Will 
 
 ''<I^
 
 b"
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD
 
 \i 
 
 Hollis Hall and Stoughton Hall. Frontispiece
 
 THE STORY OF 
 HARVARD 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR STANWOOD PIER 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
 
 VERNON HOWE BAILEY 
 
 BOSTON 
 LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
 
 1913
 
 Copyright, 79/7, 
 BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Published, September, 1913 
 
 THE COLONIAL PRESS 
 C. H. SIMONDS & CO., BOSTON, U. 8. A.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 FROM Benjamin Peirce's History of Harvard and 
 from President Quincy's History of Harvard I have 
 drawn much of the material for the earlier chapters 
 of this book. For that contained in later chapters 
 I acknowledge indebtedness particularly to Jo- 
 siah Quincy's Figures of the Past, Dr. A. P. Pea- 
 body's Harvard Reminiscences, Harvard Memorial 
 Biographies, and Mr. William Roscoe Thayer's ad- 
 mirable History and Customs of Harvard University. 
 The selections from J. R. Lowell's works are used by 
 permission of, and by special arrangement with, 
 Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized pub- 
 lishers of his works. Acknowledgment is also due 
 to Harper and Brothers for extracts from Letters 
 of James Russell Lowell, edited by Charles Eliot 
 Norton, and to Little, Brown, and Company for 
 the extracts from Francis Parkman's letters and 
 from Josiah Quincy's Figures of the Past. 
 
 A. S. P.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. PAST AND PRESENT i 
 
 II. THE BEGINNING AND THE FIRST PRESIDENT 13 
 
 III. HARVARD IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 26 
 
 IV. LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH ... 44 
 V. BEFORE THE REVOLUTION .... 58 
 
 VI. THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE . 77 
 
 VII. THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT ... 97 
 
 VIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA . 112 
 
 IX. HARVARD UNDER QUINCY . . . .128 
 
 X. ANTE - BELLUM DAYS 147 
 
 XI. HARVARD IN THE WAR 163 
 
 XII. PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADMINISTRATION . . 197 
 
 XIII. UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES . . . 209 
 
 XIV. FRESHMAN AND SENIOR .... 227
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Hollis Hall and Stoughton Hall . . Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 The Johnston West Gate ...... 4 
 
 Gore Hall 18 
 
 Germanic Museum 34 
 
 Harvard Hall . '. . . . . 54 
 
 The Union . . ... '. 74 
 
 Massachusetts Hall 94 
 
 University Hall , .no 
 
 Holworthy Hall . 132 
 
 Divinity Hall 148 
 
 Appleton Chapel . ,~ 164 
 
 Memorial Hall 178 
 
 The Lampoon Office and the " Gold Coast " .210 
 
 The Weld Boat House 218 
 
 The Stadium 224 
 
 The Yard on Class Day 246
 
 THE 
 
 STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 i 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 LET us conceive of a Harvard graduate of 
 twenty years ago, now revisiting his college 
 for the first time, with no knowledge of the changes 
 which it has undergone since his day. What would 
 be his impressions? He would probably feel at 
 first as if he were seeing a few old landmarks em- 
 bedded in a new setting. The old Cambridge and 
 the old Boston are transformed. Conveyed through 
 a tunnel from Boston Common to Harvard Square 
 in eight minutes, the returning patriarch emerges 
 upon a college yard that he hardly knows. The 
 wooden fence has disappeared; a high iron fence 
 and handsome brick gateways have replaced that 
 simple barrier, and exact of him as he enters a sense 
 of uneasy formality. He is cheered by the sight 
 of Grays and Boylston, the homely old familiars of 
 
 1
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 his youth, standing shoulder to shoulder in front 
 of him; and when he passes them he finds the build- 
 ings of the old quadrangle unchanged. But the 
 quadrangle itself, with its elms all lopped to the 
 shape of candelabra and its meager young red oaks, 
 has a bare aspect that chills his spirits. 
 
 The friendly pump, souvenir of more primitive 
 days, has disappeared from in front of Hollis. A 
 glimpse through an open window in Holworthy 
 entices him; he climbs the stairs to the room that 
 he used to occupy. The senior who welcomes him 
 is hospitable and interested; the graduate is im- 
 pressed by the luxury and comfort of the quarters. 
 The pictures and the furniture suggest to him that 
 the aesthetic sense of the undergraduate is more 
 discriminating now than it used to be. The variety 
 of medals and " shingles " upon the walls convinces 
 him that the social life is more varied. The shower- 
 bath that has been installed in what was once the 
 " coal closet " informs him that a crude way of 
 living is no longer tolerated. Unwilling to pay 
 homage to the present at the expense of the past, 
 he remembers with a manly pride the tin hat tub 
 which it was his custom to drag from under the 
 bed every morning. The room may have been of 
 a frosty temperature, the water may have been icy 
 
 2
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 cold; but the graduate is of the opinion that to 
 squat shivering in the hat tub was a tonic for 
 virility such as the young hedonist who steams and 
 streams in his warm shower can never know. 
 
 Looking out of the window, he laments' the fact 
 that the low wire fences to protect the grass plots 
 have been removed. In his day they afforded 
 pleasant opportunities for practise in walking the 
 tight-wire. The graduate himself acquired pro- 
 ficiency in that art; he tells the polite senior how 
 once he made a wager that he could strip himself 
 naked on the wire and then dress again without 
 touching foot to the ground, and how, having 
 chosen an early morning hour that would not expose 
 him to public scandal, he successfully performed 
 the feat. Something in the senior's polite manner of 
 receiving this anecdote causes him to feel that 
 Harvard men nowadays would regard such diver- 
 sions as fit only to be practised at a fresh-water 
 college. 
 
 The graduate fears that the courteous and hos- 
 pitable senior is getting bored, and so he takes his 
 departure. If the quadrangle has altered in minor 
 ways, the yard to the east of the quadrangle has 
 altered a great deal. Along Quincy Street, flank- 
 ing Sever on either side, is a series of new buildings.
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 The graduate looks in vain for Shaler's picturesque 
 old house just as, alas, he looks in vain for pictur- 
 esque old Shaler. He looks in vain for the Presi- 
 dent's ugly old house; he sees instead a handsome 
 new mansion. He looks in vain for Gore Hall, the 
 library; it has been torn down, to give place to a 
 much larger and finer library under another name. 
 The graduate thinks it is right and fitting thus to 
 honor the memory of the young Harvard man for 
 whom the building is given; but he also thinks 
 that it is rather rough on old Christopher Gore, 
 who by his bequest of a hundred thousand dollars 
 seventy years ago had become Harvard's most 
 munificent benefactor. However, the senior has 
 informed the graduate that Christopher Gore is to 
 be compensated by having one of the new fresh- 
 man dormitories named after him. 
 
 " Freshman dormitories " - that is a new idea 
 to the graduate. The senior who has outlined the 
 scheme to him has expressed the skepticism to be 
 expected of a conservative senior. He has ad- 
 mitted, however, that since it is one of President 
 Lowell's pet ideas, it may turn out all right; he 
 confesses that President Lowell has so far " made 
 good." (An expression, by the way, that annoys 
 the graduate exceedingly.) His explanation of the 
 
 4
 
 
 The Johnston West Gate
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 proposed scheme has interested the graduate; ap- 
 parently there are to be three or four dormitories 
 somewhere down by the river in which all freshmen 
 are to be segregated; the rich and the poor are to 
 live together, eat together, play together if not 
 spontaneously, why then by compulsion. The 
 graduate thinks that in his day no such artificial 
 spurs to democratic conduct were required, but he 
 concedes, after a visit to the Gold Coast, that it may 
 be different now. 
 
 The Gold Coast he finds to be a section of Mount 
 Auburn Street that has of late years been built up 
 with luxurious and high-priced dormitories. By a 
 fortunate chance, the class baby of the graduate's 
 class, who lives in Claverly Hall, emerges just as 
 he is passing that building. So the class baby takes 
 the elderly gentleman who is a friend of his as 
 well as of his father's in charge, pilots him on a 
 tour of these habitations of the rich, shows him the 
 swimming-tanks, the squash courts, offers him tea, 
 and has in several of the most civilized young per- 
 sons imaginable to meet him. 
 
 When the graduate expresses a desire to see some 
 of the athletic activities, he is escorted to Soldier's 
 Field. There the huge Stadium, looming in the 
 midst of spacious playing-grounds, excites his 
 
 5
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 wonder. Within its horse-shoe, the Varsity foot- 
 ball squad is practising; outside, on various grid- 
 irons, the members of scrub and class elevens are 
 trampling about, busily grinding one another into 
 the earth. With pleasure and surprise the graduate 
 notes that one of these filthy-faced participants is 
 the senior who had entertained him in Holworthy. 
 The graduate feels that young men who have warm 
 shower-baths in their rooms are likely to be partic- 
 ularly benefited if they eat their peck of dirt while 
 still young. He regrets that the class baby does not 
 play football. The graduate invites him and two 
 of his friends to dine wondering, as he does so, 
 whether he ought to offer them champagne. He de- 
 cides hastily that it will be expected, when the 
 class baby in accepting the invitation amends it by 
 suggesting that they go after dinner to see a show, 
 and says that he will run them all in to Boston in 
 his motor. 
 
 After appointing the rendezvous, the graduate 
 strolls off alone to revisit the scenes for which he 
 has a particular affection. He is pleased to find 
 that the Gymnasium has grown to more than 
 double its former size. With what lies behind it he 
 is profoundly impressed, but his emotions are not 
 wholly those of pleasure. Holmes Field and Jarvis 
 
 6
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Field, those arenas of athletic triumph or defeat, 
 in football, base-ball, tennis and track, have been 
 so built upon as to be unrecognizable. No vestige 
 of the wooden bleachers whence rose the cheers of 
 thousands now remains. Old John the Orangeman 
 and his donkey have passed on farther than from 
 Holmes to Soldier's Field. The ancient silk hat 
 garnished with a crimson bandage no longer goes 
 nodding in front of the stands; no more is the 
 amiable simian countenance turned upward to the 
 customer; none of the present college generations 
 have heard the mumbled greeting "Aye, frind; 
 yis, frind." 
 
 The graduate turns aside and walks along quiet 
 streets on which professors live in their modest 
 houses. They offer a singular contrast to the arid 
 splendors of the Gold Coast; with their trees and 
 shrubbery they recall the Cambridge that he knew. 
 But on the little side streets, inhabited no doubt by 
 instructors and tutors and assistants, the houses 
 seem small and dingy; the graduate regrets the 
 obvious disparity in the way of living imposed on 
 some officers of the college and that enjoyed by 
 some of the undergraduates. For at the under- 
 graduate time of life dignity in externals is especially 
 impressive; the young man accustomed to luxury 
 
 7
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 is not likely to detect worth in shabbiness. The 
 freshman whose boots are blacked and whose fire 
 is lighted before he gets out of bed will probably be 
 more attentive to a lecturer who wears dove-colored 
 spats and a fancy waistcoat than to one whose 
 trousers show horizontal creases and whose coat 
 droops from the shoulders. It is the opinion of the 
 graduate that if the pay of all the lesser officers of 
 the university could be doubled or tripled, there 
 would be a higher average of scholarship along the 
 Gold Coast than now exists, and that fewer of 
 those who have put into its ports would be pre- 
 maturely banished to cruis-e the high seas. But the 
 graduate's theory is not likely to be tested; possibly 
 the institution of freshman dormitories will pro- 
 duce one of the results that he would like to see 
 not by improving the condition of the minor officers 
 of the college, but by reducing the utterly false 
 notions of personal dignity that are now entertained 
 by many sons of multimillionaires. 
 
 Engaged in these reflections, the graduate finds 
 that he has reached that sequestered nook of Har- 
 vard University in which the divinity students are 
 congregated. The Divinity School, with its little 
 chapel and dormitory and lecture hall, is now a 
 quaintly unimportant corner of the university 
 
 8
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 so at least the graduate thinks when he remembers 
 that Harvard College was originally and primarily 
 a divinity school. 
 
 So at least he thinks until he spies beyond, in 
 what used to be a section of Norton's Woods, a very 
 beautiful, very large, very imposing and obviously 
 ecclesiastical building Norman-Gothic, of gray 
 stone, with a lofty central tower. To a passing post- 
 man he appeals for information. " The Andover 
 Theological School," says the postman. " Now run 
 in connection with the Harvard Divinity School." 
 
 An interesting reversion, thinks the graduate 
 for in 1808, the Calvinists, outraged by the growth 
 of Unitarianism at Harvard, forsook Cambridge 
 and established their own theological school at An- 
 dover. Just one hundred years later, back they 
 come and rear this noble fane at Harvard's doors 
 not in mocking triumph, but lending their strength 
 and their aid to what seems a humble and shrunken 
 little school of divinity. 
 
 As the graduate has now had enough of sight-see- 
 ing, he sits down on the steps of Divinity Chapel 
 and lets his mind dwell upon the early days of the 
 college. These acres were then a jungle of whortle- 
 berry bushes. Much of Cambridge, all of what is 
 now Cambridgeport, was a treeless, marshy waste. 
 
 9
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 The undergraduates over whom Dunster and 
 then Chauncy presided were very young. They 
 entered college at the age of twelve or thirteen 
 already devoted, most of them, to the ministry. 
 Theology was the subject of universal interest to 
 the community; the theologians were the important 
 and influential persons. 
 
 The graduate musing on the steps of Divinity 
 finds it hard to visualize and comprehend the people 
 of those days. Their apparent lack of human senti- 
 ment, their callousness to affection, their insensibility 
 to suffering and tragedy seem to him characteristic 
 of the Chinese rather than the Anglo-Saxon race. 
 Even in the households which were as happy as 
 Calvinistic households could well be, the visitations 
 of death appear scarcely to have disturbed the tran- 
 quillity of those who survived. The readiness of 
 persons and families to adapt themselves to bereave- 
 ment and make the best of it strikes the tender- 
 hearted graduate as amazing. He remembers that 
 the conduct of Robert Harvard, father of John, in 
 waiting a year and a half after the death of his 
 first wife before contracting a second marriage was 
 noted as exceptional. Robert Harvard's widow, 
 John Harvard's mother, was less patient; she 
 married John Elletson five months after Robert 
 
 10
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Harvard died; she married Richard Yearwood ten 
 months after Elletson's death. John Harvard's 
 widow had been his widow hardly a year when she 
 married Thomas Allen. The graduate, who has 
 dipped somewhat into diaries and letters of the 
 time, has been struck by the fact that the loss 
 of children seemed to cause their parents only a 
 passing pang. The frequent mortality in Cotton 
 Mather's offspring failed to detach that self-cen- 
 tered fanatic for any considerable interval from 
 the contemplation of his own spiritual experiences. 
 Even so late as the middle of the eighteenth century, 
 President Stiles of Yale hardly paused from his 
 nightly astronomical observations to be present at 
 the death of his infant son; his record of that event 
 would indicate that he regarded it as one of the 
 minor incidents of life. 
 
 Such sternness of soul was perhaps required of 
 the men who were to build up New England. And 
 though among the early presidents of Harvard were 
 many gentler spirits, the atmosphere of the time was 
 not favorable to progress in the humanities. Disci- 
 pline was severe without being just, duty was narrowly 
 defined, individualism was repressed. Harvard Col- 
 lege had its beginning in a period of reaction towards 
 medievalism in thought and monasticism in conduct. 
 
 11
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Her ideals of education were utterly divorced from 
 those which had flowered in the Elizabethan age. 
 So long as they prevailed, no great thinker or writer 
 or poet could issue from her walls. Not until she 
 had freed herself from the tyranny of the theocracy 
 and embraced with the ardor of emancipated youth 
 the liberal doctrines of the Revolution did she be- 
 gin to feel and to reveal her powers. From having 
 been, as it were, the devout watcher by the corpse 
 of learning, tending the lights at head and feet, 
 she has come forth to find herself in the presence 
 of the living; instead of guarding dry bones and 
 dust, she is quickening sensibility, inspiring senti- 
 ment, and stirring imagination. 
 
 The graduate has completed his meditations; 
 he rises from the steps of Divinity and goes to meet 
 the class baby and his friends.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BEGINNING AND THE FIRST PRESIDENT 
 
 IN 1636 the Massachusetts Bay settlement ex- 
 tended for about thirty miles along the seacoast 
 and less than twenty miles inland. West and north 
 and south of this small area stretched a wilderness, 
 inhabited by hostile Indians. The people of the 
 settlement were few in number and scattered. 
 There were perhaps five thousand families. They 
 had the Indians to fight or to pacify, a living to get 
 from the soil, houses to build, and forests to clear. 
 With all their toil and activity, with all the need 
 for co-operation in facing their problems and perils, 
 and in spite of the fact that they had exiled them- 
 selves in a desire for perfect religious freedom, 
 they found both time and inclination to engage in 
 theological controversy with one another and to 
 view one another with bitterness and suspicion. 
 Infant baptism and the Antinomian theory were 
 prolific causes of strife and dissension. Theology 
 constituted their only intellectual interest; zealots 
 
 13
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 and fanatics as they were, there was no unanimity 
 in their non-conformity. 
 
 But by one sentiment they were united the love 
 of learning. Long before there was any promise of 
 prosperity, while they were still struggling in such 
 poverty as few other pioneers have ever known, 
 they were contributing freely from their scanty re- 
 sources to keep alive the institution which remains 
 to-day the first and greatest creation of the Puri- 
 tans. 
 
 In the autumn of 1636, six years after the first 
 settlement of Boston, the General Court of Massa- 
 chusetts Bay Colony voted to grant four hundred 
 pounds for the founding of a public " school or 
 college." Two hundred pounds was to be paid the 
 next year, and the remainder of the amount when 
 the building was finished. This was the first occa- 
 sion, it is said, on which a community through its 
 representatives voted a sum of money to establish 
 an institution of learning. Twelve of the principal 
 magistrates and ministers of the colony, among them 
 Governor Winthrop and Deputy Governor Dudley, 
 were appointed to carry through the project. 
 
 They decided that the college should be at New- 
 
 14
 
 THE BEGINNING AND FIRST PRESIDENT 
 
 towne "a place very pleasant and accommodate." 
 In 1638, the year of the opening of the college, the 
 name of this place was changed to Cambridge, 
 many of the leading men of the colony being grad- 
 uates of the old English university. Thus, before the 
 college itself had received a name, it had given one 
 to the town. 
 
 In 1637, John Harvard, a young non-conformist 
 minister who had graduated two years earlier at 
 Emmanuel College, Cambridge, came over and 
 settled in Charlestown. His life there was short; 
 he died of consumption the next year. Apparently 
 the plans for the college had awakened his interest 
 and enthusiasm, for he left it half his estate 
 779 pounds, seventeen shillings and twopence 
 and also his library of 320 volumes. We may justly 
 estimate the importance of this bequest if we con- 
 sider that eight hundred pounds in those days 
 would be equivalent in value to about thirty thou- 
 sand dollars now. 
 
 John Harvard's unexpected and munificent be- 
 quest stimulated others to give freely. A list of 
 some of the contributions is rather touching; it 
 includes such items as a number of sheep, a quantity 
 of cotton cloth worth nine shillings, a pewter flagon 
 worth ten shillings, a fruit dish, a sugar spoon, a 
 
 15
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 " silver-tipt " jug, one " great salt," and one small 
 " trencher-salt." 
 
 It was John Harvard's bequest that made the 
 establishment of the college secure, and it was a 
 just appreciation of this fact that led the founders to 
 perpetuate his name. In March, 1639, it was voted 
 that the college should henceforth be known as 
 Harvard College. 
 
 Although the exact site of the original college 
 building is more or less uncertain, it was probably 
 somewhere within the limits of the present Grays 
 Hall. The building was primitive and poorly 
 constructed. On the first floor were the hall, which 
 was used for religious and literary exercises and for 
 " commons," and the kitchen and buttery. The 
 upper floors were given over to chambers; each 
 chamber had partitioned off in it two or three 
 studies about six feet square. Some of the cham- 
 bers were calked and daubed with clay, others were 
 ceiled with cedar, others were lathed, plastered, 
 and whitened. The building was clapboarded and 
 shingled, but was far from weatherproof; the win- 
 dows were more successful in admitting air than 
 light, for only a portion of each sash was glazed, 
 oiled paper being used in the rest. In cold weather 
 the small studies in the chambers were frigid, 
 
 16
 
 and the students all resorted with their books to 
 the hall, where a fire was maintained " at the ex- 
 pense of those who used it " which probably 
 means that those who did not contribute were not 
 allowed to have places near it. In this room on 
 cold nights the boys did their studying by the light 
 of " the public candle." 
 
 The pursuit of learning under such conditions 
 was severe enough; it was rendered almost intoler- 
 able by the character of the first master or professor. 
 With all the munificence, devotion, and public spirit 
 that attended the founding of Harvard College, 
 its opening was not auspicious. The Rev. Nathaniel 
 Eaton, appointed in 1637 the executive head, was 
 utterly unfit for the post although the General 
 Court had such a high opinion of his capacities 
 that they granted him five hundred acres of land 
 on the condition of his remaining permanently with 
 the college. He was both dishonest and violent; 
 with the assistance of his wife, who acted as house- 
 keeper and stewardess of the college, he cheated 
 the students, and with his own hands he ill-used 
 them. Moreover, he did not confine his cruel prac- 
 tises to undergraduates alone. He quarreled with 
 his usher, Nathaniel Briscoe, got two men to hold 
 him, and then beat him over the head and shoulders 
 
 17
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 with a club. Briscoe, thinking that he was to be 
 murdered, began to pray, whereupon Eaton gave 
 him some extra blows for taking the name of God in 
 vain. The General Court, which had hitherto 
 thought so highly of the master, dismissed him from 
 office, fined him sixty-six pounds, and ordered him 
 to pay Briscoe thirty pounds. An examination into 
 the complaints made by the students followed; 
 Eaton's wife made an abject and curious con- 
 fession, admitting, among other things, that she 
 had let the negro servitor sleep in John Wilson's 
 bed. For this and other offenses she was severely 
 censured; and then she and her husband, having 
 been excommunicated by the church, took their 
 departure from the colony. They went to Vir- 
 ginia and then to England, where Eaton showed 
 no improvement in either character or temper. 
 After the restoration of Charles II, he conformed to 
 the Church of England, obtained a living, and pro- 
 ceeded to persecute his former brethren with zeal 
 and vindictiveness. In spite of his time-serving 
 propensity he did not prosper; he was finally com- 
 mitted to prison for debt, and there ended his 
 days. 
 
 This lamentable conduct on the part of the first 
 executive did not discourage faith in the new insti- 
 
 18
 
 Gore Hall
 
 THE BEGINNING AND FIRST PRESIDENT 
 
 tution. People continued to make gifts to it, and 
 in 1640 the General Court granted the college the 
 revenue of the ferry between Charlestown and Bos- 
 ton, amounting to about sixty pounds a year. The 
 first printing-press north of Mexico, and for many 
 years . the only one in British America, was set up 
 at the college; the first work from the American 
 press was the " Freeman's Oath," issued in 1639. 
 No one was appointed to succeed Eaton until 
 August 27, 1640, when the Rev. Henry Dunster, 
 who had recently arrived from England, was elected 
 president under that title. He had come over from 
 Lancashire at the age of thirty-six with his wife and 
 children to escape persecution for non-conformity. 
 There is much that is wistful and appealing in the 
 life of the young, light-haired first president. Ar- 
 dent and enthusiastic, an idealist who knew no com- 
 promises, generous of nature, tolerant of others but 
 inflexible towards himself, Henry Dunster was the 
 truest type of man to govern the destinies of a col- 
 lege. He impoverished himself and wore himself 
 out in the service of Harvard. Poor man though 
 he was, he gave the college a hundred acres of 
 land and contributed the greater part of the funds 
 for building a house for the president; he secured 
 liberal donations, besought the General Court for 
 
 19
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 appropriations for improvements, and was himself 
 teacher, preacher, and administrator. His salary 
 was small and variable. In a letter to Governor 
 Winthrop in 1643 he referred with resignation to 
 " abatements that I have suffered, from 60 pounds 
 to 50 pounds, from 50 pounds to 45 pounds, and from 
 45 pounds to 30 pounds, which is now my rent from 
 the ferry. I was and am willing, considering the 
 poverty of the country, to descend to the lowest 
 step, if there can be nothing comfortably allowed." 
 Although his own living was so precarious, Dunster 
 was quite successful in collecting money for the 
 college; during his term as president, the donations 
 amounted to at least one thousand pounds, besides 
 annuities and grants of land. 
 
 Unfortunately doubts as to the validity of infant 
 baptism overtook him and so preyed upon his mind 
 that at last he felt compelled to give them utter- 
 ance; in the opinion of the influential persons of the 
 community, this heresy terminated his usefulness. 
 Cotton Mather wrote with sanctimonious regret 
 that " he fell into the briers of Antipsedobaptism." 
 Another devout person declared that " scruples and 
 suggestions had been injected into him by Mr. 
 Dunster's discourses," that he no longer dared 
 trust himself within reach of their " venom and 
 
 20
 
 THE BEGINNING AND FIRST PRESIDENT 
 
 poison," and that it was " not hard to discern that 
 they came from the Evil One." 
 
 So in October, 1654, after fourteen years of un- 
 selfish and devoted service, Dunster was compelled 
 to resign from the college. In November he sub- 
 mitted to the General Court " Considerations " 
 which might induce them to let him remain a little 
 longer in the president's house; they have a curious 
 simplicity and pathos. 
 
 " I. The time of the year is unseasonable, being 
 now very near the shortest day and the depth of 
 winter. 
 
 " 2. The place unto which I go is unknown to me 
 and my family, and the ways and means of sub- 
 sistence to one of my talents and parts, or for the 
 containing or conserving of my goods, or disposing 
 of my cattle, accustomed to my place of residence. 
 
 " 3. The place from which I go hath fire, fuel, 
 and all provisions for man and beast laid in for the 
 winter. To remove some things will be to destroy 
 them; to remove others, as books and household 
 goods, to damage them greatly. The house I have 
 builded, upon very damageful conditions to myself, 
 out of love for the college. . . . 
 
 " 4. The persons, all besides myself, are women 
 and children. . . . My wife is sick, and my youngest 
 
 21
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 child entirely so, and hath been for months, so 
 that we dare not carry him out of doors." 
 
 The General Court was sufficiently touched to 
 let him remain until March not a much more 
 seasonable time for moving in those days. The reader 
 of this homeless and penniless man's appeal may 
 reflect somewhat ironically upon the luxurious dor- 
 mitory at Harvard which bears Dunster's name. 
 
 The deposed president went to Scituate and be- 
 came minister of the church there; his financial 
 condition was still so straitened that the Corpora- 
 tion of Harvard College, which had recognized 
 the value of his services even while finding it neces- 
 sary to ask for his resignation, appealed to the 
 General Court to settle one hundred pounds on him 
 to compensate him for losses that he had sustained. 
 The General Court, however, neither felt under any 
 obligation to do this nor was disposed to be gener- 
 ous. Four years after leaving Cambridge, Dunster 
 died in poverty. 
 
 There were nine members of the first class that 
 graduated from Harvard College the class of 
 1642. Most of them became ministers. Benjamin 
 Woodbridge, the first scholar of the class, returned 
 to England and might have been Canon of Windsor 
 if he had been willing to conform to the Church of
 
 THE BEGINNING AND FIRST PRESIDENT 
 
 England, but he would not. John Bulkley, son 
 of the first minister at Concord, also went to England. 
 He, too, became a minister, but was ejected from his 
 parish in 1662. He then took up the practise of 
 medicine in London with considerable success. 
 William Hubbard became minister at Ipswich, 
 John Wilson at Medfield, and Nathaniel Brewster 
 on Long Island. Samuel Bellingham and Henry 
 Saltonstall took degrees in medicine in Europe. 
 Of Tobias Barnard nothing is recorded. 
 
 By far the most interesting and picturesque 
 member of the class was George Downing though 
 he was not a man of whom the college can be proud. 
 The ministry had no attractions for him; he entered 
 the English Army and was scout-master general in 
 Scotland. Afterwards he was in high favor with 
 Crom-well, but with the Restoration he became a 
 turncoat, had the merit of betraying several of the 
 regicides, and was knighted in consequence. For 
 this he was made a byword in New England; any 
 man who betrayed his trust was spoken of as " an 
 arrant George Downing." Samuel Pepys in his 
 diary, March 12, 1662, wrote: 
 
 " This morning we have news that Sir G. Down- 
 ing like a perfidious rogue, though the action is 
 good and of service to the King, yet he cannot with 
 
 23
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 a good conscience do it, hath taken Okey, Corbet, 
 and Barkstead at Delft in Holland, and sent them 
 home in the Blackmore" Five days later, mention- 
 ing the arrival of the prisoners, Pepys has this 
 passage: "The captain tells me, the Dutch were a 
 good while before they could be persuaded to let 
 them go, they being taken prisoners in their land. 
 But Sir G. Downing would not be answered so, 
 though all the world takes notice of him for a most 
 ungrateful villain for his pains." 
 
 Pepys, however, had always a warm feeling for 
 success; and it was characteristic of him that in 
 five years he should be writing: 
 
 " The new commissioners of the treasury have 
 chosen Sir G. Downing for their secretary; and I 
 think in my conscience they have done a great 
 thing in it; for he is active and a man of business, 
 and values himself upon having things do well under 
 his hand; so that I am mightily pleased in their 
 choice." 
 
 And again: " Met with Sir G. Downing, and 
 walked with him an hour, talking of business and 
 how the late war was managed, there being nobody 
 to take care of it, and he telling, when he was in 
 Holland, what he offered the King to do if he might 
 have power, and then, upon the least word, per- 
 
 24
 
 THE BEGINNING AND FIRST PRESIDENT 
 
 haps of a woman, to the King, he was contradicted 
 again, and particularly to the loss of all that we lost 
 in Guinea. He told me that he had so good spies 
 that he hath had the keys taken out of De Witt's 
 pocket when he was abed, and his closet opened and 
 papers brought to him and left in his hands for an 
 hour, and carried back and laid in the place again, 
 and the keys put into his pocket again. He says 
 he hath always had their most private debates, that 
 have been but between two or three of the chief 
 of them, brought to him in an hour after, and an 
 hour after that hath sent word thereof to the King." 
 Whether or not Harvard derived any benefit in 
 England through the influential offices of this ras- 
 cally earliest graduate does not appear. It is at 
 least to be remembered to his credit that forty 
 years after his graduation he contributed a sub- 
 stantial sum of money to the building of the old Har- 
 vard Hall; he must have had some feeling of affec- 
 tion for his needy young Alma Mater.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 HARVARD IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 SEVEN years after its founding, Harvard Col- 
 lege adopted the seal and coat of arms which it 
 now bears three books spread open upon a shield 
 and displaying the word Veritas. In 1650 the col- 
 lege became by act of the General Court a corpora- 
 tion, consisting of a president, five fellows, and a 
 treasurer; in them all the property of the institu- 
 tion was to be vested, and by them, under the super- 
 vision of the overseers, its affairs were to be directed. 
 This charter of 1650 is still the basis of the legal 
 existence and organization of the university. 
 
 The requirements for admission at this time seem 
 at first glance to have been severely classical. 
 " When any scholar is able to understand Tully 
 or such like classical Latine author extempore, 
 and make and speake true Latine in verse and prose, 
 suo ut aiunt Marte, and decline perfectly the para- 
 digms of nounes and verbes in the Greek tongue; 
 Let him then, and not before, be capable of admis- 
 
 26
 
 THE FIRST BOOK TO TELL THE LIFE STORY 
 OF THE FOUNDER OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
 
 JOHN HARVARD 
 
 AND HIS TIMES 
 
 By HENRY C. SHELLEY 
 
 Author of "Literary By-Paths in Old England," "Untrodden English 
 "Ways," " The Tragedy of Mary Stuart," etc. 
 
 With 24 full-page illustrations. NEW POPULAR EDITION. 1913 
 331 pages. Decorated cloth, gilt top, in box, $1 .50 net; by mail, $1.66 
 
 HIGHLY praised by the critics 
 and cordially endorsed by 
 Harvard graduates when it 
 originally appeared a few years ago 
 Mr. Shelley's painstaking and schol- 
 arly book on John Harvard has just 
 been reissued in a new edition, hand- 
 somely bound and with all the illus- 
 trations that appeared in the first 
 edition. Mr. Shelley brought to 
 light a great deal of valuable material regarding John 
 Harvard's parents and companions, his life in South- 
 wark where he was born, and at Emmanuel College, 
 Cambridge, where he was educated. All the avail- 
 able information regarding the young English minister's 
 life in America and the founding of Harvard College, 
 together with a fresh and vigorous picture of Joha 
 Harvard s environment is included in this book. 

 
 William C. Lane, Librarian of Harvard Univer- 
 sity, says : 
 
 " Mr. Shelley has certainly brought together a large amount 
 of interesting matter." 
 
 From The Nation : 
 
 " An interesting and excellent volume. . . . We cordially 
 admit Mr. Shelley's scholarship, judgment and good taste." 
 
 From North American Review : 
 
 " Our most vivid and plausible picture of the earliest bene- 
 factor of education in this country." 
 
 From Harvard Crimson : 
 
 " A worthy attempt to give definiteness and to honor a 
 figure to whom we all owe a grateful reverence. . . . The book 
 is fitly dedicated to President Eliot and is abundantly and 
 admirably illustrated." 
 
 From Journal of Education, Boston : 
 
 " A book of surpassing interest, educationally, historically 
 and scholastically." 
 
 From Harvard Graduates Magazine : 
 
 " So far as facts go he has omitted nothing. More 
 remarkable than his industry, however, is his excellent historic 
 sense. He puts himself into the spirit of the first quarter of the 
 seventeenth century in England. He visualizes its life in vari- 
 ous places. The result is that he has produced a vivid picture 
 vof John Harvard's environment."
 
 One of the 24 illustrations from " THE STORY OF JOHN HARVARD "
 
 JOHN HARVARD 
 
 AND HIS TIMES 
 
 By HENRY C. SHELLEY 
 
 Contents : I, Environment ; II, Parentage ; III, Early Influ- 
 ences ; IV, The Harvard Circle ; V, Cambridge ; VI, Last 
 Years in England; VII, The New World; VIII, The Praise 
 of John Harvard. 
 
 The fine manner in which the publishers have brought out 
 this interesting book, enriching it with views, portraits, and fac- 
 similes, deserves much praise. Harvard Graduates Magazine. 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., Publishers, BOSTON 
 
 Order of Your Bookseller or of the Publishers 
 
 ...191... 
 
 Dear Sirs : 
 
 You may send me cop JOHN HARVARD 
 
 AND HIS TIMES. New Popular Edition. 1913. Fully 
 illustrated. Bound in cloth, boxed. Price $1.50 net; 
 postpaid $1 .66. 
 
 Name 
 
 Address 
 
 $ Enclosed.
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sion into the College." But although these require- 
 ments in Latin sound in one way rather formidable, 
 and although the students were expected to recite 
 at all times in Latin, the college course was in 
 most respects very elementary. Its primary aim 
 was to prepare students for the ministry. Besides 
 Latin and Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac were 
 the prescribed languages; logic, ethics, arithmetic, 
 geometry, physics, metaphysics, politics, and di- 
 vinity were also prescribed. The young man who 
 went forth with more than a smattering in all 
 these subjects was no doubt exceptional. Examina- 
 tions were held frequently, especially before Com- 
 mencement. The Commencement exercises, which 
 from the very beginning were attended by the 
 governor and all the chief men of the colony, con- 
 sisted of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew orations, and 
 of disputations upon theses. In spite of being dedi- 
 cated to such forbidding displays of scholarship, 
 Commencement came to be often a time of disorder 
 and at various periods was made a subject of special 
 legislation. 
 
