From Robert A. McCaughey, Josiah Quincy: The Last Federalist. 1772-1864 (Harvard, 1974)

                              Chapter Eight:  The Making of a Schoolmaster

         If we can ever have a university at Cambridge, which shall lead the intellectual character
         of the country,  it can be I apprehend only when the present college shall have settled
         into a thorough  and well disciplined high school
                                                                     - George Ticknor, 1821

Writing in the fall of 1829 to an English acquaintance, Boston's ex-mayor [Josiah Quincy]  described his new circumstances:

I had not been free of the City employ a month, before I was invited to the office of President of Harvard University.... This offer I did not think myself at liberty to decline particularly as on many accounts it suited the general turn of my habits and mind.

Nor had four months in Cambridge caused him to doubt the wisdom of his decision.

      The office ... is altogether one of general superintendence, not involving me in the business of
       instruction, unless I voluntarily assume it, and leaving me at great leisure, hereafter,
       for general pursuits. It also being an office independent of the popular voice and held
       'during good behavior,' it is perhaps, upon the whole, one of the most eligible as well
       as honorable situations in our country.

Sixteen years would provide ample time to compare these sanguine expectations with the realities of academic life in Jacksonian America.¹

                                                          The Augustan Age

     By virtually any criterion-- financial solvency, student enrollment, faculty morale, educational offering, public reputation --Harvard during the 1820's was in serious trouble. Not since the late seventeenth century had friends more cause to fear for its future or enemies to exult about its imminent demise. The situation was made to seem gloomier still by contrast to the bright prospects which had been envisioned only a decade earlier.²

     Writing in the North American Review in 1818, the Rev. John Thornton Kirkland proposed that the institution over which he had presided since 1810 should become nothing less than "a university upon the extended plan." Harvard would continue to prepare young men for the ministry, medicine, and the law, but beyond this wished it to become the institutional locus for the "formation of the national character, and the elevation of the national spirit, encouragement or rather gathering together,-the creating of literary profession among us." After carefully distinguishing between the work of instructing undergraduates and contributing "to intellectual wealth of the world," Kirkland concluded by imply that all Harvard lacked to transform itself into a university "after most approved establishments of the kind in Europe" was the return of his academic emissaries from what one of them called "the holy land of the scholar." ³

     On April 16, 1815, George Ticknor and Edward Everett had sailed for Europe. There the twenty-four year old Dartmouth graducate whose literary inclinations had soured him on the law, and twenty-one year old Harvard professor designate who had just resigned from the ministry, spent more than three years traveling, studying, and being lionized by salon society. Everett remained Gottingen long enough to acquire a Ph.D., while Ticknor, after taking an early dislike to German universities and being notified 1816 of his election as Harvard's Smith Professor of Modern Languages, transferred his studies to France, Italy, and Spain. 1818 they were joined by two other aspiring scholars with Harvard connections: Joseph Green Cogswell, a former Latin tutor, a George Bancroft, an 1817 graduate of the college who came Europe under the aegis of a Kirkland scholarship. All four viewed their undertaking with utmost seriousness and none was unduly modest about his probable impact, either on Harvard or on the country at large. When Ticknor and Everett prepared to leave Europe in 1818 to take up their professorial duties in Cambridge, Cogswell, who was to remain for another year, wrote that they should welcomed back "as Plato was at Athens when he had finish his travels and began to impart the fruits of these to his countrymen in the groves of the academy." ⁴

     Scholarly pretensions were only one measure of Harvard's apparent vitality during the early Kirkland years. Financial solvency was another. A "public" institution in that its charter was an integral part of the Massachusetts Constitution and elected state officials dominated its Board of Overseers, Harvard had on several occasions been the recipient of legislative grants for specific projects. Although a coalition of Republicans and Calvinists had attempted to disrupt the comfortable relations which the Unitarian-controlled Harvard Corporation enjoyed with the state, by 1814 the General Court was again in the control of friendly Federalists. In that year the legislature passed "An Act for the encouragement of literature, piety, morality, and the useful arts and sciences," which made Harvard the principal beneficiary of a ten-year tax on state banks. When one considers that the total expenses of the college in 1812 were less than $63,000, this annual grant of $10,000 constituted a considerable windfall.⁵

     The state money was quickly put to use. Holworthy and University Halls were completed and the Yard spruced up; faculty salaries were increased and a scholarship fund established. The heretofore nomadic medical school acquired permanent quarters in Boston while schools of law and of divinity opened in Cambridge. More importantly, the Commonwealth's generosity seems to have stimulated private endowments as Harvard alumni funneled an impressive portion of their wartime profits into new professorships. During Kirkland's first seven years as president fifteen chairs were established, nine of them in the college where previously there had been only four. Certainly contributing to the belief that Harvard was on the verge of becoming a genuine university was its apparent possession of the financial resources to do so.⁶

     Enrollment statistics provide an important index of institutional health in an era when student fees were virtually the only source of operating income for American colleges. In the first eight years of Kirkland's administration, enrollments more than doubled; by 1818, with nearly three hundred students, Harvard again became the largest college in the country, a distinction it had lost to Yale in the 1790's. The student body grew not only larger but more cosmopolitan. Before 1810 ninety percent came from New England, the vast majority from within thirty miles of Cambridge; ten years later more than a quarter came from outside New England, most of them from the South.⁷

     Kirkland's personality unquestionably contributed to the feeling of prosperity at Harvard during his early years as president. The son of an Indian missionary, he had attended Phillips Academy as a charity student before going on to Harvard in the same situation.   Following graduation in 1789 and a brief stint as a Latin tutor, he quickly moved into the upper reaches of Boston society as a spiritual counselor. In 1793, at twenty-three, he became minister of the theologically liberal, politically conservative, and socially prestigious New South Church. Affable and modest, the young bachelor got along well with the businessmen in his congregation and famously, Emerson later mischievously recalled, with their wives.⁸

     When Harvard's President Joseph Willard died in 1804 and Fisher Ames declined the post, Kirkland became Boston's choice. The Corporation, fearful of exacerbating already strained relations with the Calvinist ministry by naming a Unitarian president, chose instead Samuel Webber, an ordained faculty member of indeterminate theological persuasion. Six years later, however, when Webber died in office, the Corporation overcame its earlier squeamishness and on August 10, 1810, unanimously elected the forty-year-old Kirkland Harvard's fourteenth president.⁹

     Though officially residing in Cambridge, President Kirkland seldom permitted his duties to interfere with his thriving social life on the other side of the Charles River. Four days a week for seventeen years he could be seen crossing the West Boston Bridge about noon, arriving in the capital in time to dine with his patron and ex-parishioner, George Cabot, or with close friends and Corporation Fellows, Theophilus Parsons and John Lowell. These almost daily respites from the adolescent clamor of the Yard preserved his irenic disposition, though their effect on the college was less positive. When afternoon chapel back in Cambridge began to impinge on his increasingly protracted Boston visits he recommended that it be dispensed with.¹⁰

     For a few years he was able by indulging the students to make up for what he lacked in attentiveness to the problems of the college. His tolerance of adolescent foibles and excesses was legend, his capacity for empathy was boundless. Many an overextended undergraduate found him generous with his own funds and prodigal with those of the college; all honored him for his "improvident virtues." "If not one of the greatest presidents of Harvard College," Samuel Eliot Morison has written of Kirkland, "he was certainly the best beloved." The Rev. John Pierce, Kirkland's eulogist, agreed that he "was very generally loved-- even by the dissolute and unprincipled." ¹¹

     That very adulation highlighted Kirkland's principal failing. It was one thing to be regularly toasted by the undergraduates and wished "a wife to tuck him up warm," another to maintain authority over the toasters. Increasingly during his tenure, hell-raising and the almost complete repudiation of parietal authority came to characterize student life in Cambridge. A typical Harvard undergraduate's existence was described in 1818 as one of indolence and dissipation.

The time not spent at the classes, is divided between eating and drinking, smoking and sleeping. Approach the door of one of their apartments at any hour of the day, you will be driven back from it, as you would from the cabin of a Dutch Smack, by the thick volume of stinking tobacco smoke which it sends forth; should you dare enter, you would find half a dozen loungers in a state of oriental lethargy, each stretched out upon two or three chairs, with scarce any other indication of life in them than the feeble effort they make to keep up the fire of their cigarrs.

     Not all their time was spent smoking "cigarrs" in their rooms; during a six-month period in 1821 twenty-six cases of venereal disease among Harvard students were reported.¹²

     During the Kirkland era social clubs like Porcellian and Hasty Pudding came into their own, their alcoholic and occasionally literary activities taking precedence over official college functions. Secret organizations committed to nothing nobler than disturbing the peace flourished, while the popularity of "blowing clubs" suggests that undergraduates thought more of their nightly entertainment than of scholarly pursuits. Students organized by class and, challenging the college authorities in "combinations," began exercising an authority of their own, blacklisting and ostracizing any classmate who informed on them. Tutors and even professors were routed out of their beds, their rooms destroyed, their persons threatened, but no one came forward to identify the culprits. Other colleges had their, uncontrollable students, chapel explosions, and physical assaults on instructors, to such an extent that the situation at most pre-Civil War colleges has been described as one of "autocracy tempered by rebellion." At Harvard it was the reverse.¹³

     Many factors, not peculiar to Harvard, contributed to the general rambunctiousness of early nineteenth-century college students. In part it was a function of the age at which they matriculated. Harvard, like other colleges, accepted students as young as twelve years old; given the competition among the proliferating institutions and the small, perhaps even declining number of boys interested in college, there was no alternative. In the absence of organized sports adolescent energies went into planning and executing the era's epic inter-class battles. Some observers thought student rebelliousness reflected the nation's traditional anti-authoritarianism. "The docility of an American youth," Joseph Cogswell wrote in 1818, "is not increased by the early and often wild notions of liberty he acquires.... College," he added, "is looked forward to by most of them as the time when the shackles of a master's and a parent's authority are thrown off, and that of freedom to commence." Still others, like George Ticknor, believed students rebelled because they were bored with a lock-step curriculum and daily recitations and pedantic instructors.¹⁴

