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Creating a Fellowship of Educated Men:

Forming Gentlemen at Pre-Revolutionary Harvard

Conrad Edick Wright

Boys. They were everywhere. On the bed. By the doors to both small studies. Leaning against the faded, grimy, whitewashed walls. In the deepening shadows at one corner of the room. In the soft, golden, lateafternoon sunlight that still streamed through a large window illuminating the center of the wide-planked wooden floor. Occupying almost every patch of space in the sparsely furnished room twenty feet square. The date was July 14, 1767. The place was the dormitory chamber of Stephen Peabody, a Harvard junior.1

The boys were in Cambridge for a reason--to be set apart from the rest of New England society. Four years at Harvard College in a highly structured, almost entirely male community would transform their lives, they believed, turning them into educated men. At the start of this journey they were callow and unformed; by its end they hoped to leave College as gentlemen.

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Samuel Moody, the master of Dummer Academy in Byfield, had prepared a bumper crop of candidates for the Harvard class of 1771, 13 of them. Between school and College, though, there was a hurdle--the admissions examination. Harvard’s College Laws specified the process and standards for entrance. Each candidate faced an oral examination in the Classics. Every boy had to be able to translate “the Greek and Latin authors in common use.” He had to demonstrate his knowledge of grammar and his ability to write proper Latin. And he had to appear to be of good character.2 By custom, in mid-July at commencement time, when much of Massachusetts descended on Cambridge to enjoy the annual festivities that accompanied Harvard’s graduation, New England’s teachers brought in the boys they were offering for consideration. Thus Moody had herded his flock of students the 40 miles from Byfield to Harvard Yard to meet with Edward Holyoke, the College’s elderly president, and whichever other faculty members happened to be available. Thanks to the large number of candidates on July 14, the process had taken so long that Moody had turned to Peabody, a former student of his at Dummer Academy, for a place to stay the night with his boys before setting out for home the next day. As formidable as the admissions requirements now sound, the entrance examination did not pose much of a challenge for Moody’s candidates--or for anyone else who had received decent classical preparation. To be sure, the prospect of a grilling by members of the College faculty was enough to intimidate nearly anyone; according to one of the boys, to “be weighed in the Scails” was a “fiery Tryal.”3 Nevertheless, the students and their teachers knew the school’s expectations in advance, and in most cases the outcome was foreordained. Harvard accepted all 13 of Dummer Academy’s candidates in 1767; between July 14 and July 20, the faculty examined 58 students, of whom it immediately admitted

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49. Of the remaining 9, 2 were to return for re-examination after a few more weeks of review. The other 7 had to wait for another year.4 Eventually, the class grew to 64, Harvard’s largest ever. 5 As entering freshman, they were about to begin a new phase of life. For most of them, College marked their first time away from home and family. Mother Harvard would try her best to keep an eye on her adopted children--to be a real alma mater for them--but College was a family in a certain sense only and there were limits to this oversight. Not yet on their own, the boys were nevertheless taking their first steps toward maturity.

The freshmen who began their studies at Harvard College in 1767 entered a community within a community.6 The wider of the two was Cambridge, a town of 1,600 residents on the northern bank of the Charles River, a shade more than two miles west of the peninsula that Boston occupied. Cambridge had been settled in 1630 at the same time as Boston, and within half a dozen years it had become the educational center of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. During the late 1630s, the village had been a tiny cluster of perhaps 50 houses, most of them occupied by families who farmed at least part of the time, huddled on a flat, open meadow at the apex of the V-shaped plain eight miles long allotted to the town.7 By 1767, the town’s acreage had grown, then had shrunk, as tracts had been added to the original grant and later were subtracted whenever new settlements had broken away from it to become townships in their own right. 8 In the late 1760s, Cambridge retained its original village core, still complemented by some outlying agricultural districts. Samuel Moody and his charges had traveled to Harvard from Byfield along a network of roads that passed through the farming and commercial towns of coastal Essex County, through Middlesex County, and into Cambridge from the northeast. Other boys came from the northwest through

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Cambridge’s agricultural Menotomy precinct; from western farming communities through Watertown; and from Boston and points south by the long bridge that spanned the Charles River, then along a causeway made of dirt, stone, and gravel through the flats along the northern river bank to Wood Street, which led up a gentle incline a quarter of a mile, past a couple of dozen small houses, shops, and taverns to the College.9 Harvard College was located on the north side of Cambridge’s main village. It was within a few yards of the boxy, spired meeting house, its façade of vertical planks painted white, and of the lemonyellow county courthouse with a big red front door and an octagonal cupola that shared the traditional center of town.10 About half of Cambridge’s population lived here in modest two- and three-story wooden structures. The rest resided in the outlying districts, most of them on farms, but several dozen of them in elegant country homes belonging to members of Boston’s merchant elite. 11 Over the course of 130 years the village had grown up beside the College. In the late 1760s, the majority of its inhabitants lived along three long dirt roads that traveled up from the river roughly southwest to northeast and four shorter crossing roads. Tavern keepers, stable owners, carpenters, masons, glaziers (who replaced the windows the boys broke), tailors, cobblers, all had settled here to serve the needs of the College and its students.12 Harvard itself made up the smaller, inner community, the scholastic family the boys would come to know. The first sight of the College must have been impressive to almost any New Englander.13 Unlike most of the structures of rural New England--squat, irregular, and made of wood14--Harvard’s principal buildings were tall, imposing, Enlightenment statements about order, symmetrical Georgian brick piles with white-painted wood trim aligned in two adjacent open quadrangles. The larger, southern square consisted of three edifices--Massachusetts Hall, Stoughton

