The Outcome of Harvard’s “Butter Rebellion”

As I wrote yesterday, the prevailing interpretation of Harvard College’s “butter rebellion” in the fall of 1766 is that the faculty quashed the protesting students.

Certainly the undergraduates did end their action on 11 October, nearly all of them signing the confession dictated by the faculty.

However, we shouldn’t lose sight of what the students had achieved already. First, the faculty inspected steward Jonathan Hastings’s supply of butter and rejected most of it. The tutors had already complained the President Edward Holyoke about the butter, but nobody made any changes. The protest got that very real problem fixed.

Second, the bulk of the student body had stood united from 24 September to 11 October—more than two weeks. They presented a strong defense for their actions, demonstrated unity and order, and commanded the attention of the college’s highest board. Despite all signing that confession, they received no punishment. There were just too many of them.

The students thus achieved a concrete benefit in exchange for a symbolic concession.

What about the individual scholars?

Asa Dunbar was the senior who started the controversy by complaining about the butter to his tutor and refusing the man’s order to sit down. His classmates feared he would be expelled. Instead, the faculty demoted him to the bottom of his class (which was still ranked by social standing rather than grades). Everyone knew that punishment could be reversed, and indeed that’s what the college administration did at the end of the school year.

Earlier I mentioned “a telling of the event that’s entirely in mock Biblical language.” That document refers to Dunbar as “Asa, the scribe,” and his private notebooks show he wrote similar pieces about other events in his life, so Harvard chronicler Clifford K. Shipton concluded he wrote the account. A person doesn’t normally compose and share long, satirical stories about events that embarrass them, so I don’t think Asa Dunbar felt much shame about his actions or punishment.

Thomas Hodgson moderated the first student meeting, which concluded with a mass threat to withdraw from college if Dunbar was expelled. He didn’t graduate with the class of 1767—but that was because in the spring he was caught with a “lewd Woman” in his room. He went home to North Carolina and died young.

Daniel Johnson, the senior who defied the faculty’s demands in long discussions on 26 September, suffered no immediate consequences from this protest at all. He was caught up in the “lewd Woman” infraction with Hodgson and demoted, but then restored to his place again.

After graduating, Dunbar was a minister in Bedford and Salem, and then an attorney in Keene, New Hampshire. One of his grandchildren was Henry David Thoreau, who created his own history of protest.

Johnson became the minister in the town of Harvard. He was a strong supporter of the Revolution, even joining his parishioners in marching toward Boston in April 1775. In the summer of 1777 he served as chaplain for a militia regiment guarding Boston harbor, apparently contracted an illness, and went home and died at the age of thirty.

As for younger Harvard students involved in the butter protest, one of the “College Committee” that signed the defense was Stephen Peabody. He learned his lessons so well that he was in the thick of an even bigger protest in 1768.

Because the administration hadn’t quashed student protest at all. 

“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.