 Besides the frequent examinations, just before 
 Commencement, there were held once a month 
 public declamations in Latin and Greek, and logical 
 and philosophical disputations. For three weeks 
 
 27
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 in June students who had been in the college two 
 years or more were subjected to a daily, four-hour, 
 oral examination. During this period, visitors were 
 made welcome in the classes and given the privilege 
 of questioning the students. The learned bores of 
 the colony greatly enjoyed this opportunity of pub- 
 licly harrying the undergraduates. 
 
 In the early days of the college there were no 
 professors; the president was assisted in imparting 
 instruction by two or three graduate students, 
 " bachelors in residence." A bachelor in residence 
 was called a Sir. Thus, in 1643 Sir Bulkley and 
 Sir Downing were appointed " for the present help of 
 the President," and received a salary of four pounds 
 a year. Bulkley in 1645 went to England and gave 
 the college an acre of land covering the site of Gore 
 Hall. Samuel Mather, of the class of 1643, be- 
 came a Sir and acquired great popularity. " Such 
 was the love of all the scholars to him that not only 
 when he read his last Philosophy Lecture in the Col- 
 lege Hall they heard him in tears, because of its 
 being his last, but also when he went away from 
 the College, they put on the tokens of mourning 
 in their very garments for it." Mitchell, of the 
 class of 1647, remained a tutor in the college for 
 several years. In 1650 he married a young widow 
 
 28
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and ordered from the college commons " a supper 
 on his wedding night." It was he who perceived 
 that President Dunster's ideas " were from the 
 Evil One." 
 
 Throughout the college year, tasks or duties were 
 assigned for practically every hour of the day, 
 and the rules regulating conduct were strict. The 
 college laws of 1650 forbade the students to use 
 tobacco " unless permitted by the president with 
 the consent of parents or guardians, and a good 
 reason first given by a physician, and then in a 
 sober and private manner." They also prohibited the 
 joining of any military band " unless of known 
 gravity, and of approved, sober, and virtuous conver- 
 sation." 
 
 There were, however, occasional quite shocking 
 outbreaks on the part of individual students. James 
 Ward, of the class of 1645, son of a clergyman, 
 and Joseph Weld, son of another clergyman, bur- 
 glarized two houses. " Being found out," writes 
 Governor Winthrop, " they were ordered by the 
 governors of the College to be there whipped, which 
 was performed by the president himself yet 
 they were about 20 years of age. . . . We had yet 
 no particular punishment for burglary." 
 
 The Rev. Charles Chauncy, an elderly clergy- 
 
 29
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 man of Scituate, succeeded President Dunster. 
 He had nothing of the martyr spirit of his prede- 
 cessor; he was quite willing to refrain from press- 
 ing unwelcome views upon people. So far from 
 sharing Dunster's inconvenient ideas about infant 
 baptism, he went too enthusiastically to the other 
 extreme to please the community; " it was his 
 judgment not only to admit infants to baptism, but 
 to wash or dip them all over." It was represented 
 to him that if he continued to disseminate that 
 doctrine, he could not be made president of Har- 
 vard; whereupon he cheerfully agreed to desist from 
 such an unwise contention. 
 
 His weakness was of conviction perhaps rather 
 than of character; at any rate he seems to have been 
 an excellent president. His administration was 
 beset with difficulties, and he struggled with them 
 manfully and on the whole efficiently. The financial 
 condition of the college was precarious; the General 
 Court, to which Chauncy appealed time and again, 
 was not disposed to make any liberal grants towards 
 its relief. As had been the case with Dunster, 
 Chauncy's salary was paid chiefly in transfers of 
 taxes; he had to collect the taxes himself, and then, 
 as they were usually paid in Indian corn or other 
 produce, he had to convert them into cash, usually 
 
 30
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 losing a considerable part of their value in the 
 transaction. 
 
 The conversion and education of the Indians was 
 much on the minds of the pious settlers. The press 
 of Harvard College was kept busy turning out 
 tracts for their enlightenment. A Society for the 
 Propagation of the Gospel among them, which had 
 its headquarters in England, was prevailed upon to 
 contribute a sum of money for a college building 
 to be known as the Indian College. This building 
 was finished in 1665, but the aborigines made very 
 little use of it. A few Indians were admitted to 
 Harvard, but only one ever graduated, and he 
 shortly afterwards died of consumption. The In- 
 dian College was soon required for other purposes 
 than those for which it was built. 
 
 Both it and the original building the first 
 Harvard Hall were poorly constructed; before 
 the end of Chauncy's term they had become almost 
 unfit for occupation. Partly because of this, partly 
 because of the apathy of the General Court towards 
 the welfare of the college, the number of students 
 declined, the total funds of the institution amounted 
 to only a thousand pounds, and its future was dark. 
 The venerable president did not lose heart; he 
 went about trying to awaken interest and enthusiasm. 
 
 31
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 His efforts were successful; and soon the different 
 towns were contributing funds to stay the decline. 
 The town of Portsmouth was the first to come for- 
 ward; it pledged sixty pounds a year for seven years. 
 Other places and people emulated this public spirit, 
 and eventually the subscriptions which came in 
 were sufficient for the building of a new Harvard 
 Hall. But this was not finished until 1682 ten 
 years after Chauncy's death. 
 
 President Chauncy set his students a good ex- 
 ample of industry; he rose every morning at four 
 o'clock and was busily occupied every day until 
 his death, at the age of eighty-two. 
 
 " The fellows of the College once leading this ven- 
 erable old man to preach a sermon on a winter day, 
 they, out of affection to him, to discourage him from 
 so difficult an undertaking, told him, ' Sir, you'll cer- 
 tainly die in the pulpit; ' but he, laying hold on what 
 they said as if they had offered him the greatest 
 encouragement in the world, pressed the more vigor- 
 ously through the snowdrift, and said, ' How glad 
 should I be if what you say might prove true!' 
 
 It is pleasant to find that the old gentleman re- 
 tained to the end certain youthful prejudices as well 
 as pious enthusiasms; he frequently inveighed from 
 the pulpit against the enormity of long hair. 
 
 32
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Upon Chauncy's death in 1672, the Rev. Leonard 
 Hoar, a graduate of the class of 1650, was chosen 
 president. Although his administration was brief 
 and unsuccessful, he deserved a better fate; his 
 writings show him to have been far more broad- 
 minded than most of his contemporaries and in 
 many ways ahead of his time. He wanted " a large, 
 well-sheltered garden and orchard, for students 
 addicted to planting; an ergasterium for mechanic 
 fancies; and a laboratory chemical for those phi- 
 losophers that by their senses would culture their 
 understandings. . . . For readings or notions only 
 are but husky provender." He was endowed with 
 the rarest of all qualities among the members of 
 his race and generation a kindly humor. Thus, 
 after giving a scapegrace nephew who was a freshman 
 some excellent advice, he ended his letter as follows : 
 
 " Touching the other items about your studies, 
 either mind them or mend them and follow better, 
 so we shall be friends and rejoice in each other; but 
 if you will neither, then, though I am no prophet, 
 yet I will foretell you the certain issue of all, viz., 
 that in a very few years be over, with inconceivable 
 indignation you will call yourself fool and caitiff, and 
 then, when it is to no purpose, me, what I now sub- 
 scribe myself, your faithful friend and loving uncle." 
 
 33
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 One of such a temper must have found very 
 distasteful some of the duties that his position 
 imposed upon him. Samuel Sewall's Diary gives 
 an interesting glimpse of college discipline. 
 
 "June 15, 1674, Thomas Sargeant was examined 
 by the Corporation finally. The advice of Mr. Dan- 
 forth, Mr. Stoughton, Mr. Thacher, Mr. Mather 
 was taken. This was his sentence: 
 
 " That being convicted of speaking blasphemous 
 words concerning the H. G." - certainly no ir- 
 reverence was intended in the abbreviation! 
 " he should be therefore publicly whipped before 
 all the scholars. 
 
 ' That he should be suspended as to taking his 
 degree of Bachelor. 
 
 " Sit alone by himself in the Hall, uncovered at 
 meals, during the pleasure of the President and 
 Fellows, and be in all things obedient, doing what 
 exercise was appointed him by the President, or 
 else be finally expelled from the college. 
 
 '' The first was presently put in execution in the 
 Library before the scholars. He kneeled down, 
 and the instrument, Goodman Hely, attended the 
 President's word as to the performance of his part 
 in the work. Prayer was had before and after by 
 the President. July i, 1674." 
 
 34
 
 
 Germanic Museum
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Corporal punishment was not uncommon in 
 those days, and remained in force as late as the 
 middle of the eighteenth century, though it was 
 not often inflicted after 1700. Whether President 
 Hoar resorted to it too readily or whether he gave 
 the students other grounds of resentment, he became 
 most unpopular so unpopular that after a couple 
 of years the undergraduates left the college in a 
 body. There is some reason to suspect that the 
 Rev. Urian Oakes, who was a member of the Corpo- 
 ration and had himself wanted to be president, had 
 a hand in fomenting the trouble. If this was the 
 fact, his machinations were only too successful; 
 Hoar resigned in 1675, broken in health and spirit, 
 and did not long survive the disgrace. 
 
 Oakes then received the appointment that he 
 coveted, but his enjoyment of authority was also 
 brief, and his administration was colorless. 
 
 John Rogers, who bore a great reputation for 
 piety, succeeded him, but only for a year. Of his 
 incumbency the credulous Cotton Mather relates 
 the following anecdote: 
 
 " It was his custom to be somewhat long in his 
 daily prayers with the scholars in the College Hall. 
 But one day, without being able to give reason of it, 
 he was not so long, it may be by half, as he used to 
 
 35
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 be. Heaven knew the reason. The scholars, re- 
 turning to their chambers, found one of them on 
 fire; and the fire had proceeded so far that if the 
 devotion had held three minutes longer, the College 
 had been irrecoverably laid in ashes, which now 
 was happily preserved." 
 
 In 1685 the Rev. Increase Mather became presi- 
 dent, and Harvard College was thrust prominently 
 into politics. Mather was a many-sided person, of 
 zeal and ability, a leader in the affairs of the colony, 
 as well as a theologian. He was, however, self- 
 seeking, had a sharp eye always to his own advan- 
 tage and advancement, and stubbornly resisted any 
 encroachment on what he chose to regard as his 
 prerogatives. He had also some of the superstitious, 
 puling quality that was one of the numerous con- 
 temptible traits of his son Cotton. With all his 
 defects, he did on the whole render Harvard College 
 and Massachusetts a considerable service. When 
 Charles II had called on Massachusetts to surrender 
 its charter, Mather had been stanch and outspoken 
 in opposition. The charter was not surrendered, 
 but it was annulled; first Dudley and then Andros 
 governed the colony so tyrannically that at last 
 Mather was sent to England to lay the grievances 
 of the people before the king. He spent four years 
 
 36
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 in England with so much personal satisfaction and 
 enjoyment that he was forever after laying plans 
 to get back there and finally he obtained a new 
 charter for the colony from King William. This 
 charter was in most essentials the negation of all 
 that Mather had been sent to obtain; it practically 
 abolished the power of the theocracy which had 
 hitherto ruled Massachusetts. But Mather was 
 diplomat enough to see that it was the best that 
 could be had, and to introduce all the compensations 
 possible. He secured the appointment of Sir Will- 
 iam Phips as first governor, confident of his in- 
 fluence over him. In fact, when Mather returned 
 in 1692 with the new governor and the new charter, 
 it was not as one who had been worsted at every 
 point, but as one who had triumphed over obstacles 
 and was sure of a welcome. 
 
 The new charter made freehold and property 
 instead of church membership the qualification for 
 electing and being elected to office. The establish- 
 ment of a religious faith was no longer to be the 
 end and aim of civil government. The clergy were 
 shorn of their temporal power. They were not 
 disposed to be placated by Mather's representations 
 that their loss was merely nominal. 
 
 He remained a man of influence in the community, 
 
 37
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 but no doubt the coolness of those who had been 
 his warm friends and admirers was one of the causes 
 of his consuming desire to return to England. His 
 duties as president of Harvard did not afford him 
 complete satisfaction. The laws of the college 
 required the president to expound chapters from 
 the Old and New Testaments to the students twice 
 a day. To Mather, who chose to live in Boston, 
 where he could be in the midst of political activity 
 and theological controversy, and who steadfastly 
 refused to heed the recommendations of the General 
 Court and take up his residence at the college, this 
 duty was extremely irksome so irksome that 
 he quite consistently neglected it. Aside from the 
 inconvenience of fulfilling it, it seemed to him a 
 degradation of his talents and scholarship. In a 
 letter to William Stoughton, who succeeded Phips 
 as governor, he refers contemptuously to the under- 
 graduates as " forty or fifty children, few of them 
 capable of edification by such exercises." 
 
 With the granting of a new charter to the colony, 
 a new charter for Harvard College seemed to be 
 required. That granted by the General Court in 
 1692 was disallowed by the king, for the reason that 
 it did not provide for the right of visitation by the 
 Crown or the Crown's representatives. Mather 
 
 38
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 immediately cherished hopes of being sent to Eng- 
 land to adjust the difficulty about the college charter. 
 He made public from time to time the fact that he 
 was receiving intimations and assurances from on 
 high of a great work that he had to do in England. 
 His diary teems with such passages as the follow- 
 ing: 
 
 " Sept. 3, 1693. . . . Also saying to the Lord that 
 some workings of his Providence seemed to inti- 
 mate that I must be returned to England again 
 and saying, * Lord, if it will be more to your glory 
 that I should go to England than for me to con- 
 tinue here in this land, then let me go; otherwise 
 not/ I was inexpressibly melted, and that for a 
 considerable time, and a stirring suggestion, that 
 to England I must go. In this there was something 
 extraordinary, either divine or angelical." 
 
 " Oct. 29th. I was much melted with the appre- 
 hension of returning to England again; strongly 
 persuaded it would be so; and that God was about 
 to do some great thing there, so that I should have 
 a great opportunity again to do service to his name.'* 
 
 " Dec. 3Oth. Meltings before the Lord this day 
 when praying, desiring being returned to England 
 again." 
 
 " April I9th, 1694. My heart was marvellously 
 
 39
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 melted with the persuasion that I should glorify 
 Christ in England." 
 
 With all these meltings and with all Mather's 
 active scheming to bring about such a divine end, 
 he did not convince the General Court of the 
 necessity for the mission. Cotton Mather, most 
 officious of busybodies, seconded his father's efforts, 
 but to no purpose. In 1697 the General Court 
 granted another charter, which was no more ac- 
 ceptable to President Mather than the one of 1692 
 had been to the king. More than ever did it seem 
 to him desirable that he should be sent to England 
 to obtain a royal charter for the college. If he could 
 accomplish that, he could remain in England the 
 rest of his life, and his son Cotton could no doubt 
 succeed him in the presidency. 
 
 The General Court grew weary of his importunity. 
 April 1 6th, 1700, Cotton Mather wrote in his diary: 
 
 " I am going to relate one of the most astonishing 
 things that ever befell in all the time of my pilgrim- 
 age. 
 
 " A particular faith had been unaccountably pro- 
 duced in my father's heart, and in my own, that 
 God will carry him unto England, and there give 
 him a short but great opportunity to glorify the 
 Lord Jesus Christ before his entrance into the heav- 
 
 40
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 enly Kingdom. There appears no probability of my 
 father's going thither but in an agency to obtain a 
 charter for the College. This matter having been 
 for several years upon the point of being carried in 
 the General Assembly, hath strangely miscarried 
 when it hath come to the birth. It is now again 
 before the Assembly, in circumstances wherein if 
 it succeed not, it is never like to be revived and re- 
 sumed any more. . . . Now all on a sudden I felt 
 an inexpressible force to fall on my mind, an afflatus, 
 which cannot be described in words; none knows 
 it but he that has it. ... It was told me that the 
 Lord Jesus Christ loved my father and loved me, 
 and that he took delight in us, as in two of his faith- 
 ful servants, and that he had not permitted us to be 
 deceived in our particular faith, but that my father 
 should be carried into England, and there glorify 
 the Lord Jesus Christ before his passing into glory. 
 
 " And now what shall I say! When the affair of 
 my father's agency after this came to a turning 
 point in the Court, it strangely miscarried! All 
 came to nothing! Some of the Tories had so wrought 
 upon the Governor that, though he had first moved 
 this matter and had given us both directions and 
 promises about it, yet he now (not without base 
 
 41
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 unhandsomeness) deferred it. The Lieutenant 
 Governor, who had formerly been for it, now (not 
 without great ebullition of unaccountable preju- 
 dice and ingratitude) appeared, with all the little 
 tricks imaginable, to confound it. It had for all 
 this been carried, had not some of the Council been 
 inconveniently called off and absent. But now the 
 whole affair of the College was left unto the man- 
 agement of the Earl of Bellamont, so that all ex- 
 pectation of a voyage for my father unto England, 
 on any such occasion, is utterly at an end. 
 
 " What shall I make of this wonderful matter? 
 Wait! Wait!" 
 
 But waiting did not give the pious son any fresh 
 inspiration. He never saw anything but " base 
 unhandsomeness," u unaccountable prejudice," and 
 " ingratitude " in the motives of those who denied 
 his father the coveted trip to England. And al- 
 though he was himself a member of the Corporation 
 of Harvard College, from this time on his affection 
 for the institution was at best intermittent and 
 fluctuated with his prospects of being chosen presi- 
 dent. 
 
 The college was prospering; one event that made 
 Increase Mather's administration notable was the 
 gift by William Stoughton, lieutenant-governor and 
 
 42
 
 IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 chief justice, of a brick building, which stood for 
 about eighty years. This was the first Stoughton 
 Hall. Stoughton, the " hanging judge " of the 
 witchcraft trials, must always remain a dark and 
 sinister figure. Few episodes in New England annals 
 are more dramatic than that when Samuel Sewall 
 rose and stood in his pew in the Old South Meeting- 
 house while his confession of sorrow for the part 
 he had taken in those monstrous and insane cruel- 
 ties was read from the pulpit. But Stoughton, who 
 with Cotton Mather had been the most relentless 
 persecutor, sat grim and silent. He had nothing to 
 confess, for he regretted nothing. But he was all 
 through his life a good friend of Harvard College. 
 
 43
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH 
 
 IN 1701, since Increase Mather obstinately re- 
 fused to take up his residence at the college and 
 perform the duties of president in accordance with 
 the General Court's conception of them, the legis- 
 lature lost patience and requested his resignation. 
 He gave it, not unwillingly; he saw now that the 
 mission to England would never come to pass, he 
 found administrative labors uncongenial, and he 
 had hopes that his son would be appointed to suc- 
 ceed him. But the Mathers, though eminent, were 
 not too popular; to the Calvinistic party, which had 
 hitherto been in power, a strong opposition was 
 developing; and the General Court, unwilling to 
 make Cotton Mather president and yet not quite 
 ready to assume his enmity, temporized. Instead 
 of appointing a president, the General Court asked 
 the Rev. Samuel Willard, one of the Corporation, 
 to take charge as vice-president. He served under 
 this title for six years, during which period Cotton 
 Mather exhibited considerable restlessness. 
 
 44
 
 LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH 
 
 The revolt against Calvinistic authority acquired 
 greater strength, and in 1707 John Leverett, a lay- 
 man, was chosen president of Harvard College. 
 He had been a tutor in the college, and his liberal 
 views were extremely obnoxious to the Mathers. 
 Both Cotton Mather and his father assailed Gov- 
 ernor Dudley violently for putting Leverett forward; 
 Dudley bore their abuse with creditable dignity and 
 good temper. In the bitterness of his resentment, 
 Cotton Mather, though remaining a member of the 
 Corporation, tried in various petty ways to thwart 
 the plans for the college and to divert donations 
 intended for Harvard to Yale College, which had 
 recently been founded. In Yale he saw an institu- 
 tion that promised more rigid adherence to orthodox 
 Calvinism; he expressed a devout dread lest " the 
 dear infant should be strangled in the birth." 
 
 Leverett was an excellent president able, act- 
 ive, and broad-minded. Under his administration 
 the college became a place where a liberal education 
 might be secured. Hitherto, it had been primarily 
 a divinity school; more than half its graduates were 
 clergymen; its teachings were deeply tinged with 
 the dark theology of the time. Now the number of 
 tutors was increased and the importance of studies 
 other than those bearing directly upon a theological 
 
 45
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 education was recognized. In consequence, the 
 number of students was so augmented that not- 
 withstanding the building of the first Stoughton 
 Hall less than twenty years before, a new building 
 was required. The General Court appropriated 
 thirty-five hundred pounds to provide this, and 
 " a fair and goodly house of brick " was built in 
 1720 and called Massachusetts Hall. It still stands, 
 the earliest of the present college buildings. 
 
 During Leverett's administration, the first cata- 
 logue of books in the library was printed; it showed 
 thirty-five hundred volumes two-thirds of them 
 theological works, most of the others in Latin. 
 Bacon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton were 
 on the list; but Dryden, Addison, Pope, Swift, and 
 many others now regarded as classics did not have 
 a place. It is to be said that the productions of 
 these authors were at that time so recent as not 
 fairly to have established their title to permanence. 
 
 An entry in Leverett's Diary gives a glimpse of the 
 college discipline: "A. was publickly admonish'd 
 in the College Hall, and there confessed his Sinful 
 Excess and his enormous profanation of the Holy 
 Name of Almighty God. And he demeaned himself 
 so that the Presid 1 and Fellows conceived great 
 hopes that he will not be lost." 
 
 46
 
 LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH 
 
 The prayers at which these public confessions and 
 admonitions were made were held at six o'clock in 
 the morning. After prayers there were recitations 
 until breakfast, which was at half-past seven. 
 
 Leverett, for all his tact and wisdom, did not have 
 an untroubled administration. Governor Dudley, 
 who had been one of the advocates of his election, 
 wished to have his son Paul made treasurer of the 
 college. His wish was not gratified, and the dis- 
 appointment rankled in both father and son; for 
 some time afterwards the two Dudleys were mis- 
 chief-makers. They even encouraged one Pierpont, 
 who had failed to get his decree, to prosecute the 
 tutor who had flunked him and to appeal from the 
 decision of the Corporation to the courts of com- 
 mon law. The courts sustained the college and dis- 
 missed the appeal. 
 
 At this period the disorders at Commencement 
 became so riotous that an act was passed " for re- 
 forming the extravagancys of Commencement." 
 It provided " that henceforth no preparation nor 
 provision of either Plumb Cake, or Roasted, Boyled, 
 or Baked Meates or Pyes of any kind shall be made 
 by any Commencer," and that none should have 
 " any distilled Lyquours in his Chamber or any com- 
 position therewith," under penalty of a fine of 
 
 47
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 twenty shillings and the forfeiture of the " pro- 
 hibited Provisions." Acts were also passed " for 
 preventing the Excesses, Immoralities, and Disorders 
 of the Commencements." The Overseers recom- 
 mended to the Corporation an act " to restrain un- 
 suitable and unseasonable dancing in the College " 
 and to prevent " the great disturbances occasioned 
 by tumultuous and indecent noyses." 
 
 These legislative attempts seem to have effected 
 a very temporary improvement. At any rate some 
 twenty years later three troubled fathers who had 
 sons about to graduate offered to give the college 
 one thousand pounds " if a trial was made of Com- 
 mencements this year in a more private manner." 
 The Corporation wished to accept this offer, but 
 the Overseers whose character must have changed 
 since the time when they urged more drastic legis- 
 lation declined it. 
 
 In Leverett's last years there was discord between 
 the House of Representatives and the Corporation, 
 which to some extent represented the aristocratic, 
 royal government. The House made a vain attempt 
 to alter the make-up of the Corporation. Leverett 
 found himself in the uncomfortable position of hav- 
 ing to oppose first one group of supporters, and 
 then another. He and his family were dependent 
 
 48
 
 LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH 
 
 chiefly on grants from the General Court; these 
 amounted to one hundred and fifty pounds annually. 
 The cost of living had increased, and inflation had 
 depreciated the currency. Under such stress of 
 circumstances, it might have been politic for Lever- 
 ett to make concessions to the General Court and 
 to uphold them in their differences with the Cor- 
 poration. He was never governed by motives of 
 self-interest, however; in 1724 he died bankrupt, 
 and his children had to sell the mansion house of 
 Governor Leverett, which had descended to them 
 from their great-grandfather. 
 
 Excellent president though Leverett was, the chief 
 laudations of the historian of this period are not 
 lavished upon him. Benjamin Peirce, the recorder 
 of these early days, indulged his enthusiasm in the 
 following marveling words : " The College had 
 already begun to engage the attention of one of the 
 most extraordinary families that Providence ever 
 raised up for the benefit of the human race. It is 
 scarcely necessary to say that I allude to the family 
 of Hollis." 
 
 The benefactions of this family began in 1719 
 with an invoice of twelve casks of nails and one of 
 cutlery from Thomas Hollis, a London merchant. 
 For the next nine years he made frequent and liberal 
 
 49
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 gifts, sometimes of money, sometimes of books or 
 other articles; in all he gave the college about 
 two thousand pounds. He founded ten scholar- 
 ships and begged the Corporation to beware of 
 recommending for them " rakes or dunces." 
 
 Thomas Hollis was about sixty years old when he 
 first began to make gifts to Harvard College. He 
 had formed a friendship by correspondence with 
 Benjamin Colman, a tutor in the college and member 
 of the Corporation, and in consequence of it " the 
 main course of his bounty was directed towards New 
 England, and particularly to Harvard College." 
 
 There were reasons why he should not have felt 
 favorably disposed towards Harvard. He was a 
 Baptist a member of a sect that was abhorred 
 by some of the colleg-e authorities and disliked by 
 most of them. Hollis was well aware of the un- 
 friendly attitude that prevailed in New England 
 towards members of his denomination, and gave 
 the college much wise advice as well as books and 
 money. In making a gift to the library he wrote: 
 " If there happen to be some books not quite ortho- 
 dox, in search after truth with an honest design, 
 don't be afraid of them. . . . ' Thus saith Aristotle,' 
 ' Thus saith Calvin,' will not now pass for proof in 
 our London disputations." The largest settle- 
 
 50
 
 LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH 
 
 ments of Baptists were in Pennsylvania and New 
 Jersey. " If any from those parts," he urged, 
 " should now or hereafter make application to your 
 college, I beseech the College to show kindness to 
 such, and stretch their charity a little. It is what I 
 wish the Baptists to do, though I have no great ex- 
 pectation." 
 
 The New England mind of the period was, how- 
 ever, not capable of entertaining tolerant views or 
 even of appreciating generosity of nature as well as 
 of purse. When Hollis, among his other bene- 
 factions, founded a professorship of divinity, which 
 he expressly stipulated was to be non-sectarian, the 
 Overseers took measures of a devious nature to 
 frustrate his design and to exclude Baptists from 
 ever occupying the chair that he had established. 
 He saw clearly enough the object at which they 
 aimed and which they tried by tortuous subter- 
 fuges to conceal, and contented himself with ad- 
 ministering a mild reproof. 
 
 Even after such treatment at the hands of his 
 beneficiaries, Hollis continued to assist the college. 
 He had confidence in Leverett, and in Benjamin 
 Colman, with whom he continued to carry on an 
 interesting and pithy correspondence. Indeed, there 
 is no one among the early Harvard worthies who 
 
 51
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 appears through what is recorded and through his 
 own written words in a more attractive light than 
 this elderly patron overseas. When, on the acces- 
 sion of George II, the Corporation felt moved to 
 send an address to the king, brimming with pious 
 expressions and assurances, they asked Thomas 
 Hollis to have it presented. He wrote in reply: 
 
 " I have showed your address to sundry persons, 
 who say your compliments to our court now are 
 fifty if not one hundred years too ancient for our 
 present polite style and court. . . . What have 
 courts to do to study Old Testament phrases and 
 prophecies? " 
 
 A request for his portrait drew a slightly satirical 
 response. He wrote to Colman: 
 
 " I have been prevailed on at your instance to 
 sit the first time for my picture, a present to your 
 Hall. I doubt not that they are pleased with my 
 monies, but I have some reason to think that some 
 among you will not be pleased to see the shade of a 
 Baptist hung there, unless you get a previous 
 order to admit it, and forbidding any indecencies 
 to it." 
 
 Eventually he sent his " shade " and wrote: 
 
 " Perhaps some among you will be pleased with 
 the picture for the painter's performance, though 
 
 52
 
 LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH 
 
 others may secretly despise it because of the particu- 
 lar principle of the original." 
 
 A kindly, modest, generous gentleman was Thomas 
 Hollis; he shines all the brighter by contrast with 
 the Mathers of the time. And his son and his son's 
 sons inherited his friendship for Harvard College 
 and his generous disposition. 
 
 Upon Leverett's death in 1724, the Corporation 
 chose the Rev. Joseph Sewall to succeed him. Cot- 
 ton Mather, who had lived on in expectancy, was 
 moved to a fresh outburst of wrath: 
 
 " I am informed that yesterday the Six men who 
 call themselves the Corporation of the College met 
 and, contrary to the epidemical expectation of the 
 country, chose a modest young man, of whose piety 
 (and little else) everyone gives a laudable character. 
 
 " I always foretold these two things of the Cor- 
 poration: first, that if it were possible for them to 
 steer clear of me, they will do so; secondly, that if 
 it were possible for them to act foolishly, they will 
 do so. 
 
 ' The perpetual envy with which my essays to 
 serve the Kingdom of God are treated among them, 
 and the dread that Satan has of my beating up his 
 quarters at the College led me into the former senti- 
 ment; the marvellous indiscretion with which the 
 
 53
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 affairs of the College are managed led me into the 
 latter." 
 
 Sewall felt unable to accept so ill-paid an office, 
 and Cotton Mather's hopes of a chance to beat up 
 Satan's quarters in the college were roused once 
 more. But with the election of Benjamin Colman 
 they were finally extinguished; in a last outcry of 
 disgust, Mather exhibited his immeasurable ego- 
 tism: 
 
 " The Corporation of the miserable College do 
 again on a fresh opportunity treat me with their 
 accustomed indignity." 
 
 Simply because they had failed to make him 
 president! 
 
 Colman followed Sewall's example and declared 
 that he could not undertake the office unless a 
 proper salary was fixed by the General Court. In 
 the depreciated state of the currency, the president's 
 salary of one hundred and fifty pounds a year was, 
 as Leverett had found, too little to provide a living. 
 But the General Court refused to have its hand 
 forced, and Colman therefore declined the election. 
 
 Next the Rev. Benjamin Wadsworth was offered 
 the honor, and accepted it. Thereupon the General 
 Court, which had not been amenable to suggestion 
 or entreaty, did bestir itself to make some better 
 
 54
 
 Harvard Hall
 
 LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH 
 
 provision for the president. It undertook to build 
 a house for him of which the present Wads worth 
 House is a survival and amplification and it in- 
 creased his salary to four hundred pounds a year. 
 Unfortunately the continued depreciation of the 
 currency was proportionate to this increase, so 
 that the measures for the president's relief were not 
 particularly effective. The house that was begun 
 for him was not finished; Wadsworth had to move 
 into it when it was incomplete. 
 
 The thirteen years of Wadsworth's administra- 
 tion were not especially noteworthy. Before this 
 time the tutors had acted in all matters of discipline 
 on their own personal authority; each man had 
 dealt with each individual case as it came before 
 him. Under Wadsworth, however, they began to 
 administer discipline and punishment as a board^ 
 no longer individually. The change was necessitated 
 by the growing disorders of the time. A reaction 
 from the strict Puritanism of the earlier years was 
 taking place, and the students were making the most 
 of it. The Commencements were more lively than 
 ever, and more than ever disturbing to the sober 
 element of the community. 
 
 In 1734 the president and fellows of the Corpora- 
 tion issued some severe regulations in an attempt 
 
 55
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 to enforce upon the undergraduates a more religious 
 and studious life. 
 
 " All the scholars shall, at sunset in the evening 
 preceding the Lord's Day, retire to their chambers 
 and not unnecessarily leave them; and all dis- 
 orders on said evening shall be punished as viola- 
 tions of the Sabbath are. . . . And whosoever shall 
 profane said day the Sabbath by unnecessary 
 business, or visiting, walking on the Common, or in 
 the streets or fields, in the town of Cambridge, or 
 by any sort of diversion before sunset, or that in 
 the evening of the Lord's Day shall behave himself 
 disorderly, or any way unbecoming the season, shall 
 be fined not exceeding ten shillings. 
 
 " That the scholars may furnish themselves with 
 useful learning, they shall keep in their respective 
 chambers, and diligently follow their studies; ex- 
 cept half an hour at breakfast; at dinner from 
 twelve to two; and after evening prayers till nine 
 of the clock. To that end, the Tutors shall fre- 
 quently visit their chambers after nine o'clock in 
 the evening and at other studying times, to quicken 
 them to their business." 
 
 It does not seem as if, under such a system of 
 vigilance and visitation, the students could fall 
 into very dissolute ways. But a few years later, 
 
 56
 
 LEVERETT AND WADSWORTH 
 
 George Whitefield, an evangelist who was stirring 
 up New England, visited Harvard College and ex- 
 pressed his displeasure at the dissipated habits of 
 the young men. He declared that the conditions 
 at Oxford were no worse a charge so damaging 
 that it greatly disturbed and incensed the college 
 authorities. 
 
 57
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 IN 1737 the Reverend Edward Holyoke of 
 Marblehead was elected to succeed Wadsworth 
 and entered upon an administration of more than 
 thirty years. During that period, stirring events 
 were taking place in the world outside which af- 
 fected the tranquillity of the college. In 1745 and 
 1756 the wars with France drew to the frontier 
 many young men who would otherwise have been 
 at their books. The provincial debt created by these 
 wars was enormous and resulted as usual in an issue 
 of paper money and general financial embarrass- 
 ment. These causes reduced the number of students 
 at Harvard; moreover, sectarian jealousies were 
 instrumental in affecting temporarily the pros- 
 perity of the college. And finally, at the end of 
 Holyoke's administration, came the preliminary 
 rumblings of the Revolution. 
 
 One of the first matters that Holyoke had to deal 
 with was the misconduct of Isaac Greenwood, the 
 
 58
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 first Hollis professor of mathematics. Hollis, who 
 had known Greenwood in England, was not en- 
 thusiastic over his appointment, but refrained 
 from prejudicing the Corporation against him. Be- 
 fore long Greenwood's intemperate habits were 
 subjecting him to repeated admonishment, and at 
 last, in 1738, since all his efforts to reform proved 
 vain, he was dismissed from the college. Shortly 
 afterwards the same fate overtook Nathan Prince, 
 who was not only a tutor, but also a member of 
 the Corporation. 
 
 Possibly this behavior on the part of two members 
 of the government was significant of a general lax- 
 ness of conduct. At any rate, in 1740 a committee 
 was appointed to inquire into the state of the college. 
 From time to time this committee brought in cer- 
 tain recommendations, and pointed out certain 
 evils, as " the costly habits of many of the scholars, 
 their wearing gold or silver lace, or brocades, silk 
 nightgowns, etc., as tending to discourage persons 
 from giving their children a college education." 
 