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College, and Harvard Hall. Harvard Hall also served as one edge of the second quadrangle, together with Hollis Hall and Holden Chapel. At any given time in the late 1760s and early 1770s, the College community numbered a little more than 200 souls, including faculty members, administrators, resident graduates, undergraduates, and employees both full- and part-time. Unlike the wider society, the College was almost entirely a male preserve. The handful of women, with but one exception, were marginal figures, easily overlooked. Aside from Elizabeth Hastings, the wife of Harvard’s steward (or business manager), and the person in charge of the College commons, the only other women regularly present were several sweepers, who cleaned the dormitories in return for gratuities from the residents, and possibly a few cooks. 15 Even faculty families and their domestics seem to have been largely outside the undergraduates’ ambit. The school was not quite a cloistered monastery and its students were not quite novice monks; outside the formal demands of the College day, girls and women still had important places in the boys’ lives. The prospect of socializing with them made vacations, visits to the shops of Cambridge, and possibly even the morning and afternoon church services every Sunday worth anticipating. Nevertheless, to a remarkable extent the students spent their four years in College in the company of other boys and men. In theory, Harvard was a rigidly hierarchical society, a relic of the medieval great chain of being, although student fractiousness meant that in reality the situation was otherwise. The school’s formal, adult façade masked an informal, adolescent culture. At the pinnacle of the formal structure was the president, the patriarch of this scholastic family. Then in descending order of honor and authority came the College’s three professors, four tutors plus the librarian (who ranked with the tutors), a couple of degree holders serving Harvard as petty administrators, perhaps a dozen recent graduates who were preparing for the ministry, 170 or more

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undergraduates, and everyone else--cooks (at least some of whom were African Americans), 16 cleaning ladies, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, and so on. Further status refinements differentiated the undergraduates. Each graduation year had priority over the succeeding ones, and a ranking system determined by the faculty established an individual hierarchy within each class, not of personal accomplishment but of family standing. (It was abandoned with the class of 1773)17 Hierarchical considerations carried over into required forms of address: in College exercises undergraduates went by their surnames, recipients of the bachelor’s degree added the honorific “Sir,” and masters of arts merited “Mr.”18 Both by tradition and by College law, respect and deference were the due of the men at the top of the hierarchy. From a requirement that the undergraduates doff their caps whenever the president or a member of one of Harvard’s two governing bodies (the Board of Overseers and the Corporation) was in the College Yard, to a regulation allowing any member of the faculty to draft a student to help him maintain order, to a set of sumptuary laws preventing undergraduates from wearing clothing that was elaborate beyond their station, the written statutes of the school established the authority of the boards, the president, the professors, and the tutors.19 Near the bottom of the ladder, above only the hired help, the entering freshmen endured a probationary year of submission, subservience, and initiation. One evening each year, shortly after the start of the fall term, the sophomore class instructed the freshmen to remain after chapel to learn the unofficial but longstanding codes, more than 20 of them, that also governed the College. “No freshman shall ware his hat in the College yeard except it rains, snows, or hails,” the customs began. “No fresman [sic] shall talk saucily to his senior or speak to him with his hat on.” Worst of all, the freshmen had to serve everyone above them in the College hierarchy. To avoid constant imposition, many freshmen took

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an individual senior as a patron and protector; in exchange for exclusive service, his senior would shield him from the demands of others. 20 With the end of classes in 1767, Stephen Peabody noted, the relieved first-year students “rejoic’d very much when their Freshmanship was up.”21 The rules and customs that governed colonial Harvard established an invisible line between it and its Cambridge neighbors, making it a society in its own right. Of course, town and gown were not entirely isolated from one another. The wider world of women and men beckoned only a few steps from the entryways to the dormitories. Cambridge furnished Harvard with most of the domestics and tradesmen who maintained its facilities and fed its students. The undergraduates patronized the shops and taverns of the village. A small number of boys, most of them freshmen, boarded in town where they lived with local families, each of them overseen by the lady of the house. When Sunday came the students went to church with the people of Cambridge. And frequent vacations offered opportunities to escape the Harvard cocoon. But the low wooden wall that enclosed the College grounds expressed the division between the wider and narrower communities. The freshman year was a boy’s time of passage, of separation from his family, of entry into a structured, male world set off from that of his childhood, his introduction to a new, homosocial culture. When the College’s tutors recommended a candidate to the president they were doing more than allowing him to take a few courses. They were setting him apart from most of the rest of New England. Once he joined the College community, he began a new existence.

The new life was a never-ending commitment to personal improvement and social order. At the same time that many boys their age were undergoing an apprenticeship in a craft, Harvard students were novices of a different sort. Before the Revolutionary War, Harvard had a clear and important civic role.

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It was to define and nurture colonial New England’s elite. Much as modern medical schools teach their charges to think like doctors and law schools mold their students into lawyers, pre-Revolutionary Harvard transformed its students into refined and educated gentlemen. A diploma from the College was the surest entrée into polite society. Harvard and the other Colleges established in the American colonies before independence were not simply finishing schools, though, at least not in the sense later generations have used the term, implying an alternative to academic rigor. Instead, academic and social objectives, classroom instruction and extracurricular cultivation, complemented each other. Learning was a mark of a true gentleman. The nine American Colleges stood at the pinnacle of formal education in the colonies.22 At the same time, they provided an avenue into the honorable and genteel world of the upper reaches of colonial American society. Not only was Harvard the oldest of these institutions; it was the largest, the wealthiest, the most prestigious, the most demanding. Lecture and recitation rooms were the site of formal instruction at Harvard. Professors at colonial Harvard devoted their classroom hours to lecturing. Public talks, for which faculty were paid with endowment income, were introductory and open to the entire student body. Private lessons, for which students in the upper classes paid additional fees, provided advanced instruction. 23 For the most part, the professors stood apart from the daily affairs of the undergraduates, as removed from their concerns as it was possible to be in a community of about two hundred members. The tutors, far less remote from the undergraduates than the professors, bore the brunt of the responsibility of instruction day-to-day through the recitations they led. They also oversaw the students’ conduct and morals. By College law they had to be unmarried: “If any Tutor shall enter into the Marriage State, his Place shall be ipso facto void,” the institution’s statutes read.24 Without other

