitionist politics from an early age, and once settled in Concord he became actively involved in the organized abolitionist movement, developing acquaintances with leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel Gridley Howe, Parker, and Wendell Phillips and serving on committees for the colonization and defense of Kansas. These associations led to Sanborn's meeting John Brown (1800-1859) in late 1856 and to his involvement in Brown's plot to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Sanborn became a member of Brown's "secret six," members of the Massachusetts Kansas Committee engaged in raising financing for Brown's abolitionist activities. When Brown's attempt to capture the Harpers Ferry arsenal failed on 18 October 1859, Sanborn's role came under the scrutiny of southern senators investigating Brown's raid, which led to an attempt by federal marshals to capture Sanborn in Concord on 3 April 1860 and return him to Washington, D.C., to testify about his part in the affair. Sanborn was rescued by the townspeople of Concord, and the U.S. Senate warrant for his arrest was eventually declared illegal by the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Sanborn remained devoted to Brown's memory for the rest of his life, and he published a biography of him, Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia, in 1885. In 1862 Sanborn married Louisa Augusta Leavitt, his cousin; they had three children.

With the end of the Civil War, Sanborn's enormous philanthropic energies were applied to a variety of social concerns. In 1865 he was appointed by Governor John A. Andrew as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Charities. That year he also assisted in organizing the American Social Science Association, serving as one of its secretaries until 1868 and, beginning in 1873, as sole chief secretary. He also served as an officer of the National Prison Association and the National Conference of Charities, both of which he also helped found. In 1866-1867 Sanborn called the meeting from which grew the Massachusetts Infant Asylum, and he was instrumental in founding the Clarke Institution for the education of the deaf. Sanborn served as the first secretary of the Board of State Charities from 1863 to 1868 and as chairman from 1874 to 1876. In 1878 he reorganized the whole system of state charities in Massachusetts and was appointed inspector of charities in 1879, serving in that post until 1888. This wide-ranging experience, an expertise in the care of the insane, and his abiding interest in social science resulted in Sanborn's being appointed a special lecturer on that subject at Cornell University from 1885 to 1888.

Sanborn was a newspaperman of some note, serving as editor of the abolitionist Boston Commonwealth in 1863 and enjoying a long association with the Springfield Republican (from 1856 to 1914) that included a stint as resident editor (1868-1872). But he is best remembered as one who shared and chronicled the lives of the Transcendentalists of Concord. His most significant contributions in this vein are Henry D. Thoreau (1882); A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (1893), which he wrote with William Torrey Harris; The Personality of Thoreau (1901); Ralph Waldo Emerson (1901); The Personality of Emerson (1903); Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, England, and Fruitlands, New England (1908); and The Life of Henry D. Thoreau (1917). Sanborn was also a literary editor, notably of Thoreau, but his editions of The Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894); Poems of Nature, which he edited with Henry S. Salt; and Walden (1909) are generally discredited today because of Sanborn's practice of rewriting Thoreau's work to suit his taste. In 1879 Sanborn, Alcott, Ednah Dow Cheney, Emerson, and Harris founded the Concord School of Philosophy, a summer school devoted to teaching the ideas of the Transcendentalists. One of the first and most lasting fruits of that venture was the still valuable collection, The Genius and Character of Emerson (1885). Sanborn died at the home of his son, Francis Bachiler Sanborn, in Westfield, New Jersey, and was buried in Concord.

Bibliography

Sanborn's manuscripts were widely scattered after his death, but the largest collections are located at the Concord Free Public Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, and the Boston Public Library. Information on locations of other holdings can be found in John W. Clarkson, "An Annotated Checklist of the Letters of F. B. Sanborn (1831-1917)" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ., 1971). The best listing of Sanborn's published work is John W. Clarkson's "A Bibliography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn," PBSA 60 (1st quarter 1966): 73-85. Sanborn's autobiography is Recollections of Seventy Years (1909). Kenneth Walter Cameron has compiled numerous autobiographical and biographical sources for Sanborn; see especially "Some Memorabilia of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn," ESQ no. 16 (3d quarter 1959): 23-30, and Transcendental Youth and Age: Chapters in Biography and Autobiography by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (1981). The best available biography is Benjamin Blakely Hickock, "The Political and Literary Careers of F. B. Sanborn" (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State Univ., 1953).

Robert E. Burkholder

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Citation:
Robert E. Burkholder. "Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin";
http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00594.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Tue Aug 06 2013 10:56:54 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
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