Though not the first to propose a common education for all, Horace Mann transformed the idea into action. As the first secretary of the Board of Higher Education in Massachusetts, president of the state senate, U.S. congressman on the eve of the Civil War, and, finally, president of Antioch College, Mann crusaded most notably for a systematic, public education but also for legal restrictions on the sale of alcohol and tobacco, state-supported medical care for the insane, a school for the blind, and the abolition of both slavery and imprisonment of debtors. Among his friends he counted Elizabeth Peabody, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, and George Combe. His adversaries included Orestes Brownson and Daniel Webster.

One of the oldest families in the Bay Colony, the Manns settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1633. Thomas Mann Jr. belonged to the third generation of his family to farm a substantial plot...