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family responsibilities, they would be surrogate uncles or older brothers to the undergraduates. Each tutor was assigned to a room in a dormitory, where he oversaw his obstreperous charges all day every day when school was in session. In class, the tutors conducted recitations in all the principal subjects of the College curriculum-Greek, Latin, logic (including ethics and metaphysics), and natural philosophy (mathematics and the sciences)--as well as offering less frequent instruction in such supplements as theology, geography, oratory, English composition, and belles lettres.25 Memorization was the key to success in most subjects. Monday through Thursday each week the tutors drilled their students on the basic topics within the College curriculum. Friday and Saturday were given over to the supplementary areas, of which elocution was of the greatest interest and practical importance. The ability to speak articulately to an audience was indispensable to a gentleman in an aural society like colonial New England, 26 and in 1756 Harvard began to require each student to declaim publicly.27 In the late 1760s and early 1770s, as the public arena filled with talk of the imperial crisis, the students wrestled with the same issue in their elocution classes: “Their declamations and forensic disputes breathe the spirit of liberty,” one member of the Corporation remarked to a friend, “. . . but they have . . . been wrought up to such a pitch of enthusiasm, that it has been difficult for their tutors to keep them within due bounds.”28 At the end of the year, when a class advanced so did its tutor, who remained with the same students as long as they stayed in school and he continued on the faculty.29 Forced to deal with each other every day for years, a class and its tutor might come to loathe one another. It was almost inevitable that a tutor, as a drillmaster and monitor, would come into conflict with many of the students he supervised. But under the best of circumstances, a permanent bond developed between the teacher

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and his pupils, and at graduation a grateful class ordinarily gave its tutor a commemorative silver bowl or flagon.30 It is hard to imagine making a career of such a demanding office; indeed, each tutor’s appointment was for only three years, although the position might be renewed repeatedly for additional three-year terms. Most tutors were recent graduates, men in their mid-20s--not much older than most of their students and often younger than a few of them--who served as instructors while they prepared themselves for the ministry.31 Beginning at the end of the seventeenth century, though, the College was blessed--or cursed--with a number of tutors, who came and--it seemed--would never leave. Henry Flynt, a 1693 graduate, held the record for service. First appointed in 1699, he endured the adolescent horseplay of the undergraduates until 1754, when he was 79. Belcher Hancock, class of 1727, another long-serving tutor, left a week after commencement in July 1767 at the age of 58; he had spent a quarter of a century on the faculty minding College boys.32 With Hancock’s resignation, the last of the career tutors was gone. The members of the class of 1771 thus encountered a young and energetic corps of instructors when they arrived in Cambridge. In 1767-1768, the average age of the four tutors was about 25. Each had graduated from Harvard within the past five years and most in this Congregationalist enclave were at least considering a life in the ministry once the classroom tour was over. The tutors would need all the energy they could muster. Their days began early with morning prayers in the chapel at 6:00 a.m. and lasted until bedtime at 9:00 p.m. Breakfast was in the College Commons. Each boy brought his own knife and fork; when he was done, he wiped the dirty utensils on the tablecloth. Recitations and lectures began at 8:00 a.m. and ran until to the noon meal of beef and Indian pudding back in the commons. Then it was time for afternoon recreation, supper, and evening

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prayers. Harvard kept the undergraduates busy from early morning until bedtime and the tutors kept them under control.33 And whenever a student transgressed one of the many College laws, the tutors met with the rest of the faculty to consider the crime, determine guilt, and decide on a sentence. The College authorities sometimes referred to their students as “scholars,” but the term carried none of its modern meanings connoting academic research. There was another purpose behind the memorization and drilling that occupied so many days of school. Boys attending Harvard in the late 1760s and early 1770s had “improvement,”34 not the increase of knowledge, on their minds. Self-cultivation took two forms, mental training and social refinement. Like a muscle, so the accepted theory went, the mind could be strengthened with exercise. Not every subject challenged the mental faculties: “The study of history cannot be considered as a severe application of the mind,” one member of the class of 1774 advised an entering student two decades later. But “the habit of thinking closely” that certain other disciplines like mathematics and logic required could enhance the mental faculties.35 If some subjects were of at best limited use in strenuously training the mind, then there had to be a different reason for them to belong in the College’s curriculum. Pre-Revolutionary Harvard was not a vocational school devoted to indoctrinating would-be doctors, lawyers, ministers, or merchants, so the reason was not preprofessional. Harvard undergraduates studied the classics, English literature, oratory, geography, and, for extra fees, French and dancing because every real gentleman needed to be acquainted with them. As one alumnus told an incoming student: “The Roman and Grecian writers of established reputation will assist you in thinking, writing, and speaking well. In their works you will find the most liberal and elegant sentiments. Many of their productions may be considered as finished models of good sense, and good language.”36 Meanwhile, an acquaintance with the French language

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introduced the student “to the politest people on earth.”37 The College licensed a local instructor, a Mr. Peter Curtis, to teach the undergraduates French, although it did not grant him a regular faculty appointment. Curtis also taught dancing, a subject that included etiquette, though he offered this instruction across the river in Boston without the official approval of the College government. Dancing class provided the students with an opportunity, which they savored, to meet girls of their own age. Twice a week between 1771 and 1774 boys and girls from Boston’s finest families, together with a representation of Harvard undergraduates, gathered at Curtis’s school on Queen Street to learn how gentlemen and ladies carried themselves in polite society. From courtly forms of address to the steps of reels, cotillions, and gavottes, dancing masters like Curtis showed their students the conventions of public intercourse in eighteenth-century Anglo-America’s most refined circles. Of these, instruction in the minuet was perhaps the most important because of the risk the dance presented for public humiliation. In the most elevated social circles, every assembly began with a minuet. Each couple danced it alone in turn before the critical eyes of the rest of the company. A man who could not perform a creditable minuet, Harvard students knew, instantly and publicly revealed himself to be no gentleman.38 Ambitious boys often knew better than their parents that the ability to dance was a social necessity. Sammy Phillips, a member of the class of 1771, was from rural Andover, something of a cultural backwater in the late 1760s and early 1770s, and his parents did not appreciate the importance of an elegant line at an assembly. During the fall of his junior year, Sammy asked his parents for permission to attend dancing classes. His father was not happy with this prospect, afraid “that it will Engross too much of your Mind and Time now, and will in Time be a great Temptation to Attend Balls

