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Horace Mann immediately succeeded to John Quincy Adams' seat in Congress as an anti-Slavery Whig. In 1850 he wrecked what might have been a promising political career by breaking with Daniel Webster after that statesman's "Seventh of March Speech," advocating a compromise on the extension of slavery to the Northern territories. In 1852 Mann was defeated as the Free-Soil candidate for governor of Massachusetts. Same year he returned to education by accepting the presidency of New Antioch College.
At Antioch, Mann and his second wife, Mary Tyler Peabody, whose sister was the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, bought a farm on the muddy Little Miami River, courageously started out anew. Mann accepted women as students, engaged several "lady professors." But the next six years were mainly a long, heartbreaking struggle to keep the college alive. Mann's salary, reduced from $3,000 to $2,000, then to $1,500, was never paid in full. In 1859 the college was sold for debt and reorganized by the trustees. Few months later he died.
Dedicated last week at Antioch was a statue of Horace Mann, contributed by alumnus Hugh Taylor Birch, made from the same casting as the one by Sculptor Emma Stebbins set up in 1865 in front of Boston State House. On the highest knoll of Mann's farm, now college property, the statue shows him standing erect, draped in a shawl which he wore in his farmhouse on wintry days, looking across Glen Helen forest to Antioch College.