     Conceding all this, the responsibility for Harvard's disciplinary problems rested principally with Kirkland and his unwillingness to exercise his legitimate authority. Rarely did he expel a student. Occasionally he resorted to suspensions but more often he merely "rusticated" (suspended for six weeks under the authority of an appointed tutor away from Cambridge) or fined his unruly charges. Early in his tenure he successfully quelled an incipient rebellion by preaching to the students on the text, "0 my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee!," but later, in a similar situation, his use of Matthew, "Do unto others as you would that others do unto you," proved ineffective.¹⁵

     Evidence began accumulating early in his administration that Kirkland's failure to exercise control over the undergraduates was having an adverse effect on the reputation of the college. "Tis said that your Principal and Professors take a pride in the extravagance of the students and encourage it," John Randolph reported from Virginia in 1813, "whilst Yale zealously inculcates the sublime truths of Poor Richard's Almanac." New England Calvinist publications, particularly Jedidiah Morse's Panoplist, freely circulated reports of carousing, in Cambridge as proof that Harvard's morals had deteriorated since it had cast off orthodoxy. Boys who earlier would have gone there were being advised by their ministers, many of them Harvard alumni, to go to places less costly, less scandalous, and doctrinally more sound: Bowdoin, Williams, and Yale. Midway through Kirkland's presidency enrollments began dropping; by 1820 Yale again forged ahead of Harvard, this time not to be headed for thirty years. -"I regret to report that the general opinion in this part of the country is unfavorable to the college," a New Hampshire alumnus wrote in 1821, "on the score of morals and discipline. Such an opinion began to prevail five or six years ago, and has constantly been gaining ground." ¹⁶

     Yet another consequence of Kirkland's laxity was that the parietal burden fell wholly on the resident faculty, thereby reducing their effectiveness as teachers and the time available for their own pursuits. No wonder the Corporation found it impossible to induce the linguist John Pickering to give up his law practice and accept a professorship; he got far more scholarly work done in his Boston office than he would have in the riotous Harvard Yard. "Do not suffer these children so to monopolize your time and strength," one harried tutor admonished himself in 1815, "as to enfeeble the one, and deprive the other of enjoyment. It cannot, cannot be duty." ¹⁷

    Of the four European-trained scholars who returned to Harvard between 1819 and 1822, only Ticknor remained in 1824. Bancroft had lasted one year, a confessed failure in his efforts to inspire a love of Greek among his students. Instead, he so alienated them that he was the victim of almost daily classroom disruptions and nightly window-smashings. Cogswell lasted two years, complaining all the while that his assigned duties "might as well be performed by any shop boy." Everett stayed for five years, but from the first week of his return spent most of his time trying to get exempted from the faculty-residency requirement and seeking more "respectable" employment. "I have found College a sickening and wearisome place," Bancroft wrote in 1823, reflecting the sentiments of all three, "not one spring of comfort have I had to draw from. My state has been nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble, and I am heartily glad that the end of the year is coming so soon." ¹⁸

    Those faculty members who became permanent fixtures-- Henry Ware, Sidney Willard, Levi Hedge, and John Snelling Popkin-- were men of modest accomplishments. Edward Tyrrel Channing, Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, stands virtually alone in the Kirkland era as a Harvard professor remembered as a great teacher, though he too produced little in the way of scholarship. More typical was Sidney Willard, Hancock Professor of Hebrew, who described himself as "a permanent instructor of youth" and took grim pride in having no time "to make it his business ... to furnish himself with literary and scientific knowledge." In response to the charge that his colleagues were "leading a life of ease," he boasted that they "are generally employed with their classes to the exclusion of great literary undertakings, to which their choices might lead them." Not surprisingly, the botanist Thomas Nuttall, a Harvard instructor in the early 1820's, dismissed his years there as "vegetating" and "doing nothing for science." Whatever enthusiasm, scholarly or otherwise, men like Popkin, Professor of Greek (1815-1833), had was soon dried up by the monotony of their duties and being made the continual butt of undergraduate pranks. Rather than teach they became "verbal drillmasters," who, as Popkin did, obliged students "to wade through Homer as though the Iliad were a bog, and it was our duty to get along at such a rate per diem. " ¹⁹

     Only George Ticknor avoided the vis inertiae that Emerson thought pervaded the Harvard faculty, but he was the exception. His continuing interest in reforming Harvard's discipline and teaching was inversely related to his involvement in either. By the stipulations of his Smith professorship he was, unlike other faculty members, exempted from the residency requirement, parietal responsibilities, and daily recitations. Living in Boston and coming to Cambridge infrequently to deliver a formal lecture or supervise the instruction of modem languages, he remained to his colleagues during his seventeen years on the faculty an "outsider." ²⁰

     In the summer of 1821 Ticknor began trying to persuade the Corporation to institute reforms along two fronts: curriculum and discipline. By recommending that limited electives be permitted in some subjects, particularly in modem languages, he hoped to break up the lock-step curriculum and to add variety to its heavily classical orientation. He also favored grouping students according to proficiency rather than alphabetically by class as was the prevailing practice. Similarly, other changes which he advocated-a longer, less frequently interrupted school year, teaching by subjects rather than books, written examinations, and formal lectures in place of daily recitations-were all designed to make Harvard "a school where the instruction shall be thorough." ²¹

     Of more immediate concern to Ticknor, however, was that "discipline be exact." Indeed, at times he seemed to argue that curricular reform was a means of achieving the more important end of disciplinary reform. This was most apparent in his plan to group students according to proficiency. Often described as Harvard's early champion of the European university system, he was far more enamored of the regimentation of West Point than of the Lernfreiheit of Gbttingen. "If we can ever have a University at Cambridge, which shall lead the intellectual character of the country," he advised Corporation Fellow William Prescott in 1821, citing the Military Academy as his model, "it can be I apprehend only when the present college shall have settled into a thorough and well-disciplined high school."²²

     To this end Ticknor made several specific recommendations. The first and most sweeping was that Harvard students be confined to Cambridge even on weekends and to the Yard after dark. Nine o'clock bed-checks were proposed as the mechanism by which compliance with the prohibition against going over to Boston would be assured. As a further check he suggested sumptuary regulations which would oblige the students to wear easily recognizable uniforms and would limit their spending money. Ticknor also called for the establishment of a three-man tribunal, composed of faculty members, which would be empowered to dismiss "without trial or assigned cause" any student it suspected of failing to fulfill "the purposes for which he came to college." "In this perfectly arbitrary power, and its constant and free exercise," argued the ex-lawyer calmly, "are to be found the only means of supplying the place of parental authority, and maintaining constant discipline in College over a large body of boys and young men."²³

     While Ticknor's proposals slowly circulated among the Corporation, a veneer of complacency continued to hide Harvard's declining fortunes from all but its closest observers. Then within a period of eight months, in two closely related events, that veneer was peeled off and the troubles in Cambridge laid bare. The first episode occurred on May 2, 1823, when President Kirkland, six weeks before Commencement, announced the dismissal of forty-three of the seventy-member senior class. The incidents that forced this action, initiated by a dispute between the class and one of its dissident members, could have been avoided had Kirkland interceded earlier. At least that was how one irate father of an expelled senior, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, viewed it. ²⁴

     The second event, following hard on the adverse publicity attending the dismissals and the election for the first time in a decade of a Democratic governor and lower house, was the General Court's announcement in February 1824 that it would not renew the state grant about to expire. Harvard had already received $95,000 from the Commonwealth, $25,000 of which had been mandated and used for scholarships. Yet the capital expenditures of the college during the years of the grant far exceeded the $70,000 balance, University Hall alone costing $64,000. "University funds have been so reduced," pleaded the Corporation, "that the usual expenses for the support of the institution and its various officers cannot be sustained without a continuance of such aid." The legislators were unmoved, intimating that they would never again underwrite the riotous goings-on over in Cambridge. "It was formerly the pride and the care of the state," Andrews Norton. wrote sadly but accurately of his alma mater. "It is now doubtful whether a majority of the inhabitants of the state do not view it with jealousy, hostility or indifference."²⁵

      The definitive rejection by the college's largest benefactor could not have come at a worse time. Enrollments had been dropping steadily since 1820; now Harvard suddenly found itself without the scholarship funds it had depended upon for a decade to attract and retain a sizable student body. In 1826, with a freshman class of thirty-six, for the first time since the 1790's the total number of students dropped below two hundred. This meant reduced receipts from fees in addition to an operating deficit of $4,000 which would have to be covered from the endowment. When a New England institution starts spending its capital, matters are indeed serious.²⁶

     Retrenchment and reform were clearly in order. The problem was how to implement them. While the Corporation and the Overseers quickly approved most of Ticknor's proposals, incorporating them in the 1825 Statutes of Harvard University, the resident faculty objected. Already overworked, underpaid, and generally put upon, the heretofore quiescent faculty, fearful that changes were about to be made at their expense, temporarily roused themselves in 1824. Eleven of the twelve resident faculty members, led by Edward Everett, seized upon a vacancy on the Corporation to assert their claim to representation. Theirs was an old argument, first raised during the Leverett administration a century before, based on the contention that all members ("Fellows") of the Corporation must reside in the college. But John Lowell, speaking for the Corporation, showed how little they thought of the faculty claim when he bluntly told the professors to confine themselves "to the pleasant duties of the classroom" and leave "the real and personal estate of the college" to those who "see it in the best and clearest light."²⁷

    Rebuffed in their attempt to gain a voice in the governance of the college, the faculty succeeded in displaying their negative power by thwarting nearly all of Ticknor's reforms. The fact that he had close social ties with the Corporation and had opposed their claims to representation was not lost on his colleagues in Cambridge. Nor was the fact that the parietal responsibilities as expanded in the new Statutes fell on them, not him. In addition, the proposed academic changes threatened to upset the personal accommodations they had long since made with the archaic but familiar curriculum. To Popkin, the encouragement of modem languages smacked of utilitarianism and challenged the supremacy of the classics. Finally, the faculty sided with the students in opposing grouping-by-proficiency as destructive of class loyalties and tending to stimulate unhealthy competition. Although they did not say so, it would also have put them on their mettle.²⁸