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and Assemblies, to lead you into Company and to be abroad at unseasonable hours.” But Sammy would not be deterred, and Samuel, Sr., relented: “I shall not Object to your Attending one quarter of a year,” he concluded, “the Tutors consent being first obtaind.”39 Four years of instruction in the classics, logic, natural philosophy, theology, oratory, English composition, and belles lettres as well as French and dance did not ordinarily produce creative scholars. Even after years of study, this learning was often superficial and ornamental.40 If Harvard did not spawn many intellectuals of the first order, though, no one was particularly concerned. Harvard undergraduates were ambitious, but their aims had little to do with the life of the mind. The College’s purpose was to provide New England with a polished elite—with gentlemen. No one even gave the possibility of an intelligentsia a thought.

On May 12, 1770, the president, professors, and tutors of the College voted to rusticate Winthrop Sargent, a senior two months shy of graduation. Short of expulsion, rustication was the College’s most severe penalty for students who were failing to meet expectations. Fourteen of the 204 members of the classes of 1771-1774 were rusticated at some point during their College careers. 41 Reprimands, fines, and degradation--reducing a student from his natural place in the class order to a lower position42-served when transgressions were minor, but Sargent, age 17 and no gentleman, had become a pus-filled boil on the College’s face, a wine-red stain on its good name. Nothing less than rustication--suspension for a year in an isolated town under the supervision of a trusted rural minister--would do. Someone who had been cast out could have no interaction with the College or its students until he had completed his sentence on pain of further punishment for himself and anyone whom he contacted. For a year, as far as

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the members of the College community were concerned, he was a nonperson, an outcast. And if the second-most severe sanction were not enough, then there was always expulsion. Sargent had run riot during the course of the spring. College life, with its genteel aspirations, had become too confining for him. By the time the faculty voted to excise him from the body collegiate it had compiled a lengthy bill of particulars. Toward the end of March, Sargent had entertained two prostitutes overnight in his dormitory room. On May 3 and again on May 8 he had taken a pistol outside and fired it wildly, endangering the citizens of Cambridge. When the faculty had called him in to discuss these actions, his response had been “insulting and Contemptuous.” Sargent had then joined two schoolmates in assaulting Capt. William Angier, a Cambridge resident who had reported on his earlier misdeeds to the College authorities. All three boys had been “for a great while in their general Conduct, idle vicious, and disorderly persons disturbing of the peace of the College and of the town of Cambridge and a common Nuisance to both.”43 Vandalism, petty thefts, rowdiness, and consorting with prostitutes were recurring problems for the College authorities. In June 1771, a sophomore and a junior torched the College outhouse late one night after unsuccessfully attempting to force a cow into Holden Chapel. A year and a half later, after his readmission, one of the two was also apparently suspected of breaking into a student’s chest and stealing a small sum of money. An affluent member of the class of 1773 even kept a prostitute for several weeks in a house near the Yard.44 Rustication was a public humiliation no less than confinement in a New England town’s pillory had been during the seventeenth century. Harvard reserved the punishment for acts that violated basic community values. The boys who burned down the outhouse in 1771 received this sentence.45 The president imposed it in the center aisle of the chapel before the entire community except the paid help.

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Most boys accepted this punishment sullenly or angrily but without overt protest. Not Winthrop Sargent. He and his confederates “all exclaimed with a loud voice the Sentence is unjust and then threw themselves out of the Chapel.”46 Sargent would not be back for 12 months, when after a humble public apology in the chapel before the community that had exiled him, he would contritely take his place with the class of 1771, which had entered a year after he had. Winthrop Sargent led a more tumultuous college life than most undergraduates, but the central lesson of his experience had broad application. Social realities rarely conform in all respects to social theory, and in fact Harvard was not the “deliberately, elaborately, smotheringly paternalistic” hierarchy to which its government aspired.47 The boys who made up most of the College community had their own ideas about its objectives and values. Less visible than the formal hierarchy of the administration and the faculty was a second - more fluid and voluntary - structure. Out of sight except when misconduct or rebellion brought it into view, there was an adolescent society, a boys’ culture. Early each fall, at about the same time the sophomores instructed the freshmen in the College customs, the two classes observed a distinctively masculine ritual, a wrestling tournament that went on for several days. The sophomores, a year older and a year more experienced, usually prevailed, thus confirming their social dominance, but no matter what the outcome one lesson for the newcomers in this particular custom was that there was room at Harvard for battlers as well as conformists. After prayers one evening during the second week of classes, the sophomores arranged the members of the two lowest classes in a large, ragged circle on the playing field behind Holden Chapel. In 1767, the first day of wrestling was Thursday, August 20. When everyone was in place, one of the sophomores swaggered to the center of the makeshift arena, challenged the newcomers’ manhood, and dared them to send out their best. At first, there were dozens of matched jousts. Puny freshmen fought