 The practises of the seniors on the day when they 
 met to choose their class officers drew a word of 
 admonition which carried the wisdom of Dogberry: 
 " It is usual for each scholar to bring a bottle of 
 wine with him, which practice the Committee ap- 
 
 59
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 prebend has a natural tendency to produce dis- 
 orders." 
 
 At the same time, the authorities showed a dis- 
 position to modify the severity of some of the old 
 laws. Thus, in 1759, it was voted that " it shall be 
 no offence if any scholar shall, at Commencement, 
 make and entertain guests at his chamber with 
 punch." Two years later a still further concession 
 was made: the limitation, " at Commencement," 
 was removed, and it was announced that the schol- 
 ars might " in a sober manner " entertain strangers 
 and each other with punch, " which, as it is 
 now usually made, is no intoxicating liquor." 
 
 This was certainly a naive admission, and like- 
 wise worthy of Dogberry; it cannot be supposed 
 that the undergraduates of Harvard have ever had 
 a uniform and strictly temperance receipt for making 
 punch. 
 
 The fines for misconduct were as follows: 
 
 s. d. 
 
 Absence from prayers 2 
 
 Tardiness at prayers I 
 
 Absence from public worship 9 
 
 Tardiness at public worship 3 
 111 behavior at public worship, not 
 
 exceeding 9 
 
 Neglect to repeat the sermon 9 
 
 60
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 s. d. 
 
 Absence from professor's public 
 
 lecture 4 
 
 Profanation of the Lord's Day, not 
 
 exceeding 3 
 
 Tarrying out of town without leave, 
 
 not exceeding I 3 per diem. 
 
 Going out of college without proper 
 
 garb, not exceeding 6 
 
 Frequenting taverns, not exceeding I 6 
 Profane cursing, not exceeding 2 6 
 
 Playing cards, not exceeding 5 
 
 Selling and exchanging without 
 
 leave I 6 
 
 Lying, not exceeding I 6 
 
 Drunkenness, not exceeding I 6 
 
 Going upon the top of the college I 6 
 Tumultuous noises I 6 
 
 " 2d offence 3 
 
 Refusing to give evidence 3 
 
 Rudeness at meals I 
 
 Keeping guns, and going skating I 
 Fighting, or hurting persons, not 
 
 exceeding I 6 
 
 Card-playing was apparently regarded as more 
 than three times as bad as lying, profanity was 
 nearly twice as bad as drunkenness, and fighting 
 was only half as objectionable to the authorities 
 as refusing to " peach " on one's friends. 
 
 In spite of the not altogether prosperous condi- 
 tion of the college, several buildings were added 
 
 61
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 during Holyoke's administration. In 1737 Madam 
 Holden, the widow of a London merchant, and her 
 daughters gave four hundred pounds for the build- 
 ing of the chapel which bears Holden's name. It 
 was soon devoted to other purposes than those of 
 worship. In 1762 the Overseers presented a peti- 
 tion to the General Court, pointing out that nearly 
 a hundred of the undergraduates had to take rooms 
 in private houses, and asking for an appropriation 
 to build a new dormitory. Massachusetts Hall 
 could receive only sixty-four students; a building 
 at least one-third larger than that was therefore 
 required. In accordance with this petition, the 
 House granted two thousand pounds out of the 
 public treasury, and the building thus erected was 
 named Hollis Hall. 
 
 Shortly after performing this friendly and gener- 
 ous act, the General Court was driven out of Boston 
 by an epidemic of smallpox. On January 16, 1764, 
 it was adjourned to Cambridge and went into session 
 in the old Harvard Hall. The college library, on the 
 second floor of the building, was occupied by the 
 governor and the council; the hall below by the 
 representatives. On the night of January 24 fire 
 destroyed the building with all its contents li- 
 brary, philosophical apparatus, and personal be- 
 
 62
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 * 
 
 longings. How important a calamity this was may 
 be inferred from the account given in the Massachu- 
 setts Gazette for February 2, 1764. 
 
 " Cambridge, January 25, 1764. 
 " Last night Harvard College suffered the most 
 ruinous loss it ever met with since its foundation. 
 In the middle of a very tempestuous night, a severe 
 cold storm of snow, attended with high wind, we 
 were awakened by the alarm of fire. Harvard Hall, 
 the only one of our ancient buildings which still 
 remained, and the repository of our most valuable 
 treasures, the public Library and Philosophical Ap- 
 paratus, was seen in flames. As it was a time of va- 
 cation, in which the students were all dispersed, not 
 a single person was left in any of the Colleges, 
 except two or three in that part of Massachusetts 
 most distant from Harvard, where the fire could 
 not be perceived till the whole surrounding air be- 
 gan to be illuminated by it. When it was discovered 
 from the t'own, it had risen to a degree of violence 
 that defied all opposition. It is conjectured to have 
 begun in a beam under the hearth in the Library, 
 where a fire had been kept for the use of the General 
 Court, now residing and sitting here, by reason of 
 the smallpox at Boston; from thence it burst out into 
 
 63
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the Library. The books easily submitted to the 
 fury of the flame, which, with a rapid and irresist- 
 ible progress, made its way into the apparatus 
 chamber, and spread through the whole building. 
 In a very short time this venerable monument of 
 the piety of our ancestors was turned into a heap 
 of ruins. The other Colleges, Stoughton Hall and 
 Massachusetts Hall, were in the utmost hazard of 
 sharing the same fate. The wind driving the fla- 
 ming cinders directly upon their roofs, they blazed 
 out several times in different places; nor could they 
 have been saved by all the help the town could 
 offer, had it not been for the assistance of the gentle- 
 men of the General Court, among whom his Excel- 
 lency the Governor was very active; who, notwith- 
 standing the extreme rigor of the season, exerted 
 themselves in supplying the town engine with 
 water, which they were obliged to fetch at last from 
 a distance, two of the College pumps being then 
 rendered useless. Even the new and beautiful 
 Hollis Hall, though it was on the windward side, 
 hardly escaped. It stood so near to Harvard that 
 the flames actually seized it, and, if they had not 
 been immediately suppressed, must have carried it. 
 " But by the blessing of God on the vigorous 
 efforts of the assistants, the ruin was confined to 
 
 64
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 Harvard Hall; and there, besides the destruction 
 of the private property of those who had chambers 
 in it, the public loss is very great, perhaps irrepa- 
 rable. The Library and the apparatus, which for 
 many years had been growing, and were now judged 
 to be the best furnished in America are annihi- 
 lated." 
 
 The library thus destroyed contained five thou- 
 sand volumes. Of the three hundred and twenty that 
 John Harvard had bequeathed, only one was saved 
 " The Christian Warfare Against the Devill, 
 World, and Flesh." The intrinsic value of the 
 books and the " philosophical apparatus " has 
 been many times replaced, but we must even now 
 feel a sentimental regret for the loss of practically 
 all that identified the college with the personality 
 of its earliest benefactor. 
 
 Prompted possibly by some sense of responsibility 
 for the disaster, the General Court at once voted 
 a sum of money for rebuilding. The Overseers 
 appointed a Committee of Correspondence to 
 obtain contributions from England as well as from 
 the colonies for the purchase of books. Subscrip- 
 tions were immediate and liberal. Thomas Hollis, 
 a great-nephew of the first benefactor of that name, 
 was the largest contributor. 
 
 65
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Harvard Hall, rebuilt, was finished in 1766; it 
 stands on the site of the burned building. The 
 library occupied the western half of the upper 
 story; the eastern half was divided into rooms for 
 the philosophical department and for a museum 
 of natural and artificial curiosities. On the lower 
 floor, the eastern half was used for commons, the 
 western for prayers. The total cost of the build- 
 ing was about sixty-nine hundred pounds. 
 
 Massachusetts Hall and Hollis Hall soon proved 
 inadequate to house all the students. Therefore, in 
 June, 1765, the General Court passed an act " for 
 raising by Lottery the sum of 3200 pounds, for build- 
 ing another Hall for the Students of Harvard College 
 to dwell in." This was the first attempt to secure 
 money for the institution by a method which became 
 for some years popular. The preamble to the act 
 stated " that the buildings belonging to Harvard Col- 
 lege are greatly insufficient for lodging the Students 
 of the said College, and will become much more so 
 when Stoughton Hall shall be pulled down, as by its 
 present ruinous state it appears it soon must be. 
 And whereas there is no Fund for erecting such 
 Buildings, and considering the great Expense which 
 the General Court has lately been at in building 
 Hollis Hall, and also in rebuilding Harvard College, 
 
 66
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 it cannot be expected that any further provision for 
 the College should be made out of the Public Treas- 
 ury; so that no other resort is left but to private 
 Benefactions, which it is conceived will be best 
 excited by means of a Lottery." 
 
 Shares in this attractive enterprise were readily 
 disposed of, and in a short time the proceeds enabled 
 the college to build another brick dormitory near 
 Hollis Hall. By the time that it was finished, the 
 dilapidated old Stoughton Hall was ready to be 
 demolished, and the new building received the old 
 building's name. 
 
 Some of the more important text-books used in 
 the courses at this time were Virgil's ^Eneid, Cicero's 
 Orations, Homer, the Greek Testament, Euclid's 
 Geometry, Watts's Logic, and Locke's " On the 
 Human Understanding." The committee on the 
 state of the college made various recommendations 
 for broadening the instruction; the most important 
 was that the tutors, instead of teaching more than 
 one subject or group of subjects, should henceforth 
 specialize in one. 
 
 On account of the unsatisfactory food to be had 
 at the commons, many of the students preferred 
 to board at private houses. This was displeasing 
 to the Overseers, who in 1757 suggested to the Cor- 
 
 67
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 poration " that it would very much contribute 
 to the health of that society," - the undergrad- 
 uates, " facilitate their studies, and prevent ex- 
 travagant expense, if the scholars were restrained 
 from dieting in private families." They recom- 
 mended, as a concession and inducement, " that 
 there should be pudding three times a week, and 
 on those days their meat should be lessened." 
 Not until 1765, however, did the Corporation 
 impose these recommendations upon the college. 
 
 The students did not submit to them meekly. 
 There were " great disorders, tending to subvert 
 all government." That delightful historian, Ben- 
 jamin Peirce, writing some time later, yet at a 
 period when uprisings against the quality of food 
 were frequent, makes an impassioned defence of 
 the commons: "Their beneficial effects are ex- 
 tended beyond the walls of the College. To a great 
 degree, the Commons, it is believed, regulate the 
 price and quality of board even in private families, 
 and thus secure in the town a general style of living 
 at once economical and favorable to health and to 
 study. But the very circumstance which is their 
 chief recommendation is the occasion also of all 
 the odium which they have to encounter; that 
 simplicity which makes the fare cheap and whole- 
 
 68
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 some and philosophical renders it also unsatisfactory 
 to dainty palates; and the occasional appearance 
 of some unlucky meat or other food is a signal for 
 a general outcry against the provisions." 
 
 In 1746 " breakfast was two sizings of bread and 
 a cue of beer," and " evening Commons were a 
 Pye." " As to the Commons," wrote an old 
 gentleman of the class of 1759, " there were in the 
 morning none while I was in College " the stu- 
 dents had then formed the habit of breakfasting 
 at private houses. " At dinner we had, of rather 
 ordinary quality, a sufficiency of meat of some kind, 
 either baked or boiled; and at supper we had either 
 a pint of milk and half a biscuit, or a meat pye or 
 some other kind. We were allowed at dinner a cue 
 of beer, which was a half-pint, and a sizing of bread, 
 which I cannot describe to you. It was quite suf- 
 ficient for one dinner." Each student carried to the 
 dining-room his own knife and fork, and when he 
 had dined wiped them on the table-cloth. In 1764 
 it was decided " that it would be much for the 
 interest of the Scholars to be prevented breakfast- 
 ing in the townspeople's houses; " and breakfast 
 at the commons was made compulsory. 
 
 About one adjunct to the commons, Peirce has 
 a dithyrambic passage: "The Buttery removed all 
 
 69
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 just occasion for resorting to the different marts of 
 luxury, intemperance, and ruin. This was a kind 
 of supplement to the Commons, and offered for 
 sale to the Students, at a moderate advance on the 
 cost, wines, liquors, groceries, stationery, and in 
 general such articles as it was proper and necessary 
 for them to have occasionally." 
 
 That so meritorious an institution should have 
 been permitted to pass out of existence the modern 
 undergraduate must regret. The Co-operative store, 
 though filling a useful function in undergraduate 
 life, does not supply even " at a moderate advance 
 on the cost " all the essentials that were furnished 
 by the buttery, nor can it be said in any sense to 
 compete successfully with " the different marts of 
 luxury, intemperance, and ruin." 
 
 Besides fulfilling the useful purposes above de- 
 scribed, the buttery was an office where records were 
 kept of absences from the college. The students 
 of the present day would no doubt find the intro- 
 duction of a grog shop into the office of the recorder 
 delightfully incongruous, but in the middle of the 
 eighteenth century such a juxtaposition apparently 
 excited no wonder. The butler, who was a college 
 graduate and received a salary of sixty pounds a 
 year, dispensed the potables, kept the records, 
 
 70
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 rang the bell, and saw that the hall was kept clean 
 and in good order. He was bar-keeper, stationer, 
 recorder, bell-ringer and janitor, all in one. 
 
 The price of board at the commons was between 
 seven and eight shillings a week. A committee ap- 
 pointed in 1766 to investigate the disorders found 
 " that there has been great neglect in the Steward 
 in the quality of the Butter provided by him for many 
 weeks past," but that " the act of the Students in 
 leaving the Hall in a body and showing contempt of 
 the Tutors was altogether unwarrantable and of 
 most dangerous tendency." The students were 
 somewhat impressed by the committee's recom- 
 mendations and censure; but in 1768 disorders 
 again broke out. The committee reported " that 
 a combination had been entered into by a great 
 number of the students against the government; 
 that in consequence great excesses had been per- 
 petrated; that on one Saturday night brickbats 
 were thrown into the windows of Mr. Willard the 
 Tutor's room, endangering the lives of three of the 
 Tutors there assembled, and that for this audacious 
 act four Students, who were discovered to have 
 committed it, were expelled." Later, although 
 President Holyoke protested, the Corporation and" 
 Overseers reinstated them, because " many who 
 
 71
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 have been great friends and benefactors to the 
 Society have condescended to intercede in their 
 behalf." 
 
 " A Description of a Number of Tyrannical 
 Pedagogues," by a student who signed himself 
 Clementiae Amator, was published in 1769. The 
 opening invocation, 
 
 " Begin, O Muse! and let your themes be these: 
 Tutors forever should their pupils please," 
 
 expresses a perennial undergraduate sentiment. The 
 poet laments that at Harvard this is not the case* 
 
 " The tutors now instead of being free, 
 
 Humane and generous as they ought to be, 
 
 An awful distance, dictatorial, keep, 
 
 And mulcts and frowns on all their pupils heap." 
 
 Then follows the description of one: 
 
 " Before his pupils he will scowl and flout, 
 And with importance turn his chair about, 
 There strut and then display a lofty crest, 
 To strike a terror into every breast." 
 
 Another 
 
 " spits his venom with sarcastick wit 
 And grins in laughter at the object hit." 
 
 And of yet another the poet complains, 
 
 72
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 " Instead of acting with an open soul 
 He peeps unmanly into every hole, 
 And sometimes listens at his pupil's door, 
 Then runs back tiptoe as he came before." 
 
 Finally the lover of mercy exhorts his brethren: 
 
 " I would advise the sons of Harvard then 
 To let them know that they are sons of men, 
 Not brutes, as they would to the world display 
 By their ill usage and unmanly way; 
 Then cast contempt upon the demigods, 
 Their frowns, their mulcts, their favors and their 
 nods." 
 
 The indignant lines possibly fomented the up- 
 rising which took place when the faculty announced 
 that excuses for absence would not be received un- 
 less offered beforehand. The students met under 
 a tree which they called the Tree of Liberty, and 
 declared the faculty's rule " unconstitutional." 
 They then proceeded to smash windows and break 
 furniture; several rioters were expelled. The senior 
 class were so aggrieved at this that they asked the 
 president to transfer them to Yale in order that they 
 might get their degrees at that institution; the 
 other classes asked to be discharged. Neither re- 
 quest was granted, and at last the revolutionists 
 accepted the " unconstitutional " legislation. 
 
 73
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Some of the rules and prohibitions of the period 
 were as follows: 
 
 " No Freshman shall wear his hat in the College 
 Yard, unless it rains, hails, or snows, provided he 
 be on foot and have not both his hands full. 
 
 " No Freshman shall speak to a Senior with his 
 hat on. 
 
 " All Freshmen . . . shall be obliged to go on 
 errands for any of their Seniors, graduates or under- 
 graduates, at any time, except in studying hours, 
 or after nine o'clock in the evening. 
 
 " When any person knocks at a Freshman's 
 door except in studying time, he shall immediately 
 open the door without inquiring who is there. 
 
 " The Freshmen shall furnish batts, balls and 
 footballs for the use of the students, to be kept in 
 the Buttery. 
 
 " The Sophomores shall publish these customs to 
 the Freshmen in the Chapel, whenever ordered by 
 any in the Government of the College, at which 
 time the Freshmen are required to keep their places 
 in their seats and attend with decency to the read- 
 ing." 
 
 The class of 1798 was the first freshman class to 
 be emancipated from this condition of servitude. 
 Joseph Story, who was then in college, was one of 
 
 74
 
 The Union
 
 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 
 
 the leaders in bringing about the reform. He took 
 an unprecedented step when he invited his fag 
 into his room and made him his friend. 
 
 Harvard was not an especially democratic in- 
 stitution in those days far less so than at pres- 
 ent. Both the college authorities and the under- 
 graduates themselves showed a great regard for 
 rank; students were placed in class according to 
 the rank of their parents. " Scholars were often 
 enraged beyond bounds for their disappointment 
 in their place," writes a graduate of the period. 
 " Often it was some time before a class could settle 
 down to an acquiescence in their allotment. The 
 highest and the lowest in the class were often as- 
 certained more easily than the intermediate members 
 where there was room for uncertainty whose claim 
 was best, and where partiality no doubt was some- 
 times indulged. The higher part of the class had 
 generally the most influential friends, and they 
 commonly had the best chambers in College as- 
 signed to them. They had also a right to help 
 themselves first at table in Commons. The fresh- 
 man class was placed within six or nine months 
 after their admission. The official notice of this 
 was given by having their names written in a large 
 German text, in a handsome style, and placed in 
 
 75
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 a conspicuous part of the College Buttery, where 
 the names of the four classes of undergraduates 
 were kept suspended until they left College. If 
 a scholar was expelled, his name was taken from 
 its place; or if he was degraded which was con- 
 sidered the next highest punishment to expulsion 
 it was moved accordingly. As soon as the fresh- 
 men were apprised of their places, each one took 
 his station according to the new arrangement at 
 recitation, and at Commons, and in the Chapel, 
 and on all other occasions. And this arrangement 
 was never afterward altered either in College or in 
 the Catalogue, however the rank of the parents 
 might be varied." Fortunately this snobbish custom 
 was soon to be abolished; in 1772 the students were 
 placed in alphabetical order. 
 
 However aristocratic in its manners and cus- 
 toms Harvard College may have been at this time, 
 revolutionary ideas were in the air there as else- 
 where. Among the public disputations at the 
 Commencement of the class of 1740 we find the 
 following: 
 
 " Whether it be lawful to resist the Supream 
 Magistrate, if the Common Wealth cannot other- 
 wise be preserved. 
 
 " Affirm'd by Samuel Adams." 
 76
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 PRESIDENT HOLYOKE died in 1769; during 
 the last few months of his life the college was 
 the center of political strife and ferment. In 1768 
 the students of the senior class had unanimously 
 voted to take their degrees " in the manufactures 
 of this country," and at Commencement in July 
 they all appeared in clothes of American manu- 
 facture. The contumacy of the colony had exas- 
 perated the British government, which now pro- 
 ceeded to coercive measures. In November, 1768, 
 two British regiments of infantry and a part of a 
 regiment of artillery were landed in Boston. A 
 military guard was stationed in State Street; can- 
 non were pointed at the door of the State House. 
 The feelings of the legislature and of the people were 
 outraged; and when it became apparent that this 
 military rigor was not to be relaxed, the House of 
 Representatives declared to Governor Bernard that 
 " an armament by sea and land investing this me- 
 
 77
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 tropolis, and a military guard, with cannon pointed 
 at the very door of the State House where this 
 Assembly is held, is inconsistent with that dignity, 
 as well as that freedom, with which we have a 
 right to deliberate, consult, and determine." 
 
 The royalist governor was not particularly ac- 
 cessible to such a protest, but when it was repeated 
 in even more pressing terms, he replied that al- 
 though he had no authority to remove the troops, 
 he would immediately adjourn the legislature to 
 Cambridge. 
 
 So in May, 1769, the General Court took pos- 
 session of Harvard College, to the great excitement 
 of the students, by act of sovereign authority. 
 It went into session in Holden Chapel and remained 
 in session until after Commencement; on that 
 day the House of Representatives dined with the 
 Corporation in the college hall. In the spring of 
 this same year, the students formed a military 
 organization, which they called the Marti-Mercurian 
 Band. They held frequent drills and had a striking 
 uniform blue coats faced with white, nankeen 
 breeches, white stockings, top-boots, and cocked hats. 
 
 The Rev. Samuel Locke of Sherburn was cho- 
 sen president in December, 1769; his adminis- 
 tration was short and ineffectual. In those stirring 
 
 78
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 days, the young men at Harvard found it hard to 
 fix their attention on their books; the most de- 
 termined president and faculty probably could not 
 have curbed their restless spirit. They lived in 
 the midst of distracting and agitating influences. 
 The legislature continued to meet in the college 
 halls; in March, 1770, Lieutenant-Go vernor Hutch- 
 inson, Governor Bernard being absent in Europe, 
 prorogued the General Court from Boston to Har- 
 vard College. There it remained until the last 
 week in April. Then Hutchinson caused writs 
 to be issued convening the General Court in May 
 again at Harvard College. The Corporation now 
 protested and expressed " their deep concern at 
 the precedent, and the inconvenience already intro- 
 duced." 
 
 Indeed the undergraduates must have chafed 
 more and more at their lessons and recitations, must 
 often have shirked them and slipped into Holden 
 Chapel instead, where they might hear Samuel 
 Adams and James Otis and gaze with admiration 
 upon the resplendent and majestic figure of John 
 Hancock. The debates and the oratory of those 
 days may not have qualified the students particularly 
 for their degrees, but probably no classes since that 
 time have left Harvard with a clearer understanding 
 
 79
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 of the great contemporaneous problems or a more 
 vivid interest in the affairs of state. The Rev. 
 Andrew Eliot wrote to Thomas Hollis: 
 
 " The removal of the General Court to Cambridge 
 hinders the scholars in their studies. The young 
 gentlemen are already taken up with politics. They 
 have caught the spirit of the times. Their dec- 
 lamations and forensic disputes breathe the spirit 
 of liberty." 
 
 The protest of the Corporation did not go un- 
 heeded. Instead of exercising their sovereign 
 authority, the governor and council made a formal 
 application for the use of the college halls on the 
 day of the general election. The Corporation, " on 
 due consideration of the circumstances of the case," 
 granted the request. To show their further scru- 
 pulous regard for the rights of the college, the House 
 of Representatives, meeting on May 30, declared 
 " that they did not choose to enter the chapel of 
 the College without the concurrence of those with 
 whom the property and care of it is betrusted." In 
 reply, the Corporation at once passed a vote " sig- 
 nifying their consent to oblige the House, in such 
 a case of necessity." 
 
 The sympathies of the Corporation and the col- 
 lege were strongly with the popular cause. Never- 
 
 80
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 theless, when Hutchinson received his appointment 
 from the Crown as governor, the Corporation gave 
 a dinner in his honor at the college and congratu- 
 lated him upon his commission. Hutchinson re- 
 plied to the congratulatory address, which, he 
 said, " expresses so much piety and loyalty to the 
 King " a sentiment that the most careful reading 
 fails to detect and declared his earnest desire to 
 " encourage this ancient seat of learning." An 
 alumnus of the college, he was popular with the 
 undergraduates; on the occasion of one of his 
 visits, a choir of students sang an anthem in this 
 strain: " Lo! thus shall the man be blessed who 
 fears the Lord! For thus saith the Lord, From hence- 
 forth, behold! all nations shall call thee blessed; 
 for thy rulers shall be of thy own kindred, your 
 nobles shall be of yourselves, and thy Governor 
 shall proceed from the midst of thee." 
 
 Feeling perhaps that the courtesy which they 
 had shown Hutchinson might be misinterpreted, or 
 else repenting it and desiring to affront him, the 
 Corporation now conferred an unprecedented honor 
 on John Hancock, who, of all the patriots of the 
 day, was most obnoxious to the governor. They 
 voted formally that he " be invited to dine in the 
 Hall whenever there is a public entertainment 
 
 81
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 there, and to sit with the governors of the College." 
 Their enthusiasm for this popular hero carried 
 them further; desiring to heap honors upon him, 
 impressed by his wealth, and overlooking his prod- 
 igality, they elected him Treasurer of Harvard. A 
 more unfortunate choice they could not possibly 
 have made. 
 
 At the end of 1773, President Locke resigned, 
 and was succeeded by the Rev. Samuel Langdon 
 of Portsmouth, an ardent member of the patriot 
 party. The prevailing sentiment was so strongly 
 revolutionary that no one who held loyalist views 
 could have been considered for the presidency of 
 the college. Yet even then there were a few Tories 
 among the undergraduates, who advertised their 
 convictions and their loyalty by bringing " India 
 tea " into the commons and drinking the detested 
 stuff a practise that provoked frequent dis- 
 orders. 
 
 Immediately after the fight at Lexington, April 
 I 9i I 775> tne militia of Massachusetts and the 
 neighboring colonies began to concentrate in Cam- 
 bridge for the siege of Boston. The students were 
 obliged to leave the college and go home which 
 it may be believed under such circumstances they 
 did most unwillingly. Some of the buildings were 
 
 82
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 turned into barracks for the troops, and officers 
 were quartered in the president's house. The 
 books were removed from the library in Harvard 
 Hall to Andover. 
 
 On July 2, Washington arrived in Cambridge 
 and took command of the American Army. On 
 July 31, the Corporation of Harvard College met 
 at Fowle's Tavern in Watertown and voted that 
 since " on account of the confusion and distress of 
 the times " a public Commencement was imprac- 
 ticable, degrees should be conferred by general 
 diploma. A few weeks later the Overseers voted 
 " that the education of the scholars of Harvard 
 College cannot be carried on at Cambridge while 
 the war in which we have been forced to engage for 
 the defence of our liberties shall continue: and 
 therefore that it is necessary some other place shall 
 be speedily appointed for that purpose." Concord 
 was- chosen, and there in September the college 
 opened its temporary quarters. 
 
 Both branches of the legislature now passed a 
 vote " recommending to the Corporation and Over- 
 seers not to appoint persons as governors and in- 
 structors but such whose political principle they 
 can confide in, and also to inquire into the prin- 
 ciples of such as are now in office and dismiss those 
 
 83
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 who by their past or present conduct appear to be 
 unfriendly to the liberties and privileges of the 
 Colonies." The principles of all the officers of 
 instruction and government appeared upon in- 
 spection to be sufficiently correct. 
 
 The British troops evacuated Boston on March 
 17, 1776. On April 3 the Corporation and Over- 
 seers met at Watertown and voted that the degree 
 of LL. D. be conferred on George Washington as 
 an " expression of the gratitude of this College 
 for his eminent services in the cause of his country 
 and to this society." Washington was the first 
 person to receive the degree of LL. D. from Har- 
 vard. On the day that they passed this vote, the 
 Corporation appealed to the Council and House of 
 Representatives to make good the damages sus- 
 tained by the college during the occupation of its 
 buildings by the American army. Immediate 
 compensation was requested in order that the 
 students might return to Cambridge as soon as 
 possible. The students themselves, who were most 
 discontented with their quarters in Concord, likewise 
 petitioned the legislature. Although the question 
 of damages remained unsettled, the students reas- 
 sembled in Cambridge on June 21, 1776, after an 
 absence of about fourteen months. 
 
 84
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 After the actual outbreak of the Revolution, 
 there seems to have been in the college but one 
 British sympathizer. This individual had absented 
 himself from the college during its sojourn at Con- 
 cord; now he applied for re-admission and was 
 refused, on the ground that he " had been found 
 guilty, and imprisoned by the General Court for 
 frequent clamoring, in the most impudent, insulting 
 and abusive language, against the American Con- 
 gress, the General Court of the Colony, and others 
 who are and have been exerting themselves to save 
 the country from misery and ruin." 
 
 For nearly sixteen months after the return of the 
 college to Cambridge, the damages to the buildings 
 remained unestimated and unrepaired. In October, 
 1777, the Overseers appointed a committee to con- 
 fer with a committee of the General Court about 
 the matter; but now fresh difficulties arose. 
 
 Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga on October 
 17. His army was ordered to Cambridge, to remain 
 there until it could be transported to Europe. 
 General Heath, who had been charged with the 
 duty of providing for the troops, could not find 
 quarters for them all in Cambridge and applied 
 to the Corporation for possession of one or more 
 of the college buildings in which to house the British 
 
 85
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 officers. He also made a similar application to the 
 Council of the Province, who laid it before the Over- 
 seers. The Overseers advised the Corporation to 
 consent " that one or more buildings might be al- 
 lowed to the said officers, until they could be accom- 
 modated elsewhere, upon full security given that all 
 damages accruing to the buildings, by fire or other- 
 wise, should be repaired." 
 
 The Corporation felt that the Overseers were un- 
 duly impressed with the necessity for such measures 
 as they recommended, and consented only that 
 " the house they had lately purchased for the resi- 
 dence of the students should be employed for that 
 purpose, containing twelve rooms, upon reasonable 
 terms, if the object could not otherwise be accom- 
 plished." 
 
 This cautious offer did not satisfy General Heath 
 at all. On November 19 he peremptorily directed 
 the governors of the college to remove the students 
 and their possessions as soon as possible and to pre- 
 pare to receive the officers of Burgoyne's army. The 
 Overseers again advised the Corporation to comply 
 with his demands. Accordingly, about the first 
 of December, the students were dismissed and in- 
 structed not to return until the first Wednesday 
 in February. 
 
 86
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 Nevertheless the Corporation really did prevail 
 in the dispute. Burgoyne's troops had arrived 
 in Cambridge early in November and were quar- 
 tered in barracks on Prospect Hill and Winter Hill. 
 The officers had been lodged in private houses; 
 and the college building to which Burgoyne himself 
 and some of his staff were now transferred was that 
 house which the Corporation had offered Ap- 
 thorp House, as it is known to-day. The students 
 returned at the beginning of February, as had been 
 appointed, and in May the library was replaced 
 in Harvard Hall after an absence of more than two 
 years. 
 
 Burgoyne's army was shipped back to England 
 in November. Its presence in the little town 
 of Cambridge had been a serious embarrassment 
 to the college. The usual public Commencement 
 had to be omitted that year, owing to " the want 
 of necessary accommodations, the houses being 
 crowded with British officers." 
 
 In 1779 the convention to frame a constitution 
 for Massachusetts drew up three articles confirming 
 the ancient rights, privileges, and government of 
 Harvard College. This section in the constitution 
 of Massachusetts is entitled " The University." 
 
 Langdon resigned the presidency in 1780. He 
 
 87
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 had not been wholly successful; in a period over- 
 shadowed by such grave difficulties no man could 
 have been wholly successful. Langdon had un- 
 fortunately lost the confidence of a number of the 
 students and of some men connected with the 
 government of the college. There seems to have 
 been an intrigue against him; a meeting of the 
 three upper classes was called and a memorial to 
 the Corporation drawn up, charging Langdon with 
 " impiety, heterodoxy, unfitness for the office of 
 preacher of the Christian religion, and still more 
 for that of President." In spite of the offensively 
 canting and hypocritical cast of these resolutions, 
 they were passed unanimously a fact discredit- 
 able enough to the whole undergraduate body. 
 
 Twelve students were appointed to wait upon 
 Langdon and invite him to resign. The interview 
 took place on a Saturday; until he read the reso- 
 lutions which were now presented to him, he had been 
 quite unaware of the extent of his unpopularity. 
 He was deeply wounded. The following Monday 
 he addressed the students after morning prayers, 
 announced to them that he would resign in accord- 
 ance with their desire, and added with emotion 
 that he and his family would then be thrown desti- 
 tute on the world. The students were moved to 
 
 88
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 some degree of compassion; the three upper classes 
 held another meeting, rescinded the resolutions 
 that had reflected on Langdon's piety, and stated 
 merely that they believed him to be unfit for the 
 office of president. 
 
 Langdon's subsequent career warrants the be- 
 lief that he was the victim in some measure of 
 undergraduate caprice. He became pastor of a 
 church near Portsmouth, was chosen in 1788 a 
 delegate to the state convention, and played an in- 
 fluential part in bringing about the acceptance of 
 the Federal Constitution. 
 
 The embarrassments of Harvard during the 
 Revolution were greatly increased by the conduct 
 of the treasurer, John Hancock. An aristocrat of 
 wealth and boundless " patriotism," he was the 
 most popular man in Massachusetts; his election 
 to the office of treasurer in 1773 was thought to be 
 a glorious stroke of policy on the part of the Har- 
 vard authorities. He had made over to the college 
 five hundred pounds from his uncle's estate; it 
 was well known that the elder Hancock had in- 
 tended to make this gift to the college, but had 
 died without doing it. John Hancock's act in 
 carrying out the expressed desire of his uncle, whose 
 entire fortune he inherited, was extolled in the 
 
 89
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 highest terms as a mark of rare nobility; the gift 
 redounded to the credit of the nephew rather than 
 of the uncle, and no condescendingly generous rich 
 man was ever bespattered with more fulsome lauda- 
 tion. 
 
 After Hancock had held the office of treasurer 
 for about a year, during which he had persistently 
 ignored all its duties, the Corporation became uneasy. 
 From November, 1774, to April, 1775, through 
 President Langdon, they kept entreating him for 
 a statement and settlement of accounts. To most 
 of these appeals he vouchsafed no reply whatever. 
 When, however, they deferentially suggested that 
 he deliver the books and papers of the college to 
 a committee, he showed great resentment and 
 practically defied the Corporation to remove him. 
 This they did not dare to do; Harvard College 
 could not afford to incur John Hancock's displeasure; 
 his following throughout the country was altogether 
 too large and powerful. 
 
 In April, 1775, without having made the account- 
 ing that had been asked for, he went to Philadelphia. 
 There he was elected President of the Continental 
 Congress, and there he continued to ignore the ap- 
 peals of Harvard and Langdon's supplications. 
 At last the Corporation ventured to suggest in the 
 
 90
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 most delicate and flattering way possible that with 
 his vast and weighty public duties, he must find 
 the office of treasurer of the college irksome; but 
 he would not take the hint. Instead, in May, 1776, 
 he proceeded to an amazing step; he had all the 
 papers, bonds, and notes of the college brought 
 from Cambridge and delivered to him in Phila- 
 delphia. After getting these safely into his posses- 
 sion, he declined more firmly than ever to make a 
 settlement. 
 