     On each of these issues Kirkland went along with the faculty. When individual instructors began sabotaging the curricular reforms authorized by the Statutes, they depended on him, if not to support their efforts, at least to ignore them. Of all those officially involved in Harvard affairs, he seems to have been least distressed by the events of 1823 and 1824. Forced to expel more than half the Class of 1823, he then proceeded to recommend several of them for law school in glowing terms! His attitude about college funds, which he dispensed without even bothering to ascertain their existence, remained casual as ever. In this he was abetted by his old friend, John C. Davis, who had managed Harvard's finances during the state-grant years without recourse to bookkeeping.²⁹

     That left only the Corporation to deal with the manifold crisis besetting Harvard. Fortunately for the college, four resignations in 1825-1826 permitted committed reformers Joseph Story and Nathaniel Bowditch, both long active on the Board of Overseers, Francis Calley Gray and Charles Jackson to move on to the Corporation and take charge of its tangled affairs. While Story concentrated on the curriculum, Bowditch tended to more immediate matters. His first action, after discovering that Davis' accounts consisted of little more than a notebook and some entries made on the backs of envelopes, was to force his resignation. It took a full-time clerk six months to reconstruct the financial history of the college since 1810 and to reconcile a cumulative error of $100,000. ³⁰

     In Davis' place, Bowditch secured the election of a Salem businessman, Ebenezer Francis. Although neither Bowditch nor Francis was an alumnus--a fact that distressed Edward Everett and Ralph Waldo Emerson--they almost singlehandedly saved Harvard from financial collapse by imposing a rigid austerity program. Beginning in 1826 faculty salaries were cut twenty percent; professorships were consolidated, left vacant, and in four instances eliminated. Operating expenses were cut to the bone and for the first time since 1810 college provisioners found their bills being scrutinized. ³¹

     Bowditch, a gruff, humorless man, an autodidact and a successful businessman who did not suffer fools gladly, went about his economizing duties "with the zeal of an apostle." Eliza Susan Quincy, altering the metaphor slightly, remembered him "as the Martin Luther of Harvard College." It was only a matter of time before he and the genial Kirkland would clash. "The President," Bowditch. wrote, in what for him was a grave indictment, "is no businessman."³²

     Kirkland in turn ignored Bowditch and carried on much as before, only, if possible, a bit more distractedly. A mild stroke in the summer of 1827, and his marriage that fall, at fifty-eight, into the Cabot family, cost him whatever interest he had in the college. During the winter of 1827-1828 he absented himself from several Corporation meetings, thereby infuriating Bowditch who valued punctuality more highly than conviviality. Finally, at a Corporation meeting on March 27, 1828, Bowditch told the president what he thought of him and his administration. The next day Kirkland resigned, thus bringing Harvard's Augustan Age to an ill-tempered close. ³³

                                                        There's a President for You

     It took the Corporation eight months to find a new president. Story and Bowditch both proposed Ticknor but others, like Charles Jackson, were less than enthusiastic about him. As one of Ticknor's warmest supporters acknowledged, "the public would not swallow such a potion." His Remarks on Changes Lately Proposed or Adopted in Harvard University (1825), as well as his widely circulated critique of Kirkland's 1827 Report, had offended many of the president's well-placed friends. It was generally known that Ticknor was unacceptable to the resident faculty. Moreover, not even the most concerned alumnus enjoyed being told by a Dartmouth graduate that his college's "reputation compared with that of other institutions has been for many years suffering and is now seriously impaired." As for his habit of comparing Harvard unfavorably with the Military Academy, John Lowell once told him bluntly, "I would as soon send my son to a brothel, as I would send him to West Point."³⁴

     Ralph Waldo Emerson, still intoxicated by his undergraduate exposure to "our Cicero," thought Edward Everett the obvious choice. Nor was he alone in this preference. Among the leading Everett-boosters was the mayor of Boston. "Other names have been mentioned," Everett's father-in-law wrote only two weeks after Kirkland's resignation, "but Mr. Q. thinks none of them will do.... Mr. Ticknor, he said, was rather a particular friend and acquaintance of his-but he had still been frank and open in his opinion that you are the man."³⁵

     Though gratified by the vote of confidence, Everett knew Harvard well enough to know that he wanted no part of its presidency. "The academic life," he told Brooks, "presents fewer attractions to a man of letters than you probably think." Now in his second term in Congress and his future in politics hopeful, Everett refused to have "his spirits exhausted and his facilities scattered," as he believed Kirkland had, "by a succession of petty causes and business details." Moreover, he doubted that his constitution could survive another tour in Cambridge.

I assure you that my share of the gov't of College, as a professor, often gave me more anxiety, than I have ever encountered as a member of Congress. In the latter capacity I have never lost 1/4 of an hour's sleep. In the former, I had my digestion destroyed for a week altogether, by intense anxiety.

Everett's bearish estimate of the Harvard presidency did not prevent him from recommending that it be given to his older and as yet unemployed brother, Alexander Hill Everett.³⁶

     Several Harvard faculty members were cited in the press, along with Ticknor and the two Everetts, as worthy of the presidency. But the names of these "mere bookmen [who] understand but little about business" were quickly passed over by the Corporation. A number of Unitarian ministers were also mentioned, though here too the Corporation seemed more prepared to break with the tradition of electing an ordained minister than run the risk of another Kirkland. "I am ag't a clergyman," Joseph Story announced early in the canvass, and that was that.³⁷

     As the search continued the Corporation became more precise in what they wanted in Harvard's next president. "The place requires a man with powers of administration, and government, and knowledge of character, and competent to a vigorous supervision of all subordinate functionaries," Story persuaded his fellow members. Not a minister, not a scholar, and not necessarily someone with teaching experience; what was needed was a vigorous executive of demonstrated competence. "He is not to scan the shrouds, nor to go out in the boat," Story wrote, "but to stand at the helm and look at the needle." Unfortunately, such captains were in short supply and 1828 drew to a close with the billet unfilled.³⁸

     "There's a President for you," Mrs. Bowditch informed her husband after learning that Quincy had withdrawn from the mayoral race. Bowditch, who was a friend of Quincy and like him an unreconstructed Federalist, snapped up his wife's suggestion and immediately polled the rest of the Corporation. Exasperated by their fruitless search and worried about letting the college muddle along without a president, they seized upon the new candidate, whom they all knew personally, with enthusiasm and relief. ³⁹

    Bowditch approached Quincy even before he vacated his municipal office, and found him hesitant but interested. Hale and hearty at fifty-seven, he had no immediate plans and clearly did not intend to retire from public life. Friends were already expressing concern that "our former mayor will want Occupation for the moment-a condition of all others the most insupportable to him." The Harvard presidency impressed him as a less strenuous office than the one he was vacating, which after nearly six years had become "on many accounts irksome as well as attended with great responsibility." After convincing Mrs. Quincy that her sizable family could be accommodated in Cambridge, Bowditch received permission to present Quincy's name formally to the Corporation. On January 15, 1829, less than two weeks after relinquishing the Boston mayoralty, Josiah Quincy was unanimously elected the fifteenth president of Harvard University, contingent upon the Overseers' approval.⁴⁰

     The announcement caught many by surprise. Edward Everett, who as late as January 8 thought his brother would be chosen, complained bitterly of what he called the Corporation's precipitancy. "I think Mr. Quincy's nomination ought to be negatived," he wrote to a member of the Board of Overseers which had yet to approve the Corporation's selection. "It is a very hasty act . . . after nine months deliberation, in which I venture to say that he was thought of as a candidate by no living man." While Everett might have had a point in faulting the Corporation for a hurried decision, his charge that Quincy "did not possess the requisite qualifications" was equally true of Alexander Everett. As for his singular qualifications, Ann Gilman Storrow, who had originally favored Ticknor, stated them admirably:

I believe Mr. Quincy is a high-minded, honourable, independent man, and I do not believe he will follow anybody's lead. He lacks judgement they say, and the poor man is subject to fits of abstraction, and occasionally he is taken with a metaphor, whereupon he gets stuck. But what of all that? He is very handsome, and remarkably agreeable and as honest as the day. Is he not fit for President, with these qualifications? ⁴¹

     Except for the rabidly Republican Boston Recorder, Quincy's election evoked surprisingly little opposition from the press. On January 29 the Board of Overseers approved the Corporation's choice by a vote of forty to twenty-six, the negatives coming from Republican or Calvinist state senators who served ex officio on the board. Despairing alumni like Dr. George Shattuck took heart, hoping that "under Mr. Quincy Harvard will attain her ancient rank." Even the Boston Courier, a violent critic of Quincy as mayor, gave him an endorsement of sorts. "We shall be disappointed indeed, if under the administration of the new president," it editorialized, "there does not grow up a system of industry, economy, and order, where for half a century there has been nothing but improvidence, laziness, prejudice, and rottenness." ⁴²

     Prior to his election as president Quincy had given little thought to academic life. His interest in Harvard was that of loyal alumnus, occasional benefactor, and father of two undergraduates. His election to the Board of Overseers in 1810, when laymen were first eligible, was due to his political prominence. Even as an overseer he was not among those who actually set policy in Cambridge. So preoccupied had he been during the 1820's with municipal affairs that Bowditch's rendering of the state of the college in December 1828 came as a rueful revelation. "There has been a great deal wasted and lost at Cambridge," Bowditch told him, "but there is noble property left." The presidency of Harvard then, as his acceptance statement to the overseers indicated, was seen as another job that needed doing: "I recognize the right of society to command my services; and I accept the appointment, as a duty, which I have no authority to decline." ⁴³