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puny sophomores; burly members of each class wrestled with one another. From his vantage point as a junior, Stephen Peabody could watch the proceedings with detachment: “there are some smart Fellows in the Freshman class,” he concluded after a day of grappling. Eventually, after several more sessions of combat following evening prayers, only one boy remained standing. The winner was Daniel Tyler, a freshman from Canterbury, Connecticut, who whipped two sophomores on the final evening: “& so,” Peabody concluded, “the Freshman Class have concur’d [conquered] the Sophomores in Wrestling.”48 Pre-Revolutionary Harvard was no meritocracy. College honors often went to the wealthy and well connected. Within the school, though, there was a space, an informal culture of adolescents largely beyond the reach of the faculty, for undergraduates to prove themselves no matter where they stood in the formal class list. Boys could pick their own friends and associates. Whenever they did, they established their own hierarchies--of insiders and outsiders, of students who held the respect of their peers and those who did not, of scholars and slackers, of leaders and followers. Over the course of an academic year, students came together in a variety of combinations. Sometimes they organized to stage plays for each other; classical themes were popular.49 Sports occupied some of the boys at all times of year; during the warmer months, in addition to wrestling, the students played at quoits and cricket, and they challenged each other to foot races across the College playing field. Fisher Ames, of the class of 1774, liked to go hunting, and during the winter he and friends sometimes traveled a mile to Fresh Pond to skate. 50 As part of his freshman year of initiation in 1768, Clement Weeks chipped in to buy bats, balls, and other athletic equipment for the undergraduates.51 Swimming with schoolmates in the river during hot weather in 1773 cost John Paddock, a freshman, his life when he could not escape an undertow.52 Stephen Peabody often liked to join in group sings in a dormitory room during the evening after prayers.53 And toward the close of their

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senior year, ten of the more stylish members of the class of 1772 took a day off for an excursion to the ocean at Point Shirley in what is now the town of Winthrop.54 Student clubs and societies, almost all of them kept secret from the faculty and other nonmembers, also occupied the attention of many undergraduates. Prayer societies, with which the College administration would certainly have had no reservations, dated back at least to 1707. Most Saturday evenings in the late 1760s, a small group of undergraduates still met in a dormitory room for a “private meeting” to pray together.55 Another group of undergraduates, concerned about a rash of profanity, gambling, and irreverence at the College, organized an association in 1767 for the suppression of vice. 56 And social clubs for promoting cultural interests and genteel conduct, the most desirable of goals to the minds of the faculty and administration, dated from at least as early as the formation in 1728 of the Philomusarian Club for discussion and poetry reading. 57 In the early 1770s at least five undergraduate clubs, four of them secret societies, were active at Harvard. The Speaking Club, the Mercurian Society (which merged with the Speaking Club eighteen months after establishment in September 1771), and the Clitonian Society all promoted social polish through oratory, discourse, and literature. As the political temperature in the American colonies started to rise in the early 1770s, current events were often on the clubs’ agendas.58 Surviving membership rosters indicate that these clubs drew impartially from most sectors of the student population, with one exception--almost all the members lived in College housing, where upperclassmen predominated. In the fall of 1771, of the forty-nine club members in College, forty-six lived in a Harvard dormitory.59 Secrecy ensured the members’ privacy from prying eyes, although it seems that most of the fraternities were really interested in their own independence and had no disorderly behavior to hide. In fact, far from engaging in subversion, clubs with cultural objectives reinforced the classroom lessons of

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the College. The only student organization that did have a reason to conceal its activities, the Spunke Club, made up of aspiring physicians, apparently plotted to rob graves to provide bodies for anatomical investigations.60 Only the Martimercurian Band, an undergraduate militia company with more than 60 members, established in 1769 or 1770, acted in the open. Wearing dashing uniforms of long blue coats faced in white, nankeen breeches, white stockings, black gaiters, and three-cornered hats, and carrying muskets supplied by the province, the members of the company drilled in public, then passed around buckets of rum toddy. 61 Away from home, in many cases for the first time, the students learned to rely upon themselves and one another. Although grown-ups were around, they were less of a presence for these boys than in any previous situation they had encountered. Not yet independent of adult supervision, nevertheless they were beginning to strike out on their own.

Collectively the undergraduates had more power over the affairs of the College than either they or the authorities acknowledged. In a College community of slightly more than 200 at any one time, the undergraduates numbered at least 170 and sometimes as many as 180, or nearly 90 percent of the whole. When the students believed that they had a grievance, they were so numerous that Harvard’s administration had to pay attention to them. During the late 1760s, a series of student actions shook the College. In the spring of 1768 the most serious of these upheavals, a student strike, crippled the school for weeks and caused the entire senior class to petition for permission to transfer to Yale. 62 At the root of the disturbance was concern among the tutors about the laxity of some students in class. By custom, pupils who had failed to prepare for recitation could excuse themselves by answering

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“nolo”--“I don’t wish to”--when called upon to recite. To force the undergraduates to study, the tutors announced on March 21 that henceforth they would accept only excuses presented in advance. Only the seniors, whose College careers were nearly at an end, were exempt. The lower three classes revolted immediately. The new policy was “so rediculous that it is really sickish,” junior Stephen Peabody angrily entered in his diary. Tensions swelled between March 21 and April 4. Most of the underclassmen indignantly refused to comply with the new regulation, and at night the tutors had to dodge the brickbats that exploded through their windows. One tutor’s room was ransacked and another found his door covered with manure. Rumors flew that one tutor had imprisoned a freshman for most of a day to try to compel him to inform on the ringleaders of the uprising. The undergraduates’ trump card was to quit school, leaving it a broken shell. On April 4, more than 100 underclassmen resigned their rooms, and the seniors, who had tried to avoid becoming involved in the argument, petitioned President Holyoke for permission to transfer to the college in New Haven. The prospect for Harvard was a catastrophic reduction in the student body to about forty. By resigning their chambers and returning home, however, the students inadvertently sabotaged their own cause. No longer in regular contact with one another, they were prey to the maneuverings of the faculty, who gradually persuaded individual strikers to apologize, abandon their cause, and return to school. By early May, all but a few agitators had come back to Cambridge. One ringleader transferred to Rhode Island College rather than apologize for his role in the upheaval. By early July, though, the rest were back in class after offering humbling statements of repentance.63

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Harvard had never seen anything like the disturbances of the 1760s. Student misbehavior was nothing new, but the concerted actions of angry undergraduates were a concern. It was hard to imagine what else might go wrong.