 The Overseers then took a hand in the matter 
 and dispatched messages to him, without eliciting 
 any response. After about six months of futile 
 pleading with him, the Corporation sent a special 
 messenger to Philadelphia to bring back the papers 
 and an accounting. The messenger was successful 
 to this extent: he returned with bonds and notes 
 to the amount of sixteen thousand pounds, but he 
 had been unable to obtain any accounting or state- 
 ment of the balance that remained in the treasurer's 
 hands. In March, 1777, the Overseers advised the 
 Corporation to elect another treasurer. This put 
 the Corporation into a great flutter. They held 
 three meetings, preparing a twenty-eight page let- 
 ter to Hancock, in the hope that it would mollify 
 any resentment that he might entertain on account 
 
 91
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 of their ungraciousness, and also in the hope that 
 it might induce him to resign. This letter he never 
 answered. So, in July, 1777, the Corporation 
 screwed up their courage and elected Ebenezer 
 Storer treasurer in place of John Hancock. 
 
 This action angered Hancock so much that the 
 Corporation were quite terrified. His political 
 influence with the legislature, on whose bounty 
 the college depended for the support of its presi- 
 dent and professors, and his vindictiveness of 
 temper, made him a dangerous person to af- 
 front. Therefore the Corporation took steps to 
 conciliate him. In January, 1778, they passed a 
 vote, requesting him " to permit his portrait to be 
 drawn at the expense of the Corporation, and placed 
 in the philosophy chamber, by that of his uncle." 
 Hancock had not the graciousness to reply. 
 
 Throughout the year 1778 both Overseers and Cor- 
 poration tried all their persuasive arts on Hancock; 
 they wanted to obtain a settlement from him, and at 
 the same time not to give him further offence. In 
 February, 1779, they got to the point of threaten- 
 ing to bring suit. This drew from Hancock the 
 announcement that as soon as the General Assembly 
 should adjourn, he would settle his accounts. The 
 General Assembly adjourned, and he did not settle 
 
 92
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 his accounts. A motion in the Board of Overseers to 
 bring suit against him was rejected. As he was 
 in the height of his popularity and power, the major- 
 ity of the Board did not dare to attack him. 
 
 He was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 
 1780. The Corporation continued to pursue their 
 pusillanimous course by making a complimentary 
 address to the chief magistrate and expressing " their 
 happiness that a gentleman is placed at the head 
 of the General Court and of the Overseers who has 
 given such substantial evidence of his love of letters 
 and affection to the College by the generous and 
 repeated benefactions with which he hath endowed 
 it." If the college authorities entertained any 
 expectations that the governor's conscience would 
 be stirred by this undeserved tribute, they were 
 disappointed. In March, 1781, Hancock took his 
 seat, ex officio, as president of the Overseers, but 
 left his accounts still unsettled. 
 
 Two years later the committee on Treasurer 
 Storer's accounts had the hardihood to state at a 
 meeting over which Hancock presided that " it 
 is not yet known what sums the late Treasurer had 
 received and paid, his accounts being still unsettled." 
 Hancock was silent. Soon after that, the Overseers 
 met again, and, finding that Hancock was absent, 
 
 93
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 unanimously voted that at their next meeting they 
 should come to a final resolution respecting the 
 measures necessary to effect a settlement of the late 
 treasurer's accounts. At the next meeting Hancock 
 presided, and nobody ventured to bring up the 
 subject. 
 
 After having been elected governor five times 
 in succession, Hancock, in January, 1785, announced 
 his intention to resign which he did in February. 
 In this interval he made a statement of accounts, 
 showing that there was due from him to the college 
 ten hundred and fifty-four pounds. From that 
 time until Hancock's death in 1793, Harvard College 
 struggled vainly to get this money. Some years 
 after his death, his heirs reluctantly discharged the 
 debt, but could not be persuaded to pay interest on it. 
 
 From the foundation of the college to the year 
 1707, the payments from the public treasury to 
 those who held the office of president never exceeded 
 and probably never equalled one hundred pounds 
 a year. During Leverett's presidency, the grant 
 did not average one hundred and eighty pounds a 
 year. Wadsworth received four hundred pounds a 
 year forty pounds from the rents of Massachu- 
 setts Hall. Holyoke received uncertain annual 
 grants. 
 
 94
 
 
 
 
 Massachusetts Hall
 
 THE REVOLUTION: HARVARD IN EXILE 
 
 In 1777 the college funds were invested in Con- 
 tinental and state paper, which continued to de- 
 teriorate in value, so that by 1786 the college had 
 lost more than half its capital. 
 
 The damage done to the college buildings by the 
 American troops in 1775 was estimated at four 
 hundred and forty-eight pounds; this sum was al- 
 lowed and paid by the General Court, but in de- 
 preciated currency which was worth exactly one 
 quarter of the claim. During the Revolutionary 
 period, the president derived his support from the 
 rents of Massachusetts Hall now sixty pounds - 
 from an annual grant of two hundred pounds from 
 the General Court, and from fees; his total in- 
 come was about three hundred pounds. Each pro- 
 fessor received about two hundred pounds annually. 
 
 The Reverend Joseph Willard was elected presi- 
 dent in 1781. More than eighteen months elapsed 
 after his inauguration, and no grant was made either 
 to him or to the professors, who by that time were 
 in serious financial difficulties. The Corporation 
 appealed then to the legislature, which granted the 
 president one hundred and fifty pounds and the 
 professors about one hundred pounds each, but 
 intimated that such patronage of the college must 
 soon cease. This grant by no means relieved the 
 
 95
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 professors from all financial embarrassment; the 
 Corporation therefore made loans to them, in 
 the expectation of being reimbursed by the legis- 
 lature. For two years the Corporation continued 
 to make loans to its needy officers; then the legis- 
 lature made its last grant. By 1792 the loans 
 amounted to three thousand pounds. As the State 
 was then more prosperous, the Corporation ap- 
 pealed to the General Court for indemnification. 
 The General Court ignored the appeal, and the 
 Corporation cancelled the indebtedness of the 
 professors and submitted to the loss. During all 
 this period the wise judgment of the treasurer, 
 Ebenezer Storer, and of James Bowdoin and John 
 Lowell, two members of the Corporation, served 
 Harvard well, and together with gifts from with- 
 out, enabled her to restore her shattered fortunes.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT 
 
 THE success of the patriot cause greatly im- 
 proved the financial standing of Harvard 
 College. The funds of the college had been invested 
 chiefly in Continental and Massachusetts certifi- 
 cates; the life of the college had been virtually 
 pledged to the struggle for independence. In 
 1793 the appreciation in the securities of the college 
 was such that its total endowment amounted to 
 one hundred and eighty thousand dollars as con- 
 trasted with an endowment of about eighty thou- 
 sand dollars, at the beginning of the Revolutionary 
 War. By 1800 the endowment had been raised to 
 nearly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. 
 The college no longer needed to appeal to the State 
 for regular support; it had entered upon the era of 
 prosperity which has continued and increased to the 
 present day. 
 
 Medical professorships the foundation of the 
 Medical School were established in 1782. Not 
 
 97
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 until 1814, however, was any other special pro- 
 vision made for the students of medicine. . Then 
 Holden Chapel, which had already been put to 
 many varied and temporal uses, was set apart for 
 medical lectures; " and costly wax preparations 
 were purchased to supersede the necessity of dis- 
 secting human subjects." 
 
 The Phi Beta Kappa Society, which was founded 
 at William and Mary College in Virginia, was es- 
 tablished at Harvard in 1781. Its objects were 
 " the promotion of literature and friendly inter- 
 course among scholars." Worthy as such a purpose 
 might appear, it did not win universal commenda- 
 tion, and a number of students presented a petition 
 to the authorities, complaining against the society. 
 A committee of Overseers, headed by John Hancock, 
 proceeded to investigate, and reported that " there 
 is an institution in the University, with the nature 
 of which the Government is not acquainted, which 
 tends to make a discrimination among the students." 
 This report was not acted upon; and the scholarly 
 society was permitted to survive. 
 
 In 1786, to lessen the expense of dress, a uniform 
 was prescribed, the color and form of which were 
 minutely set forth. The classes were distinguished 
 by means of frogs on the cuffs and button-holes; 
 
 98
 
 THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT 
 
 silk was prohibited, and home manufactures were 
 recommended. The idea was unpopular and had 
 to be enforced with severe penalties; in 1797 it had 
 become so obnoxious and difficult of enforcement 
 that it was radically modified, and soon abandoned. 
 
 Washington visited the college in 1790; no pic- 
 turesque account of the occasion is preserved. He 
 received an address from the Corporation and in 
 reply expressed his hope that " the Muses may long 
 enjoy a tranquil residence within the walls of this 
 University." 
 
 From 1789 to 1793, Number 8, Hollis Hall, was 
 occupied by Charles Angier, concerning whom Mr. 
 John Holmes, the too little known brother of Dr. 
 Holmes, has a pleasing passage: 
 
 " He conceived the grand idea of a perpetual 
 entertainment and a standing invitation. The 
 legend says, ' His table was always supplied with 
 wine, brandy, and crackers, of which his friends 
 were at liberty to partake at any time.' We take 
 upon us, in the absence of historical evidence, to 
 vouch for the constancy of Mr. Angier's friends. 
 No better goal of pilgrimage for a graduate of con- 
 vivial turn can be imagined. The shrine is gone, 
 but the flavor of a transcendent hospitality will 
 always pervade Number 8." 
 
 99
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Joseph Story and William Elleiy Channing were 
 members of the class of 1798, and through their 
 eyes we have been given a glimpse of the college 
 life of the time. Amusements, books, resources 
 were few. " Two ships only plied as regular packets 
 between Boston and London, one in the spring and 
 one in the autumn, and their arrival was an era in 
 our college life. They brought books and periodi- 
 cals from England." 
 
 The social life of the undergraduates was re- 
 stricted: " different classes were almost strangers 
 to each other. The students had no connection 
 whatever with the inhabitants of Cambridge by 
 private social visits. There was none between the 
 families of the president and professors of the Col- 
 lege and the students. ... A free and easy inter- 
 course with them (the professors) would have been 
 thought somewhat obtrusive on one side and on the 
 other would have exposed the student to the im- 
 putation of being what in technical language was 
 called a ' fisherman' - - a rank and noxious char- 
 acter in college annals. . . . Invitations to social 
 parties in Boston rarely extended to college circles." 
 
 Yet a little anecdote has come down to show that 
 the professors of those days could be kindly and 
 human. Washington Allston, who was then an 
 
 100
 
 THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT 
 
 undergraduate, was as clever at mathematics as 
 he was with his pencil, and at his room Channing 
 stopped one day to get help on a problem that 
 puzzled him. Allston furnished him with the solu- 
 tion, and Channing was so amused by it that he 
 audaciously presented it at the recitation. " It 
 consisted of pyramids of figures heaped upon one 
 another's shoulders in various attitudes, each of 
 which was a slightly caricatured portrait of the 
 professors and tutors." 
 
 It is not quite clear how even the accomplished 
 Allston could give a portrait value to mathematical 
 symbols, but we must take the chronicler's word for 
 it, and for the fact that the professor laughed 
 heartily over the caricature and permitted the class 
 to share his amusement. 
 
 Channing and Story were both members of the 
 Speaking Club afterwards called the Institute 
 of 1770, under which name it still exists. The prin- 
 cipal aim of this society at that time was improve- 
 ment in elocution and oratory. The members were 
 chosen from the sophomore and junior classes, 
 twelve or fifteen from each. They met in the evening 
 " at some retired room," and took turns in de- 
 claiming. Each orator, after his performance, was 
 subjected to frank criticism. 
 
 101
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 The Hasty Pudding Club, which was organized 
 in 1795 with about twenty members from the junior 
 class, was a literary society, and admission to it 
 was partly on a. basis of scholarship. Meetings were 
 held on Saturday evenings; the members ate hasty 
 pudding and molasses and closed the exercises by 
 singing a hymn. The Porcellian Club, which had 
 come into existence a few years earlier, was from the 
 beginning " of a more luxurious and convivial cast." 
 
 Story writes that in 1798 " badges of loyalty to 
 our own government and of hatred to France were 
 everywhere worn in New England, and the cockade 
 was a signal of patriotic devotion to ' Adams and 
 liberty.' It was impossible that the academical 
 walls could escape the common contagion." One 
 hundred and seventy Harvard students practi- 
 cally the entire undergraduate body offered an 
 address to President Adams, which was drawn up by 
 Channing and began as follows: 
 
 " Sir: We flatter ourselves you will not be dis- 
 pleased at hearing that the walls of your native 
 seminary are now inhabited by youth possessing 
 sentiments congenial with your own." It ended with 
 the solemn offer of " the unwasted ardor and un- 
 impaired energies of our youth to the service of our 
 country." 
 
 102
 
 THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT 
 
 Shortly after composing this impassioned ad- 
 dress, Channing was chosen to give at Commence- 
 ment an oration on " The Present Age." The sub- 
 ject appealed to his excited soul; but when the 
 president told him that in treating it he must avoid 
 all political discussion, Channing felt outraged, and 
 declared that under such conditions he would de- 
 liver no oration even though the refusal should 
 cost him his degree. His incensed and sympathetic 
 classmates applauded his determination. 
 
 " I could join you, my friend," wrote one of them, 
 " in offering an unfeigned tear to the manes of 
 those joys which are forever fled; but indignation 
 has dried up the source from which that tear must 
 flow. The government of College have completed 
 the climax of their despotism. They have obtained 
 an arret, which from its features I could swear is 
 the offspring of the French Directory. Although 
 they pretend to be firm friends to American liberty 
 and independence, their embargo on politics, which 
 has subjected you to so many inconveniences, is 
 strong proof to me that they are Jacobins, or at 
 best pretended patriots, who have not courage to 
 defend the rights of their country. 
 
 " William, should you be deprived of a degree 
 for not performing at Commencement, every friend 
 
 103
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 of liberty must consider it as a glorious sacrifice 
 on the altar of your country." 
 
 President Willard allowed the ferment to go on 
 for a fortnight; then he sent for Channing and in a 
 conciliatory spirit made concessions that were suffi- 
 cient to placate the proud young orator. At the 
 same time, Channing was not permitted to express 
 himself as freely as he wished. The restriction 
 weighed so heavily on him that towards the close 
 of his oration he glanced towards President Willard 
 and then, turning to the audience, exclaimed: " But 
 that I am forbid, I could a tale unfold which would 
 harrow up your souls!" This melodramatic out- 
 burst was received with " unbounded applause; " 
 and after he left the stage, the audience cheered 
 him for many minutes. 
 
 " The students who boarded in Commons," wrote 
 Professor Sidney Willard of the class of 1798, " were 
 obliged to go to the kitchen door with their bowls 
 or pitchers for their suppers, where they received 
 their modicum of milk or chocolate in their vessel, 
 held in one hand, and their piece of bread in the 
 other, and repaired to their rooms to take their 
 solitary repast. There were suspicions at times that 
 the milk was diluted by a mixture of a very common 
 tasteless fluid, which led a sagacious Yankee student 
 
 104
 
 THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT 
 
 to put the matter to the test by asking the simple 
 carrier-boy why his mother did not mix the milk 
 with warm water instead of cold. ' She does,' re- 
 plied the honest youth.' 
 
 There were more harmful adulterations than 
 this. In 1791? in order to prevent an examination 
 from being held, some students poured a quantity 
 of tartar emetic into the kitchen boilers before 
 breakfast. Coffee was made from the water in 
 the boilers, and at breakfast practically every one 
 was taken violently sick. The conspirators were 
 sickest of all, for they had drunk most heartily, 
 in order to divert suspicion from themselves. One 
 of them had been seen, however, while committing 
 his infamous act, others were questioned and con- 
 fessed, and finally, all were rusticated for several 
 weeks. 
 
 President Willard died in 1804; Samuel Webber 
 succeeded him. In the same year the Boylston 
 Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory was es- 
 tablished, and John Quincy Adams elected the 
 first professor. Stoughton Hall was built in 1805 
 from the proceeds of the lotteries that had been 
 conducted for a number of years; and in 1813 
 Holworthy Hall was completed, the funds for it* 
 having been raised by the same questionable meas- 
 
 105
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 ures. An article in a Boston newspaper of 1795 
 shows to what insidious practices the college au- 
 thorities resorted: 
 
 " So great is the demand for Tickets in the 2d 
 Class of Harvard College Lottery that it has be- 
 come doubtful whether there will be any to dispose 
 of, for several days previous to the 9th of April 
 next, on which day the Lottery is positively to com- 
 mence drawing. The spirit which animated the 
 first settlers of this country, to promote useful 
 knowledge, has, if possible, encreased with the 
 present generations; and this is the evidence, That 
 there is scarcely a single one in the community, 
 either male or female, who is not more or less in- 
 terested in the College Lottery. 
 
 "The lisping babe cries, ' Papa, care for me, 
 Pray buy a Ticket and in time you'll see 
 The pleasing benefit thy son will find 
 In Learning faithfully to serve mankind.' ' 
 
 Holworthy Hall derived its name from Sir Mat- 
 thew Hoi worthy, who wLh a bequest of one thou- 
 sand pounds had achieved the distinction of making 
 the largest single gift to Harvard in the seventeenth 
 century. With the building of more dormitories, 
 the need of resident officers to keep order and watch 
 over the undergraduates seemed to make itself 
 
 106
 
 THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT 
 
 felt; and in 1805 proctors came into being. In 
 the same year an even more important development 
 took place; by the election of the Rev. Henry Ware, 
 a Unitarian, to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, 
 Harvard College showed its sympathy with liberal 
 theological views and alienated the confidence and 
 support of the Calvinistic leaders. Mr. Ware was 
 a methodical gentleman; he had a sermon for 
 every Sunday of the four college years. Thus every 
 undergraduate heard every sermon in his repertory, 
 and nobody heard the same sermon twice. Under 
 Mr. Ware's leadership, Harvard became a distinct- 
 ively Unitarian college and did not alter its char- 
 acter in this respect for more than half a century. 
 The Rev. John Thornton Kirkland succeeded 
 President Webber in 1810. He was the son of a 
 missionary to the Oneida Indians; he had entered 
 college at the age of fifteen, but withdrew the next 
 year to enlist in the army raised to suppress Shays' 
 Rebellion. Of President Kirkland, Lowell has 
 given an attractive picture: "This life was good 
 enough for him, and the next not too good. The 
 gentlemanlike pervaded even his prayers. His were 
 not the manners of a man of the world, nor of a 
 man of the other world either; but both met in him 
 to balance each other in a beautiful equilibrium. 
 
 107
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Praying, he leaned forward on the pulpit cushion, 
 as for conversation, and seemed to feel himself - 
 without irreverence on terms of friendly but 
 courteous familiarity with heaven." 
 
 He was a plump, cheery, pleasant-faced gentle- 
 man. Prescott, writing of the oral entrance ex- 
 aminations', which terrified him. records gratefully 
 the fact that President Kirkland sent in to the 
 candidates a " good dish of pears " and treated 
 them " very much like gentlemen." He was some- 
 thing of a wit, and one at least of his aphorisms, 
 which has the Johnsonian flavor, has earned its 
 place in the list of familiar quotations: "The chief 
 value of statistics is to confute other statistics." 
 
 Lowell records a pleasant anecdote of him: 
 " Hearing that Porter's flip which was exemplary 
 had too great an attraction for the collegians, 
 he resolved to investigate the matter himself. 
 Accordingly, entering the old inn one day, he called 
 for a mug of it, and having drunk it, said, ' And so, 
 Mr. Porter, the young gentlemen come to drink your 
 flip, do they?' 'Yes, sir sometimes.' 'Ah, 
 well, I should think they would. Good day, Mr. 
 Porter,' and departed, saying nothing more; for he 
 always wisely allowed for the existence of a certain 
 amount of human nature in ingenuous youth." 
 
 108
 
 THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT 
 
 There seems little doubt that potations among 
 the college youths were both general and generous. 
 Lowell tells of the Harvard Washington Corps, - 
 the successor of the Marti-Mercurian Band, - 
 " whose gyrating banner, inscribed Tarn Marti 
 fjuam Mercurio, on the evening of training-days, 
 was an accurate dynamometer of Willard's punch 
 or Porter's flip. It was they who, after being royally 
 entertained by a maiden lady of the town, entered 
 in their orderly book a vote that Miss Blank was 
 a gentleman. I see them now, returning from the 
 imminent deadly breach of the law of Rechab, 
 unable to form other than the serpentine line of 
 beauty, while their officers, brotherly rather than 
 imperious, instead of reprimanding, tearfully em- 
 braced the more eccentric wanderers from military 
 precision." 
 
 The Harvard Washington Corps was composed 
 of juniors and seniors, but officered by seniors 
 only. To hold a command was a great distinction. 
 The uniform required the officers to appear in 
 tights, and the first question asked about any candi- 
 date for promotion was: " How is the man off for 
 a leg?" 
 
 President Kirkland's administration was note- 
 worthy not only for the building of Holworthy, 
 
 100
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 University, and Divinity Halls, but also for the 
 founding of the Law School, which was established 
 in 1817. In spite of the losses that the commerce of 
 New England endured during and after the War 
 of 1812, the prosperity of Harvard College main- 
 tained a steady growth in this period. The salaries 
 of the professors were increased; the grounds sur- 
 rounding the buildings were planted with trees and 
 shrubbery; the place acquired a greater air of 
 dignity. 
 
 Edward Everett, of the class of 1811, described 
 the Yard as it was when he was a freshman, be- 
 fore the improvements made in Kirkland's adminis- 
 tration: " A low, unpainted, board fence ran along 
 the south of Massachusetts and east of Hollis 
 and Stoughton, at a distance of two or three rods, 
 forming an enclosure of the shabbiest kind. The 
 College woodyard was advantageously posted on 
 the site of University Hall; and farther to the north- 
 east stretched an indefinite extent of wild pasture 
 and whortleberry swamp, the depths of which were 
 rarely penetrated by the most adventurous fresh- 
 man." Cambridgeport was so bare of trees and 
 houses that from some windows in the college build- 
 ings the houses on Mount Vernon Street in Boston, 
 above what is now Louisburg Square, could be seen. 
 
 110
 
 U 
 
 University Hall
 
 THE PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT 
 
 Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
 the curriculum, although it had been somewhat 
 relieved of its early theological trend, remained ex- 
 traordinarily limited. It consisted of Latin, Greek, 
 mathematics, English composition, philosophy, the- 
 ology, and either Hebrew or French, as the students 
 might elect. No other subjects were studied. Ex- 
 cept for French, there was no opportunity given 
 the student to learn any modern language. There 
 was no instruction in history or in economics, in 
 chemistry, geology, or botany. But an interest 
 in all these matters was awakening in America, 
 and Harvard College could not afford to be back- 
 ward in meeting it. The influence of some pro- 
 fessors who had studied in Europe supplied also a 
 beneficial impetus from within. 
 
 In consequence, the college was soon brought 
 into more direct relation with life and with its con- 
 temporaneous problems, and the undergraduates 
 were given an opportunity to obtain at least the 
 elements of an education that was not aridly classi- 
 cal. But notwithstanding this progress, in which 
 Harvard led every other college of the period, edu- 
 cation there as elsewhere was still far from breaking 
 away from the classical convention that had been 
 imposed by the founders. 
 
 Ill
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 IN 1825 the Corporation and the Overseers passed 
 a new code of laws, under which the governing 
 body was named the " Faculty of the University," 
 and the university was divided into departments. 
 The students were given greater freedom and a 
 wider choice of studies, and were no longer required 
 to board at the commons. 
 
 This liberalizing of the college was largely the 
 work of Professor George Ticknor, a graduate of 
 Dartmouth, who had studied for some years in 
 Europe and brought to Cambridge an idea of 
 broader culture than had hitherto existed in that 
 community. But the traditions and influence of 
 foreign scholarship which he represented met with 
 opposition from the other professors, even from the 
 liberally minded president, and in Ticknor's own 
 eyes his efforts failed. After fifteen years of service 
 he resigned in discouragement; Harvard seemed to 
 him incurably provincial. As one of his friends wrote: 
 
 112
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 " it was the college of Boston and Salem, not of 
 the Commonwealth." 
 
 Nevertheless, under Kirkland, Ticknor had been 
 the pioneer; in the ensuing years, when the old 
 professors dropped off, they were usually succeeded 
 by men who had studied abroad, and who shared 
 Ticknor's views. 
 
 And Ticknor had in after years the satisfaction of 
 knowing that he had been the first to stimulate 
 Prescott in those studies which were later to bring 
 him fame as a historian. The first part of Prescott's 
 college life did not augur a brilliant career as a 
 scholar. He entered Harvard as a sophomore in 
 1811, a lively and humorous youth with a bright 
 mind, but by no means given to study. He had 
 a fondness for making resolutions and confiding 
 them to friends and acquaintances. 
 
 " These resolutions related often to the number 
 of hours, nay, the number of minutes per day to be 
 appropriated to each particular exercise or study; the 
 number of recitations and public prayers per week 
 that he would not fail to attend; the number of times 
 per week that he would not exceed in attending balls, 
 theatrical entertainments in Boston, etc. . . . He 
 would be sure not to run one minute over, however 
 he might sometimes fall short of the full time for 
 
 113
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 learning a particular lesson, which he used to con 
 with his watch before him, lest by any inadvertence 
 he might cheat himself into too much study. On 
 the same principle he was careful never to attend 
 any greater number of college exercises nor any less 
 number of evening diversions in Boston than he 
 had bargained for with himself." 
 
 In his junior year, one day after dinner at the 
 commons, there was a disturbance just as he was 
 going out of the room. He turned to see what was 
 happening and was struck in the eye by a hard piece 
 of bread. The blindness and the suffering that he 
 endured the rest of his life are well known. The 
 injury seemed to sober him and to mark a turning 
 point in his character and in his habits. His gay 
 and humorous spirit did not forsake him; he still 
 gave way to bursts of wild merriment, as when in 
 an amateur rehearsal of " Julius Caesar," at the 
 words, " thou meek and bleeding piece of earth," 
 addressed to the prostrate friend who took that part, 
 he roared with laughter and broke up the perform- 
 ance, but he worked with a determination that 
 he had never shown before. Mathematics he 
 could not grasp; so, for a time, he committed to 
 memory every prescribed demonstration every 
 symbol and letter and gave perfect recitations 
 
 114
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 daily. This laborious method became as irksome 
 as it was foolish; he went to the professor and told 
 him the truth. He explained that if necessary he 
 was willing to go on committing to memory, but 
 that there was no use in it, for he really could not 
 understand the subject at all, and that he thought 
 he could employ his time more profitably. The 
 professor good-naturedly let him off from further 
 recitations, but continued to require his presence 
 in the class-room. In his other studies Prescott 
 did so well that he was ejected into Phi Beta Kappa, 
 and at graduation he delivered a poem in Latin. 
 
 Prescott had been out of Harvard three years 
 when Emerson entered college. Emerson did not 
 cut much of a figure. Singing in the Yard was a 
 popular diversion; and early in his freshman year 
 Emerson, wishing to have "a share in this amuse- 
 ment, went to the singing-master, who said to him: 
 " Chord." 
 
 " So I made some kind of a noise," said Emerson, 
 "and the singing-master said: 'That will do, sir. 
 You need not come again.' ' 
 
 The experience seems to have been rather typical 
 of the sage's undergraduate career. One of his class- 
 mates recorded in his journal: " I went to the chapel 
 to hear Emerson's dissertation; a very good one, 
 
 115
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 but rather too long to give much pleasure to the 
 hearers." He was made class poet, but only after 
 seven others had been successively elected and had 
 successively declined the honor. His class appears 
 to have been an unusually turbulent one, even for 
 those roistering days, and Emerson doubtless felt 
 himself not in sympathy with the prevailing 
 spirit. 
 
 On November 18, 1818, his classmate, Josiah 
 Quincy, pasted a dry twig on the leaf of his journal 
 and made this entry: " Resistance to tyrants is 
 obedience to God. This twig was my badge; all 
 the class tore them from the Rebellion Tree and 
 agreed to wear them in their bosoms." 
 
 The freshmen and sophomores dined in two large 
 halls separated by folding doors, which were usually 
 locked. One Sunday evening the doors were ac- 
 cidentally left open; a sophomore shied a plate in 
 among the freshmen, and a battle, in which much 
 crockery was smashed, resulted. Five of the sopho- 
 mores were suspended. The rest of the class es- 
 corted them out of the town, cheering them as they 
 went, then, returning to the college yard, assembled 
 round the Rebellion Tree. 
 
 President Kirkland sent for the three ringleaders, 
 Adams, Otis and Quincy, advised them to leave 
 
 116
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 town, and forbade them " at their peril " to return 
 to the tree. 
 
 So they promptly went back to the tree and 
 Adams harangued the crowd, ending as follows: 
 " Gentlemen, we have been commanded, at our 
 peril, not to return to the Rebellion Tree; at our 
 peril we do return ! " 
 
 There was immense applause and the class voted 
 to remain in rebellious session all day and absent 
 themselves from all college exercises. In conse- 
 quence, there were a number of rustications and sus- 
 pensions, and after a while the rebellion wore itself 
 out. 
 
 A few notes from the undergraduate career of 
 Stephen Salisbury, of the class of 1817, give an 
 idea of the simplicity of life and the formality of 
 manners of the period. He paid six cents for a foot- 
 ball. His father wrote to him: "Your Scates shall 
 be sent to you, but you must not scate on any Ponds 
 or Rivers nor neglect your studies for any Amuse- 
 ments." His mother begged him to skip rope in 
 his room when it was too stormy to go for a walk. 
 
 At his Commencement, his parents issued a 
 number of invitations in this style: "Mr. & Mrs. 
 Stephen Salisbury request the honor of 's com- 
 pany at Dinner at the Rooms of their Son, at Mr. 
 
 117
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Hearsay's, in Cambridge, on Commencement Day." 
 A typical reply was the following: " With their 
 respectfull acknowledgments to Mr. & Mrs. Salis- 
 bury, Mr. & Mrs. Lincoln regret that indispensable 
 avocations must deprive them of the satisfaction 
 of participating personally with Mr. Salisbury & 
 his friends the pleasures of a Commencement 
 which will place on the theatre of the world their 
 promising son." 
 
 The commons in University Hall, conducted by 
 one Cooley, occasioned much dissatisfaction. Thus 
 an epicure of the class of 1824 records in his diary: 
 
 " 16 Nov. 1820. We have lately had very bad 
 commons, but more especially this day. I hope 
 they will soon be better. Several have gone out to 
 board. 
 
 " 28 Nov. At noon commons we have a great 
 plenty of roast goose. Probably every one in the 
 hall (which amounted to eight or ten) might have 
 been bought for a dollar. Indeed I never saw such 
 tough, raw-boned, shocking, ill-looking animals ever 
 placed upon a table. I hope something better will 
 come on to-morrow. 
 
 " 29 Nov. Commons still remains very bad. 
 At supper the bread was mere dough; that is, it 
 was not half baked. I have not eaten in commons for 
 
 118
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 a week past one dollar's worth of anything what- 
 ever. 
 
 " 26 June. In commons Mr. Cooley gave a turtle 
 soup to the four classes to-day, having invited the 
 chief of those who boarded out. But whether it 
 was turtle soup or not I am unable to say, as I 
 never ate any. At least no one appeared to like 
 it, and, as for myself, I never dined so poorly in my 
 life. 
 
 " 29 June. Mr. Cooley has put up an advertise- 
 ment on the University board, stating that he has 
 now employed cooks superior to any in the United 
 States. This, however, is only to keep the students 
 in commons." 
 
 Thus did an originally sanguine, hopeful nature 
 become the abode of cynicism and distrust. 
 
 Going to the theater was punishable with a 
 fine of ten dollars, and going to a party in Boston 
 made the student liable to a fine of five dollars. 
 These penalties seem not to have been often 
 inflicted, but indulgence in such pleasures in the 
 winter months carried with it certain hardships. 
 
 " The difficulty of getting a light with numb fingers 
 on a cold night was a petty misery of life," wrote 
 Quincy. " In vain were the flint and steel clashed 
 together; too often it happened that no available 
 
 119
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 spark was the result. The tinder, which we made 
 from old shirts, would absorb dampness in spite 
 of all precautions to keep it dry. Sometimes after 
 shivering for half an hour, during our efforts to 
 kindle it, we were forced to go to bed in the dark 
 in a condition of great discomfort, and feeling that 
 we had purchased our amusement at an extrava- 
 gant cost." 
 
 The college owned a little fire-engine, " scarcely 
 fit to water a flower bed," and the undergraduates 
 enjoyed the privilege of trundling out this machine 
 whenever there was an alarm of fire. The captain 
 of the engine company was appointed by the pres- 
 ident, but the minor offices were elective. " No 
 sooner did the fire bell ring than we got into all 
 sorts of horrible and grotesque garments. Hats in 
 the last stages of dilapidation and strange ancestral 
 coats were carefully kept for those occasions. Feel- 
 ing that we were pretty well disguised by costume 
 and darkness, there seemed nothing to hinder that 
 lawless abandonment to a frolic which is so delight- 
 ful to unregenerate man when youthful blood bub- 
 bles in his veins. I cannot remember that we ever 
 rendered the slightest assistance in extinguishing 
 a fire; indeed, there were so many good reasons for 
 stopping on the way that we commonly arrived 
 
 120
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 after it was out. And then, if we were tired, we had 
 an impudent way of leaving the tub upon the ground, 
 well knowing that the government would send for 
 their property the next day." 
 
 The students made it their custom upon return- 
 ing from a fire to regale themselves with " black- 
 strap " an intoxicating compound in which rum 
 and molasses were the principal ingredients. " It 
 finally broke up the engine company, and this was 
 perhaps the only good thing which ever came of it. 
 For matters at last reached a crisis; the govern- 
 ment came to their senses, sold the engine, and 
 broke up the association. But to take the edge off 
 the cruelty of this necessary act, it was decided 
 that the company should be allowed a final meeting. 
 And so we celebrated the obsequies of the old machine 
 with an oration and a poem following up these 
 exercises with other proceedings of which a detailed 
 account is unnecessary." 
 
 With no athletics in which to vent their energy, 
 it is no wonder that the students were often restless 
 and riotous. They entered college usually at the age 
 of fifteen, sometimes, as in the case of Motley, at 
 the age of thirteen. Study was not merely difficult; 
 it was attended often by severe bodily discomfort. 
 In winter the college rooms were wretchedly cold. 
 
 121
 
 Harrison Gray Otis kept two lumps of anthracite 
 on his mantelpiece as curiosities. Not for many 
 years did coal come into use. " Our light came from 
 dipped candles, with very broad bases, and grad- 
 ually narrowing to the top. These required the 
 constant use of snuffers a circumstance which 
 hindered application to an extent that in these days 
 of kerosene and gas can scarcely be appreciated. 
 The dual brain with which mankind are furnished 
 seemed to us to show intelligent design. One brain 
 was clearly required to do the studying, while it 
 was the business of the other to watch the candles 
 and look after the snuffers." 
 
 The college owned a sloop, the Harvard, which 
 made an annual voyage to Maine to bring back 
 wood from some timber lands that the college had 
 there acquired. This practice continued until the 
 eminent mathematician, Nathaniel Bowditch, de- 
 monstrated to the authorities that it would be 
 cheaper for them to buy firewood from the nearest 
 and dearest dealer than to send their own sloop to 
 their own timber lands for it. 
 