      Quincy began preparing for his presidential responsibilities by immediately undertaking a five-week tour of eastern colleges. Along the way he hoped to give himself a cram course in academic administration. New Haven was his first stop. Harvard's president-elect might be new to the problems of collegiate life, but Yale's President Jeremiah Day was decidedly not. Like most American colleges in the 1820's, Day's Yale had received its share of public scrutiny, some in the form of an investigation by the Connecticut legislature, which concluded that its curriculum "must be newmodelled . . . , adopted to the spirits and wants of the age," and better accommodated "to the business of. the nation." Criticism had focused on the prominence of Greek and Latin in the prescribed curriculum which left little room for modern languages and none for vocational courses. But unlike other colleges, Yale had decided to answer its critics. ⁴⁴

     The Yale Report of 1828, largely the work of President Day, was a ringing endorsement of the academic status quo. In a clearly argued statement, it presented an impressive defense of the centrality of classical studies by demonstrating how they successfully, and economically, provided what any college curriculum should: "the discipline and the furniture of the mind." The report insisted that the former, best acquired by heavy doses of Greek and Latin, ought to have priority over the latter. The fact that Greek and Latin were "dead languages," or that students disliked studying them, only enhanced their disciplinary value, whereas the study of modern languages was lacking in sufficient rigor. Also defended were daily recitations, study of particular books rather than subjects, and the prohibition of vocational courses. In summary, all was thought to be well in New Haven and, by implication, at any other American college where the traditional classical curriculum persisted.⁴⁵

     Quincy was impressed. Himself a serious student of the classics and long persuaded that they provided "the sure and solid foundation, on which you may, in after life, build whatsoever intellectual frame you will," he departed New Haven with all his conservative suspicions about curricular innovations confirmed. This was unfortunate as these suspicions would later prove difficult to exorcise. A more positive outcome of his academic grand tour, however, was his resultant conviction that an effective educational program, whether traditional or innovative, must wait upon the establishment of a sound system of discipline. Visits to Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, both of which had been having difficulties with unruly students, convinced Quincy to ignore Day's misgivings and to handle all of Harvard's disciplinary problems personally. ⁴⁶

     Inaugural ceremonies began on the morning of June 2, 1829, with an academic procession, followed by a felicitous Latin exchange between Governor Levi Lincoln and the new president, and then by the Inaugural Address. After praising his predecessor, Quincy assured his audience that he would "adopt innovations with great caution." The Boston Courier thought the speech manly in style and conservative in content, and worthy of Burke on both counts. Later that evening, the students, on their best behavior, illuminated the windows of Holworthy and Hollis Halls, spelling out "KIRKLAND" and "QUINCY." It was an auspicious if cautious beginning. ⁴⁷

     After settling his family into Wadsworth House, Quincy began to make his executive presence felt. His first project was to standardize the chaotic grading system he had inherited. Under Kirkland, instructors devised their own grading schemes and reported only the final results to the president, a practice that was both confusing and open to charges of partiality. After examining how his predecessor had handled this ticklish matter, Quincy concluded that Kirkland's "had been a government of favoritism but should be no longer." The new president's solution was to institute "The Scale of Comparative Merit," a complicated, multi-weighted system by which points in multiples of eight were awarded or denied for virtually every move made by an undergraduate during his four years in Cambridge. Total possible point accumulation was 29,920! Each instructor submitted daily reports to Quincy who insisted on keeping the ledgers himself, in his effort to eliminate the possibility of faculty collusion and to keep informed of each student's performance.⁴⁸

    The new grading system had other drawbacks in addition to its cumbrousness. Instructors were saddled with even more in-class bookkeeping than previously, scholastic performance was confounded with deportment, and, because the system assumed daily recitations and a uniform program, it proved an obstacle to opening up the curriculum and instituting lectures as part of the regular academic fare. Nonetheless, it put to rest charges of favoritism and reflected at least implicit support of the grouping-by-proficiency reform. For Quincy it constituted an important first step in bringing both the academic and disciplinary affairs of the college under his personal control. Anyone familiar with his centralizing proclivities as mayor should have expected as much. ⁴⁹

     Predictably, the ranking system did not sit well with those being ranked. Students believed, not entirely without cause, that it was intended to generate "a spirit of ungenerous rivalry" within the classes. They were finding that they much preferred the old president's "charities which secured our hearts" to the business-like efficiency of his successor. But Quincy was less interested in securing his charges' love than their obedient respect. He did not, however, underestimate the obstacles he faced. "An age almost lawless from its love of liberty," he sadly noted in his Inaugural Address, "is calling for restraints to be taught and practiced here, which it neglects itself to teach and practice, and has no disposition to countenance elsewhere." ⁵⁰

     While even Yale's kindly President Day acknowledged that "there may be perverse members of a college as well as a family," separating them out was no simple matter. Unless caught red-handed by a college officer, most campus criminals went undetected. "The esprit de corps was strongly against tale-bearing," one Harvard student of the 1830's recalled, "if anyone knew the offender.... he did not reveal it." Few undergraduates would risk even talking with an instructor outside of class for fear of being thought by his classmates an informer. Because of the lock-step curriculum and small classes, which enrolled never more than seventy during Quincy's era, loyalties quickly developed that were carried into later life. Lavish class dinners (the Class of 1835 ordered six gallons of whisky and rum for the forty members expected at their freshman banquet) further instilled a sense of common identity, to say nothing of communal inebriation. Class reputations were made not from academic ranking-an administrative matter dismissed as inconsequential-but by defiance of the faculty. Suspension was regarded not as a disgrace but rather as personal triumph, and assured a rousing reception upon the suspended student's return. Richard Henry Dana Jr., rusticated in 1832, revealed the prevailing student mores in a letter to a "dear ex-classmate": "I hear some of your relations in Cambridge say that you had nothing to do with our disturbances; If I were you, I would not let such a report, so much to my discredit, be circulated if I could help it." ⁵¹

    Some colleges, like the University of Pennsylvania, when confronted with collective assaults on its authority, simply gave up all responsibility for regulating the students' lives. Closing its dormitories and obliging students to secure their own room and board, the college authorities left all undergraduate violations of the law to the Philadelphia police. Yale was not willing to abandon its parietal responsibilities to that extent, but President Day readily admitted that there were some students "whom nothing but the arm of the law can reach." This same fatalism found expression in Cambridge, where on July 20, 1826, following a series of explosions in the dormitories, the Harvard Corporation directed President Kirkland to make use of "the proper civil tribunal" in future cases of student violations against "any person or property, which is cognizable by the Laws of the Land." Three weeks earlier, after Professor Popkin had been assaulted in the Yard, the faculty had asked the president to turn over uncooperative student witnesses to the Middlesex County grand jury where they would be obliged to testify under oath. But as long as "jolly old Kirkland" remained president, Harvard students knew that "being sent to Concord" was an idle threat. ⁵²

     They could not be so sure with Kirkland's successor, whose reputation as a stem judge of the municipal court, vigorous enforcer of the licensing laws and scourge of Boston's prostitutes, had preceded him to Cambridge. If any doubt lingered on into the fall that Harvard was under new management, Quincy's first talk with the undergraduates erased it. After congratulating them generally on their good behavior, he went on to specify a number of recent lapses: the blowing up of a recitation room; the ransacking of the Cambridge armory for shells and powder which one student planned to use in blowing up the library; a short but destructive riot in commons; widespread pilferage and selling of library books. "Knowledge of the facts," he reminded his audience, "is not and can not be confined within the walls of the university. They are blazoned abroad." ⁵³

    Quincy then proceeded to lay down the law as unanimously voted a week earlier by the Corporation:

         In all cases of gross theft and depredations upon the property of the University
         or of others, or of gross trespasses or injuries done to persons or property within
         the precincts of the University, or charged upon any of its members, it shall be the
         duty of the President, first taking the advice of the faculty or Corporation, in that
         respect to cause prosecution to be instituted before the established tribunals of the
         state; and the usual forms of proceeding to be pursued which are applicable to
         like crimes and offenses when committed by other citizens or residents, according
         to the laws of the Commonwealth.

The Corporation had been brought to this decision, Quincy told the students, both because the faculty lacked the necessary coercive powers of the courts and because they were persuaded that the traditional exemption of undergraduates from criminal prosecution had the effect of licensing campus rowdiness. He described the new policy as "a Magna Charta for the young men of this seminary"; suspected students would now be able to prove their innocence before a judge, availing themselves fully of due process. The students, however, interpreted the Corporation's action as a unilateral change in the ancient rules of campus warfare." ⁵⁴

     Whether momentarily intimidated or unusually phlegmatic, Harvard students declined to rise immediately to the challenge implicit in the new policy. Quincy's first year passed quietly. Not until the spring of 1831, when the faculty sent off a popular sophomore, George William Amory, for neglecting his studies, did a disturbance occur. Upon hearing of the dismissal, the sophomores expressed their disapproval by setting fire to Amory's vacated dormitory room and disrupting chapel services. The president first tried reasoning with them by reading a letter from Amory's father approving the faculty's decision, but this, "instead of silencing them as it should have done," a scandalized freshman reported, "made them more turbulent, and the confusion continued until the services were over." ⁵⁵

     When a similar disturbance disrupted chapel services the next morning, Quincy announced that expulsions were in the offing. He further threatened to send the entire sophomore class to testify before the grand jury about the destruction of Amory's room. That terminated the disturbance, "the first serious difficulty President Quincy has met with." ⁵⁶

     The following spring a more serious challenge to the president's authority occurred, this time from the freshman class. Augustus Kendall Rugg, when summoned before the faculty to discuss his knowledge of events surrounding a recent dormitory explosion, refused to cooperate. Quincy then informed him that he would be sent to Concord where his testimony would be extracted under oath. Rugg's classmates, assuming he was covering for someone, rallied to his aid. "A meeting was called at which all the class but two or three very timid and mean spirited lads attended," Richard Henry Dana Jr. later recalled. "We passed resolutions that we would sustain our classmate and proceeded to act accordingly." Chapel services were disrupted for three days running and so complete was a boycott of classes that the faculty announced the cancellation of freshman classes for a week. ⁵⁷