“If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become President of Harvard College,” Edward Holyoke declared on his deathbed in 1769.64 By the end of his tenure, after more than 30 years in office, the frustrations of dealing with fractious students finally became too much for the father of the College community. If Holyoke had known about the fate of his successor, though, he would have felt grateful to escape to his grave with his reputation intact. For all the problems due to student disobedience in the pre-Revolutionary years, the source of Harvard’s greatest embarrassment was its twelfth president, Samuel Locke. The search for a new president took half a year. In advance, no one could have guessed the surprising candidate it yielded, the short, stout, handsome, and thoroughly obscure minister of the Congregational Church in Sherborn, Massachusetts.65 Locke, who had graduated from the College in 1755, was only 37 years old at his inauguration, the youngest man ever to hold Harvard’s presidency, 42 years younger than Holyoke had been at the time of his death. The new president had never served on the faculty in any capacity, although between taking his two degrees he had spent some time in the late 1750s at the College as a petty administrator. Over slightly more than a decade between his ordination in November 1759 and the invitation to succeed Holyoke, he had come to the public attention only once, in 1762, when he preached the annual sermon before the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston.

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As observers thought about Locke’s selection, though, it began to make sense to some of them. John Adams, a classmate of Locke, was full of praise for the appointment: “no Man was better qualified.”66 And Andrew Eliot, a member of the Corporation, saw at least half a dozen arguments in Locke’s favor: “He has fine talents, is a close thinker, had at College the character of a first rate scholar; he is possessed of an excellent spirit, has generous, catholic sentiments, is a friend to liberty.” Locke was “universally acceptable so far as I have heard.”67 Personable and approachable to a degree that Holyoke had never been, Locke quickly set about to win the favor of members of the governing boards, faculty, and students alike. His most lasting legacy was the decision a few months later to abandon class ranking based on family dignity in favor of alphabetical order. 68 The Corporation responded at the July 1773 commencement by awarding him an honorary doctorate. By now, though, Locke was already sowing the seeds of his own downfall. When his wife’s housekeeper became pregnant during the summer of 1773, President Locke tried to bribe her to disappear. She refused, and Locke, humiliated and under pressure from the College’s Corporation, quietly resigned his office on December 1.69 What kind of moral leadership could an adulterer provide the young boys under his direction? Decency and propriety may have distinguished Locke’s induction into office; his departure was characterized by nothing of the sort.

Commencement arrived four years, almost to the day, for most boys from their first, heart-gripping interviews with the tutors and the president. The College years were over. It was time to celebrate. During the eighteenth century, Harvard commencement was the great summer festival in eastern Massachusetts, an excuse not only for the graduates and their families, but for men and women who had

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nothing to do with the College to drop their work for a day and carouse. Graduation took place each year on the third Wednesday of July. In 1771 that day fell on July 17. Inside the Yard, and in the meetinghouse of the First Parish, where the College conducted the formal morning and afternoon exercises, the atmosphere was dignified and decorous, for the most part. To the north of the Yard, however, in instructive counterpoint to the mood at the College ceremonies, the ambience was anything but seemly. If the goal of College was to prepare young men for genteel and honorable lives, then the activities off the College grounds were an unmistakable reminder of another path. The members of the class of 1771 performed during the morning exercises offering addresses, dialogues, and disputations. It was a high honor to be asked to speak at graduation, but the student commencement parts were also the most unpredictable and potentially controversial pieces on the program.70 One irreverent speech in 1771, on “Quackery in all Professions,” caused such hilarity at the expense of the dignity of the careers that many of the graduates planned to pursue that a Boston minister angrily published a pamphlet deploring “the satyrical drollery at Cambridge last Commencement Day.”71 During the afternoon, following a recess for dinner, the master’s degree candidates took their turn, offering disputes and an English oration. After the degrees were conferred, the ceremonies concluded with a Latin oration. According to the notice that the College placed in the Boston newspapers, “The whole was conducted with Elegance and Propriety much to the Credit of the College and to the Satisfaction of the Audience.”72 The graduates and their families had been preparing for the festival for weeks, laying in stores and securing rooms to entertain guests.73 In the interval between the morning and the afternoon exercises, Col. John Murray celebrated the graduation of his son Daniel in 1771 with a lavish

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commencement spread attended by “A Large Company, the Governour, Councill and too many to Enumerate.”74 The following year, George Inman’s graduation party at his family’s Cambridge home boasted a guest list of 347, 210 of whom dined at a single long table.75 Even at their most raucous, though, the parties of the graduates and their families were staid in comparison with what was going on to the north of the College grounds. A more rowdy swirl of activities ebbed and flowed outside the Yard and the meetinghouse. Commencement was carnival time, complete with jugglers, caged animals, paupers, pickpockets, games of skill, and games of chance. In one corner, archers tested their marksmanship. In another, wrestlers grappled with each other. Fat dripping from grilling meats caused smoky cooking fires to leap and dance. If the College exercises attracted dignitaries, the parents of graduates, and alumni, the festivities outside the Yard drew a considerably less genteel audience—sailors, farm laborers, journeymen mechanics, apprentices. Row upon row of large, cream-colored tents appeared almost overnight, the work and property of opportunistic petty entrepreneurs. Each tent held tables and chairs as well as a crude counter to serve as a bar. For the rugged men and women who came to Cambridge each year to have fun, not to observe a collegiate rite of passage, commencement was a time for drinking, gambling, and cavorting. Dusk came late to Cambridge in mid-July. The festivities were winding down. By sunset, many of the revelers, gentle folk and common folk alike, were beginning to wend their way home to Lynn or Dedham or Waltham. For many of those who had spent the day in Cambridge, the night would be short enough to sleep off the glow before the morrow came. And for the proud graduates, it was now time to think about the future. 76

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Notes This essay is adapted from the author’s forthcoming book, Revolutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence (Amherst: university of Massachusetts Press).

