Goldsborough Sappington Griffith was born November 4, 1814 in Harford County, Maryland, the son of James and Sarah (Cox) Griffith. His father died as the result of exposure while serving in the War of 1812 when the boy was only a few months old; his mother married again; and in 1826 the family, increased by several children, moved to Baltimore.
Young Griffith at the age of twelve secured a regular position in a tobacco manufactory. The occupation was distasteful to him, however, and he was soon commanding excellent pay as an expert paper-hanger.
At the age of twenty-two, having accumulated $500, with a partner who had amassed a similar amount, he opened a paper-hanging and upholstering house. Within a few years he became sole owner and conducted a large business until 1854 when he sold it to his half-brothers that he might devote his entire attention to the carpet-house which he had meanwhile opened.
Becoming an earnest worker in his wife’s church, the German Reformed, he served it in many capacities throughout his long life. During an eighteen months’ visit in Europe with his wife, he acted as American delegate to the Evangelical Alliance in Lübeck in 1856, and again in Berlin the following year.
In 1863, when because of the Civil War the Maryland Sunday School Union was in clanger of extinction, his great success as a Sunday-school teacher and organizer led to his appointment to the presidency, an office to which he was annually reëlect- ed until his death.
He was peculiarly fitted by virtue of his unquestioned loyalty to the Union and his sympathy with the South, to undertake the task of administering physical and spiritual aid to the sick and wounded soldiers in the border state of Maryland during the Civil War.
On May 4, 1861, a few days after the first shedding of blood, the Baltimore Christian Association was organized at his initiative. His selection as president naturally followed. The effort to supply clothing, hospital supplies, delicacies of food, and religious literature to 60, 000 suffering soldiers of both armies taxed his time and abilities to the utmost. When the United States Christian Commission was formed in the following November, the Baltimore organization became an auxiliary to the national body, though maintaining its own identity, and achieved a remarkable work over a wide territory, despite an unsympathetic element in the population.
The desire to relieve the desperate distress of the South, which he had seen personally on two visits immediately after the war, and to rehabilitate the thousands of refugees in Maryland impelled him to suggest the formation of the Maryland Union Commission, which he reluctantly consented to head.
He was one of three men to call a meeting in 1860 with a view to organizing the Children’s Aid Society, later known, in recognition of a handsome bequest, as the Henry Watson Children’s Aid Society. Its object was to care for homeless children and to prevent delinquent children from becoming confirmed criminals by being committed to penal institutions. Griffith was a deeply interested member of the board of managers for years.
From the age of nineteen, he had manifested an interest in the welfare of prisoners, carrying on personal religious work among them, and in 1859 he had organized the first prison Sunday-schools ever established.
A few years after the war, in 1869, at the suggestion of the penitentiary warden, he summoned a gathering of interested men who founded the Maryland Prisoners’ Aid Association, of which Griffith, almost as a matter of course, was elected president. The society soon made its influence felt among managers of penal and charitable institutions throughout the state; in his official capacity Griffith made annual tours of inspection, and neglectful wardens soon felt the lash of his tongue and pen.
Distinguished as Griffith was in Sunday-school circles and for his war work, he is most notable for his labors in behalf of penal reform. He played a leading role in much remedial penal legislation during the seventies and eighties. He represented Maryland at nearly all the national and international prison congresses and was made corresponding member of the Société Générale des Prisons of France and of the Howard Association of London. He was also a pioneer temperance worker, was long associated with the Y. M. C. A. , and was one of the incorporators of the News Boys’ Home and a founder of the Asylum for Feebleminded Children. Despite his lack of early formal training, he was a frequent and forceful contributor to religious papers and to the Baltimore newspapers. An indomitable will, and strict economy, enabled him to give away about $200, 000 during his lifetime. Inspired by a charity that embraced all men, he labored without any apparent loss of energy until his ninetieth year. Two pamphlets published by him are, Argument on the Contract Labor System and the Reformation of Convicts, and Report on the Penal and Reformatory Institutions of the State of Maryland (1872).
On May 30, 1839, he married Elizabeth Diirst, whose parents were natives of Switzerland.