    What had begun to look like "an open Rebellion" suddenly fizzled when Rugg, thoroughly frightened by his imminent trip to Concord, confessed to Quincy that he was personally responsible for the dormitory explosion and that only the desire to save his own skin had prompted his earlier refusal to talk. He received a two-year suspension while Dana and seven other leaders of the freshman disturbances were rusticated for six weeks. "They went off," sophomore George Moore recorded, "amid the huzzas of the students," but Quincy had won round two. More importantly, it began to appear that, by invoking the threat of criminal prosecution, he had found the answer to student combinations. ⁵⁸

                                                         A Bone for Old Quin' to Pick

     Except for a brief town-gown scuffle, which Quincy personally halted, Cambridge remained placid throughout the 1832-1833 academic year. The fall and winter terms that followed were uneventful. "College thus far this present year has been more calm and still than I ever knew it before," wrote Moore, now a somewhat restive senior, on March 8, 1834: "Everything goes on regularly-we scarce have a bonfire to vary the dull monotony of College life. I have some time thought that a rebellion, or some scrape would be a good thing for the sake of variety-but far be it from me to wish any such thing." ⁵⁹

    Six weeks later, on Monday, May 19, a classroom disagreement arose between a freshman, John Bayard Maxwell, and his twenty-two year old Greek instructor, Christopher Dunkin. After declining Dunkin's invitation to recite and then refusing a directive to do so, Maxwell challenged the young instructor's authority to direct the class. He was promptly sent to the president who told the freshman that he must either apologize to Dunkin or give up his connections with the college. After weighing his options for two days, Maxwell decided Harvard was not worth an apology and quit. ⁶⁰

    Such bravado evoked an immediate and sympathetic response from Maxwell's classmates. "Crackers were fired off in Chapel" following the announcement of his departure on Friday evening, "and a continuous noise by scraping and kicking kept up during the services." Later that night Dunkin's recitation room was set afire, the furniture shattered and thrown out into the Yard. On one of the room's walls was scrawled, "A Bone for Old Quin' to Pick." When two night watchmen tried to intervene, they were beaten. Chapel services all that weekend were disrupted by rampaging freshmen. ⁶¹

     On Monday, May 26, several sophomores joined the freshmen in causing another chapel disturbance. Their apparent reason for doing so, other than for the fun of it, also involved a classroom disagreement with Dunkin. The zealous instructor had decided earlier in the spring that Harvard sophomores ought to learn to write Greek as well as read it. His students immediately protested the assignment as onerous and unprecedented, and in a petition informed the president to that effect. Quincy rejected the petition with his opinion that writing Greek would not inflict permanent damage on either their health or college traditions. The sophomores had rejoined with their feet. ⁶²

    Isolating the instigators of a disturbance in a room crowded with two hundred students and officers was not a simple matter, as the students well knew. But procedural difficulties notwithstanding, Quincy thought it imperative that he respond forcefully and promptly to Monday's outbreak. Less than two hours after the close of chapel he announced the rustication of four freshmen and the expulsion of a sophomore transfer student, Jonathan Barnwell. Why Barnwell was singled out was much disputed at the time. Quincy insisted that he had been the only sophomore positively identified by the tutors and, while certainly not the only offender, was, under the University Statutes' "selective punishment" provisions, liable to expulsion. Students dismissed this explanation as casuistical and continued to believe that Barnwell had been selected "as one who was but little acquainted, as a Southerner, and one concerning whom no disturbance would be made-but they were here mistaken." ⁶³

     News of the Barnwell expulsion precipitated a series of unauthorized class caucuses in tile Yard to "take some measure on the subject." Out of these came a petition signed by nearly all the undergraduates which called upon the president and faculty to reinstate Barnwell. Although described by one student as "couched in mild terms and without any abusive or menacing tone," the petition did demand a response-"by tomorrow morning." "We are on the eve of a Rebellion," wrote the no-longer-bored Moore, "and something serious will-must-soon be done." ⁶⁴

     While the president conferred with the faculty about the student ultimatum, the sophomores seized control of the rebellion. They boycotted morning chapel and classes on Tuesday; on Wednesday they stormed into Chapel, completely disrupting services. When Quincy ordered them to take their seats, they turned in defiance and marched out. Furious, he suspended the entire class on the spot, and by three o'clock that afternoon forty-four sophomores had departed from Cambridge." ⁶⁵

     On Thursday Quincy announced that he and the faculty, after reviewing the student petition, had no intention of reinstating Barnwell. "Groans and hisses" greeted the announcement as did calls for another round of class meetings. Far less restrained than those earlier in the week, these were highlighted by "speeches, flaming rebellious speeches, denouncing the Government and their proceedings." With the sophomores chased from the field, the freshmen again asserted their claims to the rebellion's leadership by hoisting above Holworthy Hall "the black flag of rebellion." ⁶⁶

     Most upperclassmen, however, remained aloof. "We can look coolly on these matters," one senior wrote, perhaps recalling the Rugg incident two years earlier, as "we have experienced enough to know that the Government [is] generally right in [its] decisions and that they would not take rash measures without good cause." On Friday, a week after the disturbances had begun, Quincy appealed to this segment of student opinion by assuring the seniors that Barnwell had not been expelled, merely suspended for two years. This "concession" apparently satisfied not only the seniors but the juniors, who rescinded inflammatory statements they had issued earlier. Friday evening the Yard was quiet, leading some to believe the rebellion had run its course. ⁶⁷

     Unfortunately, the freshmen were not so easily appeased. Saturday morning found them back in Chapel, stomping away. Two of them were suspended for creating a disturbance as was a junior who had joined in. However justified the junior's suspension, it had the effect of inciting still another class to rebellion. In memory of their departed comrade, and as a symbol of their opposition to Quincy, juniors took to wearing black armbands. ⁶⁸

     By Sunday, having recovered from his lapse into conciliatory politics, Quincy decided to wheel out his major weapon. During the course of the day each member of the freshman class was notified that on June 12 he was to appear before the grand jury in Concord to testify as to his involvement in the destruction of Dunkin's room and the attack upon the night watchmen. That did it. Even seniors like George Moore, long straddling the barricades, now leaped over to the rebels' side. "This is a course that will never favorably operate," he declared upon hearing of the president's intention to resort to the courts. "The Community will not tolerate it-the members of the College will not suffer it." ⁶⁹

     As Moore implied, the Harvard disturbances had already attracted considerable public notice. "No one can talk about anything else," he wrote after attending Artillery Election Day in Boston on June 2 where the principal topic of conversation was Quincy's difficulties in Cambridge. Critics of the college and its president revelled in the prospect of Harvard tearing itself apart. They were to have more cause to do so when reports of what was transpiring back in the Yard reached Boston. As Moore described it:

This evening, about 11 o'clock, a disgraceful scene took place in the College yard. An effigy of Pres. Quincy was hung with a rope about the neck from the Rebellion Tree,-a bonfire built near it-a loud shouting raised-and after being exhibited for some time in this way-it was set on fire, and burnt, while crackers were firing around, and explosions going on continually from powder in the body! This was done by the junior Class, and by a vote of the Class!

What began as a simple classroom argument had escalated in the course of two weeks into a confrontation between the entire Harvard student body and its president, with the whole state looking on. ⁷⁰

     If Quincy retained any illusions of support in the senior class, whose tenure at Harvard coincided with his, they were shattered on June 11 with the publication of A Circular of the Senior Class of Harvard College on the Recent Disturbances. Intended for wide circulation, the eight-page pamphlet offered a point-by-point refutation of the -official explanation given a week earlier by the president in a letter to all parents of suspended students. Blame for the disturbances was placed squarely upon Quincy and his "want of discretion." The Circular concluded by questioning his personal qualifications to remain at the head of the college:

The manners of President Quincy toward many of the students have not been such as to conciliate their esteem and affection. His defective memory, and the natural impetuosity of his character, often give the appearance of acting in an arbitrary and capricious manner; and though his friends allow his sincerity and integrity, yet it can not be wondered at that many of the students, whom he has not made his friends, should entertain a different opinion.⁷¹

Those Boston and sectarian newspapers traditionally critical of Harvard joined the seniors in calling for Quincy's resignation. Editors vied with one another in resurrecting incidents out of the president's political past to corroborate the charge of impetuosity, hardly a difficult task. Even the Boston Courier and the Columbian Centinel, generally more sympathetic to the college, reprinted the Senior Circular, appending only a few words of support for its beleaguered president." ⁷²

     "I am not a man to be frightened from a post of duty and usefulness," the sixty-three year old Quincy kept assuring his friends all through the spring; "the harder the tempest rages, the tighter I shall stick to the rudder." Deriving a certain amount of pleasure from the turmoil surrounding him, he likened it to his days in Congress and in the mayor's office. "I have known what it is to endure the calumnies and clamour of grown men," he stated after reading the Senior Circular, "there are no terrors in those of half fledged boys." But more than half-fledged boys were after him." ⁷³

     Although the Corporation unanimously backed Quincy's summary handling of the student rebels, including his invoking the state courts, comparable support was lacking from the faculty and Board of Overseers. Students thought of the president and faculty as a single unit, "meeting like the Inquisition, ever ready to proceed against new offenders," when actually they were seldom in complete agreement. Quincy's hard line policy usually prevailed but never without generating opposition from individual faculty members. On the issue of whether to suspend all the seniors who signed the Senior Circular-virtually the entire class-or only those who instigated it, the president's preference for the more extreme action failed to receive the faculty's support, obliging him to settle for the suspension of seven instigators. ⁷⁴

     The leader of the dissident faction within the faculty was Karl Follen, then in the fourth year of a five-year appointment as Professor of German Literature. Active in the student-led Burschenschaft movement of the 1820's, Follen left Germany after being implicated in the assassination of a ranking government official. Shortly after migrating to the United States and taking an instructorship at Harvard, he married Eliza Lee Cabot, whose father set him up in a temporary chair. The long-standing feud between the Quincy ladies and Eliza was only aggravated by her move out to Cambridge in 1830, accompanied not only by her new husband but by two unmarried sisters-in-law, all of whom "were given to hospitality." With four unattached females in her own household, Mrs. Quincy did not take such encroachment kindly. ⁷⁵