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1. Stephen Peabody, Diary, July 14, 1767, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 2. “The Laws of Harvard College [1767],” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 31 (1935): 347. 3. Samuel Phillips, Jr., to Samuel and Elizabeth Phillips, June 15, 1767, Phillips Papers, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. 4. Peabody, Diary, July 18, 20, 1767. 5. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates 17: 466-67. 6. Although it takes a different approach than I have, the most valuable study of the relationship between Harvard and Cambridge is John D. Burton, “Puritan Town and Gown: Harvard College and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1636-1800” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1996). 7. For a map of Cambridge in 1638, see Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), between pp. 192-93. 8. Lucius R. Paige, History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630 to 1877 (Boston: H. O. Houghton, 1877), 3. 9. Rupert Ballou Lillie, Cambridge in 1775 (Salem, Mass.: Newcomb and Gauss, 1949), 7 and map. 10. Lillie, Cambridge in 1775, 11-13; Bainbridge Bunting and Robert H. Nylander, Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge: Report Four: Old Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973), 33; An Historic Guide to Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Daughters of the American Revolution, 1907), facing p. 14. 11. Burton, “Puritan Town and Gown,” 18-20. 12. On the economic relationship between Harvard and Cambridge, see Burton, “Puritan Town and Gown,” chap. 6; see esp. pp. 182-86 for a discussion of Harvard as an employer. 13. Winfred E. A. Bernhard, Fisher Ames, Federalist and Statesman, 1758-1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 20.

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14. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 110-17. 15. Information on the cooks is very difficult to discover. Extensive searching has resulted in no firm information on either their number or their sex. 16. Samuel Phillips, Jr., to Samuel and Elizabeth Phillips, Dec. 1, 1767, Phillips Papers. 17. Clifford K. Shipton, “Ye Mystery of Ye Ages Solved, or, how Placing Worked at Colonial Harvard & Yale,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin (Dec. 11, 1954), 258-59, 262-63. Yale followed a similar practice until 1766, when it opted for the alphabet instead. See Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 75-78. Harvard’s decision to reorder the class of 1771 came after a complaint over rankings by Samuel Phillips, Sr., who understood that it had the potential for causing discontent and jealousy. As Samuel, Sr., wrote to Samuel, Jr.: “You are now in the most Difficult Scituation, the Eyes of all Above and below you will be upon you, and I wish if it might be that you could be at home till the talk about the Change was a little over, but this dont Expect. Every word, action & even your Countenance will be watchd perticularly by those who Envy you, and perhaps by those who do not; Therefore keep as much retired as possible, wave all Conversation about it, dont let it appear that you are in the least degree Affected wth the Change. If any difficulties should arise with your any of your Classmates, that now fall below you, treat them with all possible tenderness.” (Aug. 29, 1769, Phillips Papers). At about the same time that Harvard and Yale gave up their traditional ranking system, many New England towns abandoned a similar practice--assigning seats in their meetinghouses based on personal dignity. See David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1976; rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 78-79.

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18. These terms were also used at other American Colleges; see Melvin Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth: Familial Ideology and the Beginnings of the American Republic (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 66. 19. “Laws of Harvard College,” 350, 355, 359. 20. “College Customs Anno 1734/4,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 31 (1935): 383-84. Sidney Willard, Memories of Youth and Manhood, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: J. Bartlett, 1855), 1: 258-59. 21. Peabody, Diary, July 14, 1767. 22. The other eight, in order of founding, were: William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Pennsylvania (1755), Rhode Island College – soon renamed Brown (1764) – Rutgers (1766) and Dartmouth (1769) 23. Seymour E. Harris, Economics of Harvard (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 39, 139; Thomas Jay Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College in the 18th Century” (Ph.D. diss, Harvard University, 1990), 237, 238, 251-52; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 80n. 24. “Laws of Harvard College,” 377. 25. Harvard’s curriculum was quite similar to what one found at the other colonial Colleges: see, for example, Kelley, Yale: A History, 78-83; Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 20-21.

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26. Oratorical training led to periodic public exhibitions and, ultimately, to public addresses at commencement. Declamations took two forms: syllogistic, in which an individual speaker logically analyzed a proposition, and forensic, in which two students debated a point at issue. At the same time that Harvard was placing increasing emphasis on public speaking, the same reform was taking place at other American Colleges, including Yale and Princeton. See Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College,” 265-66; Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University, 2 vols. (1840; Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Company, 1860), 2: 124ff.; Louis Leonard Tucker, Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale College (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 77; Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 35. 27. Burton, “Puritan Town and Gown,” 44; Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 89-90. 28. Quincy, History of Harvard University, 2: 163. 29. Until 1767, each tutor was responsible for his class’s instruction in each College subject. A reform introduced that year assigned each tutor to one of the four major academic subjects--Greek, Latin, logic, and natural philosophy. In addition to his special subject, though, each tutor continued to have charge of a graduating class, which he instructed in all the minor subjects until either he left or it did. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 90. 30. For a late example of this silver, see Kathryn C. Buhler, American Silver, 1655-1825, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2 vols. (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1972), 1: 365-67. Buhler also lists three other donations of tutorial silver from this era.

