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Page Chapter 1
The debate between signers and oralists is an old one, and it was already old when Bell and Gallaudet assumed leadership of
the two ideological armies.
RICHARD WINEFIELD Never the Twain Shall Meet
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Page The story of the introduction of sign language into the United States and its use in educating deaf people is well known, and it is synonymous with the name of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. In 1807, after graduating from Yale at the age of eighteen, Gallaudet studied law in Hartford. After only one year, however, he returned to Yale, where he studied English literature and became deeply engrossed in religious matters and the condition of his own soul. He soon decided that a career in business would help to improve his feeble health, but by 1813 he had abandoned business and enrolled in the Andover Theological Seminary. It was at this time that Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet first met Alice Cogswell, a seven-year-old deaf child, and immediately developed an interest in her welfare and education.
Alice's father, Mason Cogswell, a wealthy Hartford resident, had devoted enormous time and energy to finding a suitable way to educate not only his own daughter but other deaf children in Connecticut. Initially, Cogswell contacted the Scottish educator
Thomas Braidwood, Jr, who was visiting the United States. The Braidwood family had earned a reputation in Europe for their success in using oral methods to educate deaf children. Braidwood had left Scotland to escape creditors and was in the process of establishing a school in Maryland. However, he was soon arrested for spending the money given to him as tutoring fees without having provided the tutoring services. His subsequent legal problems forced him to honor contracts in Virginia,
preventing him from establishing a school or tutoring in the Hartford area.
This was fortuitous not only for Alice Cogswell but for the future of deaf education in the United States. Gallaudet, while still a student at Andover, began to tutor Alice, and his success in this endeavorcombined with Braidwood's continuing problems with debtorsled Cogswell and other prominent Hartford residents to choose Gallaudet to travel to Europe into research the methods being used thereto educate deaf children. On his return Gallaudet applied these methods in a school established by his
Hartford patrons.
It is somewhat ironic that Gallaudet, whose name has become so closely associated with sign language instruction, initially intended to visit the Braidwood School in Edinburgh,

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