“A snow ball was sent against the chapel windows”

As I wrote back here, in December 1788 Harvard professor Eliphalet Pearson began to keep a “Journal of disorders &c.”

It’s possible Pearson had assembled a similar notebook previously and it just doesn’t survive. But I think internal evidence strongly suggests that this journal was a response to an extraordinary spate of student disturbances in the 1788-89 academic year.

The most prominent study of this document is Leon Jackson’s “The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth-Century Harvard,” published in the History of Higher Education Annual in 1995 and then slightly anachronistically in The American College in the Nineteenth Century. (Thanks to Boston 1775 reader Ed Bell for alerting me to the second, more easily read publication.) Jackson treats the record as an undifferentiated whole, documenting a “day after day” litany of drinking, vandalism, and rudeness.

I think it’s more striking that the disorder of the 1788-89 year tapered off abruptly. From June to December 1789, Prof. Pearson recorded only one more disciplinary item in his journal, and he added only one in all of 1790. (Both involved Benjamin Foisson Trapier, a younger brother of Paul, who ended up never graduating.) The journal has no entries for 1791 or all of 1792 until December.

Thus, while we can look at the overall nature of Harvard student disturbances as Jackson did, we should also ask why those events clustered and died off. What made 1788-89 such a troublesome time for the Harvard faculty?

The first incidents Pearson recorded involved a faculty member breaking up a party in a dormitory, the faculty punishing one of the students involved, then that entire class protesting at prayers or lecture by making noise or throwing things. This happened with the juniors, then the sophomores. But tutors had broken up such parties before without seeing such a backlash. Why was this winter different?

Historians have paid a lot of attention to Harvard student activism in the pre-Revolutionary decade: the vandalism of Gov. Francis Bernard’s portrait in 1765, the “Butter Rebellion” of 1766, the identification of a “rebellion tree” in 1768, and so on. The political atmosphere of that period seems to have made the students unusually militant about their own grievances.

Was the same dynamic at work in 1788-89? The economy was still pretty bad. The Shays Rebellion had occurred a couple of years before. The national government was changing. Did that social environment produce a more militant student body? One problem with that theory is that the Harvard student body came largely from the socioeconomic class opposed to popular resistance.

Another possible factor was individual dynamics. I noted yesterday how a couple of the troublemakers in early 1789 came from South Carolina. Before the Revolution, those boys might have gone to Britain for their college experience. Now they were in Cambridge. Were scholars from outside New England more apt to push back against the Harvard establishment?

Pearson named some particular troublemakers, but he also described entire classes protesting en masse. Even before this winter, John Quincy Adams had noted how the freshman class disrupted the sophomore class recitations simply for the sake of rivalry. Such group behavior seems to have been a form of bonding among the boys.

Leon Jackson’s main finding concerned fraternal organizations such as Phi Beta Kappa, which came to Harvard in the early 1780s. Several other student social groups appeared at this time. Jackson said that students who were in fraternal societies were less prone to bad behavior. Looking over the names in Pearson’s journal and on the Phi Beta Kappa roll, I agree that there’s only a little overlap. One exception, appearing on both lists, was Charles Adams.

It’s also striking to me how much the disorder that Pearson chronicled focused on religious services. Classes started by “scraping” the floor to make noise when professors were speaking but soon escalated to throwing coins and pebbles. Professors came into the chapel to find the furnishings in a heap. Chapel windows were broken, in one case the glass striking a faculty member inside. Was there a theological dispute fueling the trouble? Or was attacking that building just the easiest way to target faculty?

That focus on religious services gives a more significant cast to an event that Prof. Pearson recorded on 26 Mar 1789:

Sunday at evening prayers, while the President was praying, a snow ball was sent against the chapel windows, by Adams 1, as by him confessed to Mr. Webber.

The president of the college was Joseph Willard (1738-1804). Samuel Webber (1759-1810) taught mathematics and natural philosophy; he would succeed Willard as president of the college. And “Adams 1” was Charles Adams.

Remarkably, this incident didn’t get into the faculty minutes. There was no official punishment for Adams. Maybe there would have been if the snowball had broken the window. Or if Adams hadn’t convinced Webber that he was sorry, or had been throwing at someone else. Or if Adams wasn’t doing well in his classes and close to graduating.

I must also note that in spring 1789, Adams’s father had become the second highest elected official in the U.S. of A.

TOMORROW: Back at the Blue Anchor Tavern.

(The picture above comes from the Museum of the American Revolution’s depiction of an earlier snowball thrown in Harvard Yard, in the winter of 1775-76, as recalled by Israel Trask.)

John Quincy Adams’s College Entrance Exam

On 15 Mar 1786, John Quincy Adams finally took his entrance test for Harvard College. As I’ve quoted in recent postings, he had come back from Europe the year before to finish his education at his father’s alma mater. At age eighteen, he hoped to enter as a junior and to study law.

Here’s John Quincy’s description of the test from his diary:

Between 9 and 10 in the morning, I went to the President’s [Rev. Joseph Willard], and was there examined, before, the President, the four Tutors three Professors, and Librarian.