     Eliza Susan, writing many years later, charged the Follens with fomenting the 1834 Rebellion. They were unquestionably popular with many students, their home serving as a sanctuary from the dormitories. Furthermore, Follen's frequently expressed wish "to see less outward government in college, and to induce the young men to govern themselves," suggests where his sympathies were. Although never able to gain the consistent support of the rest of the faculty for his conciliatory position towards the rebels, his efforts to undercut the president's authority prompted Quincy to label him a troublemaker. It was this, not his abolitionist sympathies, as his wife later charged, that led to his being sacked. ⁷⁶

    More formidable was the opposition Quincy encountered from members of the Board of Overseers. Strained relations antedated the student disturbances, going back to 1833 when the Corporation conferred upon President Andrew Jackson Harvard's highest award, an honorary LL.D. Because the college had conferred the same degree upon President Monroe in 1817, Quincy and the Corporation, after being informed early in June that Jackson would pass through Cambridge later that month, felt they were obliged to follow the precedent. The honor was hardly intended as a political endorsement but rather as a prudent act of institutional self-defense. It was one thing for John Quincy Adams to write in his diary that Jackson was "a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his name," and was therefore "unworthy of literary honors," quite another, as Quincy unsuccessfully tried to persuade him, for the Corporation to deny him those honors and have the omission "imputed to party spirit-a charge they wished to avoid." ⁷⁷

     Approval for the conferral of such a degree had to be obtained from the Board of Overseers. Accordingly the board, consisting of the governor, lieutenant governor, twelve members of the governor's council, all thirty-six state senators, and thirty permanent members elected by the board, was hastily called together two days before the President's scheduled arrival in Cambridge. A mix-up with some of the announcements for the meeting, the short notice, and the Saturday-morning meeting time combined to produce a meeting at which only thirty of the eighty overseers were present. Nevertheless, those who were in attendance approved the Corporation's recommendation and the conferral took place on June 23 without incident. ⁷⁸

    At the next regularly scheduled meeting of the Board of Overseers several of those who had not been present to vote on Jackson's degree charged Quincy and the Corporation with duplicity. "You have probably heard ... the proceedings of the Overseers," a correspondent of Joseph Story wrote following a January 1834 meeting, "and how the Pres't bears his baiting." James Trecothick Austin and George Blake, both old Republican foes of Mayor Quincy and now prominent Whigs, and Alexander Hill Everett, still with his eye on the Harvard presidency, were the principal baiters. The fact that a majority of the overseers were not Harvard graduates, and that many were far more interested in challenging the Corporation than protecting the college, lent virtually any criticism of Quincy and the Corporation an attractiveness, if not plausibility. It took two special meetings, a voluminous correspondence and the help of legal counsel before Quincy could convince a majority of the overseers that no "deep design" had existed. ⁷⁹

     Messrs. Everett, Austin and Blake were ready and waiting when the rebellion provided further grounds for an attack on Quincy. At the overseers' meeting on July 17, 1834, Everett introduced the Senior Circular for discussion. During the ensuing debate he and Austin, who a month earlier as attorney general had offered Quincy his support in prosecuting the student rebels, espoused the seniors' position by contending that the disturbances would not have occurred but for a series of presidential "indiscretions." When Quincy is supporters on the board moved that he be given an immediate vote of confidence, they found most of their colleagues unwilling to comply. Instead they directed that a committee of overseers examine the allegations made in the Senior Circular and report its findings before any judgment be made on the president's handling of the rebellion. Everett was appointed to the committee, but fortunately for Quincy, so was John Quincy Adams. ⁸⁰

     On August 21 the Harvard Board of Overseers held what must rank as one of its stormiest meetings. It was certainly one of its least productive. Everett moved at the outset that the meeting be opened to the public, and only after a heated debate was this unprecedented proposal narrowly rejected. There followed an even more heated debate over which of two committee reports to accept, that drafted by Adams and approved by a majority of the committee, or that "corrected" by Everett which promised to be far more critical of Quincy. Unable to decide between the two, the overseers adjourned for four days, directing the investigating committee to determine in the interim which report represented its collective view. ⁸¹

     Finally, on August 25, John Quincy Adams had his say. He wasted no time making clear where the responsibility for the rebellion lay. "There is within the recollection of your committee," he stated in his opening paragraph, "no previous example of disorders, in their origin or in their progress so unprovoked and unjustifiable, on the part of the students, as in the present case." Though he went on to condemn all the student rebels and those overseers who seemed prepared to condone their unlawful actions, Adams saved his most impassioned remarks for those responsible for the "untenable pretensions" of the Senior Circular. Here his argument went beyond a defense of his old friend and became an eloquent plea in behalf of, if not filial deference, at least generational comity:

In estimating the true character of this charge of want of discretion, preferred by the undergraduates, scarcely yet themselves of the ordinary age of discretion, against the President of the University, a man of more than three score winters, who, for nearly forty years, has successfully filled, by the confidence of his fellow citizens, offices of the highest trust, legislative, executive, judicial, civil and literary, and always with unsullied honor; always with untainted reputation; the first sentiment that forces itself upon the Committee is, that of the rule of proportion in the moral standing of the two parties, the accusers and the accused, before the committee.

The Circular of the Seniors claims, from the Government of the College toward them, the delicacy of and the tenderness of the parental relation, and descants upon the duties, which this relation imposes....

Have the authors and avowed approvers of that Circular, fathers of their own? And if they have, and should, in the course of their lives, unhappily, have had occasion to observe in them 'a want of discretion,' do they feel, as if it was for them, in their filial relation, to proclaim that indiscretion to the world? ... Have they yet to learn, that the primeval curse pronounced in Holy Writ was upon the son, who beheld and exposed his father's frailties? Have they yet to learn, may they never learn by the contamination of their own example,

                                              'How sharper, than a serpent's tooth it is
                                                     'To have a thankless child?'

Everett denounced Adams' report as a "fulsome apology," but most of the overseers were sufficiently moved to give Quincy and his policies their endorsement* while denouncing the Senior Circular as "entirely inconsistent with the station and duties of the undergraduates of this University." ⁸²

     But Quincy was still not out of the woods. Rumors had been circulating since the close of college on July 15 that the seniors intended to boycott Commencement Day, as a protest against the suspension of seven classmates responsible for the Circular. As graduation approached, however, some seniors began to reconsider their plans. Ironically, one of the contributing causes appears to have been the reaction that followed the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown on August 11. "Reports reached Cambridge that the Catholics in order to retaliate upon our citizens for the loss of what they deemed their most sacred property," George Moore wrote the next day, "were coming to attack and bum down the library: several Irishmen were seen during the day going around the college and examining the premises." In the accompanying hysteria, many seniors put their own arguments with Harvard aside and joined with faculty and alumni to form a company of armed volunteers to defend the college against this external threat. Though the Irishmen never appeared, the experience of students and faculty standing together ready to repulse them may well have served to vent some of the pressure that had been building since May. ⁸³

     On August 20, seven days before graduation, the seniors still refused to agree to accept their degrees or participate in the ceremonies unless their suspended classmates were reinstated. Nevertheless, the margin by which this motion was carried at the class meeting was so slight as to suggest that the united front was beginning to crumble. Three days later the seniors voted to participate in the ceremonies but continued to insist that they would not take their degrees until such time as the suspended seven received theirs. Quincy, sensing he had them on the run, responded that they would take their degrees at the prescribed time, or never. ⁸⁴

     On Commencement Day thirty-seven of the fifty-four-member Class of 1834 stepped smartly forward to receive their degrees. To the relief of all in attendance, the ceremonies "passed off without disorder. " "Mr. Quincy and his family appeared in a state of considerable elation," one guest remarked at the end of the day, "and on the whole I do not wonder." ⁸⁵

    Quincy had won; he had also been lucky. But for the intervention of John Quincy Adams, "half-fledged boys" and a few dissidents on the faculty and Board of Overseers nearly brought his tenure as president of Harvard to an ignominious and abrupt end. His heavyhanded tactics had at times aggravated the situation. The Barnwell incident was poorly if not disingenuously handled; the timing of the announcement to send freshmen to Concord was provocative; the lack of rapport between him and the more moderate students was continually evident. Too often he gave the appearance of acting unilaterally while regularly minimizing the resourcefulness of his antagonists. He did restore order, but only after two months of disruptions, a moratorium on all academic activity, the suspension of the entire sophomore class, the dismissal of seven freshmen, one junior and seven seniors, plus two indictments (subsequently dropped by Quincy) against three undergraduates in the Middlesex County Court of Common Pleas. ⁸⁶

     Nor did victory come cheaply in personal terms. After conversing with Quincy in the fall, John Quincy Adams estimated its toll on his friend:

He spoke of the present condition of the University as satisfactory; but while the words were cheering, his tone was dejected. He can never again regain his popularity with the students, and the public treat him as they treat all old men, with cold neglect and insulting compassion. He is not made of the stuff to struggle long against this.

Although Adams underestimated the stuff of which his friend was made, he correctly saw that Quincy, and all the Harvard presidents who followed, would have to get along without the love Harvard students had given so freely to his predecessor. ⁸⁷

    Yet the essential fact remains that Quincy won; he outlasted his challengers. For better or worse, the most important outcome of the Rebellion of 1834 was to confirm the fact that control of Harvard rested not with the Overseers, not with the Faculty, and not with the students, but with the President and the Corporation. What they intended to do with their "well disciplined high school" remained to be seen.

Notes to Chapter 8: The Making of a Schoolmaster

1.    JQ, Cambridge, to Sir Thomas C. Banks, November 10, 1829, JQ Papers, Houghton Library.

2.    Both Professor Morison ( Three Centuries, 195-221) and Josiah Quincy (Harvard, 11, 344-353) understate the difficulties at Harvard in the 1820's. Morison's earlier 'The Great Rebellion in Harvard College and the Resignation of President Kirkland" (Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications, 27 (1928), 54-112) is more revealing. The two best sources for the period are Quincy's 41-page memorandum on the "general state of Harvard University antecedent to ... June 1829," in his "Memorandum Book" (1825 - 1847), written after he published his History, and Nathaniel Bowditch's "College History," written in 1828 and apparently used to force the retirement of College Treasurer Davis and to hasten the departure of Kirkland. Both manuscripts are in the Harvard University Archives.