 The Med. Fac. Society, which was until a few 
 years ago a celebrated and sometimes a notorious 
 organization, originated in Hollis 13, in 1818. Four 
 members of the class of 1820 were the founders. It 
 
 122
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 was from the beginning devoted to pranks and mis- 
 chief. " Frequent meetings were called by the 
 President to carry out the object of the institution," 
 writes John Holmes. " They were always held 
 in some student's room in the afternoon. The room 
 was made as dark as possible and brilliantly lighted. 
 The ' Faculty ' sat around a long table in some 
 singular and antique costumes, almost all in large 
 wigs and breeches with knee buckles. . . . The 
 President wore the academic square cap, perhaps 
 of abnormal size. The table at which he presided 
 was covered with specimens of anatomy, collected 
 by the ' Faculty ' themselves or under their in- 
 spection. The candidate for membership was ex- 
 amined with reference to these." He was also made 
 to do " stunts " obliged to swim on the floor, 
 etc. Two tall ".gendarmes," armed with musket 
 and bayonet, prodded him to- the performance of 
 his duties. 
 
 The Med. Fac. meetings were suppressed in 1824, 
 and its anatomical collection dispersed, but the secret 
 activities of the society continued for about eighty 
 years, provoking sometimes wrath and sometimes 
 mirth. It conferred honorary degrees on the Sia- 
 mese Twins, the Sea Serpent, and Alexander I of 
 Russia. The Czar, taking the distinction seriously, 
 
 123
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 reciprocated by sending a very fine case of surgical 
 instruments, which was appropriated by the Corpora- 
 tion for the use of the medical professors. An old 
 catalogue of the society names the professorships 
 bestowed on its members Professorships Bugo- 
 logiae, Craniologiae, Vitae et Mortis, and Intelli- 
 gentiae Generalis being among them. 
 
 Another convivial organization of this period was 
 the Navy Club. In the spring its marquee, " the 
 good ship Harvard," was erected near Divinity 
 Hall; the floor was divided into a quarter and a 
 main deck, each under the command of an admiral. 
 At the boatswain's whistle, the club was accustomed 
 to form in line in front of Holworthy and proceed 
 to its " ship," where it was understood to indulge 
 in some very peculiar naval manoeuvres. 
 
 The class of 1821 the boisterous class which 
 had made Emerson their eighth choice as poet 
 marched on their graduating day to Porter's Tav- 
 ern, where they sat down at two o'clock to " a fine 
 dinner." Caleb Gushing gave for a toast: "The 
 bonds of friendship, which always tighten when 
 they are wet." After this inspired sentiment the 
 feast waxed merry. " When we had all drunk our 
 skins full, we marched round to all the professors' 
 houses, danced round the Rebellion and Liberty 
 
 124
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 Trees, and then returned to the hall. A great many 
 of the class were half-seas over, and I had the pleas- 
 ure of supporting one of them. This was as hard 
 work as I ever desire to do. Many ladies came 
 to witness our dancing and were much scandalized 
 by the elevation of spirit which some exhibited. 
 We parted with more grief than any class I ever 
 saw, every one of us being drowned in tears." 
 
 In President Kirkland's administration under- 
 graduates were required to wear a uniform of black. 
 In 1829 a concession was made; the waistcoat had 
 to be either black or white. Charles Sumner per- 
 sisted in wearing one of buff color and was dis- 
 ciplined several times for this disobedience; he 
 insisted that it was nearly white enough to come 
 under the rule, and at last the Parietal Board 
 yielded to him in the controversy. Seventeen years 
 later, when he delivered his oration before the Phi 
 Beta Kappa, he wore a buff waistcoat. Sumner's 
 college bills, including tuition, rent, and care of 
 room, fuel, books, and fees, amounted to 'about 
 eight hundred dollars for four years. Two hundred 
 dollars a year probably represented the average scale 
 of expenditure among the students of the period. 
 
 Rebellions were of frequent occurrence; in April, 
 1823, there was a curious uprising among the seniors. 
 
 125
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 The names are shrouded in mystery, but this is 
 the story: X. was about to graduate at the head 
 of the class. Z. was believed on what grounds 
 does not appear to have told the faculty that 
 X., who was a student receiving college aid, had 
 spent in dissipation the funds that had been be- 
 stowed on him. X., on being questioned, denied 
 this, but the authorities deprived him of further 
 pecuniary assistance and of all academic honors. 
 The class, indignant and sympathizing with X., 
 hissed Z. on his appearance in chapel. On account 
 of this demonstration, X., though he had not pro- 
 moted it in any way, was expelled. The next day, 
 when Z. appeared in chapel, his classmates rushed 
 upon him and threw him out. They did this on two 
 succeeding occasions; then Z. found it advisable 
 to withdraw from Cambridge. But because of their 
 disorderly and indignant proceedings, thirty-seven 
 seniors were expelled. Twenty years later they 
 were granted their degrees. 
 
 Class Day was celebrated very informally. Thus 
 George Whitney, of the class of 1824, wrote in 
 his diary: "Tuesday, 13 July. We part to-day. 
 After Commons, according to previous appoint- 
 ment we had a good prayer from Burnap in the 
 Senior Hall. We spent an hour or two after this in 
 
 126
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA 
 
 calling on each other and bidding good-by to many 
 who would not even meet us at Commencement. 
 At half-past ten the class went in procession to the 
 Chapel and heard a very beautiful valedictory 
 oration from Newell and poem from George Lunt." 
 
 Whitney attended the Class Day exercises in 
 1829, when Oliver Wendell Holmes read the poem. 
 " He is both young and small in distinction from 
 most others," Whitney wrote, " and on these cir- 
 cumstances he contrived to cut some good jokes. 
 His poem was very happy and abounded in wit. 
 Instead of a spiritual muse, he invoked for his 
 goddess the ladies present and in so doing he sang 
 very amusingly of ' his hapless amour with too tall 
 a maid.' " 
 
 In 1824 Lafayette visited Harvard. The streets 
 were decorated, he passed under triumphal arches 
 on his way from Boston, and the crowds gave him 
 such an ovation that he was several hours late when 
 he at last arrived at the college. President Kirk- 
 land met him at the gate. When Edward Everett 
 in his oration spoke of " the noble conduct of our 
 guest in procuring a ship for his own transportation, 
 at a time when all America was too poor to offer 
 him a passage to her shores," he moved the audience 
 to tears. 
 
 127
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 KIRKLAND resigned the presidency in 1829 
 on account of ill health, and was succeeded by 
 Josiah Quincy, who had been for three terms mayor 
 of Boston. In Quincy's able and progressive admin- 
 istration, the Law School was reorganized and given a 
 home of its own, in Dane Hall, and the Astro- 
 nomical Observatory was established. But perhaps 
 Quincy's most important service to Harvard was in 
 repressing the spirit and habit of lawlessness which 
 his lenient predecessors had too long tolerated. At 
 this day it seems strange that the president of the 
 college should have felt compelled to assert that 
 students should be held amenable to civil authority 
 for offences against the law, " even though committed 
 within academic precincts." 
 
 But we have the testimony of Dr. Andrew P. 
 Peabody, then a tutor in Harvard: " The habits of 
 the students were rude, and outrages involving not 
 only large destruction of property, but peril of life 
 
 128
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 as, for instance, the blowing up of public rooms in 
 inhabited buildings were occurring every year. 
 Mr. Quincy was sustained by the Governing Boards, 
 but encountered an untold amount of hostility and 
 obloquy from the students, their friends, and the 
 outside public. He persevered, and gradually won 
 over the best public opinion to his view. While the 
 detestable practice of hazing was rife, crimes that 
 were worthy of the penitentiary were of frequent 
 occurrence, resulting in some cases in driving a 
 persecuted freshman from college; in many in- 
 stances, in serious and lasting injury; and once, at 
 least, in fatal illness. The usual college penalty 
 punished the parents alone. The suspended student 
 was escorted in triumph on his departure and his 
 return, and was the hero of his class for the residue 
 of his college life." 
 
 The Great Rebellion, as the undergraduate revolt 
 of 1834 was called, illustrated the disorderly tend- 
 encies with which Quincy had to cope. It began on 
 May 19; a freshman, a Southerner, refused to re- 
 cite in Greek when called on by the instructor, one 
 Dunkin. He not only refused to recite; he was in- 
 solent. President Quincy summoned him and told 
 him that he must apologize. The young Southerner 
 declared that he would rather withdraw from the 
 
 129
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 university; Quincy gave him the opportunity to 
 make that choice, and he withdrew. As he had 
 been well liked by upper classmen as well as by 
 freshmen, a popular movement to avenge him was 
 set on foot. Mobs tore Dunkin's room to pieces, 
 smashed his furniture, and broke his windows. They 
 set off torpedoes in chapel and promoted an almost 
 continuous disorder in recitations. Finally all the 
 sophomores but three went on strike and were sent 
 home. The juniors wore crape on their left arms 
 and burned Quincy in effigy. Rioting was inces- 
 sant, the breaking of windows and the smashing of 
 furniture continued. Legal proceedings for assault 
 and trespass were brought against some of the ring- 
 leaders. For the eight weeks from the iQth of May 
 to the end of the college year, the university work 
 was practically discontinued, " the students being 
 occupied with their various class meetings and the 
 instructors attending the frequent sessions of the 
 Faculty." In after years many of those who were 
 suspended for their foolishness received their de- 
 grees. 
 
 President Quincy was abrupt and rather harsh 
 in manner and seldom remembered a student's 
 name. But his feeling towards the undergradu- 
 ates was kindly, and he took endless pains, even in 
 
 130
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 small details, to improve their conditions. He com- 
 pelled the contractor of the commons to furnish 
 better food; he even imported tableware, porcelain, 
 and silver, stamped with the college arms, for use 
 in the commons. He was cordial and hospitable 
 in welcoming the students to his house; his popu- 
 larity increased as the students came to know him. 
 When Andrew Jackson visited the college, Presi- 
 dent Quincy was much distressed at having to con- 
 fer the degree of LL. D. on him; indeed all the fac- 
 ulty abhorred Jackson. " Preparations for a public 
 funeral certainly for his could not have been 
 made less cheerfully than ours for his welcome," 
 writes Dr. Peabody. However, the affair went off 
 not so badly; the first scholar of the class delivered 
 a Latin address; President Quincy conferred the 
 degree in elegant Latin; the general replied, " prob- 
 ably in English," but in so low a tone that no one 
 could hear what he said; and he was then escorted 
 to the president's house, to a reception. " His whole 
 bearing, in the Chapel and in the drawing-room, by 
 its blended majesty and benignity, won for the time 
 the reverence and admiration of all who saw him." 
 The qualifying clause suggests that Dr. Peabody 
 certainly and President Quincy probably reverted 
 to their original views of Old Hickory. 
 
 131
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Dr. John Snelling Popkin was the professor of 
 Greek under Quincy. " Who that ever saw him," 
 writes Lowell, " can forget him, in his old age, like 
 a lusty winter, frosty but kindly, with great silver 
 spectacles of the heroic period, such as scarce twelve 
 noses of these degenerate days could bear? . . . 
 The son of an officer of distinction in the Revolu- 
 tionary War, he mounted the pulpit with the erect 
 port of a soldier and carried his cane more in the 
 fashion of a weapon than a staff, but with the point 
 lowered, in token of surrender to the peaceful pro- 
 prieties of his calling. Yet sometimes the martial 
 instincts would burst the cerements of black coat 
 and clerical neck-cloth, as once, when the students 
 had got into a fight upon the training-field, and the 
 licentious soldiery, furious with rum, had driven 
 them at point of bayonet to the college gates, and 
 even threatened to lift their arms against the Muses' 
 bower. Then, like Major Goffe at Deerfield, sud- 
 denly appeared the gray-haired professor, all his 
 father resurgent in him, and shouted: 'Now, my 
 lads, stand your ground, you're in the right now! 
 Don't let one of them set foot within the College 
 grounds! ' 
 
 He liked to smoke, but " knowing that the ani- 
 mal appetites ever hold one hand behind them for 
 
 132
 
 
 Holworthy Hall
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 Satan to drop a bribe in," he would never have two 
 cigars in his rooms at once, but walked daily to the 
 tobacconist's to purchase his single article of dissi- 
 pation. " Nor would he trust himself with two on 
 Saturdays, preferring (since he could not violate 
 the Sabbath even by that infinitesimal traffic) to 
 depend on Providential ravens, which were seldom 
 wanting in the shape of some black-coated friend 
 who knew his need and honored the scruple that 
 occasioned it." 
 
 For many years he lived on the second floor of 
 Holworthy, " the venerable Goody Morse cooking 
 his food, bringing it to him at the regular college 
 hours, and taking the most assiduous care for his 
 comfort." But finally, when he had to provide a 
 home in Cambridge for a widowed sister and two 
 nieces, he abandoned his comfortable bachelor's 
 lodgings, and took a house next door to a classmate 
 and lifelong friend. The two men used to hold long 
 conversations over the dividing fence, but neither 
 of them ever entered the other's house. Dr. Pea- 
 body dwells on Popkin affectionately in his remi- 
 niscences: 
 
 " In his recitation room Dr. Popkin sat by a table 
 rather than behind it, and grasped his right leg, 
 generally with both hands, lifting it as if he were 
 
 133
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 making attempts to shoulder it, and more nearly 
 accomplishing that feat daily than an ordinary 
 gymnast would after a year's special training. As 
 chairman of the parietal government, he regarded 
 it as his official duty to preserve order in the college 
 yard; but he was the frequent cause of disorder, 
 for nothing so amused the students as to see him in 
 full chase after an offender or dancing round a 
 bonfire; while it was well understood that as a de- 
 tective he was almost always at fault. . . . Yet 
 the students held him in reverence and at the same 
 time liked him. His were the only windows of 
 parietal officers that were never broken." 
 
 Although showing him this distinguished consider- 
 ation, the undergraduates made him at times the 
 victim of rude practical jokes. " Once while Dr. 
 Popkin was groping on the floor in quest of smothered 
 fire, in a room that had been shattered by an ex- 
 plosion of gunpowder, a bucket of water was thrown 
 on him." The students might take liberties with 
 him, but he stood on his dignity with others; on 
 overhearing a young man " of jaunty, dapper, un- 
 academic aspect " utter his nickname, he exclaimed: 
 " What right have you, sir, to call me Old Pop? 
 You were never a member of Harvard College." 
 
 Dr. Jonathan Barber was the instructor in elo- 
 134
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 cution. " His great glory was the invention of a 
 hollow sphere, six feet in diameter, made of some 
 six or eight bamboo rods, which were its meridians, 
 and were crossed by an equator, by at least two 
 great circles besides, and by an adequate number of 
 small circles corresponding to parallels of latitude. 
 In this sphere the students stood to declaim, and 
 the circles by their various altitudes and intersec- 
 tions determined the gestures appropriate to each 
 specific mood of feeling or form of mental action." 
 The merits of the contrivance were not appreciated; 
 it was discovered one morning suspended from a 
 barber's pole, and shortly after that affront Dr. 
 Barber abandoned his college work in elocution and 
 went about the country lecturing on phrenology. 
 The barber's pole was that in front of the shop that 
 Lowell remembered so pleasantly: 
 
 " The barber's shop was a museum, scarce second 
 to the larger one of Greenwood in the metropolis. 
 The boy who was to be clipped there was always 
 accompanied to the sacrifice by troops of friends, 
 who thus inspected the curiosities gratis. While the 
 watchful eye of R. wandered to keep in check these 
 rather unscrupulous explorers, the unpausing shears 
 would sometimes overstep the boundaries of strict 
 tonsorial prescription, and make a notch through 
 
 135
 
 which the phrenological developments could be 
 distinctly seen. As Michael Angelo's design was 
 modified by the shape of his block, so R., rigid in 
 artistic proprieties, would contrive to give an ap- 
 pearance of design to this aberration by making it 
 the key-note to his work, and reducing the whole 
 head to an appearance of premature baldness. What 
 a charming place it was, how full of wonder and 
 delight! The sunny little room, fronting southwest 
 upon the Common, rang with canaries and Java 
 sparrows, nor were the familiar notes of robin, thrush 
 and bobolink wanting. A large white cockatoo 
 harangued vaguely, at intervals, in what we be- 
 lieved (on R.'s authority) to be the Hottentot lan- 
 guage." 
 
 Dr. Peabody has left a picturesque account of 
 the student's manner of life at this period: 
 
 " The feather bed mattresses not having come 
 into general use was regarded as a valuable chat- 
 tel; but ten dollars would have been a fair auction 
 price for all the other contents of an average room, 
 which were a pine bedstead, washstand, table, and 
 desk, a cheap rocking-chair and from two to four 
 other chairs of the plainest fashion. I doubt whether 
 any fellow student of mine owned a carpet. A 
 second-hand furniture dealer had a few defaced and 
 
 136
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 threadbare carpets, which he leased at an extrava- 
 gant price to certain Southern members of the 
 Senior class; but even Southerners, though reputed 
 to be fabulously rich, did not aspire to this luxury 
 till the Senior year. Coal was just coming into use, 
 and hardly found its way into the college. The 
 students' rooms several of the recitation rooms 
 as well were heated by open wood-fires. Almost 
 every room had, too, among its trans mittenda a can- 
 non-ball supposed to have been derived from the 
 arsenal, which on very cold days was heated to a red 
 heat and placed as calorific radiant on a skillet or 
 on some extemporized metallic stand; while at 
 other seasons it was often utilized by being rolled 
 downstairs at such time as might most nearly bisect 
 a proctor's night-sleep. Friction-matches accord- 
 ing to Faraday the most useful invention of our 
 age were not yet. Coals were carefully buried 
 in ashes over night to start the morning fire; while 
 in summer the evening lamp could be lighted only 
 by the awkward and often baffling process of stri- 
 king fire with flint, steel, and tinder box. 
 
 " The student's life was hard. Morning prayers 
 were in summer at six; in winter, about half an. 
 hour before sunrise in a bitterly cold chapel. Thence 
 half of each class passed into the several recitation 
 
 137
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 rooms in the same building University Hall 
 and three quarters of an hour later the bell rang for 
 a second set of recitations, including the remaining 
 half of the students. Then came breakfast, which 
 in the College commons consisted solely of coffee, 
 hot rolls, and butter, except when the members of a 
 mess had succeeded in pinning to the nether surface 
 of the table, by a two-pronged fork, some slices of 
 meat from the previous day's dinner. Between ten 
 and twelve every student attended another recita- 
 tion or a lecture. Dinner was at half-past twelve, 
 a meal not deficient in quantity, but by no means 
 appetizing to those who had come from neat homes 
 and well ordered tables. There was another recita- 
 tion in the afternoon, except on Saturday; then 
 evening prayers at six, or in winter at early twi- 
 light; then the evening meal, plain as the breakfast, 
 with tea instead of coffee, and cold bread, of the 
 consistency of wool, for the hot rolls. After tea 
 the dormitories rang with song and merriment till 
 the study bell, at eight in winter, at nine in 
 summer, sounded the curfew for fun and frolic, 
 proclaiming dead silence throughout the college 
 premises. 
 
 " On Sundays all were required to be in residence, 
 not excepting even those whose homes were in 
 
 138
 
 Boston; and all were required to attend worship 
 twice each day at the college chapel. On Saturday 
 alone was there permission to leave Cambridge, 
 absence from town at any other time being a punish- 
 able offence. This weekly liberty was taken by 
 almost every member of college, Boston being the 
 universal resort; though seldom otherwise than on 
 foot, the only public conveyance then being a two- 
 horse stage-coach, which ran twice a day." 
 
 Commons, which had occupied rooms in Harvard 
 Hall, were transferred in 1815 to University. In 
 Harvard Hall, officers and graduates sat at a table 
 on a dais at the head of each room; seniors and 
 sophomores occupied the main floor of one room, 
 juniors and freshmen the main floor of the other. 
 " By this arrangement each pair of adjacent classes, 
 always supposed to hold relations of mutual an- 
 tagonism, were fed apart, and had different doors of 
 entrance and egress." The kitchen in the basement 
 of University was the largest in New England, and 
 an object of curiosity and interest to visitors. ' The 
 students felt in large part remunerated for coarse fare 
 and rude service by their connection with a feeding 
 place that possessed what seemed to them world-wide 
 celebrity. They were not the only dependents 
 upon the college kitchen, but shared its viands with 
 
 139
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 a half-score or more of swine, whose sties were close 
 in the rear of the building, and with rats of abnormal 
 size that had free quarters with the pigs." 
 
 Two or three of the professors took in boarders 
 at three dollars a week wealthy Southerners pre- 
 sumably. These boarders were objects of suspicion 
 to their classmates; if one of them received any 
 college honor, " it was uniformly ascribed to undue 
 influence, catered for on the one side and exerted 
 on the other, in consequence of this domestic ar- 
 rangement." 
 
 The students were invariably hostile to the 
 faculty. " If a student went unsummoned to a 
 teacher's room, it was almost always by night. 
 It was regarded as a high crime by his class for a 
 student to enter a recitation room before the ringing 
 of the bell, or to remain to ask a question of the 
 instructor; and even one who was uniformly first 
 in the class-room would have had his way to Coven- 
 try made easy. In case of a general disturbance, 
 the entire Faculty were on the chase for offenders 
 a chase seldom successful; while their unskilled 
 manoeuvres in this uncongenial service were wont 
 to elicit, not so much silent admiration, as shouts of 
 laughter and applause. 
 
 " The recitations were mere hearings of lessons, 
 140
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 without comment or collateral instruction. They 
 were generally heard in quarter sections of a class, 
 the entire class containing from fifty to sixty mem- 
 bers. The custom was to call on every student in 
 the section at every recitation." 
 
 At this time the college yard was unenclosed and 
 extended only a few feet behind University Hall - 
 only far enough in fact to afford quarters for the 
 pigs. The chapel exercises were held in University 
 Hall, and at them as at the commons, seniors and 
 sophomores were kept apart from juniors and fresh- 
 men. In front of the pulpit was a stage, for the 
 chapel room was also the room for public declama- 
 tions and exhibitions. At daily prayers a professor 
 kept watch over the congregation from a sort of 
 raised sentry box and noted down the name of any 
 one guilty of a misdemeanor. 
 
 The entrance examinations all oral began 
 at six o'clock in the morning and lasted all day, with 
 but a half-hour intermission for luncheon. " Each 
 of the thirteen College officers took a section and 
 passed it to the next, and so on until it had gone the 
 entire round." It may well be believed that this 
 matriculation day was not a time of festivities; 
 but it was far otherwise with Commencement Day. 
 
 " The entire Common, then an unenclosed dust 
 141
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 plain, was completely covered on Commencement 
 Day and the night preceding and following it with 
 drinking stands, dancing booths, mountebank shows 
 and gambling tables; and I have never heard such 
 a horrid din, tumult, and jargon of oath, shout, 
 scream, fiddle, quarrelling and drunkenness as on 
 those two nights. By such summary methods as but 
 few other men could have employed, Mr. Quincy 
 at the outset of his presidency swept the Common 
 clear; and during his entire administration the 
 public days of the College were kept free from rowdy- 
 ism. . . . 
 
 " Pious citizens of Boston [before 1776] used to send 
 their slaves to Commencement for their religious in- 
 struction and edification. But the negroes soon found 
 that they could spend their holidays more to their 
 satisfaction, if not more to the good of their souls, 
 on the outside than in the interior of the meeting- 
 house. At length Commencement came to be the 
 great gala day of the year for the colored people 
 in and about Boston, who were by no means such 
 quiet and orderly citizens as their representatives 
 now are, while their comparative number was much 
 greater." 
 
 In 1836 the Rev. John Pierce entered this observa- 
 tion in his diary: " Be it noted that this is the first 
 
 142
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 Commencement I ever attended in Cambridge in 
 which I saw not a single person drunk in the Hall 
 or out of it. ... There were the fewest present I 
 ever remember." 
 
 Class Day, which, as we have seen, had only a 
 few years before been a day of innocent literary 
 exercises, had also become an occasion for disorderly 
 revelry. The class of 1834 treated all comers to 
 iced punch. " In 1836," writes Lowell, " the 
 College janitor, in vain protesting, yet not without 
 hilarious collusion on his own part, was borne in 
 wavering triumph on a door, the chance-selected 
 symbol of his office." Of these first Class Day 
 orgies, Lowell writes: " Crowds gathered to witness 
 these anarchic ceremonies. The windows which 
 commanded the scene were bursting with heads, 
 and in as much request as formerly those which gave 
 a near view of the ghastly tree at Tyburn." 
 
 But in 1838, the year when Lowell was rusticating 
 at Concord and so was unable to read his class poem, 
 there was a reform; from that time on drunkenness 
 ceased to be the most distinguishing feature of 
 Class Day. For a number of years each class planted 
 an ivy shoot on Class Day, and the orator delivered 
 his oration over it. But as the ivy always died, 
 the custom of planting it was abandoned altogether; 
 
 143
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 and the Ivy Oration, though not discontinued, ac- 
 quired what was in the circumstances an appro- 
 priately humorous character, and was assigned to the 
 reputed wit of the class. 
 
 The long vacation was in the winter, and con- 
 tinued to be until 1869. Professor Ticknor in 1825 
 wrote: "The longest vacation should happen in 
 the hot season, when insubordination and miscon- 
 duct are now most frequent, partly from the in- 
 dolence produced by the season. There is a reason 
 against this, I know the poverty of many students 
 who keep school for a part of their subsistence." 
 
 One of the greatest hot weather excitements oc- 
 curred in August, 1834. A Protestant mob had 
 burned down a Roman Catholic chapel in Charles- 
 town. The rumor spread through Cambridge that 
 in retaliation the Papists meant to set fire to 
 the Harvard Library. Students and graduates 
 gathered to defend it, and sentinels stationed them- 
 selves with muskets at the windows. Night came 
 on, and a horseman galloped up to announce that 
 one thousand armed Irishmen were marching to 
 Cambridge. Excitement and precautions were re- 
 doubled but it was no doubt the horseman's 
 little joke; the column of armed and angered Fenians 
 never appeared. 
 
 144
 
 HARVARD UNDER QUINCY 
 
 The most memorable event of Quincy's adminis- 
 tration was the bicentennial celebration of the found- 
 ing of the college, which was held on September 8, 
 1836. A pavilion one hundred and fifty feet by 
 one hundred and twenty was built in front of Uni- 
 versity Hall and covered with white canvas. Its 
 pillars were wreathed with evergreens and flowers; 
 streamers of blue and white floated down from the 
 top of the tent. All the college buildings were 
 decorated in a similar manner. Early in the morn- 
 ing the roads from Boston to Cambridge were the 
 scene of unusual activity. The townspeople turned 
 out along the way, booths were set up, coaches and 
 carriages rolled by continuously. At nine o'clock 
 the alumni and invited guests, to the number of 
 fifteen hundred, assembled in University Hall. 
 At ten o'clock the procession formed, headed by 
 one member of the class of 1774. It passed through 
 the gate between Massachusetts Hall and Harvard 
 Hall and entered the Congregational Church. There 
 " Fair Harvard," written for the occasion by the 
 Rev. Samuel Gilman of Charleston, South Carolina, 
 was sung for the first time. President Quincy 
 made a two-hour address, which was followed by 
 a prayer, hymn, and benediction. Then the pro- 
 cession marched through the common, back into 
 
 145
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the yard, and entered the pavilion. Here Edward 
 Everett presided at the dinner and delivered a 
 characteristic and abundant oration, overflowing 
 with classical allusions. Forty toasts were pro- 
 posed, each one in the stately language of the period, 
 and nearly as many speeches, among them one by 
 Daniel Webster, were delivered all of a consider- 
 able length and not one with the slightest trace of 
 humor. In fact, the speech-making lasted until 
 eight o'clock in the evening. 
 
 Pedantry was in the air of Cambridge in those 
 days; such words as " the feast of reason and the 
 flow of soul " really seemed to the people of the 
 time to express very happily an agreeable idea; 
 and an occasion which to an audience of the present 
 would have been a monumental affliction held our 
 solemn forefathers rapt and attentive and provided 
 them with a lifelong, pleasant memory. 
 
 146
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ANTE - BELLUM DAYS 
 
 IN President Quincy's administration, sharp 
 restrictions were still imposed upon the under- 
 graduate's freedom. The college rules of 1832 or- 
 dained that " no student shall be absent from the 
 University a night in term time, or go out of the 
 town of Cambridge at any time . . . without per- 
 mission from the President," and that " every 
 student is required on the Lord's Day and the evening 
 preceding to abstain from visiting and from re- 
 ceiving visits, from unnecessary walking, and from 
 using any diversion, and from all behavior incon- 
 sistent with the sacred season." With these and 
 with other cramping regulations, and with practi- 
 cally no athletics to absorb nervous and physical 
 energy, college life often seemed irksome; frequent 
 outbursts of disorder and drunkenness were the 
 methods by which undergraduates sought relief 
 from monotony. 
 
 Some letters written by Francis Parkman, of the 
 147
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 class of '44, portray the diversions of a young gentle- 
 man of the period : 
 
 " Here I am, down in Divinity Hall (!) enjoying 
 to my heart's content that otium cum dignitate 
 
 which you so affectionately admire Do you 
 
 not envy me my literary ease? a sea-coal fire - 
 a dressing-gown slippers a favorite author; 
 
 all set off by an occasional bottle of champagne, 
 or a bowl of stewed oysters at V/ashburn's? This 
 is the cream of existence. To lie abed in the morn- 
 ing, till the sun has half melted away the trees and 
 castles on the window-panes, and Nigger Lewis's 
 fire is almost burnt out, listening meanwhile to 
 the steps of the starved Divinities as they rush shiv- 
 ering and panting to their prayers and recitations 
 
 - then to get up to a fashionable breakfast at eleven 
 
 then go to lecture find it a little too late, and 
 adjourn to Joe Peabody's room for a novel, conver- 
 sation, and a morning glass of madeira." One hardly 
 recognizes in this sybarite the hero of the Oregon 
 Trail! 
 
 Again: "Joe got up one of his old-fashioned 
 suppers, on a scale of double magnificence, inviting 
 thereunto every specimen of the class of '44 that 
 lingered within an accessible distance. . . . The spree 
 was worthy of the entertainment. None got drunk, 
 
 148
 
 (j 
 
 Divinity Hall
 
 ANTE-BELLUM DAYS 
 
 but all got jolly; and Joe's champagne disappeared 
 first; then his madeira; and his whiskey punch 
 would have followed suit, if its copious supplies 
 
 had not prevented The whole ended with 
 
 smashing a dozen bottles against the Washington 
 (elm?) and a war-dance with scalp yells in the middle 
 of the common, in the course of which several night- 
 capped heads appeared at the opened windows of 
 the astonished neighbors." 
 
 Champagne, madeira, whiskey punch, and only 
 an air of jollity! But another passage recording 
 an incident of Parkman's freshman year convinces 
 us that these young men were not superhuman: 
 
 " It was a very hot night. We had opened our 
 windows in search of air when there was a knock 
 on the door and ten or twelve seniors came in. It 
 was an immensely impressive circumstance. We 
 regarded the seniors with awe and reverence. Still 
 it was not above their dignity to haze a couple 
 of harmless and callow freshmen. They closed the 
 windows and took out cigars and began to smoke 
 their cigars to smoke us out. We bore it for a while; 
 then the air became thick, and we began to think 
 we had had enough of it. Suddenly one of the 
 seniors sprang up and rushed to the door and asked 
 for the key. The door was opened; he went out, 
 
 149
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 left his supper on the doorstep, and went to his 
 room, followed by all the rest." 
 
 In 1843 a small gymnasium was provided for the 
 use of the students, the first official recognition 
 of the importance of physical exercise. Athletics 
 began to play an important part in the college life, 
 but even through the fifties it was a very informal 
 and unorganized kind of athletics. A crude sort 
 of football was played on the Delta, where Memorial 
 Hall now stands. Robert Gould Shaw at the be- 
 ginning of his freshman year, in 1856, described one 
 of the contests: 
 
 " Last Monday we had our six annual football 
 games, Freshmen kicking against Sophomores. In 
 the last three games the Juniors help the Freshmen, 
 and the Seniors help the Sophomores. We beat 
 the third game alone, a thing which has happened 
 only three times since the University was founded. 
 The Sophomores generally beat all six games be- 
 cause they know the ground and know each other. 
 As I think a description of the whole affair would 
 amuse you, I will give it to you. 
 
 " At half past six we went to the Delta, and in a 
 few minutes the whole Sophomore class streamed 
 into the field at one end, and about as large a class 
 of Freshmen into the other, and stood opposite 
 
 150
 
 ANTE-BELLUM DAYS 
 
 each other about a hundred yards apart, like two 
 hostile armies. There we stood cheering and getting 
 up our courage until the ball was brought. It was 
 received with great cheering and hurrahing, and 
 handed over to the Sophomores, who had the first 
 kick by rights. After they had kicked once, they 
 waited until our champion, [Caspar] Crowninshield, 
 had one kick, and then rushed in. 
 
 " They knew that we were a large class and had a 
 good many big fellows, so they determined to 
 frighten us by hard fighting; and if anything was 
 calculated to frighten fellows not used to it, it was 
 the way in which they came upon us. They rushed 
 down in a body, and, hardly looking for the ball, 
 the greater part of them turned their attention to 
 knocking down as many as they could, and kicked 
 the ball when they happened to come across it. 
 It was a regular battle, with fifty to seventy men on 
 each side. It resembled more my idea of the hand- 
 to-hand fighting of the ancients than anything 
 else. After the first game, few had their own hats 
 on, few a whole shirt. In the beginning I rushed into 
 the middle with the crowd, but after that I kept 
 among fellows of my own size on the outskirts. 
 My experience in the middle was this: before I had 
 been there more than a second, I had got three fear- 
 
 151
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 ful raps on the head, and was knocked down, and 
 they all ran over me after the ball, which had 
 been kicked to another part of the field. Then I 
 picked myself up, as did a great many other fellows 
 lying about me, and looked for my hat among about 
 twenty others and a good many rags. I found it some 
 time afterwards serving as football to a Sophomore 
 during the entr' acte. That was Monday, and to- 
 day is Friday, but my head is not entirely well yet. 
 I got a good many blows which I didn't feel at all 
 till the next day. A good many of our fellows were 
 more badly hurt, because they had pluck enough 
 to go into the thick of it each time; once was enough 
 for me. It was fine to see how little some of them 
 cared for the blows they got. After the Juniors 
 and Seniors came in, there must have been two 
 hundred on the ground. Of the last three games, 
 we beat one and one was voted a drawn game. This 
 is a much more important thing than one would 
 think, because it is an established custom; and 
 our having beaten is a great glory, and gives the 
 other classes a much higher opinion of us than 
 they would otherwise have. They talked about it 
 quite amicably the next day. Several of the Sopho- 
 mores and Seniors, who were both opposed to us, 
 came over to our side that same evening and con- 
 
 152
 
 ANTE-BELLUM DAYS 
 
 gratulated us upon having beaten them, because it 
 was such an unusual thing. Now we play football 
 every evening, but all the classes mix up, and there 
 is little or no righting." 
 
 In 1845 President Quincy resigned after what had 
 been in many ways the most memorable and pro- 
 gressive administration that any president had 
 given to Harvard University. His successor was 
 Edward Everett, who held the office for only three 
 years. The admired orator of the period was not 
 well qualified to fulfil the president's duties. His 
 ideas of discipline were those of the pedagogue of 
 the primary school, his sense of personal dignity 
 was too acute, his lack of humor and of human under- 
 standing was conspicuous. 
 
