“In all Respects behave as dutiful & obedient Pupils”
- Prof. Samuel Wigglesworth’s description of the preceding month’s conflict over rancid butter, endorsed by college president Edward Holyoke and the faculty.
- “A Paper said to be found on the Chapel door,” which I don’t think has survived.
- The students’ defense of their united protest, signed by seven undergraduates as a “College Committee.”
- “A Confession signed by 43 Scholars.”
Addressing the president, professors, and tutors, those forty-three students stated:
As the Undergraduates of this College have been inform’d, That their late Transactions, have had a Tendency, to disturb the Peace & good Order of this Society; “We do therefore to testify our earnest Desire, to promote that Harmony wch. ought ever to subsist, and to remove any Suspicion, wch. may have arisen in the Breasts of our immediate Govern.”, freely acknowledge, That our Proceedings have been attended, wth. some irregularity; That we are sorry, if by any of our Actions, we have incurr’d the Displeasure of any of our Worthy Instructrs.; Wou’d have persu’d better & more lawful Methods, if we were sensible of Them; Are willing to pay all due Respect to the Authority over us, and if any future Grievance should arise, will seek for Redress according to the Directions of Law; And hope by the regularity of our Conduct, to reinstate ourselves in the Good Opinion of our Instructrs. & reflect Honour on this Society.Six students signed that message as a committee for the rest. The signatories included Thomas Hodgson, who had moderated the student body’s first gathering, and three of the seven members of the earlier “College Committee.”
Back on 26 September, the faculty had told protest leader Daniel Johnson that the students could draft their own “Declaration of Grievances and the Reason of their Conduct.” But now the overseers deemed this admission from undergraduates as “their pretended Submission to the Governmt of the College.” They resolved that the students’ language wasn’t good enough.
The next morning, with the overseers present, President Holyoke addressed the student body at chapel. He read out a longer confession and demanded that all the boys sign it:
We the Subscribers being now made sensible, That some of our late Proceedings in Order to obtain Relief from a Grievance We labour’d under, were irregular & unconstitutional;Out of 172 undergraduates, 155 signed this document. The only exceptions were four students who had sat out the protests and thirteen were absent for some or all of the events.
That our resolving to go out of the Chapel in a disorderly Manner, & to leave College in Case [Asa] Dunbar should be rusticated or expell’d, or if our Absence from Prayers was not excus’d by the Presdt when We should respectively answer Detentus a Nuntio paterno:
And that our entering into a written Ingagemt. to do the same, if any public Censure should be inflicted upon any Student, for his being concern’d in the late extraordinary Transactions; Were Violations of our Duty as Pupils, inconsistent wth the Peace & good Order of this Society & eventually tended to its Destruction;
And that our Offence, in entering into the abovesd. Resolutions is aggravated by the Obstinacy we discover’d in refusing to sign a Moderate acknowledgemt. of the same, & a Promise of future good Conduct, when invited thereunto by the Presdt. Profesrs & Tutrs., wth. a Promise that our Misconduct shou’d be overlook’d upon our Compliance:
Do hereby manifest our hearty Sorrow for every Thing Each of us severally have done, contrary to the good Order & Laws of the College, & humbly ask Pardon therefor of every Person to whom We have Given just Cause of Offence: promising that if We shall hereafter be under any Grievance or Difficulty, We will seek Redress in a regular constitutional Way, & That We will never enter into any agreemt. to oppose the good Governmt. of this Society, but on the contrary will alwaies discountenance, & to our utmost, endeavour to prevent, all disorderly unlawful Combinations, & in all Respects behave as dutiful & obedient Pupils.
“Those proceedings appear to have had the desired effect,” wrote Benjamin Peirce in his 1833 history of Harvard. A century later, Samuel Eliot Morison drew this conclusion in Three Centuries of Harvard: “It is clear that the Governing Boards would stand for almost any individual misconduct, but that a concerted effort must be vigorously suppressed lest the students suppose that ’in union there is strength.’”
In articles published in 1974 and 1981, Sheldon S. Cohen wrote about this outcome as a big win for the administration. “Student defiance almost immediately collapsed,” says one essay. But that comment applied only to the final confrontation in the chapel on 11 October.
I have a somewhat different interpretation.
TOMORROW: Consequences.
5 comments:
I have enjoyed reading about the troubles at Harvard over rancid butter. Perhaps it was an ongoing problem, or perhaps he read of this incident, because Kenneth Roberts used bad food at Harvard as a plot device in his novel NORTHWEST PASSAGE.
The protagonist is a student in 1759 at Harvard, where the students are served meat pies that they revile as "carrion." "On the instant I punctured the crust of mine, a hot and nauseous smell gushed upward -- a smell so ripely evil that it caught at the throat and at the stomach too."
While under the influence of hot buttered rum, the protagonist draws a cartoon of a skunk holding its nose and refusing a dish of the stinking food. This causes him to be suspended from the college and starts him off on all his adventures in the French and Indian War under Robert Rogers.
I bet you’re right about Kenneth Roberts’s inspiration. The major documents of the “butter rebellion” were published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in the first decade of the 1900s, and the event was mentioned in Samuel Eliot Morrison’s 1933 history of the college. Roberts could well have come across those sources during his research for Northwest Passage, published in 1937, and created a fictionalized version.
I suspect the longer confession was a negotiated compromise. Yes it's a promise to behave better in the future, but the undercurrent screams of their grievances being legitimate. - Chris H. Of Woburn
My big question is whether there were actual negotiations—between the scholars and a trusted tutor, for instance—or whether there was just a tacit understanding.
‘Remember that we, the faculty, haven’t really punished students severely for this sort of thing, but we can’t promise out loud to do that again, so you’ll just have to defer to our judgment and trust the pattern to repeat itself.’
Also, one other person not formally punished for this episode, and remaining on the job: college steward Jonathan Hastings. The faculty deemed most of his butter supply inedible. Was that a reprimand? Or did he argue for a bigger budget for better butter? Or did everyone agree that, say, that summer was particularly warm, and lots of people’s butter went bad?
FYI on rancid butter. Usually butter stinks not because it has gone bad as butter but because it was made with bad cream. Having milked my cows for years, and many times made butter, I have paid a lot of attention to historical accounts of butter-making. A number of them tell of the interesting "sharp" taste of old-time butter, unlike today's bland "sweet." Even more interesting to me has been accounts that tell of churning weeks' worth of cream, skimming mold off the cream pans, etc. In the past, butter was often unsalted, so it was the tang of the slightly sour cream that gave it flavor. (Fresh butter, unsalted, is an acquired taste... to me it is bland grease.) I would imagine that a certain point in the life of aged cream, the taste of the butter made would pass "sharp" and descend into "rancid."
This spoilage would happen more rapidly in a warm summer or when corners were cut in mass production. Thinking of the work (and the amount of cream milked and skimmed) involved in preparing a single firkin of butter before industrialization makes my hands and arms ache in sympathy.
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