3.     John Thornton Kirkland, "Literary Institutions-University," North American Review, 7 (1818), 270-278. The article was actually written by Edward Everett, thereby keeping intact Kirkland's record of writing nothing while at Harvard. See David B. Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967), 86.

4.     Ibid., 43-83; Paul Revere Frothingham, Edward Everett: Orator and Statesman (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 33-60; Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, The Life and Letters of George Bancroft (2 vols., New York, Scribner's, 1908), 1, 31-154; [Joseph Green Cogswell], "On the Means of Education, and the State of Learning, in the United States of America," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 4 (February 1819), 550. See also Orie Long, Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1935); Cynthia Stokes Brown, "The American Discovery of the German University: Four Students at G6ttingen, 1815-1822," unpub. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1964.

5.     JQ, Harvard, 11, 112-114, 293, 307; Morison, Three Centuries, 212-213; Thomas Metcalf, ed., The General Laws of Massachusetts (Boston, 1823), 251-252, 312-313, 347, 358.

6.     JQ, Harvard, 11, 312-333; Goodman, "Ethics and Enterprise," American Quarterly, 18 (Fall 1966), 437-452; George Ticknor, Remarks on Changes Lately Proposed or Adopted, in Harvard University (Boston, 1825), 3.

7.     "Charts on Harvard Admissions" (1725-1859), comparisons with Yale and Princeton, and the percentage of students admitted from outside New England have been compiled by Clifford K. Shipton and are in the Harvard University Archives.

8.     Morison, Three Centuries, 195-196; John Pierce, "Memoir of John Thornton Kirkland," MHS Procs., 2nd ser., 9 (1894), 143-157; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord, to William Emerson, April 3, 1828, in Rusk, Letters Of Emerson, 1, 230.

9.     Morison, Three Centuries, 190, 195; Eliza Quincy, Quincy, to Winthrop, July 7, 1879, Winthrop Papers.

10.     Bowditch, "College History," 6-8,116, HUA.

11.     Morison, "The Great Rebellion," 58; Pierce, "Kirkland," 144-157, 151. For a sullen undergraduate's view of Kirkland as "an intolerable bore," see CFA, Diary, 1, 375.

12.     [Cogswell], "On the Means of Education," 549; Morison, 'The Great Rebellion," 93-94; Ticknor, Remarks on Changes, 9-10.

13.                        , The Rebelliad, or Terrible Transactions at the Seat of the Muses [18181, (Boston, 1842); CFA, Diary, 1, 184-186; Josiah Quincy Jr., Figures of the Past, 16-43; "Frederick West Holland Diary, 1827-1828." Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 30 (September-October 1927), 7-11, 35-39; George Pael Schmidt, The Liberal Arts College: A Chapter in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1957), 93.

14.     Francis Wayland, Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States (Boston, 1842); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University (New York, Knopf, 1962), 201-240; [Cogswell], "On the Mea
Education," 549; Ticknor, Boston, to William Prescott, July 31, 1821, Ticknor Papers. See also Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, The American College and American Culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1970), 19-42.

15.     Pierce, "Kirkland," MHS Procs., 2nd ser., 9 (1894), 150-156; Andrew P. Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences (Boston, 188 8),9-17.

16.     Randolph, Richmond, to JQ, December 11, 1813, Randolph Papers Jedidiah Morse, An Appeal to the Public on the Controversy respecting the Revolution in Harvard College (Charleston, 1814); N. A. Haven, Portsmouth, N.H., to Ticknor, September 15, 1821, Ticknor Papers; Columbian Cenntinel, September 1 and 22, November 10, December 5. 1821.

17.     Mary Orne Pickering, Life of John Pickering (Boston, 1887), 230-231;  Thomas Tracy, "Commonplace Book," MS., July 7, 1815 9 HUA.

18.     Russel B. Nye, George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel (New York, Knopf, 1944), 64-66; Faculty Recs., X, 26: April 23, 1823; Cogswell, Cambridge, to Kirkland, October 21, 1822, Coll. Papers, X, 40; Everett, Cambridge, to Story, April 13, 1821, in Frothingham, Everett, 71; Howe, Bancroft, 1, 163.

19.     Sidney Willard, "State of Learning in the United States," North American Review, 10 (1819), 240-269; Willard, Memories, 1, 326; Jeannette R. Graustein, Thomas Nuttall, Naturalist (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967), 207; Cornelius C. Felton, ed., A Memorial of the Rev. John Snelling Popkin, D.D. (Cambridge, 1852); James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography, ed. Edward Everett Hale (Boston, 1891), 36-37.

20.     On Ticknor's marginal place in Cambridge, see JQ, Cambridge, to Gallatin, November 29, 1830, Gallatin Papers.

21.     Tyack, Ticknor, 117.

22.     Ticknor, Remarks on Changes, 10, 43-45. See also letter signed "G." to the Daily Advertiser, August 7, 1821, praising West Point; a clipping of it is in the Ticknor Papers.

23.     Ticknor to Prescott, July 31, 1821, Ticknor Papers. These recommendations, only slightly modified, are repeated in his Remarks on Changes and "Comments on the President's Report," April 11, 1827, Corp. Papers.

24.     Morison, "The Great Rebellion," 54-112;JQA, Washington, to Kirkland, May 19, 1823, Corp. Papers, X, 58.

25.     Harvard Corporation Representation to the General Court, February 9, 1824, copied into the Corp. Minutes, VI, 120-125; Quincy, Harvard, 11, 357-359; Andrews Norton, Cambridge, to Charming, September 10, 1824, Ticknor Papers.

26.     Shipton charts, HUA; Ticknor, Remarks on Changes, 8; John Thornton Kirkland, The Annual Report of the President of Harvard University for the Academical Year 1825-26 (Cambridge, 1827), 38-45; Ticknor, "Remarks on the President's Report," Ticknor Papers.

27.     Edward Everett et al., "Memorial of the Resident Instructors," May 31, 1824, Overseers Recs., VII (1825), 102-162; Report of Overseers to the Memorial of the Resident Instructors, January 6, 1825 (Boston, 1825); [John Lowell], Remarks on the Memorial of the Officers of Harvard College (Boston, 1824); [John Lowell], Further Remarks on the Memorial.. . (Boston, 1825). For a defense of the instructors' position, see Andrews Norton, In Behalf of the Resident Instructors (Boston, 1825); for the Corporation's position, see JQ, Harvard, 11, 338-353.

28.     Tyack, Ticknor, 115; Ticknor, Boston, to John Lowell, November 6, 1822, Ticknor Papers; Ticknor, Remarks on Changes, 27;John Snelling Popkin, Cambridge, to John Pickering, October 17, 1825, in Pickering, Life of Pickering, 306; Bowditch, "College History," 13, 70-71, HUA.

29.     Ibid., 10-23, 36-37; Kirkland, Cambridge, to Pickering, June 13, 1826, Corp. Papers; JQ, On the state of Harvard University, "Memorandum Book," JQ Papers, HUA; Eliza Quincy, Quincy, to Winthrop, July 7, 1879, Winthrop Papers; Charles Saunders, Cambridge, to Ebenezer Francis, June 25, 1828, Coll. Papers, 111, 44.

30.    Gerald T. Dunne, Justice Joseph Story and the Rise of the Supreme Court (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1970), 248-251; JQ, Harvard, 11, 362-368; JQ, On the state of the University, "Memorandum Book,"JQ Papers, HUA; Bowditch, "College History," 20, HUA; microfilm of Davis' reconstructed Treasurer's books, Corp. Papers; Overseers Recs., VU, 320: January 18, 1827; Corp. Minutes, VII, 66-67: March 27, 1828.

31.     Everett, Washington, to Isaac Parker, January 22, 1829, Everett Papers; R. W. Emerson, Concord, to William Emerson, April 3, 1828, in Rusk, Letters of Emerson, 1, 230; Overseers Recs., VII, 405-417: January 17, 1828; Coll. Pape_ 11, 68-69: August 31, 1827.

32.     Eliza Quincy, Quincy, to Winthrop, July 7, 1879, Winthrop Papers; Bowditch, "College History," 37, HUA.

33.     Morison, "The Great Rebellion," I 10; Overseers Recs., VII, 419: May 8, 1828; [Boston] Evening Gazette, April 5, 1828; [Boston] Evening Bulletin, April 9, 1828; Columbian Centinel, June 7, 1828.

34.     Tyack, Ticknor, 122; Ann Gilman Storrow, Boston, to Jared Sparks, January 23, 1829, in Frances Bradshaw Blanshard, ed., "Letters of Ann Gilman Storrow to Jared Sparks," Smith College Studies in History, 6 (1921), 236; Story, Washington, to Webster, April 13, 1828, Story Papers; Story, Boston, to Bowditch, January 1, 1829, Coll. Papers, 111, 188; Peter Chardon Brooks, Medford, to Everett, April 14, 1828, Everett Papers; John Lowell, Roxbury, to Ticknor, October 9, 1825, Ticknor Papers.

35.     Emerson to John Haskins Ladd, April 18, 1828, in Rusk, Letters Of Emerson, 1, 232; Brooks, Medford, to Everett, April 14, 1828, Everett Papers.

36.     Everett, Washington, to Brooks, May 9, 1828, and Everett, Charlestown, to Alexander Hill Everett, September 15, 18289 ibid.

37.     Ticknor, Boston, to Nicholas Biddle, July 9, 1828, Ticknor Papers; Columbian Centinel, October 8, 11, 15, 18, 1828; Charles Saunders, Cambridge, to Francis, July 16, 1828, Coll. Papers, 111, 77.