 Mr. Joseph H. Choate, of the class of '52, has re- 
 called an illuminating instance of President Ever- 
 ett's insistence upon petty formalities. Mr. Choate 
 was a freshman of only one week's standing when 
 he received a summons from the president's secre- 
 tary. " Mr. Choate," said the secretary, " the 
 president has directed me to inform you that he 
 observes with great regret that you passed him in 
 Harvard Square yesterday without touching your 
 hat. He trusts that this offence will never be re- 
 peated." 
 
 153
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 There is a delightfully naive account by Dr. 
 Andrew P. Peabody of the lecture on Washington 
 with which Everett toured the country; for the 
 humorous light that it throws upon the taste 
 of the period as well as upon two of Har- 
 vard's worthies, it may be introduced into these 
 pages : 
 
 " That lecture was the most marvellous master- 
 work of rhetorical art and skill of which I ever had 
 any knowledge. Washington's character, in its 
 massive simplicity and perfectness, afforded very 
 little hold for popular eloquence. Mr. Everett, fully 
 aware of this, grouped around the honored name a 
 vast number and an immense diversity of men, in- 
 cidents, objects of admiration in nature and curi- 
 osity in art, scientific facts, classical allusions, 
 myths of the gods of Greece, the greater part 
 of them not in themselves illustrative of his theme, 
 but all of them pressed into its service and forced 
 into an adaptation that was made at the time to 
 appear natural and obvious. A catalogue of the 
 materials used in that lecture would seem as heter- 
 ogeneous as the contents of a country variety shop, 
 and a man of ordinary genius would have won only 
 ridicule in the attempt to bring them together. But 
 Mr. Everett compressed them into perfect and 
 
 154
 
 ANTE-BELLUM DAYS 
 
 amazing unity, and rendered them all subsidiary to 
 the name and fame of Washington; while, when 
 the lecture was over, it was impossible to recollect 
 what bearing on the character of our first President 
 was assigned to the greater part of them. I first 
 heard the lecture in Boston. A few weeks after- 
 ward he delivered it in Portsmouth, N. H., where 
 I then lived and shared with the friend at whose 
 house he stayed the charge and pleasure of his hos- 
 pitable reception. We took him to the family 
 mansion where Tobias Lear, Washington's private 
 secretary, was born, and where Washington, on 
 his Northern tour during his presidency, was a 
 guest, and introduced him there to an old lady, 
 Mr. Lear's niece, who had in her parlor the very sofa 
 on which Washington had sat, holding her on his 
 knee, and a sampler which she had wrought with 
 a long lock of his white hair which he gave her. 
 Mr. Everett, without seeking time for special prep- 
 aration, so worked the Lear house, its occupant, 
 and its furniture into the appropriate part of his 
 lecture that the whole story seemed absolutely 
 inseparable from what preceded and what followed, 
 and as if it had been written in its place in the be- 
 ginning. A short time afterward I went to Bruns- 
 wick to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa address, and he 
 
 155
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 was going to deliver his Washington lecture in 
 the evening. I was his fellow guest at the house of 
 his cousin, Hon. Ebenezer Everett. It was in- 
 cidentally said at table that ' all Bath ' was com- 
 ing up to hear him, arrangements having been made 
 for a special train. A short time previously the 
 wife of a Bath ship-master disabled by paralysis, 
 though herself in a condition that might have ex- 
 cused her from active duty, had taken command 
 of her husband's ship, in the harbor of San Francisco, 
 and brought it home in good order to Bath. That 
 story Mr. Everett incorporated into his lecture, 
 entering with the utmost delicacy into the cir- 
 cumstances that rendered the achievement the more 
 heroic and noteworthy; and there was no portion 
 of the lecture which seemed more closely adapted 
 to the subject or which the hearers would have missed 
 more had they heard the discourse again elsewhere. 
 Yet, when Mr. Everett had gone to his room, we 
 found it impossible to recall the process by which 
 he had dovetailed this story into his lecture, or 
 the precise bearing which it had on the merit and 
 fame of Washington." 
 
 Dr. Peabody remained for many years to delight, 
 entertain, and instruct the youth of Harvard; 
 but Edward Everett seemed to excite irritation 
 
 156
 
 ANTE-BELLUM DAYS 
 
 and levity rather than respect, and in 1849 he re- 
 signed the presidency of the college. 
 
 Jared Sparks, the author and editor of volu- 
 minous biography, succeeded him. He was not 
 a man under whose leadership a university would 
 be likely to make any notable advance; but he 
 was a substantial scholar and a kindly human be- 
 ing. The other college authorities were disposed to 
 maintain the severe standards of discipline set by 
 his predecessor, under whom " the omission of a 
 necktie in the early darkness of morning pray- 
 ers incurred for the offender an admonition from 
 the chairman of the parietal board; the throwing 
 of a snowball was reported to the faculty; the 
 question was raised whether the making of the 
 snowball without throwing it did not deserve 
 censure; and the blowing of a horn was a capital 
 crime." 
 
 But President Sparks often intervened to pro- 
 tect the students from the extremes of such harsh 
 doctrine. " Oh, let the boys alone; they will take 
 care of themselves," was his frequent admonition 
 to an over-zealous officer. 
 
 The chapel was the theater of ingenious and secret 
 undergraduate activities. To prevent the bell from 
 being rung was the ambition of many college gener- 
 
 157
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 ations. It was turned up and filled with water, 
 which froze; sulphuric acid was poured into it; the 
 rope was cut; the keyholes of the locked chapel 
 doors were plugged up with wax; on one occasion 
 the bell-tongue was removed, the doors leading to 
 the belfry were screwed up, and the heads of the 
 screws were filed off. But the resourceful janitor 
 broke his way in and punctually rang the bell by 
 beating it with a hammer. In the matter of bell 
 ringing, the college authorities always triumphed. 
 But in Sparks's administration the Bible was suc- 
 cessfully stolen from the chapel and sent by express 
 to the Librarian of Yale, who returned it to Har- 
 vard. On the fly leaf was written: " Hoc Biblum 
 raptum vi a pulpite Harvard Coll. Chapelli facultati 
 Yali ab Harv. Coll. under graduatibus donatur. Co- 
 veres servamus in usum Chessboardi. Pro Helter 
 Skelter Club." 
 
 Notwithstanding Sparks's amiability, he had a 
 certain stubbornness and clung to his prejudices. 
 He had no admiration for Kossuth, who was en- 
 gaged in a triumphant tour of the country and was 
 making for Cambridge. The faculty wished to do 
 special honor to the Hungarian patriot, and as he 
 would be on hand for the usual spring " exhibition," 
 they voted to hold it in the First Parish Church, 
 
 158
 
 ANTE-BELLUM DAYS 
 
 where Commencements were held, instead of in the 
 small college chapel. President Sparks said: " It 
 is for you, gentlemen, to hold .the exhibition where 
 you please. I shall go to the chapel in my cap and 
 gown at the usual hour." The faculty reconsidered 
 their vote; and the projected Kossuth celebration 
 fell flat. 
 
 On account of physical infirmity President Sparks 
 resigned in 1853; James Walker, professor of nat- 
 ural religion and moral philosophy, was elected in 
 his place. In matters of discipline he was even 
 more tolerant than Sparks had been, and he suc- 
 ceeded in eliminating the absurd code that had pre- 
 vailed under Everett. He was a celebrated preacher; 
 his chief claim to distinction lay in his sermons. 
 He resigned in 1860; Cornelius C. Felton, the 
 most eminent Greek scholar of the university, 
 succeeded him, but died in less than two years. 
 Then came Thomas Hill, professor of mathematics; 
 his term likewise was short, for he retired in 
 1868. 
 
 A letter written by Lowell to President Hill in 
 1863 gives a criticism of the college yard at this 
 period : 
 
 "... Something ought to be done about the 
 trees in the college yard. That is my thesis, and 
 
 159
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 my corollary is that you are the man to do it. They 
 remind me always of a young author's first volume 
 of poems. There are too many of 'em and too 
 many of one kind. If they were not planted in 
 such formal rows, they would typify very well 
 John Bull's notion of ' our democracy,' where every 
 tree is its neighbor's enemy, and all turn out scrubs 
 in the end, because none can develop fairly. Then 
 there is scarce anything but American elms. I 
 have nothing to say against the tree in itself. I have 
 some myself whose trunks I look on as the most 
 precious baggage I am responsible for in the journey 
 of life, but planted as they are in the yard, there's 
 no chance for one in ten. If our buildings so 
 nobly dispute architectural pre-eminence with cotton 
 mills, perhaps it is all right that the trees should 
 become spindles, but I think Hesiod (who knew 
 something of country matters) was clearly right 
 in his half being better than the whole, and no- 
 where more so than in the matter of trees. There 
 are two English beeches in the yard which would 
 become noble trees if the elms would let 'em alone. 
 As it is, they are in danger of starving. Now, as 
 you are our Kubernetes, I want you to take the 
 'elm in hand. We want more variety, more group- 
 ing. We want to learn that one fine tree is worth 
 
 160
 
 ANTE-BELLUM DAYS 
 
 more than any mob of second rate ones. We want 
 to take a leaf out of Chaucer's book and understand 
 that in a stately grove every tree must ' stand well 
 from his fellow apart.' A doom hangs over us in the 
 matter of architecture, but if we will only let a 
 tree alone it will build itself with a nobleness of 
 proportion and grace of detail that Giotto himself 
 might have envied. Nor should the pruning as 
 now be entrusted to men who get all they cut off, 
 and whose whole notion of pruning accordingly is, 
 ' axe and it shall be given unto you.' Do, pray, 
 take this matter into your own hands for you 
 know how to love a tree and give us a modern 
 instance of a wise saw. Be remembered among your 
 other good things as the president that planted the 
 groups of evergreens for the wind to dream of the 
 sea in all summer and for the snowflakes to roost 
 on in winter." 
 
 The last adjuration failed to move Dr. Hill; 
 no groups of evergreens have flourished in the yard. 
 And curiously enough the president whom future 
 generations will connect with tree-planting is he 
 who bears the name of Lowell. 
 
 Yet President Hill deserves to rank as one of 
 the progressives to use a word that had not 
 then achieved currency. It was in his administra- 
 
 161
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 tion that the idea of elective studies was first vigor- 
 ously advocated in Harvard College. It remained 
 for his successor to give the principle its widest 
 application. 
 
 162
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 THE South had always been friendly to Harvard, 
 and before the struggle over slavery became 
 acute, Harvard was sympathetic with the South. 
 To Harvard came some of the best representatives 
 of the Southern aristocracy. The idea of slave- 
 holding as expressed by these young men was 
 patriarchal rather than iniquitous. Harvard un- 
 dergraduates, Harvard professors accepted the ex- 
 istence of slavery in the South without particularly 
 questioning the justice or wisdom or desirability 
 of it. Their feeling was that it was an economic 
 necessity, and that the rights of property must 
 be respected. 
 
 The Abolitionists had no following at Harvard. 
 Lowell, graduating in 1838, sent his class poem 
 in from Concord, where he had been rusticated for 
 neglect of studies; it ridiculed the Abolitionists, 
 and the ridicule was popular. Wendell Phillips, 
 while he was in college and even while he was in 
 
 163
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the Law School, had not been inflamed and in- 
 spired by their propaganda. Sumner in 1848 made 
 speeches for the Free Soil party throughout Massa- 
 chusetts, and came to Cambridge; there he was 
 hissed. Lowell was a late convert to the Free Soil 
 cause; but Ticknor, Everett, Sparks, Felton, Mot- 
 ley, Parkman, and Dana were among the distin- 
 guished Harvard men who stood firmly on the other 
 side. The professors in the Law School defended 
 the Fugitive Slave Law, and out of the hundred 
 students under them, only six were opposed to it. 
 Nevertheless, as the crisis of Secession drew 
 near, the Union sentiment of the college swept away 
 conservative inclinations. In 1861 all the Southern- 
 ers went home. In April, on the day after Lincoln 
 made his appeal for volunteers, the seniors raised 
 a transparency on a tree in front of Holworthy. 
 One side bore the legend, " The Constitution and 
 the Enforcement of the Laws," the other, " Harvard 
 For War." The undergraduates assembled and 
 cheered; that evening rockets were set off; the 
 next morning from every window in Massachusetts 
 Hall, then a sophomore dormitory, a-flag was flying. 
 Governor Andrew called on Harvard for volunteers 
 to guard the arsenal at Watertown. Military 
 drills were held daily on the Delta; students 
 
 164
 
 Appleton Chapel
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 rushed to enroll themselves in volunteer companies 
 for defence. For a time the authorities attempted 
 to check the martial enthusiasm; but when the 
 magnitude of the struggle became apparent, they 
 withdrew their opposition. Eighty-one men were 
 graduated in the class of '61 ; fifty-one of them bore 
 arms for the Union. The rooms in the college yard 
 were scenes of grave debate between young men 
 earnestly seeking to decide where their duty lay. 
 Often it happened that of two room-mates, one 
 went to the war, the other stayed behind. There 
 were sword-presentations to those who departed: 
 sometimes the young soldier, returning on fur- 
 lough, brightened the yard with his holiday uni- 
 form; on Class Day and Commencement there 
 would be a sprinkling of undergraduates and recent 
 graduates who were already seasoned veterans of 
 the war. 
 
 Thirteen hundred and eleven Harvard men 
 served in the Union army and navy. One hundred 
 and sixty-seven were killed or died of disease. Two 
 hundred and fifty-seven Harvard men fought on 
 the Confederate side; sixty-four of them were 
 killed or died of disease. 
 
 The story of Harvard College is in a sense the 
 story of her sons; the brightest and the most 
 
 165
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 touching page in her history is that which records 
 their services in the Civil War. Therefore I will 
 make no apology for sketching here a few of those 
 whose deeds and whose death cast a luster on the 
 university they loved. 
 
 Everett Peabody was one of the leading scholars 
 of the class of '49; he was also a big, athletic 
 fellow, full of animal spirits, brimming with energy, 
 fond of pranks; he was rusticated for making a 
 bonfire on the steps of University Hall. In spite 
 of this he was graduated with honors and had a 
 part at Commencement. He went West, became an 
 engineer, and built railroads in Ohio, Illinois, and 
 Missouri; before he was thirty he was regarded 
 as the best field engineer in all that country. He 
 lived chiefly in a " boarding car " at the unfinished 
 extremity of a new railroad track; he was in the 
 habit of dating his letters home from " Boarding 
 Cars." 
 
 " The aforesaid cars," he wrote in a letter that 
 showed his characteristic liveliness of spirit, " are 
 now on an embankment about forty feet high, and 
 the snow stretches away to the north and south. 
 The trees are black and dreary looking, and the 
 wind goes howling by. Bitter cold it is, too, out- 
 side. But I have finished my frugal repast of 
 
 166
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 bread and butter and do not purpose exposing my 
 cherished nose to the night air again. Vague rem- 
 iniscences come back to me of ancient sleigh-rides, 
 of pretty faces snuggling close to your side, of 
 muffs held up before faces to keep off the wind, and 
 gentle words. There is fun enough, and wit and 
 nonsense enough, out here; but after all it is hard 
 and angular and lacks entirely the refining influence 
 which womankind infuses into man's life. But the 
 weird sisters weave, and Atropos sits ready. Let 
 her sit." 
 
 In the spring of 1861 Peabody took an active part 
 in the convention that kept Missouri in the Union. 
 Soon after that he was commissioned colonel of 
 the 1 3th Missouri Infantry. He wrote to his brother: 
 " Good-by, old fellow. I have a sort of presenti- 
 ment I shall go under. If I do, it shall be in a man- 
 ner that the old family shall feel proud of it." 
 
 Within a month the ill-fated regiment encoun- 
 tered a vastly superior force at Lexington, Missouri; 
 and after stubbornly holding its position in an 
 eight-day fight, it was at last surrounded and cap- 
 tured. Peabody was wounded in the foot. A 
 couple of months later he was exchanged, and, still 
 on crutches, set about reorganizing his regiment, 
 which now became the 25th Missouri. In a letter 
 
 167
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 written at this time he says: " I am a nondescript 
 animal, which I call a triped, as yet, but I trust 
 in a short time to be on foot once more. --You 
 in Massachusetts, who see your men going off 
 thoroughly equipped and prepared for the service, 
 can hardly conceive the destitution and ragged 
 condition of the Missouri volunteers. If I had a 
 whole pair of breeches in my regiment at Lexing- 
 ton, I don't know it; but I learned there that 
 bravery did not depend on good clothes." 
 
 In March, 1862, he was in command of the lead- 
 ing brigade in General Prentiss's division, at Shi- 
 loh. Just before the battle, he felt that the army 
 was in danger of being surprised, and asked Prentiss 
 for permission to send out a scouting party. Pren- 
 tiss delayed answering and finally ignored the re- 
 quest; Peabody therefore sent out a scouting party 
 on his own responsibility. This party met the Con- 
 federate column advancing, just as Peabody had 
 feared, and fell back, skirmishing. Peabody had 
 his brigade in line to receive the attack; the rest of 
 the division was unprepared and was thrown into 
 confusion. Had Peabody instead of Prentiss held 
 the division command, the ultimate victory of the 
 Union troops might have been less dearly bought. 
 The right of the division was captured en masse; 
 
 168
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 Peabody rode gallantly to the front to rally his 
 brigade against the overwhelming attack, was 
 shot through the head, and killed instantly. 
 
 Wilder Dwight, of the class of '53, was an earnest 
 and somewhat introspective youth. He kept a 
 diary in college. " I am somewhat of a ' dig,' I 
 suppose," he reflected in his freshman year; " and 
 though the character is rather an ignominious one 
 in college, it is in so good repute elsewhere and among 
 wiser persons than freshmen or even sophomores 
 that I shall endeavor always to deserve the title. 
 Natural geniuses, that is, lazy good scholars, are 
 few and far between. I shall, therefore, estimate 
 myself as a very common sort of a person; and as 
 I desire to excel, I shall choose the way which seems 
 to promise success." This serious-minded young 
 moralist, whose diary is filled with abstracts of 
 sermons and reflections induced by them, wonder- 
 fully escaped developing into a prig. After gradua- 
 tion, he went through the Law School, then spent 
 more than a year in study abroad, and after that 
 established himself as a lawyer in Boston. Soon 
 he was known as one of the ablest of the younger 
 men practising at the bar. 
 
 At the outbreak of the war, Dwight determined 
 to raise a regiment. He got subscriptions to guar- 
 
 169
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 antee necessary expenses; he went to Washington 
 and obtained from the Secretary of War the spe- 
 cial authority required for enlistment. The regi- 
 ment that he helped to recruit was the Second 
 Massachusetts, which, officered very largely by 
 Harvard men, went through some of the most des- 
 perate fighting of the war. From that time on, 
 as his mother wrote, " his history was that of the 
 regiment." He was commissioned major; in 
 June, 1862, he was promoted to be lieutenant- 
 colonel. He was an admirable officer in camp and 
 on the field; he looked after the health and comfort 
 of his men and was indefatigable in his kindness 
 to them. His fiery-hearted zeal for accomplishment, 
 for action, underwent severe trials; the regiment 
 was attached to the Army of the Potomac under 
 AlcClellan; Dwight chafed at the enforced idle- 
 ness. " I had rather lose my life to-morrow in a 
 victory than save it for fifty years without one! " he 
 wrote. And again: " I presume I love life and home 
 and friends as much as any one; but I should sooner 
 give them all up to-morrow than to have our regi- 
 ment go home empty. ... If you have any prayers 
 to give, give them all to the supplication that the 
 Second Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers may 
 find a field whereon to write a record of itself. Do 
 
 170
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 not spend your days in weakly fearing or regretting 
 this or that life, lives whose whole sweetness and 
 value depend upon their opportunities, not upon 
 their length." 
 
 But there was to be no lack of opportunities for 
 the Second Massachusetts. Soon it was in the 
 thick of the fighting. It covered Banks's retreat 
 in May, 1862; D wight, lingering to assist two 
 wounded soldiers, fell into the enemy's hands. 
 After a week he was paroled. His regiment had 
 given him up for dead; when his men saw him ap- 
 proaching, they rushed forward and welcomed him 
 with joyous enthusiasm. He told them who of their 
 comrades were in prison in Winchester, and who 
 were wounded. Then he said triumphantly: " And 
 now do you want to know what the Rebels think 
 of the Massachusetts Second ? ' Who was it am- 
 buscaded us near Bartonsville? ' a cavalry officer 
 asked me. ' That was the Massachusetts Second,' 
 I replied. An officer of Rebel infantry asked me 
 who it was that was at the run near Bartonsville. 
 ' That was the Massachusetts Second,' said I. 
 ' Whose,' asked another officer, ' was the battery so 
 splendidly served, and the line of sharpshooters 
 behind the stone wall, who picked off every officer 
 of ours who showed himself? ' ' That was the Massa- 
 
 171
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 chusetts Second,' said I. On the whole, the Rebels 
 came to the conclusion that they had been fighting 
 the Massachusetts Second, and that they did not 
 care to do it again in the dark." 
 
 Under parole, he chafed at being out of action. 
 In the battle of Cedar Mountain his regiment was 
 engaged and sustained heavy losses; Dwight's 
 mortification over his absence was keen. But that 
 day his exchange was effected, and he joined his 
 men in time to take part in Pope's inglorious retreat. 
 He wrote bitterly: " We want soldiers, soldiers, 
 and a general in command. Please notice the words, 
 all of them." 
 
 At the battle of Antietam, the regiment was drawn 
 up under the shelter of a fence; Dwight walked 
 along it, directing the men to keep their heads down 
 out of reach of the enemy's fire. Soon he fell mor- 
 tally wounded. His regiment was ordered to re- 
 treat, and men were detailed to carry him, but his 
 pain was so intense that he could not be moved; 
 he was left lying where he fell. A little later, young 
 Rupert Saddler, a private of his command, crept 
 out to him at great risk. Afterwards Saddler 
 wrote this statement: " I saw a man with his head 
 lying on a rail. I felt that it was the Colonel, and 
 I hurried to him. I gave him a drink of water, 
 
 172
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 and asked him where he was wounded. He said 
 his thigh-bone was shattered. I saw his arm was 
 bleeding. I asked, was it serious? He said, ' It's 
 a pretty little wound.' I saw two of our men 
 coming, and I called them over. The Rebels saw 
 them and began firing. ' Colonel Dwight wanted us 
 to go back to the regiment. Said he, ' Rupert, if 
 you live, I want you to be a good boy.' I wanted 
 to bind up his wounds, but he said it was no use. He 
 gave me a paper he had been trying to write on, 
 and the pencil; the paper was covered with his 
 blood." 
 
 It was a note to his mother, sending her his love 
 and saying good-by. 
 
 Saddler and the two other men lifted him and 
 carried him, under fire, into a corn-field. General 
 Gordon rode up to him, and Dwight saluted. Bul- 
 lets were whistling overhead. " I must have you re- 
 moved from here," said General Gordon. " Never 
 mind me," Dwight answered. " Only whip them." 
 He was carried to the field hospital and then to 
 Boonesborough, where he died. 
 
 Charles Russell Lowell followed Wilder Dwight 
 at Harvard by a year. Born in 1835, he was one 
 of the youngest men in the class of '54. He was 
 a man such as appears in a college once or twice in a 
 
 173
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 generation. He was the first scholar of the class 
 throughout his college course. Ardent in mind and 
 temper, handsome, athletic, he was distinguished 
 not only by his love of learning, but also by his 
 ruggechiess of character, his moral steadiness and 
 strength. In every way he appears to have been 
 the acknowledged leader of the class. As a scholar 
 he showed the greatest versatility and the most 
 enthusiastic acquisitiveness; he mastered languages 
 and sciences with equal zeal. In his valedictory 
 oration on " The Reverence Due from Old Men to 
 Young," there is a passage that shows the quality 
 of his thought and expression, even at the age of 
 nineteen: 
 
 " Mere action is no proof of progress; we make 
 it our boast how much we do, and then grow blind 
 to what we do. Action here is the Minotaur which 
 claims and devours our youths. Athens bewailed 
 the seven who yearly left her shore; with us scarce 
 seven remain, and we urge the victims to their fate. 
 
 " Apollonius of Tyana tells us in his Travels 
 that he saw ' a youth, one of the blackest of the 
 Indians, who had between his eyebrows a shi- 
 ning moon. Another youth named Memnon, the 
 pupil of Herodes the Sophist, had this moon when 
 he was young; but as he approached to man's estate, 
 
 174
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 its light grew fainter and fainter, and finally van- 
 ished.' The world should see with reverence on 
 each youth's brow, as a shining moon, his fresh ideal. 
 It should remember that he is already in the hands 
 of a sophist more dangerous than Herodes, for that 
 sophist is himself. It should watch, lest, from too 
 early and exclusive action, the moon on his brow, 
 growing fainter and fainter, should finally vanish, 
 and, sadder than all, should leave in vanishing no 
 sense of loss." 
 
 Although thus deprecating the young man's 
 eagerness for action, Lowell himself exhibited the 
 characteristic that he deplored. Immediately after 
 graduation he entered the iron mill of the Ames 
 Company at Chicopee, Massachusetts, as a common 
 workman. Already he had ideas for improving the 
 condition of laboring men, and he was not unwilling 
 to make a first-hand study of it. A year later he 
 went to take an important executive position with 
 the Trenton Iron Company of New Jersey. He had 
 been there but a short time when he was attacked 
 by hemorrhage of the lungs. He had to abandon his 
 work and his hopes; for two years he travelled abroad 
 for his health. When he came back in 1858, he was 
 still too unwell to resume his former occupation; 
 he went West and became treasurer of the Burling- 
 
 175
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 ton and Missouri River Railroad. In the two years 
 that he was in Burlington his health improved, and 
 his reputation for efficiency was established. In 
 1860 he was invited to undertake the management 
 of the Mount Savage Iron Works at Cumberland, 
 Maryland, and accepted the offer, seeing in it an 
 opportunity ultimately to put into practice his 
 plans for improving the lot of the workingman. 
 
 But on April 20, 1861, Lowell got the news of the 
 attack made the day before in Baltimore on the 
 Sixth Massachusetts. He resigned the management 
 of the iron works and applied for the commission 
 of second lieutenant in the regular army. Of this 
 application he said: "Military science I have ab- 
 solutely none, military talent I am too ignorant yet 
 to recognize; but my education and experience in 
 business and in the working of men may, if wanted, 
 be made available at once in the regular army. 
 Of course I am too old to be tickled with a uniform." 
 -He was only twenty-six! 
 
 In June he wrote that he would not think of be- 
 coming a soldier, " were it not for a muddled and 
 twisted idea that somehow or other this fight is 
 going to be one in which decent men ought to engage 
 for the sake of humanity." He was commissioned, 
 not second lieutenant, but captain, in the Third, 
 
 176
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 afterwards the Sixth, U. S. Cavalry. During the 
 summer he was engaged in recruiting in different 
 parts of the country. The regiment spent the 
 autumn and winter in drilling and preparing for 
 the field. Lowell felt that he had as much to learn 
 as any of the raw recruits; he worked zealously. 
 His colonel pronounced him the best officer appointed 
 from civil life that he had ever known and gave him 
 command of a squadron. 
 
 In March, 1862, the regiment joined the Army of 
 the Potomac. Lowell's younger brother, James 
 Jackson Lowell, who was the first scholar in the class 
 of '58, and, like Charles, generous, warm-hearted, 
 and beloved, was also in McClellan's army first 
 lieutenant in the igth Massachusetts Infantry. He 
 was mortally wounded on June 30 at the battle 
 of Glendale, and died on the Fourth of July. Charles 
 Lowell wrote: "The little fellow was very happy; 
 he thought the war would soon be over, that every- 
 thing was going right." 
 
 That summer Lowell was detailed as an aide to 
 McClellan; at Antietam, bearing orders for Sedg- 
 wick's division and meeting it as it was retreating 
 in confusion, he rode along the line, drove back 
 and rallied the men, and checked what threatened 
 to be a rout. For the gallantry and the quality of 
 
 177
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 leadership that he thus exhibited, McClellan chose 
 him to present to the President the trophies of the 
 campaign; and Lowell bore to Washington the 
 thirty-nine colors taken from the enemy. 
 
 In the autumn he was ordered to report to Gov- 
 ernor Andrew of Massachusetts, to organize the 
 Second Massachusetts Cavalry, of which he was 
 appointed colonel. The work of organization kept 
 him in Boston until the spring of 1863. The appoint- 
 ment of Robert Gould Shaw to command the 54th 
 Massachusetts, the negro regiment, deprived him of 
 one of his best officers, but he heartily approved 
 the appointment. " It is very important that the 
 regiment should be started soberly and not spoilt 
 by too much fanaticism," he wrote. " Shaw is not 
 a fanatic." About this time Lowell became engaged 
 to Shaw's sister, whom he married in the autumn. 
 
 While he was organizing the Second Cavalry, a 
 serious mutiny broke out at the barracks; the men 
 attacked their officers with drawn swords. Lowell 
 shot and killed the ringleader in the act of slashing 
 at a lieutenant. He immediately reported to the 
 Governor, who said: " I need nothing more; Colonel 
 Lowell is as humane as he is brave." 
 
 In May he left Boston with his regiment and went 
 to Virginia, where for some time he endeavored to 
 
 178
 
 Sr*V * ' i. .', . \' ; 
 
 ' 
 
 1 
 
 Memorial Hall
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 check the incursions of Mosby and his troopers. 
 Mosby wrote afterwards that of all the Federal 
 commanders opposed to him Colonel Lowell was 
 the one for whom he had the highest respect. 
 
 Passages from letters written at this period reveal 
 the young commander's growing maturity: 
 
 " A man is meant to act and to undertake, to 
 try to succeed in his undertakings, to take all means 
 which he thinks necessary to success: but he must 
 not let his undertakings look too large and make a 
 slave of him. Still less must he let the means. He 
 must keep free and grow integrally. 
 
 " I feel every day, more and more, that a man 
 has no right to himself at all; that, indeed, he can 
 do nothing useful unless he recognizes this clearly. 
 We were counting over the ' satisfactory ' people 
 of our acquaintance the other day, and very few 
 they were. It seems to me that this change in public 
 affairs [the war] has entirely changed my standard, 
 and that men whom ten years ago I should have 
 almost accepted as satisfactory now show lamentably 
 deficient. Men do not yet seem to have risen with 
 the occasion; and the perpetual perception of this 
 is uncomfortable. It is painful here to see how 
 sadly personal motives interfere with most of our 
 officers' usefulness. After the war how much there 
 
 179
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 will be to do, and how little opportunity a fellow 
 in the field has to prepare himself for the sort of 
 doing that will be required! It makes me quite 
 sad sometimes; but then I reflect that the great 
 secret of doing, after all, is in seeing what is to be 
 done. 
 
 " Yesterday we took a little fellow only sixteen 
 years old. He had joined one of these gangs [bush- 
 whackers] to avoid the conscription, which is very 
 sweeping. He told us all he knew about the company 
 to which he belonged; but he was such a babe that 
 it seemed mean to question him." 
 
 In July, 1864, Lowell was given the command of a 
 brigade containing, besides his own regiment, rep- 
 resentatives of every cavalry regiment in the serv- 
 ice. With this patchwork following, which he soon 
 welded with wonderful skill into a strong fighting 
 organization, he joined Sheridan's Army of the 
 Shenandoah. On August 16, Sheridan began to 
 retire down the Valley, Lowell's brigade protecting 
 his rear; and from the sixteenth till the thirty-first 
 the brigade was fighting every day. On the twenty- 
 sixth Lowell led a brilliant attack, in which his 
 Massachusetts regiment captured seventy-four men. 
 Sheridan then showed his admiration of Lowell's 
 leadership by appointing him to the command of the 
 
 180
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 Reserve Brigade, the best cavalry brigade in the 
 service. It consisted of three regiments of regular 
 cavalry, one of artillery, and Lowell's own volunteer 
 regiment the regiment that had mutinied at the 
 outset and that his skilful handling had now brought 
 to this perfection. 
 
 At Winchester on September 19, Lowell with a 
 captain and four men charged a Confederate gun 
 and captured it though the gun was fired, the 
 horses of the two officers killed, and the captain's 
 arm torn off. " A little more spunk," said Lowell 
 in commenting on the incident, " and we should 
 have had all their colors." 
 
 Thirteen horses were shot under him in as many 
 weeks. But he was more than the daring and dash- 
 ing cavalryman. " In whatever position Lowell was 
 placed," said a fellow officer, " it always seemed to 
 those around him that he was made for just that 
 work." So it had been in college, where he had 
 mastered languages and sciences with equal ease and 
 equal zeal. He was young, and he looked even 
 younger than he was. But his men, who had now 
 learned to know him, adored him and followed him 
 with enthusiasm and with confidence. 
 
 He wrote of Sheridan: " I like him immensely. 
 Whether he succeeds or fails, he is the first general 
 
 181
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 I have seen who puts as much heart and time and 
 thought into his work as if he were doing it for his 
 own exclusive profit. He works like a mill-owner or 
 an iron-master, not like a soldier. Never sleeps, 
 never worries, is never cross, but isn't afraid to come 
 down on a man who deserves it." 
 
 His own ripening ideals appear in a letter that he 
 wrote to Major Henry L. Higginson, then disabled: 
 " I hope that you have outgrown all foolish ambitions, 
 and are now content to become a ' useful citizen. ' 
 . . . Don't grow rich; if you once begin, you will 
 find it much more difficult to be a useful citizen. . . . 
 There, what a stale sermon I'm preaching! But 
 being a soldier, it does seem to me that I should 
 like nothing so well as being a useful citizen. Well, 
 trying to be one, I mean. I shall stay in the service, 
 of course, till the war is over, or till I'm disabled; 
 but then I look forward to a pleasanter career. I 
 believe I have lost all my ambitions. I don't think 
 I would turn my hand to be a distinguished chemist 
 or a farhous mathematician. All I now care about 
 is to be a useful citizen, with money enough to buy 
 bread and firewood, and to teach my children to 
 ride on horseback and look strangers in the face, 
 especially Southern strangers!" 
 
 On October 15, Sheridan left his army intrenched 
 182
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 near Cedar Creek and went to visit Front Royal 
 and other points in the Valley. In the dawn of the 
 nineteenth, the Confederates surprised the left of 
 the line and drove it headlong down the Valley - 
 until at noon Sheridan came galloping from Win- 
 chester. Meanwhile Lowell had led his Reserve 
 Brigade from the right of the field to the left, a 
 distance of three miles, and was covering the re- 
 treat. He established himself at the extreme left 
 and maintained his position against a greatly su- 
 perior force. Riding back and forth along the line 
 of his skirmishers, he was a conspicuous mark for 
 the sharpshooters on the roofs of the village. At 
 one o'clock a spent ball struck him in the right breast, 
 over his bad lung, and though the bullet did not. 
 break the skin, the blow caused internal hemorrhage 
 and deprived him of breath and voice. For an hour 
 and a half he lay on the ground. Then came Sheri- 
 dan's order to begin an advance all along the line - 
 the advance that was destined to give the Union 
 troops the victory. " I feel well now," Lowell 
 whispered, and insisted on being helped into his 
 saddle that he might take part in the charge. He 
 gave his orders through a member of his staff; his 
 brigade swept forward into the thickest of the fight, 
 he at the head of it, and in a few moments he fell 
 
 183
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 mortally wounded. He lived long enough to know 
 that the Union troops had won the battle not 
 long enough to receive his commission as brigadier- 
 general, signed the day he died. 
 
