“In all Respects behave as dutiful & obedient Pupils”

When the overseers of Harvard College met on 10 Oct 1766, they had four documents to consider:

• 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.”

The last document was new, and suggested that the student body’s united front was cracking.

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;

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.

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.

“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.

“The present uncomfortable state of the College”

Yesterday’s posting left the Harvard College community on 26 Sept 1766 roiled with controversy over butter.

Or rather, the undergraduates and faculty (at least the tutors, the younger ones who habitually dined with the undergraduates) were in agreement about the butter supplied by steward Jonathan Hastings. It was bad.

The controversy was over how far the students had gone to protest that situation. The faculty objected to the boys:

• complaining in the dining hall, possibly using the word “stinketh.”
• gathering in a large group to plan actions, or what the college laws called a “combination.”
• walking out of the dining hall en masse before being dismissed with prayer.

But, President Edward Holyoke said, he could be forgiving if the students just confessed their guilt.

Daniel Johnson, the senior who was one of the leaders of the protest, refused to do that. And almost the whole student body showed up at the president’s house to support Johnson.

During evening prayers on 26 September, Holyoke threw all his authority behind the demand that the undergraduates sign an acknowledgment of wrongdoing written by the faculty. As Johnson had predicted, the student body stood firm against doing that.

On 4 October, Holyoke and the tutors endorsed a report on the situation written by Prof. Samuel Wigglesworth. They sent that to the Harvard Corporation, which met three days later, alongside the Harvard Board of Trustees. The latter group included Gov. Francis Bernard, Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, provincial treasurer Harrison Gray, and several impressive clergymen.

Those gentlemen considered “the present uncomfortable state of the College” and came down firmly on the side of the administration. Both bodies said the students’ action was “irregular & disorderly in an high Degree” while the faculty response was “mild & gentle.” As for the students’ threat to withdraw as a mass protest, the boards resolved:

That if any Scholar shall leave the College in persuance of the Combinations enter’d into as afforesd. or shall go out of the Town of Cambridge wtḥout Leave, before ye Fall vacation which will begin on Wednesday the fifteenth Instant, every Scholar so offending shall be adjudged to have renounc’d his Relation to the College & shall not be again rec’d. into it, wtḥ out a Vote of the Presdt. Professrs. & Tutors.

The overseers agreed to act together (in what might otherwise be called a combination) by attending the chapel service when President Holyoke read all those resolutions. Surely that show of authority would cow the student body into agreeing “to sign a full & ample Confession of their Crimes.”

Instead, the students submitted a defense of their actions more than 1,500 words long. It was signed by seven undergraduates as a “College Committee”—four seniors plus one representative from each of the other classes. The first signatory was senior Thomas Bernard, son of the governor.

Incidentally, other prominent men who had sons at Harvard at this time included Lt. Gov. Hutchinson, colony secretary Andrew Oliver, new clerk of the legislature Samuel Adams, and Prof. John Winthrop. Even steward Hastings had a son in the college, though he was staying out of the protest.

The students’ defense repeated how their protest against the butter was the only way they could be heard, expressing gratitude that the faculty had finally done something about that shared problem. As for the charge of being “disorderly in an high Degree,” they emphasized their group discipline: in visiting President Holyoke, “we formed ourselves into regular Ranks, & marched in a Body to his House,” showing “remarkable good Order.” That quasi-military behavior was similar to the 5 Nov 1765 anti-Stamp Act march in Boston, and to the rural court closings of 1774.

The Board of Overseers gathered again on 10 October, with only five days left before the fall vacation.

TOMORROW: The opposition melts.

(The photo above shows steward Jonathan Hastings’s house, which stood near Harvard Yard in an area now used by the Harvard Law School. It became the headquarters of the provincial army in April 1775.)

“They shou’d have been obliged to have eat all the Bad Butter”

Harvard College picked up the rebellious spirit of the ’60s—the 1760s.