38.     Story to Webster, April 13, 1828, Story Papers.

39.     "Journal of Eliza Susan Quincy," excerpts in Cambridge Historical Society Publications, 4 (October 1909). 90; Robert Elton Berry, Yankee Stargazer: The Life of Nathaniel Bowditch (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1941), 203-210.

40.     "Journal of Eliza Quincy," 91; Brooks, Medford, to Everett, January 8, 1829, Everett Papers; JQ, Cambridge, to Sir Thomas C. Banks, November 10, 1829, JQ Papers, Houghton Library; Corp. Minutes, VII, 105: January 15, 1829.

41.     Everett, Washington, to A. H. Everett, January 18, 1829, and to Isaac Parker, January 22, 1829, Everett Papers; R. W. Emerson, Cambridge, to William Emerson, February 2, 1829, in Rusk, Letters of Emerson, 1, 262; Ann Gilman Storrow to Sparks, January 23, 1829, "Letters of Ann Storrow," 236.

42.     Boston Recorder, January 17 and 29, 1829; Boston Statesman, January 23 and 26, 1829; Shattuck, Boston, to R. Shurtleff, June 3, 1829, Shattuck Papers, MHS. The Overseers confirmed Quincy's election by a vote of 40 to 26 (Overseers Recs., VII, 459: January 29, 1829).

43.     "Journal of Eliza Quincy," 90; Overseers Recs., VII, 479: June 4, 1829.

44.     JQ, "Diary of a journey" (February 3-March 6, 1829), JQ Papers, MHS; "Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education [The Yale Report]," American Journal of Science, 15 (1829~), 297-345. See also George Paul Schmidt, "Intellectual Crosscurrents in American Colleges, 1825-1855," AHR,42 (1936),46-53.

45.     "Yale Report," 305, 308, 312, 317.

46.     JQ, "Diary of a journey," 2-16, 17-23, JQ Papers, MHS: JQ, Boston, to EQ,January 1, 1823, EQ Papers.

47.     JQ, "Inaugural Address," June 2, 1829, JQ Papers, HUA; Boston Courier, June 5, 1829; Pierce, "Memoir," 5 (June 2, 1829), Pierce Papers. Because Nathaniel Bowditch took exception to Quincy's generous remarks about Kirkland, the Inaugural Address was not published. See Eliza Quincy's margin note on manuscript copy in HUA.

48.     JQA, "Diary," September 10, 1829, reel no. 39, Adams Papers; JQ, "Memorandum on Aggregate of the Weight of Scale . . . " Corp. Papers (folder for 1829, 1830); Peabody, Reminiscences, 30-31; R. H. Dana, Newport, to R. H. Dana Jr., October 24, 183 1, Dana Papers.

49.     Benjamin Peirce, Cambridge, to JQ, May 13, 1833, JQ Papers, HUA; Faculty Recs., XI, 50: October 3, 1836; Morison, Three Centuries, 260.

50.     JQ, "Abstract of Petitions against Rank," Coll. Papers, VI (1834), 109-110. Opposition to instilling "a spirit of emulation" in the students was also found in the faculty; see "Rough Minutes of Remarks of Faculty on RankEmulation," March 31, 1834, JQ Papers, HUA.

5 1.     "Yale Report," 303; Robert F. Lucid, ed., The Journal of Richard Henry Dana Jr. (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968), 1, 22-24; George E. Channing, Cambridge, to Dana, June 2, 1832, and Dana, Cambridge, to Channing, March 21, 1832, Dana Papers.

52.     JQ, "Diary of a journey" (1829), 22-23, JQ Papers, MHS; "Yale Report," 303; Corp. Minutes, VI, 303: July 20, 1826; Faculty Recs., X, 124: June 12, 1826.

53.     JQ, "Address Delivered to the Students," October 1829, outline in JQ Papers, HUA.

54.     Corp. Minutes, September 29, 1829; JQ, "Address," October 1829, JQ Papers, HUA.

55.     George Moore, "Diary" (1828-1836), March 17, 1831, HUA.

56.     Ibid., March 18, 183 1.

5 7.     Lucid, Journal of Dana, 1, 20-22.

58.     Ibid., 22; Moore, "Diary," March 3, 5, 10, 1832; JQ, "Account of the Disturbances in Harvard College, March, 1832," and "Argument before the Overseers on the Necessity of Making the Undergraduates of a College Amenable to the Laws of the State," JQ Papers (1832), HUA.

59.     Moore, "Diary," March 8. 1834.

60.     Ibid., May 23, 1834; Faculty Recs., 11, 138-139: May 21 and 26, 1834; JQ, "Communication to Parents and Guardians regarding a Series of Trespasses . . . " June 4, 1834, copy in Massachusetts State Library, Boston.

61.     Moore, "Diary," May 2 7, 1834.

62.     "Sophomore Memorial to Faculty," March, 1834, Coll. Papers, VI, 115-117; Faculty Recs., XI, 140: May 2 6, 18 34.

63.     JQ, "Statement to Overseers," July 31, 1834, Overseers Recs., VIII, 170-175.

64.     Moore, "Diary," May 27, 1834.

65.     Ibid., May 29, 1834; Faculty Recs., XI, 140-141: May 30, 1834.

66.     Moore, "Diary," May 29, 1834.

67.     Ibid., May 30, 1834.

68.     Faculty Recs., XI, 146: May 31, 1834; Moore, "Diary," May 31, 1834.

69.     Faculty Recs., XI, 146: June 2, 1834; Moore, "Diary," May 31, 1834.

70.     Ibid., June 2, 1834. On June 6, 1834, Massachusetts Attorney General James Trecothick Austin offered the college the use of "public officers to preserve and vindicate the public peace." See Coll. Papers, VI, 180, and JQ, Cambridge, to Austin, June 6, 18 34, Norcross Collection.

71.     ______,A Circular of the Senior Class of Harvard College on the Recent Disturbances (Boston, 1834), 8.

72.     [Boston] Evening Transcript, June 16, June 18, 1834; Mercantile journal, June 18, 1834; Columbian Centinel, June 16, 1834; Boston [Daily] Advocate, 1834; Boston Courier, June 19, 1834; Columbian Centinel, June 16 1834.

73.     JQ, Cambridge, to Charles Upham, June 21, 1834, JQ Papers, HUA.

74.     Faculty Recs., XX, 143-164: May 30-July 7, 1834. Characteristically, Quincy insisted on keeping the minutes of all faculty meetings and recording the divisions on all matters brought to a vote.

75.     George W. Spindler, Life of Charles Follen: A Study in German-American Cultural Relations (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1917), 10-93; Peabody, Reminiscences, 122; Lewis Feuer, The Conflict of Generations (New York, Basic Books, 1969), 59-66. See also Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, "Two Early Harvard Wives: Eliza Farrar and Eliza Follen," NEQ, 18 (June 1965), 147-167.

76.     Eliza Quincy, "Journal," interlineations made in 1870's on November 28, 1814 entry, Quincy Family Papers; Sibley, "Journal," 791: May 28, 1868, Sibley Papers; Eliza Cabot Follen, Life of Charles Follen (Boston, 1844), 228; Samuel Cabot, Brookline, to JQ, May 21, 1834, Coll. Papers, VI (1833-1835), 172; Corp. Minutes, VII, 361: June 19, 1834. It was Ticknor who brought Follen to Harvard as an instructor, assuring Kirkland that he had been expelled from Germany "for political causes entirely." See Ticknor to Kirkland, September 26, 1825, Ticknor Papers.

77.     Andrew McFarland Davis, "Jackson's LL.D.-A Tempest in a Teapot," MHS Procs., 2nd ser., 20 (December 1906), 490-512; Josiah Quincy Jr., Figures of the Past, 303-304; Overseers Recs., VII, 130: June 22, 1833; JQA, "Diary," June 17, 1833, reel no. 42, Adams Papers.

78.     Pierce, "Memoir," 6 (1833-1836), 31-32, Pierce Papers. For national reaction to the event, see Ward, Andrew Jackson, 83-8 6.

79.     Simon Greenleaf, Cambridge, to Story, January 23 1834 Story Papers; Overseers Recs., VIII, 154-164: February 6 and 13, 1834; Boston [Daily] Advocate, January 11, 1834; "Commencement journal of the Rev. Dr. John Pierce," MHS Procs., 2nd ser., 5 (January 1890), 213; Leverett Saltonstall, SalemAustin,, to Story, September 24, 1835, Saltonstall Papers; JQ, Cambridge, to Austin, February 8, 1834, G. L. Paine Papers, MHS.

80.     Overseers Recs., VIII, 167-176: July 17 and 31, 1834; JQA, "Diary," August 8, 19, 21, 1834, reel no. 42, Adams Papers.

81.     Overseers Recs., VIII, 178-195: August 25, 1834. Two anonymous pamphlets published during the summer of 1834, both taking exception to John Quincy Adams' Report, further suggest that Everett was waiting in the wings Remarks on a Pamphlet entitled Proceedings of the Overseers of Harvard University (Boston, 1834), and Remarks Occasioned by the Publication of a Pamphlet Entitled Proceedings of the Overseers of Harvard University (Boston, 1834). The copies of the pamphlets in the Adams Papers were brought to my attention by Mr. Marc Friedlander, the Associate Editor of the Adams Papers.

82.     JQA, "Report to the Overseers," August 25, 1834, Overseers Recs., VIII, 178-196.

83.     JQA, "Diary," July 26, 1834, reel no. 42, Adams Papers; Moore, "Diary," July 15 and 19, August 11, 1834. See also CFA, "Diary," August 23, 1834, reel no. 62, Adams Papers.

84.     Moore, "Diary," August 20 and 23, 1834.

85.     Ibid., August 27, 1834; JQA, "Diary," August 27, 1834, reel no. 42, and CFA, "Diary," August 27, 1834, reel no. 62, Adams Papers.

86.     Faculty Recs., XI, 140, 200: September 4 and October 6. 1834.

87.     JQA, "Diary," October 15, 1834, reel no. 42, Adams Papers.