 Less illustrious, yet no less heroic is the story of 
 Charles Brooks Brown, of the class of '56. He was 
 one of eleven children; the family, who lived in 
 Cambridge, were in humble circumstances. He 
 worked his way through college kept school in 
 winter, acted as monitor, wrote sermons or theo- 
 logical discourses for religious newspapers, novel- 
 ettes for weekly papers, conundrums for prize offers. 
 After graduation, he studied law and then went to 
 Springfield, Illinois, to practise. There he became 
 known to Abraham Lincoln; he made speeches for 
 Lincoln in the campaign of 1858. It was chiefly 
 because of what Brown told him of the place that 
 Lincoln decided to send his son to Harvard. 
 
 After a year and a half in Springfield, Brown came 
 back to Boston. On the morning of April 17, 1861, 
 he left his home in Cambridge to go to his office, 
 but learning that a Cambridge company of volun- 
 teers was starting for the South that day, he joined 
 them. That night he was on a steamer bound for 
 Fortress Monroe a private in the Third Massa- 
 chusetts. He served with his company at Fortress 
 
 184
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 Monroe during the three months' campaign, re- 
 ceived his discharge July 22, 1861, and came home. 
 
 But after Bull Run he could stay at home no 
 longer. He looked about for a regiment likely soon 
 to get into action, and in August enlisted as a private 
 in the Nineteenth Massachusetts. He soon became 
 a sergeant. 
 
 He had chosen his regiment well, for the Nine- 
 teenth Massachu setts saw plenty of fighting. At 
 the battle of Fair Oaks in June, 1862, Brown was 
 wounded in the leg. He fought on for some time 
 after being struck; then, using his gun as a crutch, 
 he hobbled from the field. He was sent to the U. S. 
 General Hospital at David's Island, New York, 
 and was detained there until October 15. In No- 
 vember he rejoined his regiment, shortly before 
 the battle of Fredericksburg, The regiment had 
 been presented with a new stand of colors, to re- 
 place those that had been sent home stripped and 
 torn by bullets. At Fredericksburg the new colors 
 had fourteen holes shot through them, and were 
 carried by eleven different men, nine of whom were 
 filled or wounded within an hour. Brown was the 
 seventh man to seize them, was wounded in the 
 head, refused to give up the colors, and rushing out 
 in advance of the line, staggered and fell, driving 
 
 185
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the color-lance into the earth. The wound that 
 to his comrades had seemed mortal proved not to be 
 serious, and in a few days he was on duty again. 
 
 The next spring, though he was, as he wrote, 
 " in full enjoyment of the blessings of fever and ague 
 and rheumatism," he refused to accept the surgeon's 
 advice and go on the sick list. At the battle of 
 Chancellorsville he volunteered for dangerous service 
 and performed it. After the battle, against his 
 protestations, he was sent to the hospital at Chest- 
 nut Hill, Philadelphia. He was restless at being 
 absent from the. regiment, but he wrote to con- 
 gratulate a brother on not being drafted, for he 
 thought that in sending three sons to the war the 
 family were doing their share. 
 
 In November, 1863, he rejoined his regiment. In 
 December he had to decide whether or not to re- 
 enlist. He had been in practically continuous serv- 
 ice since the very outbreak of the war, had been twice 
 wounded, was broken in health, and was a soldier 
 in a regiment of such gallant reputation that it 
 was always sure to be sent into the thickest of the 
 fight. With his ability, education, and opportuni- 
 ties, Brown could easily have obtained a commission 
 in another regiment; he could easily have obtained 
 an honorable discharge. But he resolved to stay 
 
 186
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 with the regiment until the end of the war and to 
 win a commission in it or not at all. So he re-en- 
 listed in the ranks. 
 
 Just as the campaign in the Wilderness began, 
 he received an appointment as first lieutenant; he 
 put the document in his pocket, and still as a private 
 went into the bloody fighting of that terrible cam- 
 paign. On May 12, 1864, leading his company in 
 Hancock's charge, at Spottsylvania Court-House, he 
 was struck by a shell. 
 
 He knew that his wounds were mortal; he drew 
 from his pocket his unused commission as lieutenant, 
 now stained with his blood, and a photograph of the 
 girl to whom he had become engaged during his 
 month's furlough after re-enlistment; he asked 
 the comrades who came up to send them home with 
 the news of his death. His brother James was 
 wounded in the same battle and died the same day. 
 The girl to whom Brown was engaged was pros- 
 trated, fell ill of consumption, and died six months 
 later with his name on her lips. 
 
 Strong Vincent, '59, of Erie, Pennsylvania, was 
 big, handsome, and popular one of the marshals 
 of his class. After graduation, he read law in Erie. 
 At the first call for volunteers he enlisted in the 
 Wayne Guards and married immediately the girl 
 
 187
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 to whom for some time he had been engaged. His 
 wife accompanied him to Pittsburg, where the 
 Wayne Guards remained during the three months 
 of their enlistment. Then Vincent assisted in 
 raising the Eighty-third Pennsylvania and was 
 made lieutenant-colonel of the regiment. He was 
 dangerously ill when the battle of Games' Mills be- 
 gan, in which more than half his regiment were killed 
 or wounded. The colonel and the major were both 
 killed. Hearing this, Vincent rose from his bed, 
 mounted a horse, and put himself at the head of his 
 men. His example inspired them, but soon he 
 reeled from his horse; he was put into an ambulance 
 and then sent on a sick-transport down the James 
 River and up to New York. Finally he was taken 
 home to Erie; but on October I he rejoined his 
 regiment as its colonel. At Fredericksburg he was 
 in command of a brigade. He was made president 
 of a general court-martial, and was offered the 
 position of judge-advocate general of the Army of the 
 Potomac, but he declined the honor, preferring 
 active service with the troops. 
 
 At Gettysburg, again commanding a brigade, he 
 was sent to seize Little Round Top, and to hold it 
 and the ravine between it and Big Round Top. 
 His disposition of his troops was most skilful. 
 
 188
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 Standing on a huge boulder from which he might 
 survey and direct operations, a target for all the 
 guns of the attacking force, he was mortally wounded. 
 The appointment of brigadier-general was sent to 
 him the next day, but did not reach him before he 
 died. 
 
 Edward Gardner Abbott and Henry Livermore 
 Abbott, brothers and members of the class of 1860, 
 both met chivalrous deaths. Edward Abbott, 
 captain in the Second Massachusetts, was killed 
 at Cedar Mountain while exposing himself in order 
 to steady his men. Henry Abbott, second lieu- 
 tenant in the Twentieth Massachusetts, was shot 
 through the arm at Glendale, but went on fighting, 
 and fought through the next day at Malvern Hill. 
 With his company of sixty men he led his regiment 
 when it cleared the main street of Fredericksburg; 
 thirty-five of his sixty fell under the Confederates' 
 terrific fire. At Gettysburg the Twentieth again 
 lost heavily; at the end of the battle Abbott, then 
 major, found himself in command. In the battle 
 of the Wilderness he was mortally wounded; dying, 
 he directed that all the money he left should be used 
 for the relief of widows and orphans of the regi- 
 ment. 
 
 Robert Gould Shaw, also of the class of '60, had 
 189
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 grown up a rather timid, very sensitive and affec- 
 tionate boy. He was fond of music and of sketching. 
 In college he was an active member of the Pierian 
 Sodality, an organization devoted to music. He 
 took no rank as a scholar never stood in the 
 first half of his class. 
 
 In April, 1861, he marched with the Seventh New 
 York to Washington. The call for the Seventh was 
 for only thirty days; at the end of that time he 
 applied for and obtained a commission as second 
 lieutenant in the Second Massachusetts. Almost 
 immediately he saw hard fighting. Of the battle 
 of Cedar Mountain he wrote: " Goodwin, Gary, 
 Choate, and Stephen Perkins [all college mates] 
 were all quite ill, but would not stay away from the 
 fight. Choate was the only one of the four not 
 killed. Goodwin couldn't keep up with the regi- 
 ment; but I saw him toiling up the hill at some dis- 
 tance behind with the assistance of his servant. 
 He hardly reached the front when he was killed. 
 All our officers behaved nobly. Those who ought 
 to have stayed away didn't. It was splendid to 
 see those sick fellows walk straight up into the 
 shower of bullets as if it were so much rain; men 
 who, until this year, had lived lives of perfect ease 
 and luxury." 
 
 190
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 After the battle of Antietam, having gone about 
 among the wounded, he wrote: "There are so 
 many young boys and old men among the Rebels 
 that it seems hardly possible that they can have 
 come of their own accord to fight us; and it makes 
 you pity them all the more as they lie moaning on 
 the field." And later he wrote: " This life gradually 
 makes us feel that, so far as a man himself is con- 
 cerned, he may as well die now as a few years hence; 
 but I never see one killed without thinking of the 
 people he leaves at home; that is the sad part of it." 
 
 January 30, 1863, Governor Andrew wrote to 
 him as follows: " I am about to organize in Massa- 
 chusetts a colored regiment as part of the volunteer 
 quota of this State, the commissioned officers to 
 be white men. I have to-day written to your father, 
 expressing to him my sense of the importance of 
 this undertaking and requesting him to forward to 
 you this letter, in which I offer you the commission 
 of colonel over it. The lieutenant-colonelcy I have 
 offered to Captain Hallowell of the 2Oth Massa- 
 chusetts regiment. It is important to the organi- 
 zation of this regiment that I should receive your 
 reply to this offer at the earliest day consistent with 
 your ability to arrive at a deliberate conclusion on 
 the subject." 
 
 191
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Shaw hesitated; he distrusted his abilities, he liked 
 the service with the Second Massachusetts among 
 officers and men who were his friends, and he was no 
 doubt reluctant to leave it for the command of col- 
 ored troops and the social ostracism to which such 
 an exchange would subject him in some quarters. 
 But the governor's request seemed to impose on him 
 a duty; he accepted the commission, went to Boston, 
 and threw himself heart and soul into the work of 
 organizing and drilling the Fifty-fourth Massachu- 
 setts. On May 2, he was married; on May 28 he 
 sailed from Boston with his regiment, and his bride 
 of a little more than three weeks never saw him 
 again. 
 
 With him went as second lieutenant young Cabot 
 Jackson Russel, of the class of '65. The first act in 
 which the negro regiment had to participate after 
 landing on Port Royal Island was the burning of the 
 defenceless town of Darien, Georgia. Shaw obeyed 
 the orders of his superior commanding officer in this 
 matter most unwillingly, and young Russel wrote: 
 " This is not the sort of work I came for, nor do I 
 believe it good work, but it is not for me to criti- 
 cize." 
 
 On Saturday, July 1 8, General Strong, commanding 
 the Union troops in front of Fort Wagner, offered 
 
 192
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 Shaw the post of honor in the suicidal assault. Now 
 this is what Shaw and his regiment had passed 
 through in the two preceding days: Thursday, 
 July 16, they were engaged in a fight on James 
 Island the first fighting that they had been in 
 and beat back the enemy gallantly. That evening 
 at nine o'clock they left James Island and marched 
 to Cole's Island, which they reached at four in the 
 morning; it rained, thundered, and lightened all 
 night. Upon their arrival at Cole's Island they lay 
 round all day a day that Shaw described in his 
 last letter: "There is hardly any water to be got 
 here, and the sun and sand are dazzling and roast- 
 ing us." They had no food except the hardtack 
 and coffee in their haversacks. From eleven o'clock 
 Friday night until four o'clock Saturday morning, 
 again under a pelting rain, they were being put on 
 board a transport from a boat that took out about 
 fifty at a time. They breakfasted on what was left 
 of their hardtack, and they had no other food all 
 that day. The transport left Cole's Island at six 
 in the morning and landed the troops at Pawnee 
 Landing at half-past nine. Thence they marched 
 to the point opposite Morris Island, arriving at 
 about two in the afternoon. A steamer took them 
 across the inlet; they reached General Strong's 
 
 193
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 headquarters at six o'clock. Immediately General 
 Strong offered them the brunt of the attack. 
 
 Shaw was not twenty-six years old. But he was 
 no longer the timid youth who had shrunk from the 
 football scrimmages on the Delta. He formed his 
 regiment in line of battle, and when at half-past 
 seven the order was given, he led the charge. A 
 hundred yards from the fort, the negroes faltered 
 under the scathing fire; but Shaw, waving his sword 
 and shouting, " Forward, Fifty-fourth! " rallied 
 them, and they followed him devotedly. He was 
 himself one of the first to scale the walls. On the 
 ramparts he was shot dead and fell inside the 
 fort. 
 
 Brigadier-General Haygood, the Confederate com- 
 mander, made this statement: " I knew Colonel 
 Shaw before the war, and then esteemed him. Had 
 he b v een in command of white troops, I should have 
 given him an honorable burial. As it is, I shall 
 bury him in the common trench, with the negroes 
 that fell with him." 
 
 This was done; and the Confederate general 
 thus provided for the body of his former friend what 
 Thomas Hughes justly termed " the grandest 
 sepulchre earned by any soldier of the century." 
 
 Robert Shaw was not the only white officer who 
 194
 
 HARVARD IN THE WAR 
 
 earned that burial. Here are the words in which 
 one who knew Cabot Russel described his end: 
 
 " The darkness of night hung over the sufferings 
 of that sacrifice where the noblest and the best, 
 appointed to lead black soldiers to death and prove 
 that they were men, had obeyed the order. When 
 our troops fell back from an assault in which they 
 were not supported, hundreds of dead and wounded 
 marked how far they had gone. Among those who 
 did not return was Captain Russel. A ball struck 
 him in the shoulder and he fell. Captain Simpkins 
 offered to carry him off. But the boy had become a 
 veteran in a moment, and the answer was, ' No, 
 but you may straighten me out.' As his friend, true 
 to the end, was rendering this last service, a bullet 
 pierced his heart, and his dead body fell over the 
 dying." 
 
 Then some of Russel's soldiers wished to bear 
 him from the field. But the young officer's last 
 order was: " Do not touch me; move on, men, fol- 
 low your colors." 
 
 So they left him. He was not quite nineteen. 
 
 On July 21, 1865, Commemoration Day was 
 celebrated at Harvard College in honor of those 
 students and graduates who had served in the war. 
 General Meade was present and received the degree 
 
 195
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 of LL. D. Among the younger men of Harvard who 
 were there was Major-General William Francis Bart- 
 lett, of the class of '62. He had lost a leg at the siege 
 of Yorktown; a few months later, returning to the 
 front at the head of the regiment of which he had 
 been made colonel, he had ridden down Broadway 
 with his crutch strapped to his back; he had been 
 wounded at Port Hudson and in the Wilderness 
 and before Petersburg; and now at the gathering 
 before which Lowell read his Commemoration Ode, 
 the president called upon him in these words: 
 '' I introduce to you Major-General William Francis 
 Bartlett, his heart is left." 
 
 196
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADMINISTRATION 
 
 /CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT was chosen 
 V^ President of Harvard by the Corporation in 
 September, 1868, when he was thirty-four years 
 old. The votaries of a classical education dis- 
 trusted the young professor of chemistry; the Over- 
 seers felt that an older man was needed, and twice 
 vetoed the election. But the Corporation stood 
 firm, and in May, 1869, the Overseers accepted 
 their choice. 
 
 In his inaugural address, the young president did 
 not conciliate those who had opposed him. It was 
 a departure from the usual suave and colorless 
 disquisition produced for such an occasion; there 
 was in it none of the harmless pedantry or platitu- 
 dinous verbiage which in the middle of the century 
 was wont to pass as denoting scholarship. The crisp 
 and pungent declarations of the new president 
 startled many of his hearers. " The endless con- 
 troversies whether language, philosophy, mathe- 
 
 197
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 matics, or science supply the best mental training, 
 whether general education should be chiefly literary 
 or chiefly scientific, have no practical lesson for us 
 to-day. This University recognizes no real antago- 
 nism between literature and science, and consents 
 to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics 
 or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have 
 them all, and at their best." 
 
 That speech was the memorable utterance of a 
 strong, sane optimist, a clear-thinking, courageous 
 leader. It was in no idle spirit of vaunting prophecy 
 that he declared, " The future of the University 
 will not be unworthy of its past." 
 
 During the last fifty years the material growth 
 in America has been in all ways incalculable. Ham- 
 lets have become cities, deserts have been made 
 fertile, the forests that once seemed a forbidding 
 barrier to progress now have to be cherished in the 
 name of progress, the web of industry is spun in 
 places and across spaces that must have seemed un- 
 conquerable to the men of half a century ago. That 
 Harvard University should have grown with the 
 times was inevitable; but its growth has been greater 
 than that of almost any standard for comparison. 
 Playgrounds have been usurped for buildings, and 
 wider playgrounds have been laid out; students and 
 
 198
 
 PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADMINISTRATION 
 
 officers have increased many times in number, re- 
 sources have been augmented enormously, wealth 
 has been poured into Harvard's lap; in 1869 her 
 capital was about two and a quarter millions; now 
 her income is about two and a quarter millions. 
 
 With all that, Harvard is not a rich university 
 in the sense, at least, of having a comfortable sur- 
 plus after all legitimate needs are provided for. 
 She spends worthily every year all that she has, and 
 she always needs more. Her professors and in- 
 structors are not highly paid. If they have no 
 other sources of revenue than their salaries, they 
 must live with a careful eye to the present and an 
 anxious one to the future. Perhaps President Eliot 
 was never deeply moved by their pecuniary diffi- 
 culties. To his ascetic and devoted spirit, asceticism 
 and devotion were required of the teachers of 
 youth, and it mattered little if they were prescribed 
 by poverty instead of being elective. The cost to 
 Harvard of each student's education is not covered 
 by the student's tuition fee. This fact is, in one 
 way, a burden that the teachers must bear, and for 
 the most part they bear it cheerfully. 
 
 It is the teachers, not the buildings or the athletic 
 victories, that make a college; and at no time since 
 President Eliot took charge of the university has 
 
 199
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 Harvard had cause to fear for her primacy in scholar- 
 ship. The names of Agassiz and Gray and Shaler, 
 of Norton and Child and Lowell, of Goodwin and 
 Lane and James, of Dunbar and Hill dim the luster 
 of many others that are minor only because of the 
 distinguished juxtaposition that they enjoy. And it 
 is to President Eliot's genius for securing the best 
 and eliminating the second-rate that Harvard 
 owes a teaching staff inferior to none in the English- 
 speaking world. 
 
 The Law School and the Medical School had been 
 pursuing their comfortable and independent courses. 
 Each institution had its own treasury, in conse- 
 quence felt self-sufficient, and was as indisposed as 
 it was unaccustomed to receive interference from 
 any outside authority. When President Eliot 
 made it manifest that he proposed to take these 
 organizations under his control, their officers were 
 indignant and dismayed. 
 
 But within three years the Medical School had 
 turned its finances over to the college treasurer, 
 and had submitted to a complete revision of its 
 courses and to an alteration of its term time and 
 vacation. Henceforth, it was a docile member of 
 President's Eliot's empire. 
 
 So too with the Law School. Here instruction had 
 200
 
 PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADMINISTRATION 
 
 been irregular and desultory, no examinations were 
 held, and even the good instructors were handi- 
 capped by the lack of system. President Eliot 
 found in the new dean, Professor Langdell, an 
 able and enthusiastic coadjutor. The funds were 
 turned over to the common treasury; students were 
 obliged to live in Cambridge, to attend recitations 
 regularly, and to undergo examinations; the stand- 
 ard of instruction was raised and the method of it 
 altered. Since its reorganization, the Law School 
 has been one of the most flourishing and important 
 departments of the university. 
 
 The other schools are all, to a greater or less degree,, 
 monuments to President Eliot; and by the college 
 itself his influence has been as directly felt. The 
 elective system, although it had been introduced in 
 a qualified form many years before he took office, 
 will always be, for Harvard men, associated with 
 Eliot's name. Its scope was broadened, new courses 
 were continually being established, the methods 
 of instruction were revised and improved the aim 
 constantly being to make the student think for him- 
 self and of his own independent interest pursue the 
 truth to its original sources. This ideal of education 
 was admirably adapted to the needs of those under- 
 graduates who were not immature, indolent, or in- 
 
 201
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 different, and who came to Harvard meaning to 
 work as well as to play. For the more irresponsible 
 members of the college society, it was perhaps less 
 fruitful than the old-fashioned daily recitations and 
 prescribed curriculum might have been. A certain 
 number in every class became proficient in selecting 
 courses that exacted the minimum amount of effort 
 for a passing mark; for many years the visitor to 
 Harvard was sure to express surprise at the number 
 of young men who elected to study Semitic; and 
 there were courses in Fine Arts and Geology which 
 were taken quite plausibly too with the idea 
 that to sit under the distinguished professors who 
 gave them was, without making further effort, to 
 acquire a liberal education. That there was con- 
 siderable abuse of the privileges and opportunities 
 conferred by the elective system there is no doubt; 
 and the present administration is undertaking to 
 prevent this by curtailing the freedom of choice in 
 the first year and by requiring of each student a 
 coherent plan of studies instead of permitting him 
 to nibble here and there. The effort is to make 
 every undergraduate, as President Lowell has said, 
 " know a little of everything and one thing well." 
 
 President Eliot's large-minded liberality affected 
 the system of discipline as well as that of instruction. 
 
 202
 
 PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADMINISTRATION 
 
 In 1886, chapel attendance was made voluntary, 
 and in other respects much freedom of movement 
 was permitted to the student who maintained a good 
 standing in his work. 
 
 In May, 1865, at a meeting of graduates held in 
 Boston, a committee had been appointed to report 
 on the subject of a permanent memorial commemora- 
 ting the Harvard men who had fought and died for 
 the Union. This committee reported that a building 
 in which statues, portraits, and commemorative 
 tablets might be placed and which would be a " suit- 
 able theatre or auditorium for the literary festivals 
 of the College " should be constructed. Funds were 
 quickly raised, and on October 6, 1870, the corner- 
 stone of Memorial Hall was laid, but not until 
 Commencement, 1874, was the building ready for 
 occupancy. Its great dining-hall and its kitchens 
 have furnished a satisfactory solution of the prob- 
 lem of commons which had vexed so many adminis- 
 trations. Its lofty, vaulted transept with the stained- 
 glass windows and the marble tablets whereon are 
 recorded one hundred and thirty-six names 
 recent researches show that there should be one 
 hundred and sixty-seven is the threshold that 
 the senior crosses on Commencement Day to pass 
 out into the world. Its auditorium, Sanders Theatre, 
 
 203
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 has been the scene of many distinguished gatherings 
 and has heard the voices of many illustrious men. 
 Perhaps the most memorable occasion that Sanders 
 Theatre has known was that which marked the 
 climax of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary 
 of Harvard College. 
 
 The celebration lasted for three days, November 
 6, 7, and 8, 1886. The first day, Saturday, was 
 Undergraduates' Day; the programme provided 
 for undergraduate literary exercises in the morning, 
 athletic sports in the afternoon, and a torchlight 
 procession in the evening. The first two features 
 of this programme were successfully carried out, 
 but the torchlight procession had to be postponed 
 on account of rain until the evening of the last day. 
 It had somewhat the character of a pageant. On a 
 dray was a model of the Harvard statue, supported 
 by burlesque representations of a butcher, a cooper, 
 and a grocer these having been the father and two 
 step-fathers of John Harvard, who had eventually 
 received their accumulated fortunes. The group 
 was labeled: "Johnnie Harvard's Pa's." An old 
 printing-press was carried on a wagon and served 
 by an Indian. Then came a squad of Puritans, 
 with sugar-loaf hats and knee-breeches; after them 
 the old Washington Corps, with blue, swallow-tailed 
 
 204
 
 PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADMINISTRATION 
 
 coats and white small-clothes. There were various 
 impersonators of old Harvard worthies, Hollis, 
 Stoughton, Holworthy, and others. The ancient 
 Navy Club, " in which the laziest man was high 
 admiral," was represented; " this supreme slug- 
 gard," as the historian of the occasion calls him, 
 lay on a red divan, dressed in admiral's uniform. 
 The procession paraded for two hours and finally 
 ended at Holmes Field, where there was a display 
 of fireworks the climax being a representation 
 of John Harvard standing inside a gorgeous temple. 
 
 The second day of the celebration, Sunday, was 
 Foundation Day, the anniversary of the passage of 
 the vote by the General Court granting four hundred 
 pounds for the establishment of the college. Com- 
 memoration exercises were held in Appleton Chapel. 
 
 On the morning of Monday, the eighth, Alumni 
 Day, two thousand graduates assembled in the 
 yard. President Cleveland arrived, escorted by the 
 Lancers. His carriage drove up to Gore Hall, 
 where the chief marshal and President Eliot received 
 him. The church bells rang and batteries on the 
 Common fired a salute. Then the procession formed 
 and marched to Sanders Theatre. Lowell was the 
 orator of the occasion, and Holmes the poet. In his 
 address, Lowell, one of the conservatives, questioned 
 
 205
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the wisdom of the elective system, humorously: " Is 
 it indeed so self-evident a proposition as it seems to 
 many, that ' You may ' is as wholesome a lesson for 
 youth as ' You must? ' Is it so good a fore-school- 
 ing for Life, which will be a teacher of quite other 
 mood, making us learn, rod in hand, precisely 
 those lessons we should not have chosen? I have, 
 to be sure, heard the late President Quincy (clarum 
 et venerabile nomen) say that if a young man came 
 hither and did nothing more than rub his shoulders 
 against the College buildings for four years, he would 
 imbibe some tincture of sound learning by an in- 
 voluntary process of absorption. The founders 
 of the College also believed in some impulsions 
 towards science communicated a tergo, but of 
 sharper virtue, and accordingly armed their presi- 
 dent with that ductor dubitantium which was wielded 
 to such good purpose by the Reverend James Bowyer 
 at Christ's Hospital in the days of Coleridge and 
 Lamb. They believed with the old poet that whip- 
 ping was ' a wild benefit of nature,' and could they 
 have read Wordsworth's exquisite stanza, 
 
 " ' One impulse from a vernal wood 
 Can teach us more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good 
 Than all the sages can,' 
 
 206
 
 PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADMINISTRATION 
 
 they would have struck out ' vernal ' and inserted 
 * birchen ' on the margin." 
 
 That this passage met with approval deeper than 
 that of laughter in some of the audience cannot be 
 doubted; but the greatest applause came when the 
 orator welcomed Dr. Mandell Creighton, " who 
 brings the message of John Harvard's College, 
 Emmanuel. The welcome we give him could not be 
 warmer than that which we offer to his colleagues; 
 but we cannot help feeling that in pressing his hand 
 our own instinctively closes a little more tightly, as 
 with a sense of nearer kindred." 
 
 After the oration and the poem and the conferring 
 of honorary degrees, there was an Alumni banquet 
 in Memorial Hall. The speech-making was of a 
 somewhat livelier character than that which had 
 distinguished the bicentennial celebration. Presi- 
 dent Cleveland expressed his congratulations, am- 
 bassadors from other institutions paid their trib- 
 utes, and Dr. Creighton made a happy response to 
 Lowell's compliment of the morning when he said: 
 " Ten years ago Emmanuel College celebrated the 
 three hundredth anniversary of its foundation in 
 some such way as you are doing to-day. On that 
 occasion two distinguished alumni of Harvard 
 Professor Lowell and Professor Norton no less by 
 
 207
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the dignity of their presence than by the eloquence of 
 their speech almost succeeded in converting our 
 festival into a celebration of Harvard College in its 
 ancestral soil of England." 
 
 208
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES 
 
 WITH the increase in freedom that marked 
 President Eliot's administration there was 
 an increase in the variety of activities attractive 
 to undergraduates. In the first half of the century, 
 the competitive spirit had found almost no outlet 
 except in scholarship; social intercourse with the 
 world outside the college walls had hardly existed; 
 there had been no athletics; and there had been 
 few students with purses well enough filled to com- 
 mand luxuries. 
 
 Undergraduate activities of the recent and con- 
 temporary generations may be classified as three- 
 fold literary, social, and athletic. 
 
 A hundred years ago literary avocations were more 
 generally associated with the name of culture than 
 they are to-day; the students of Harvard, trained 
 to express themselves in the classical and orotund 
 style of the period, desired to see, and to have their 
 friends see, their compositions in print. So, not- 
 
 209
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 withstanding the smallness of the public that could 
 be counted on to support it, the Lyceum, a monthly 
 periodical, was launched in 1810. Edward Everett 
 and Samuel Gilman, the author of " Fair Harvard," 
 were among its editors. It lasted less than a year; 
 it perished with this admonition from the disillu- 
 sioned editors: " The legacy which we leave to our 
 collegiate posterity is our advice that they enjoy all 
 those exquisite pleasures which literary seclusion 
 affords, but that they do not strive to communicate 
 them to others." 
 
 Four college generations seem to have been im- 
 pressed by the solemnity of the warning; but in 
 1827 the Register was founded; its early demise 
 offered little encouragement to the sanguine souls 
 who three years later started the Collegian, Al- 
 though Holmes contributed several excellent pieces 
 to this publication, among them " The Height of 
 the Ridiculous," it ran for only six numbers. Un- 
 daunted by the unsuccessful outcome of these ex- 
 periments, some members of the class of 1836 
 brought out a periodical which they called Harvard- 
 iana. Lowell was one of the editors and helped to 
 keep it alive for three years. The Harvard Magazine, 
 set afloat in 1854, held its head above water till 
 1864 and then was submerged. 
 
 210
 
 The Lampoon Office and the "Gold Coast
 
 In May, 1866, the Advocate, which still maintains 
 a prosperous existence, was founded. It is issued 
 fortnightly and contains fiction, poetry, essays, 
 and comment on matters of current undergraduate 
 interest. The editors formerly held their meetings 
 in one another's rooms, but now resort to the well 
 equipped sanctum in the Harvard Union the 
 great university club. A daily paper, the Magenta, 
 now the Crimson, was started in 1873. The Crim- 
 son is a profitable and useful enterprise and makes 
 a good training school for young men who wish to 
 take up newspaper work. Like the Advocate and 
 the Monthly, it has offices in the Union. The Lam- 
 poon, a humorous illustrated paper, was founded in 
 1876, and in 1885, the Monthly, more ambitious in 
 its literary efforts than the Advocate, had its birth. 
 The Lampoon has a house of its own, of an indi- 
 vidual and admirably suggestive style of archi- 
 tecture, in Mount Auburn Street. Although the 
 interests of these various publications do not often 
 clash, rivalry and jealousy are occasionally revealed 
 in good-humored gibes and acrimonious sneers. 
 The Advocate regards the Monthly as owlish, the 
 Monthly looks upon the Advocate as trivial, the 
 Crimson considers both of them dilettante, and the 
 Lampoon chastens all three. The holiday on which 
 
 211
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the Lampoon issued what purported to be the Crim- 
 son and proved to be a satirical burlesque of it is 
 historic. Whatever venom charges the pens of the 
 scribes, their personal relations are amicable enough; 
 and the annual baseball game between the Crimson 
 and the Lampoon is, for the members of the two 
 boards, one of the pleasing and humorous events 
 of the year. 
 
 Nowadays the criticism is often made that too 
 many of the young men of our colleges have pre- 
 maturely ensconced themselves in the club window 
 to look out upon life. Certainly at Harvard a num- 
 ber of clubs assist their members to acquire sophis- 
 tication and to partake of non-academic luxuries. 
 The pursuit of these two aims would no doubt 
 interest a certain proportion of young men even if 
 there were no clubs to facilitate it; without these 
 institutions, which do in varying degrees provide 
 an education in worldliness, the acquisition of 
 knowledge and the enjoyment of luxury would be 
 rather more perilous than it now is. At Harvard the 
 man without a club who embarks upon the educa- 
 tion of his senses is more likely to become demoralized 
 and cheapened than the kindred spirit with club 
 restraints and club opportunities to guide him. 
 
 It is frequently and somewhat stridently objected 
 212
 
 UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES 
 
 that the club life at Harvard does not promote a 
 spirit of democracy. Does club life promote such 
 a spirit anywhere? To live in a dormitory de luxe, 
 with a private bath of your own and a swimming 
 tank in the basement, when the fellow that checks 
 off your attendance at recitations dwells in a dim 
 attic and bathes at the gymnasium, does not promote 
 a spirit of democracy. At Harvard, as elsewhere in 
 America, the rich have grown richer, and the poor 
 are still the poor. 
 
 Clubland lies along the Gold Coast. In and 
 about this part of Mount Auburn Street are clus- 
 tered the expensive dormitories occupied by the 
 rich, and the expensive little clubs maintained by the 
 socially fortunate among the rich. 
 
 A hundred years ago it was the custom for two 
 youths to bear from the college commons to the 
 weekly meeting and feast of the Hasty Pudding 
 Club a great iron kettle rilled with hasty pudding. 
 Nowadays a club dinner is a more formal matter 
 or begins as such. It is an affair of evening dress, 
 wines, liqueurs, and good cigars. The Hasty Pudding 
 Club still serves hasty pudding at its occasional 
 gatherings, a rather barren effort to maintain the 
 traditions of those early and simpler days. But the 
 Pudding has suffered a decline in prestige with the 
 
 213
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 increase in number and in luxury of the smaller 
 clubs. Until about the middle of the nineteenth 
 century the Porcellian was the only small club de- 
 voted to social and convivial purposes. Then came 
 an era of Greek letter fraternities. The Harvard 
 chapters finally withdrew from the parent organi- 
 zations and became separate clubs. Within the 
 last few years other small clubs have organized and 
 have built themselves houses which by the standard 
 of the eighties are extremely luxurious. 
 
 In those days and even later the Dickey was an 
 organization highly regarded by certain of the under- 
 graduates partly because the initiation gave a 
 fellow in his sophomore year an opportunity to know 
 and become known to a number of upper classmen, 
 and partly because membership in it was a badge 
 of social distinction. As a club the Dickey never 
 amounted to anything, yet sophomores were only 
 too delighted to be dragged from their rooms at 
 night, hurled down-stairs and kicked through the 
 streets at the head of a chanting procession this 
 being the method of apprising them of election - 
 and then for the better part of a week to lead a life 
 of servitude, bound to obey every behest of any one 
 who was a Dickey member. The pranks that they 
 were compelled to play in public and in private were 
 
 214
 
 UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES 
 
 sometimes ingenious and amusing, sometimes stupid 
 and vulgar. The initiation had features of brutality 
 which have been partially reformed. On the whole, 
 the Dickey is a senseless organization, and may be 
 expected before many years to see its own uselessness 
 and act upon it creditably in the manner of two fresh- 
 man clubs, the Fencing and the Polo, which, being 
 made aware of their pernicious nature and influence, 
 disbanded. The Dickey is a society within a club, 
 being composed of a certain proportion of the mem- 
 bership of the Institute of 1770 that organization 
 formed originally to encourage and develop public 
 speaking. The Institute has a club-house not one 
 of the luxurious and modern type and clings to 
 a more or less languishing existence. 
 