The first book was Horace, where Mr. [Eleazer] James the Latin Tutor told me to turn to the Carmen saeculare where I construed 3 stanza’s, and parsed the word sylvarum, but called potens a substantive.

Okay, a little slip there, but he can recover.

Mr. [Timothy Lindall] Jennison, the greek Tutor then put me to the beginning of the fourth Book of Homer; I construed Lines, but parsed wrong αλληλομς. I had then παραβληδην given me.

Uh-oh, the pressure might be getting to him.

I was then asked a few questions in [Isaac] Watts’s Logic [Logic, or The Right Use of Reason, in the Inquiry after Truth], by Mr. [John] Hale, and a considerable number in [John] Locke, on the Understanding [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding], very few of which I was able to answer.

This isn‘t looking good, is it?

The next thing was Geography, where Mr. [Nathan] Read ask’d me what was the figure of the Earth, and several other questions, some of which I answered; and others not.

He’s really going to have to catch up now.

Mr. [Samuel] Williams asked me if I had studied Euclid, and Arithmetic, after which the President conducted me to another Room, and gave me the following piece of English to turn into Latin, from the World.

There cannot certainly be an higher ridicule, than to give an air of Importance, to Amusements, if they are in themselves contemptible and void of taste, but if they are the object and care of the judicious and polite and really deserve that distinction, the conduct of them is certainly of Consequence.

Here’s that sentence published in the British essay series titled The World in 1756. A 1787 reprint identified the authors of some of those essays, but not that one. Can John Quincy pull this off?

I made it thus.

Nihil profecto risu dignior, potest esse, quam magni aestimare delectamenta, si per se despicienda sunt, atque sine sapore. At si res oblatae atque cura sunt sagacibus et artibus excultis, et revera hanc distinctionem merent, administratio eorum haud dubie utilitatis est.

(I take it from memory only, as no scholar is suffered to take a Copy of the Latin he made at his examination.)

The President then took it, was gone about ¼ of an hour, return’d, and said “you are admitted, Adams,” and gave me a paper to carry to the Steward [Caleb Gannett].

Yes! He did it!

Actually, there should have been little doubt of that outcome. John Quincy noted every mistake in his performance, but he probably did better than most applicants. He was already a well-traveled, educated, serious young man, with a father at the Court of St. James and a younger brother in a lower class. Among the gentlemen vouching for him were a friend on the faculty, Prof. Benjamin Waterhouse; Dr. Cotton Tufts; his uncle, the Rev. John Shaw; and his host in town and old employer, lawyer Francis Dana. There was no way the college would have rejected him.

We can see how the college president viewed his new student by how he arranged for him to share a room with Henry Ware, who had already graduated and was “keeping the town-school” in Cambridge—i.e., another mature young man. John Quincy wrote, ”He is very much esteemed and respected in college, and has an excellent chamber.”

As for the rest of the undergraduates, John Quincy’s diary entry also recorded this:

Spent the afternoon, and evening in College. The Sophimore Class had what is called in College, an high-go. They assembled all together in the Chamber, of one of the Class; where some of them got drunk, then sallied out and broke a number of windows for three of the Tutors, and after this sublime manoeuvre stagger’d to their chambers. Such are the great achievements of many of the sons of Harvard, such the delights of many of the students here.

He chose to return to Mr. Dana’s house that night instead of making new friends among the sophomores.

“Make Application before the said first Day of November”

Here’s a glimpse of Ames’s Almanack for 1766. Usually almanacs were published at the end of the preceding year, sometimes reprinted in the first couple of weeks of the year they covered.

The 1766 almanacs, however, would then fall under the provisions of the Stamp Act, taking effect on 1 Nov 1765. Some printers therefore moved up their publishing schedules so they could sell copies without needing stamped paper.

Richard and Samuel Draper advertised this almanac in early September issues of their Boston News-Letter. Its second page summarized the part of the Stamp Act that applied to almanacs and then warned:

Those Persons who are desirous of being furnished with this Almanack, are requested to make Application before the said first Day of November, as the Price after that Time will be more than double what it is now.

(Incidentally, the author of this almanac wasn’t Dr. Nathaniel Ames of Dedham, despite its title. Instead, it was probably Joseph Willard [1738-1804] credited as “a late Student of Harvard-College.” Ames had published with the Draper family in the past, but this year he either didn’t like being rushed or chose to go with other printers, so the Drapers just pirated his name. But hey—they were taking a moral stand against the Stamp Act!)

Harvard professor John Winthrop (or his wife Hannah, but I think it was John) bought a copy of this almanac, presumably before November. It became part of the couple’s papers in the collections of Harvard University.

And now that university is digitizing this almanac and all its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents to create the Colonial North American Project at Harvard University, as reported here. The Winthrops’ artifacts are also part of a new exhibit at the Pusey Library called “Opening New Worlds.” And both the online resource and the exhibit are free to all.