The unrest started with a protest against rancid butter in autumn 1766. According to one account, on 23 September student Asa Dunbar told the college’s senior fellow, Belcher Hancock, “Behold our butter stinketh and we cannot eat thereof!”

That quotation appears in a telling of the event that’s entirely in mock Biblical language, so I’m not convinced those were Dunbar’s actual words.

Whatever Dunbar said, the faculty deemed his behavior “a very great Misdemeanr. by an high act of Disobedience.” They demanded an apology and demoted him to the bottom of his class.

Predictably, instead of stopping the protests, that harsh punishment caused more discontent. Most of the undergraduates had a meeting that night. Then more bad butter was served the next morning. When more boys complained, their tutors replied by saying that morning’s butter was “pretty good—much better than they had frequently been served with.”

At that point, senior Daniel Johnson (1747–1777) stood up and started walking out of the dining hall, before the faculty read the prayer of thanks and dismissed the students. A second later, as they had agreed the night before, almost all the undergraduates stood and followed him. Only three upperclassmen and a few freshmen remained in the hall. Outside in the yard, the students huzzahed and fanned out into Cambridge to find breakfast.

The students didn’t know that the faculty had appointed a committee “to examine the Condition of the Stewards Butter & condemn what they tho’t not proper to be offerd to the Scholars.” Later that day, that committee rejected one barrel and six firkins of butter and deemed four firkins suitable “for Sauce only.” The tutors agreed that the butter was bad, and indeed they’d made their own complaints to college steward Jonathan Hastings.

The bigger problem, as far as the college administration was concerned, was that the undergraduates had not “presented a Petition to those in the im̄ediate Governmt. of the College, to have this Grievance redress’d.” Instead, their large meetings and collective actions constituted “a Breach of the Law relating to Combinations.”

That evening, after prayers, the long-tenured college president, the Rev. Samuel Holyoke (shown above), announced the butter committee’s findings. But he demanded that students confess they had broken college rules while promising that he might remit their punishment.

Prof. Samuel Wigglesworth summoned Daniel Johnson, a former tutee, and asked him to cooperate to avoid being rusticated (and presumably set an example for the rest of the student body). Johnson refused to sign any acknowledgement of guilt, insisting that the students had no other way of gaining redress.

On 26 September, more faculty members met with Johnson, asking him to sign, and get his classmates to sign, an admission “That some of our late Proceedings, in Order to procure Relief from a Grievance we have lain under, were irregular & unconstitutional.”

Johnson refused to sign any confession. Furthermore, he said most of the undergraduates would leave the college before signing any confession.

This wasn’t a confession, the faculty insisted; it was merely an expression of sorrow. Johnson said he had nothing to express sorrow about. He repeated that the students’ method of protest was the only way they could be heard. That response echoed what American Whigs were saying to the Crown.

The discussion continued to go round and round about proper procedure:

He was told, that the College Law prescrib’d, First an Application to the Presdt. & Tutrs., Then to the Corporation & Overseers.

He said, if they had proceeded in that Manner, they shou’d have been obliged to have eat all the Bad Butter before They cou’d have procur’d Redress.

Upon this he was told, That upon emergent Occasions [i.e., in emergencies] The Presdt. call’d a Meeting of the Corporation im̄ediately & that if Theyhad made a proper Application, There might probably have been a Meeting of the Corporation on ye next Day.

Having made that promise, the faculty asked Johnson to read their language to his fellow students. According to William C. Lane, the senior said he’d “be afraid to enter the College Yard should it be known that he had such a paper about him, for he should either have his limbs broke or be hissed out of the Yard.”

Increasingly desperate, the faculty invited Johnson and his fellow scholars to draft their own “Declaration of Grievances and the Reason of their Conduct” and sign that. And if anyone objected to signing that, he could speak personally to the college president.

Half an hour later, President Holyoke was about to leave his house to lead evening prayers. Almost the whole student body was on his doorstep asking to explain their objections to him.

TOMORROW: The controversy churns.