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31. Between 1767-1768 and 1773-1774, the average age of the tutors ranged from 24 3/4 to 30; the average age of the professors was 40 in 1767-1768; all three professors were still in place six years later in 1773-1774. 32. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 4: 162-67; 8: 137-40. Also see Daniel Munro Wilson, “Tutor Henry Flynt, New England’s Earliest Humorist,” New England Magazine 23 (1900): 284-93. 33. Sheldon S. Cohen, “Harvard College on the Eve of the American Revolution,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 59 (1982): 175; “The Harvard Diary of Pitt Clarke, 1786-1791,” ibid., 238; Willard, Memories, 313; Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 15: 448-49. 34. William Gallison to Col. John Gallison, Oct. 27, 1773, C. E. French Papers, 18: 427-28, Massachusetts Historical Society. 35. John Clarke, Letters to a Student in the University of Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1796), 72, 80-92, 97. 36. Clarke, Letters to a Student, 47-48. 37. Ibid., 76. 38. Corporation Records, 2: 260, 322, 327, 338, Harvard University Archives; Clement Weeks, Diary, 1768-1796, July 27, 1772, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord; Barbara Lambert, “Music Masters in Colonial Boston,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (1980) 54: 1110-12. On the social role of the minuet, see Cathleene B. Hellier, “Dance in the Virginia Gentry Household: A Tutor’s-Eye View in the 1770s,” unpublished paper, Research Department, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Va., esp. 6-7, 12, and Hellier, “ ‘These Rules and Customs’: Gender, Power, and the Rules of Assemblies in Two Novels by Fanny Burney,” unpublished paper, Research Department, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Va., esp. 12-14. 39. Samuel Phillips, Sr., to Samuel Phillips, Jr., Nov. 20, 1769, Phillips Papers. In the same collection, see also Samuel Phillips, Sr., to Samuel Phillips, Jr., Nov. 5, 1769.

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40. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 23-24. 41. Faculty Records, 2: 468-69, 504; 3 :37, 83, 131-32, 155, 183, 193, 195, 212-13, Harvard University Archives. 42. Fourteen members of the classes of 1771 through 1774 were degraded at some point during their College careers. Only one student in these classes, John Barnard Swett, suffered both punishments. Twenty-seven of 204 students (13 percent) incurred rustication, degradation, or both. Faculty Records, 3: 67, 132, 162-63, 183-84, 195, 198, 201, 209-10. 43. Ibid., 152-53. 44. Ibid., 193, 194, 195, 201, 208; Sarah E. Mulkern, ed., “Harvard on the Eve of the Revolution,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 10 (1902): 377-78. 45. Faculty Records, 3: 194-95. 46. Ibid., 152-54. 47. Bernard Bailyn, et al., Glimpses of the Harvard Past (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 25. 48. Willard, Memories, 260-61; Peabody, Diary, Aug. 20-24, 1767; Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 130. 49. The Nation 98 (1914): 295; Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 91-92. 50. Willard, Memories, 315-17; Bernhard, Fisher Ames, 25. 51. Weeks, Diary, Aug. 1768. 52. Mulkern, “Harvard on the Eve of the Revolution,” 529-30. 53. Peabody, Diary, Aug. 21, 26, 1767. 54. Weeks, Diary, June 9, 1772.

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55. Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College,” 301; William C. Lane, “A Religious Society at Harvard College, 1719,” Proceedings of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 24 (1923): 309-13; Albert Matthews, “A Society at Harvard College, 1721-1723,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (1923) 24: 156-59; Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 61-63; Peabody, Diary, passim. 56. Articles of an Association for the Suppression of Vice, Apr. 7, 1767, Harvard University Archives. 57. Philomusarian Club, Articles, 1728, Harvard University Archives. A group of resident graduates formed an even earlier society, the Spy Club, for discussing philosophical topics in 1719. Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College,” 302-3. 58. Speaking Club, Minutes and Other Records, Harvard University Archives; Bernhard, Fisher Ames, 28. 59. Speaking Club, Minutes and Other Records, Harvard University Archives; Clitonian Society, Diploma, 1773, Massachusetts Historical Society [photostat]; “A List of the Officers of the Martimercurian Company at College 1771,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 24 (1923): 161-65; Faculty Records, Original, 1771-1772, [n.p.], Harvard University Archives. 60. The full membership of the Spunke Club is now impossible to reconstruct through a few cryptic surviving mentions. 61. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 141; “Officers of the Martimercurian Company, 1771,” 161-65. Harvard was not alone in sponsoring a student militia company. Yale, Brown, and Columbia also had them. See Kelley, Yale: A History, 84; John F. Roche, The Colonial Colleges in the War for American Independence (Millwood, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1986), 61-63. 62. For a full account of this event, see Sheldon S. Cohen, “The Turkish Tyranny,” New England Quarterly 47 (1974): 564-83. 63. Administrative Records of College Disorders, April 1768, Harvard University Archives.

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64. Quoted in Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 99. 65. Corporation Records, Dec. 18, 1769, 3: 322. 66. L. H. Butterfield, et al., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 3: 260. 67. Andrew Eliot to Thomas Hollis, Dec. 25, 1769, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., 4: 447-48. 68. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 13: 624; Faculty Records, 3: 168-69. 69. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 100. 70. In September, near the start of their final year, the members of the senior class gathered to hold elections. They voted for two commencement orators and four thesis collectors, who drafted the graduation program. These six men were, in effect, the officers of the graduating class. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 119; Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College,” 325-26. 71. Andrew Croswell, Brief Remarks on the Satyrical Drollery at Cambridge, Last Commencement Day (Boston: Ezekiel Russell, 1771). For a rejoinder accusing Croswell of being too stuffy, probably by Rev. Thomas Prentice, the minister of the Congregational church in Charlestown and a member of the Board of Overseers, see Simon, the Tanner, A Letter to the Reverend Andrew Croswell (Boston: Ezekiel Russell, 1771). 72. Boston Post-Boy, July 22, 1771. 73. Peabody, Diary, July 3, 4, 1767. 74. John Rowe, Diary, July 17, 1771, Massachusetts Historical Society. 75. Elizabeth [Murray] Inman to Lady Don, fall 1773 (filed 1774), J. M. Robbins Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. A published account of this party appears in the Boston Gazette, July 20, 1772. For these citations I am grateful to Patricia Cleary.

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76. For an account of Harvard commencement in the late colonial period, see Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 123-31.