 The Hasty Pudding has a club-house, considered 
 very magnificent when built, some thirty years ago, 
 but regarded now as offering too little to its mem- 
 bers to be attractive. Its theatre and its custom 
 of giving every year a musical farce, written and 
 acted by members, keep it alive; but as a place 
 of resort it is little used. That function has been 
 usurped by the numerous smaller clubs, which are 
 all prosperous and which have a membership each of 
 from thirty to forty, drawn from the three upper 
 classes. These clubs, of which the Porcellian and 
 
 215
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the A. D. are the most prominent, have handsome, 
 well-equipped houses and good libraries; some of 
 them have squash or handball courts. Living in a 
 Mount Auburn Street dormitory, eating at a Mount 
 Auburn Street club, and going to the theatre with 
 a Mount Auburn Street crowd, the inhabitants of 
 the Gold Coast aroused considerable feeling by their 
 exclusiveness; some of them deprecated the cleavage 
 which was becoming more and more pronounced be- 
 tween them and the rest of Harvard College. A 
 movement which had for its slogan, " Back to the 
 Yard!" was started, and with some success, - 
 especially as the Corporation renovated the old 
 dormitories and made them more attractive. Now 
 men who pass their sophomore and junior years in 
 Claverly welcome an opportunity to live during their 
 senior year in Holworthy, the most desirable of all 
 the dormitories. 
 
 Between the clubbed and the unclubbed, inti- 
 macies seldom are formed. Men may sit side by 
 side in certain lecture courses, they may meet on the 
 athletic field, and from such occasional proximity 
 may come to cherish a very friendly feeling for 
 each other; but intimate friendship results only from 
 intimate association. This the club man naturally 
 has with his club mates; and the outsider has it 
 
 216
 
 UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES 
 
 with other outsiders. Of recent years there has 
 been an increase in the number of clubs; and there 
 are now a good many that are conducted on a more 
 modest scale and so offer membership to a less opu- 
 lent class than do those identified with the Mount 
 Auburn Street region. 
 
 The Harvard Union, made possible by the gift of 
 Mr. Henry Lee Higginson, who was the donor 
 also of Soldier's Field, is a club which every member 
 of the university may join; the annual dues are ten 
 dollars. It has a very large and fine building, with 
 a magnificent hall, comfortable reading-rooms, pleas- 
 ant dining-rooms, and a good library. But its very 
 size and comprehensiveness prevent it from fulfill- 
 ing one of the most important functions of a club, 
 the promotion of friendships. It serves many useful 
 purposes, it makes a convenient rallying-point, but 
 there is in it no club feeling or life. It will doubtless 
 be otherwise with that adjunct to it opened in 1912 
 -the Varsity Club. For membership in this all 
 who have won their letter H in any of the major 
 sports are eligible; the dues are made so low that 
 the poor man may feel able to meet them, and the 
 club itself is attractive enough in its appointments 
 to induce and merit the interest of the athlete 
 who may be already a member of the Porcellian or 
 
 217
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 the A. D. If it fulfils expectations, the Varsity Club 
 will develop and foster comradeships begun on the 
 field, and will be for some men a broadening and 
 for others a civilizing influence. 
 
 The athletic rivalry with Yale, which has become 
 one of the moving influences of Harvard undergrad- 
 uate life, had its origin in the first Harvard-Yale 
 boat race in 1852. In each college, rowing had for 
 some years been a popular sport, and there were 
 clubs that owned boats and held races. In the 
 summer of 1852 the Undine Boat Club of Yale 
 challenged the Oneida Boat Club of Harvard, and 
 the challenge was promptly accepted. The adver- 
 tising agent of the Boston, Concord, and Montreal 
 Railroad took charge of the affair; the oarsmen were 
 given free transportation to Centre Harbor on 
 Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire, and were 
 entertained during their stay at the expense of the 
 road, which " featured " their contest. As a result 
 of the advertising man's efforts, on August 3, the 
 day of the race, a considerable number of specta- 
 tors assembled on the shore. Harvard was rep- 
 resented by one eight-oared boat, the Oneida, Yale 
 by two, the Undine and the Shawmut. The course 
 was about a mile and a half in length. The Oneida 
 won by two lengths over the Shawmut, and her crew 
 
 218
 
 The Weld Boat House
 
 UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES 
 
 received as a prize a pair of black walnut oars orna- 
 mented with silver. The Harvard oarsmen had 
 rowed only a few times before the race, " for fear 
 of blistering their hands." 
 
 This patriarchal Harvard craft had been built 
 for a race between two clubs of Boston mechanics 
 and had been purchased in 1844 by some members 
 of the class of '46. It was about three and a half 
 feet wide, and thirty-seven feet long, and was rowed 
 on the gunwale. Outriggers were used in the next 
 race with Yale, in 1855; the first six-oared shell was 
 made for Harvard in 1857. 
 
 In the race in 1855, rowed on the Connecticut at 
 Springfield and won by Harvard, Alexander Agassiz, 
 the bow oar, steered the boat. The Harvard crews 
 of those days were not composed exclusively of un- 
 dergraduates. Thus Agassiz, graduating in 1855, 
 rowed on the crews of 1856, 1857, and 1858; and 
 the future President Eliot, though he was of the 
 class of '53, rowed on the crew of 1858. But be- 
 tween the years 1855 and 1859 there were no races 
 with Yale; the Harvard crews took part instead in 
 various local regattas, some of them apparently of a 
 semi-professional character; for instance, President 
 Eliot's crew won two money prizes, seventy-five 
 dollars in one race, and a hundred dollars in another. 
 
 219
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 In 1859 Harvard and Yale met again on the water, 
 this time in a two days' regatta on Lake Quinsiga- 
 mond, at Worcester. Harvard won the first day, 
 Yale won the second; " at this, the first defeat that 
 Harvard had endured, the crew threw their turbans 
 into the lake in disgust, but permitted no detraction 
 from the Yale's success." Harvard won the race 
 of 1860; then, during four years of war time, there 
 was no race. In 1864, however, Harvard and Yale 
 resumed aquatic relations, again at Lake Quinsiga- 
 mond, and continued them there annually until 
 1870, Harvard winning five of the seven races. 
 Yale at last became dissatisfied with the conditions 
 and refused to row any longer at Lake Quinsigamond. 
 In 1871, chiefly as the result of a misunderstanding, 
 there was no race between the two colleges. In- 
 stead Harvard took part in a three-cornered race 
 at Springfield with Brown and Massachusetts 
 Agricultural College. The Agricultural crew won, 
 Harvard coming in second; thenceforth until 1877 
 Harvard and Yale were rather unsuccessful partici- 
 pants in large intercollegiate regattas, held now at 
 Springfield, now at Saratoga; Yale won only one of 
 the races, and Harvard did not win at all. 
 
 After the race of 1875 at Saratoga, in which thir- 
 teen crews were entered, Yale withdrew from the in- 
 
 220
 
 UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES 
 
 tercollegiate association and challenged Harvard the 
 next year to a race. Harvard accepted the challenge; 
 and on June 20. 1876, the first eight-oared race be- 
 tween the two colleges was rowed at Springfield, 
 Yale winning easily, owing to an accident in the Har- 
 vard boat. About a month later the Harvard crew 
 diminished necessarily to six entered the intercolle- 
 giate six-oared regatta and finished second to Cornell. 
 This was for many years the last appearance of a 
 Harvard crew in an intercollegiate regatta. The 
 dual contests with Yale henceforth absorbed the 
 interest of Harvard's best oarsmen, except in the 
 interval between 1895 an ^ 1899. Then Harvard 
 took part in regattas on the Poughkeepsie, with no 
 conspicuous success. After 1885, for about twenty 
 years, Harvard victories were few and far between; 
 but in 1906 a turn for the better took place, and 
 since that time Harvard has been conspicuously suc- 
 cessful on the water. Between the years 1852 and 
 1912 inclusive Harvard and Yale rowed forty-six dual 
 races, and each won twenty-three. 
 
 But boating at Harvard does not concern itself 
 merely with the competition of men who want to row 
 against Yale. The two boat clubs, the Weld and 
 the Newell, have many members, by no means so 
 hopeful of their prowess. Fellows row on club crews
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 or class crews or dormitory crews; they go out in 
 single shells or wherries; every bright spring after- 
 noon, scattered about on the river from the Arsenal 
 to the lower end of the Basin, there are dozens of 
 little craft with bare-backed oarsmen, gliding rhyth- 
 mically or balancing at rest. 
 
 Varsity football at Harvard is twenty years 
 younger than varsity rowing. In 1873 tne Uni- 
 versity Football Association was organized; there 
 were fifteen men on a team; the game was one of 
 kicking almost exclusively. The modern game may 
 be said to date from 1880, when the Rugby rules 
 were adopted. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale 
 formed a triangular league; in 1889 Harvard with- 
 drew to enter into a dual league with Yale. Since 
 that time, with the exception of two years when 
 athletic relations with Yale were broken off, the 
 " Yale game " has been the greatest annual sporting 
 event. In the late eighties and early nineties it was 
 played at Springfield. The last Springfield game 
 was in 1894 and is memorable as the roughest en- 
 counter in the history of the two universities; it 
 was the cause of the subsequent rupture between 
 them. For two years Harvard and Yale were in the 
 position of playmates who do not speak; then nego- 
 tiations led to a resumption of friendlier feelings 
 
 222
 
 UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES 
 
 and athletic competition. There are now no more 
 cleanly played games anywhere than those between 
 Harvard and Yale. 
 
 Baseball receives a less important measure of 
 undergraduate esteem than either football or rowing, 
 presumably because those who devote themselves 
 to it undergo less real hardship of training than the 
 followers of the other sports. The class of '66 had 
 the first baseball nine of which there is any record 
 at Harvard, and played a game with the Brown 
 sophomores in 1863. Harvard won, and for a num- 
 ber of years the Harvard nines were almost invariably 
 successful in their important contests. It was a 
 Harvard captain, Mr. F. W. Thayer, of the class 
 of '78, who invented the catcher's mask and by that 
 invention revolutionized the game. As in football 
 and in rowing, although the contests with Yale 
 furnish the climax of the baseball season, there are 
 minor rivalries that give inferior degrees of skill 
 and an equal love for the sport the opportunity to 
 express themselves. The class games excite the 
 players to an intensity of effort and provoke the 
 spectators to a ferocity of partisanship. Tin horns, 
 whistles, and even firearms are employed by some 
 of the more ardent loyalists of a class to shatter 
 the nerves of the opposing team; the first baseman 
 
 223
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 or the third baseman is a mark for the jeers and 
 taunts of the hostile horde encamped along his 
 base-line; every batter is admonished derisively 
 as he stands at the plate. After the game the tri- 
 umphant class dances a serpentine about the field, 
 gathers at the steps of the Locker Building, and 
 cheers its heroes. There are not many livelier 
 spectacles of an informal kind at Harvard than that 
 afforded by an inter-class baseball game. 
 
 Track athletics are the fourth " major " sport. 
 The first intercollegiate meet in which Harvard -took 
 part was in 1876. Now her athletes of the track 
 train for two great occasions, the intercollegiate 
 meet and the dual meet with Yale. Many of them 
 begin to prepare themselves in the gymnasium in the 
 early winter; various indoor meets supply a stim- 
 ulus for the drudgery. 
 
 Lacrosse, soccer, and of course tennis have their 
 enthusiasts; tennis is probably the most popular 
 of all the sports; class tournaments and the college 
 championship tournament bring out every year a 
 great number of entries. 
 
 It is a gay and pleasant sight that you may see 
 when you stroll along the upper promenade of the 
 Stadium on a sunny afternoon in May. Below in the 
 oval the bare-armed, bare-legged athletes in their 
 
 224
 
 
 The Stadium
 
 UNDERGRADUATE ACTIVITIES 
 
 shining white are sprinting on the track, jumping, 
 pole-vaulting; beyond on the other side, the lacrosse 
 team is practising and perhaps some candidates for 
 the next autumn's football eleven are being tried 
 out in a scrimmage or at punting. On the baseball 
 field near by the varsity nine is playing a practice 
 game with the second, and farther off you see class 
 nines and scrub nines occupying other diamonds 
 and hear the adjurations of the coaches; with ad- 
 miring eyes you follow the quick and graceful move- 
 ments of the players; pleasant to your ear is the 
 satisfying crack of bat against ball, the comfortable 
 thud of ball into mitt. But your eyes rove after 
 a while beyond the ball games; the tennis courts, 
 still more distant, are alive with active figures, and 
 out on the silvery river which enfolds the level 
 acres there are boats gliding, oars flashing, brown 
 backs bending. Surveying all this from your lofty 
 point of vantage, you may be willing to assert that 
 nowhere else in America is there to be observed such 
 a panorama of athletics. 
 
 But the most significant feature of this scene is 
 not the vast Stadium, nor the playing-fields, nor even 
 the multitudinous, gay-hearted, light-limbed activity 
 of vigorous youth; it is the slender marble shaft 
 that rises inside the gate and bears this inscription: 
 
 225
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 TO THE HAPPY 
 
 MEMORY OF 
 
 JAMES SAVAGE 
 
 CHARLES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 EDWARD BARRY DALTON 
 
 STEPHEN GEORGE PERKINS 
 
 JAMES JACKSON LOWELL 
 
 ROBERT GOULD SHAW 
 
 FRIENDS, COMRADES, KINSMEN, 
 
 WHO DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY, 
 
 THIS FIELD IS DEDICATED BY 
 
 HENRY LEE HIGGINSON 
 
 And beneath this inscription is the stanza: 
 
 " THOUGH LOVE REPINE AND REASON CHAFE, 
 
 THERE CAME A VOICE WITHOUT REPLY, 
 * 'TIS MAN'S PERDITION TO BE SAFE 
 
 Every youth in going to his play and in returning 
 from it must pass that monitory monument. The 
 crowds of strangers stream by it on Class Day and 
 on the afternoons of the great games. The under- 
 graduates gather round it to cheer their victorious 
 team. About it flow the currents of the most 
 eager expectancy and the keenest excitement 
 and in the midst of these, by the emphasis of 
 contrast, some heart is receiving a new spiritual 
 impulse; the six ennobled names and the message of 
 Emerson are doing Harvard's work. 
 
 226
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 TWO days before the opening of college they 
 arrive, the youths who are starting out upon 
 their first great adventure. They are to IDC recog- 
 nized at sight as they stroll about the college grounds, 
 with their young, downy, more or less engaging faces 
 and their new clothes and their somewhat self-con- 
 scious air. They saunter composedly, but there is 
 furtive inquiry in their glance; they eye one another 
 with a curiosity and an interest which they do not 
 in these initial days bestow on any other human 
 beings. 
 
 Classmates! It is their magic word, and for a 
 little while it embraces the world of their thoughts. 
 Harvard College with its traditions and its triumphs 
 is a theme that has excited them for months past 
 and that will grow dear and dearer to them in the 
 months and years to come, but suddenly its sig- 
 nificance and importance are diminished or elimi- 
 nated. The faculty have never been much in their 
 
 227
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 minds; and will never be less so than in these open- 
 ing days. Sophomores, juniors, seniors appear as 
 vague phantoms brushing across the background 
 of their perspective and bearing no., vital relation 
 to the stirring actions which fill the foreground. Al- 
 though these stirring actions are themselves vague 
 and misty of definition, there is hardly a freshman 
 but believes implicitly that he has been liberated 
 upon a tumult of excitement and*is exultant and 
 palpitating at the prospect. Whatever the drama, 
 these classmates, now unknown to him, are to be 
 his fellow actors; and so he peers at them and 
 fixes their lineaments in his memory and learns 
 their names and wonders with which his lot will 
 be most intimately cast. 
 
 While waiting confidently for the vortex of " col- 
 lege life " to open up and suck him in, the freshman 
 busies himself with furnishing his rooms unless 
 his mother has already attended to this for him. 
 He affixes a couple of Harvard flags to the wall, 
 distributes sofa pillows bearing class numerals 
 or the lette* H upon his window-seat, and arranges 
 pipes and tobacco jar upon his table. His furniture 
 is likely to be of the Mission style, and as he 
 finds out before long less comfortable than it 
 looks. His library is notably meagre, but in the 
 
 228
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 course of the year begins to manifest itself in ex- 
 pensively bound initial volumes of classic_authors, 
 contracted for upon the instalment plan an in- 
 discrefion which for the next two years the purchaser 
 never ceases to deplore. x 
 
 Having made his room as typical a college room 
 as he can and being pleased with the result, the 
 freshman desires to display it to a classmate. It 
 is probable that he does not come to college quite 
 unfriended and alone; if he does not, he is very 
 soon dispensing hospitality, passing cigarettes and 
 pipe tobacco round a circle of fellows whom he 
 is already enthusiastically pronouncing " perfectly 
 bully." If he happens to come to college without 
 knowing any one, he probably, within a day or so, 
 will have struck up an acquaintance with some youth 
 who has seemed as lonely as himself and whose face 
 appeals to him as attractive. With one or two friends 
 of the right sort to exchange confidences with, the 
 freshman is prepared for his career in the college 
 world. 
 
 The question is, of course, what are the right sort. 
 Generally speaking, they ought to be those who are 
 of one's own sort. Yet this classification is some- 
 what unsatisfactory and inadequate. It might be 
 an excellent thing for the young man with the auto- 
 
 229
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 mobile to choose for one of his intimate friends the 
 youth who has to work his way through college; it 
 might conceivably be an excellent thing for the 
 indigent youth also. The unfortunate fact is, 
 however, that in the early stages of a college career 
 friendships are determined, more or less of necessity, 
 by a man's possessions and disbursements. The 
 freshman who can command luxury and expensive 
 amusements requires companionship to enjoy them. 
 Many wealthy parents send their boys to college 
 with what they regard as a moderate allowance and 
 with an earnest wish that their sons lead a simple 
 and democratic life. Yet at the same time they 
 wish their boys to be well dressed, well housed, well 
 fed, to have all the comforts of home and not to be 
 placed in a position of social inferiority. The com- 
 forts and the amusements which the freshman of 
 easy circumstances requires are various and costly; 
 his surroundings remove him for a time from the 
 possibility of intimate contact with the boy of scanty 
 resources. In the beginning of college life, friend- 
 ships are formed in the pursuit of amusement rather 
 than in the pursuit of work. The theatre, the club 
 table, the expensive suite of rooms, frequent auto- 
 mobiles and taxicabs, occasional little dinners with 
 wine indulgence in these luxuries certainly assists 
 
 230
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 the freshman to acquire acquaintances and to en- 
 large the circle of his friends, yet at the same time 
 it limits him to the companionship of the luxurious. 
 
 Having acquired a satisfactory number of con- 
 genial friends and acquaintances, having established 
 a reputation for liberality with the head waiters at 
 one or two Boston hotels, having occupied a box with 
 a few choice spirits at a musical show, and having 
 sat up till an early morning hour at a poker game 
 having in general demonstrated that he is a free 
 man, under no galling supervision, the freshman, if 
 he is of the right sort, experiences a sense of dis- 
 satisfaction and discontent. These activities have 
 all been new and exciting in their way, but they have 
 not particularly identified him with college life or 
 with the interests of his class. If the freshman is 
 of the right sort, he soon wants to count for some- 
 thing and to be of some use in the class and the 
 college. The desire to be of service is probably less 
 moving than the desire to make a name for himself; 
 but the two work hand in hand to spur him on to 
 some kind of extra effort. 
 
 Athletics, of course, offer the great opportunity. 
 If a boy has any skill or strength, he wants to make 
 it tell. With the opening of the college year, there 
 is set in motion a busy and inviting panorama of 
 
 231
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 games and sports. A tennis tournament is soon 
 under way; the fall track games are scheduled 
 and candidates are summoned to practice; in a week 
 or two the football players are arming themselves 
 with their head-pieces and nose-guards. Any one 
 may be a candidate for anything and if a fresh- 
 man is soon " fired from this squad," he can at least 
 take his place on the side-lines with the consciousness 
 of having made a m'anful attempt, of having tasted 
 more fully the spirit of college life, of having felt 
 more convincingly than before the strength and 
 heartiness of his classmates. To be stood rudely on 
 his head by Hiram Higgs, the strapping farmer lad 
 from Oxbow Corners, may be a profitable experience 
 for Reginald Richmond of Groton and Fifth Avenue; 
 and if, in the next play, Reginald tramples upon the 
 pride of Oxbow Corners, Hiram also may be bene- 
 fited. One of the virtues of freshmen athletics 
 is that in the enthusiastic desire of all who are 
 physically fit to get into the game, a good deal 
 of social prejudice is rubbed off and a new basis 
 of judgment is formed. 
 
 Of course there is not much likelihood of a per- 
 manent friendship resulting from an accidental 
 brush on the football field; if a boy's prowess is 
 not sufficient to carry him through more than two
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 or three scrimmages, he is likely to .leave the field 
 richer only in sentiment. The fellows who make the 
 team are the ones who are most likely to develop 
 lasting ties of affection from their athletic experi- 
 ences. For them the problems of the* freshman 
 year a part of it, at any rate and of college 
 life are simplified, and the temptations minimized. 
 " To break training " before the season is over is 
 so heinous an offence in the college world that it 
 practically does not occur; the force of public 
 opinion will keep straight the athlete of the most 
 devious propensities. His standing in his clas'ses 
 is also looked after with great care by the coach or 
 by some other authority; the possibility of the 
 faculty's laying a ban on him at the last moment 
 on account of neglect of studies is one that is kept 
 diligently before his mind. Consequently all in- 
 fluences contribute to give him a good start, to 
 fix in him habits of industry, and to develop in him 
 the sense of responsibility which in most of his class- 
 mates is of slower growth. 
 
 The freshman who is not under athletic discipline 
 and whose financial circumstances are easy is likely 
 to enjoy about one month of exhilarating liberty, 
 hilarity, and frivolity. He finds that he is under 
 no such restrictions as existed in the school at which 
 
 233
 
 he prepared for college. He cuts a recitation, and 
 nothing is said about it. He stays up and out 
 half the night, and nobody seems to care. He smokes 
 publicly as well as privately, and no one is scandal- 
 ized. In 'some of his courses he does not have to 
 prepare a daily lesson, because there are lectures 
 instead of recitations. He goes to class with a note- 
 book in which he jots down as much of the lecturer's 
 remarks as he deems important. These notes, 
 read afterwards, have a curious meaninglessness, 
 a disconnected and unhinged quality which gives 
 him a rather low opinion of the lecturer's intelligence. 
 A man who is so vague in his utterances can cer- 
 tainly not come into any very practical relation with 
 one's life; probably he will never show that he is 
 aware of one's existence. It is a comfortable feeling. 
 There is absolutely nothing to interfere with the 
 delightful occupation of making and seeing friends 
 - which includes seeing " shows," playing pool 
 and billiards, having late suppers and coming home 
 in early morning taxicabs. It is a beautiful world, 
 in which there are no penalties. There are no study 
 hours to be observed, there is no being kept in after 
 school to atone for failures. 
 
 Then one morning the lecturer in European His- 
 tory, who has been setting forth in a tiresome fashion 
 
 234
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 the geographical alterations occasioned by the per- 
 formances of Charlemagne, concludes by remarking: 
 " Gentlemen," and not yet has the freshman quite 
 adjusted himself to the pleasurable shock of being 
 addressed collectively as " Gentlemen " instead of 
 " Boys " - " Gentlemen, there will be an hour 
 examination in this subject one week from to-day." 
 
 The freshman who has been having a glorious 
 and untrammeled time is frightened. When he 
 gets to his room and begins to look over his notes and 
 finds how little they convey to his mind, he feels 
 desperate. However, there are references to reading 
 which may prove illuminating. He visits the li- 
 brary, and finds that other desperate freshmen have 
 forestalled him. Every book which has been pre- 
 scribed is now in some one's hands. Most of them 
 are volumes in expensive sets, and the freshman 
 who is ready to spend money quite freely on dinners 
 and taxicabs usually balks at a heavy outlay for 
 books of a scholastic nature which are not ornamental 
 in their bindings. He learns that there is another 
 resource open to him, and his heart soars again. 
 
 There is an experienced tutor who for years and 
 years has made a practice of extricating freshmen 
 from just such difficulties. He supplies the applicant 
 with a volume of very full typewritten or printed 
 
 235
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 notes transcribed from the instructor's lectures. 
 " Learn this date " is an adjuration found frequently 
 upon the pages; and " Be sure to bear in mind this 
 fact." But the freshman is given to understand that 
 the printed notes alone are too precarious a guide; 
 relying on them and nothing else he can hardly hope 
 to pass. The day before the examinations the tutor 
 gives a " seminar," which lasts from two to three 
 hours. On the walls of his room are blackboards on 
 which he has drawn various maps. He stands before 
 his class of students, who are now literally thirsting 
 for information, and lectures to them, slowly, clearly, 
 repeating and emphasizing certain points. " This 
 question has been, in one form or another, on seven 
 out of the last ten hour examinations," he will say. 
 " Better be prepared to answer it. Alaric and the 
 Goths always in some form you will be required 
 to deal with Alaric and the Goths. Here are a few 
 simple facts about them." And so on. The fresh- 
 man comes forth from his three-hour session ex- 
 hausted, but with a number of subjects on which he 
 feels able to write a concise and definite paragraph. 
 So deftly has the tutor selected these subjects that 
 the next morning the freshman is gratified to see 
 that four out of the six questions have been pro- 
 vided for. 
 
 236
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 He passes the examination not with distinction 
 but by a safe margin. Similar frantic exertions 
 secure for him what he is fond of terming a " gen- 
 tleman's mark " in the other hour examinations, 
 which are now in quick succession launched at him. 
 But when the returns are all in, he finds that two 
 or three of those whom he had come to regard as 
 " perfectly bully " fellows are no more. For a day 
 or two he bitterly denounces the instructors at 
 whose hands they met their fate; then his sports 
 and his friends and, to an increased though still 
 limited degree, his studies for he has profited 
 a little by his experience absorb his attention. 
 
 To the boy whose family are making sacrifices 
 to put him through college and who is partly de- 
 pendent on himself for the funds required, the fresh- 
 man year is a period, not of care-free sociability and 
 indolence, but of anxiety and lonely uncertainty. 
 Whether he is really worth a college education or 
 not is a vital question to him. He enters into com- 
 petition with other boys who are as determined as 
 he to justify the endeavor and the sacrifice. The 
 prizes that the college offers in the way of scholar- 
 ships are always less in number than the com- 
 petitors; the possibilities of earning money in his 
 leisure hours do not make themselves known very 
 
 237
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 readily to the freshman, and the necessity of striving 
 hard for a scholarship provides him with few leisure 
 hours. Yet his pride in his class is as strong as 
 that of one who is more free to indulge in the pur- 
 suits that promote such sentiment; and when the 
 class football games are played, the " grinds " are 
 as numerous and vociferous on the side-lines as 
 those who have habitually been spending their after- 
 noons in the somewhat languid occupation of en- 
 couraging the team. On the afternoon of the game 
 with the sophomores, nobody stays away. The 
 enthusiasm and the partisanship are as violent as 
 when the varsity eleven contends with the foreign 
 and hereditary foe. The captain or the manager 
 of the team appoints certain individuals to lead the 
 cheering; with backs to the game and zeal in their 
 eyes and exhortation in their waving arms, they 
 busy themselves deliriously. Theirs is a proud posi- 
 tion; many a freshman in the obedient cheering 
 mass wishes that he were equally distinguished. 
 When the game is over and the sophomores have 
 been defeated, there is a rush for the victorious 
 captain; he is transported from the field upon the 
 shoulders of a few fortunate ones, while all round him 
 presses the acclaiming multitude. At the steps of 
 the athletic house he and his worthy fellow athletes 
 
 238
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 are detained, and one after another is elevated to 
 the public view to blush and be cheered. Lucky 
 freshman! Has he ever tasted, will he ever taste 
 again a sweeter triumph? 
 
 Excitement is not yet ready to be quenched; the 
 celebration must be prolonged. The ordinary food 
 and drink of freshmen are not for such an occasion 
 as this; it calls for a more festive board than that 
 of Memorial Hall. In congenial parties they dine 
 that evening at hotels and afterwards attend a 
 musical " show " - for which seats have been re- 
 served in anticipation of victory and also by way 
 of consolation for possible defeat. The theatre is 
 theirs sometimes. It depends on the manage- 
 ment, the actors, and most of all, on the freshmen 
 themselves. If they behave with a certain amount 
 of decorum, show merely a somewhat excessive 
 enthusiasm, and are not too importunate in their 
 demands for encores, they will probably be gratified 
 by the appearance of the leading lady waving the 
 colors of their class and smiling upon them be- 
 witchingly. What a class it is that this lovely 
 being honors it thus! After the show, a little 
 supper possibly, a Welsh rabbit and a bottle of 
 beer; and then the freshman, never before so re- 
 plete and complete, takes taxicab or trolley-car 
 
 239
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 back to his academic home and tumbles drowsily to 
 bed, his last thought being: " What a bully day! " 
 There has been a good deal heard, there always 
 is a good deal heard, of the dissipated life of fresh- 
 men. If a boy's home training has been of a sort 
 to make it easy for him to drift into dissipation, and 
 if he has inherited tendencies of that nature, he 
 will probably be as dissipated at college as he would 
 be elsewhere not more so. The freshman and 
 in this he resembles his elders would like to be 
 a " good fellow " and to be known as such; but the 
 standards required in the attainment of this am- 
 bition do not call for the inordinate consumption 
 of rum and cigarettes or for the pursuit and enter- 
 tainment of chorus girls. There is probably more 
 harmless and innocent conviviality in any under- 
 graduate gathering than is to be found elsewhere 
 outside the walls of a well conducted Old Ladies' 
 Home. For a time, freshmen are exhilarated by the 
 unaccustomed sensation of liberty, and their age 
 and spirits tend to make them experimental; on 
 the other hand, the standards which are maintained 
 by the influence of home training and association, 
 of college advisers, and of undergraduate opinion, 
 are such as not to warrant the widespread belief 
 in the perils of a college career. 
 
 240
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 And as the year goes on, the freshman acquires a 
 deeper interest in matters that are of importance. 
 He begins perhaps to feel that he has not so far made 
 the most of his opportunities, that he has given too 
 much energy to seeking the pleasures of life, and that 
 he has somewhat disappointed the expectations of 
 those whom he would like to have always regard 
 him with pride as well as with affection. He feels 
 perhaps that he ought to be preparing himself a 
 little more earnestly for that still distant future 
 when he shall be turned out into the world to earn 
 his own living and make his own way. Intercourse 
 with his friends and with his teachers has supplied 
 him with more urgent ambitions and ideals. He 
 dislikes examinations as much as ever, but he accepts 
 the necessity of studying for them and of not depend- 
 ing on a tutor at the last moment. He finds that 
 what is winning the deepest respect among his class- 
 mates is character yes, even more than good- 
 fellowship. He learns by observation and experi- 
 ence; and by the time the end of the year approaches, 
 his smile is just as cheerful, but his backbone is less 
 pliant than when he entered college. 
 
 Of course it is not often that the boy matures into 
 the man in his freshman year. In no respect prob- 
 ably does he show his immaturity more than in his 
 
 241
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 desire to be known and esteemed by prominent per- 
 sons of his own or of other classes. He is pleased 
 if they think well enough of him to call him by his 
 first name. Sometimes it goes to his head if he be- 
 lieves that they are considering him as a possible 
 candidate for one of their clubs. It is not strange 
 that with a knowledge of such institutions and an 
 acquaintance with their members, the freshman 
 spends some time wondering if he is in line of elec- 
 tion. The assiduous cultivation of the popular and 
 socially successful is an odious trait; the freshman 
 who is guilty of it may advance himself temporarily, 
 but an undesirable reputation will cling to him 
 throughout the rest of his college career. Some 
 clubs have a reprehensible practise of pursuing and 
 endeavoring to pledge freshmen who are prominent 
 and promising, even though election cannot take 
 place until the sophomore year. Not many fresh- 
 men are toadies, but the great majority of them 
 are not indifferent to the charms of social prestige 
 and success. And in certain circles the discussion 
 why A made such and such a club is apt to be more 
 interesting and pithy than the comments on . B's 
 making such and such a team. Discussion of this 
 sort is one of the least wholesome of undergraduate 
 occupations. 
 
 242
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 Fortunate is the boy who by the end of his fresh- 
 man year has begun to find himself who has ac- 
 quired a sound interest in some subject and has 
 provided himself with a definite aim. Most men are 
 likely to look back on their freshman year with 
 regret, as a year of waste, a year barren of results; 
 but often it has been the year in which some happy 
 influence has enabled them to feel and follow their 
 own best qualifications and powers, and so to dedi- 
 cate themselves to a life of usefulness. 
 
 Let us glance at one of our freshmen four years 
 later, when he is leaving Harvard. He has finished 
 his last examination, and he has a few days with 
 nothing to do except loaf and make half-hearted 
 preparations for departure. He feels wistful and 
 eager, clinging to the passing minute, yet rest- 
 less while it passes. He looks with particular wist- 
 fulness at those friends of his who are returning to 
 the Law School, or whose occupation will keep them 
 in Boston; he is going out to Seattle, where his father, 
 who has been profitably developing real estate, 
 proposes to enlist his son's abilities towards the 
 further improvement and building up of that me- 
 tropolis. And because his destination is so romanti- 
 cally distant and his destiny so bright, the Easterners 
 whose lot excites his wistfulness look on him with 
 
 243
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 envious eyes. He feels that they will go on indefi- 
 nitely enjoying the sweets of college life, seeing 
 their friends, dining with one another, going to Yale 
 games, but he he may get back to it all, if 
 he's lucky, for a few days about once every five 
 years. And they think that he is the fellow who is 
 going to have adventures. 
 
 He has not distinguished himself in college, 
 either in athletics or in scholarship; he has been one 
 of the " average " men. Every year he has tried 
 for his class eleven in the autumn and for his class 
 nine in the spring never with success. He has 
 spent a fair amount of time on his books and so has 
 escaped difficulties with the " office," but his marks 
 have not been high. He has some very warm friends 
 and a number of pleasant acquaintances, for he has 
 always been a cheerful, honest, laughing soul. It 
 annoys him in these days, when he is with some of 
 his Boston classmates and hears them talking about 
 their plans, to feel that there is a choke in his throat. 
 
 The last Sunday comes, and in the afternoon, in 
 his cap and gown, he takes his place in the procession 
 that files into Appleton Chapel to hear the Bacca- 
 laureate Sermon. He has been in Appleton Chapel 
 only five times before; once to morning prayers, 
 to see what they were like, once to the funeral of an 
 
 244
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 old professor under whom he had sat and whose 
 death had moved him strangely, once on a Sunday 
 evening to hear a celebrated preacher, and on two 
 occasions to morning prayers because of a vague 
 feeling that the atmosphere might do him good. On 
 this .Sunday afternoon the clergyman preaches from 
 the text " Go not forth hastily to strive, lest 
 thou know not what to do in the end thereof; " 
 the senior means to listen attentively, but his 
 thoughts wander with his eyes from face to face. 
 And when he is outside the walls of the chapel, it 
 comes over him with rather a pang that he has got 
 nothing whatever from his one and only Bacca- 
 laureate Sermon. 
 
 Tuesday is Class Day. After breakfast he goes 
 in to Boston to the Copley-Plaza, where his father 
 and mother and sister are stopping. He thanks 
 heaven that his sister is really not bad-looking. He 
 takes the family out to Cambridge in a taxicab, 
 shows them round the Yard, and has two or three 
 fellows at his rooms to meet them. Then he sends 
 the family over to Sanders Theatre, and putting 
 on cap and gown, he falls into line behind the band. 
 At Sanders Theatre the seniors occupy the orchestra 
 and first balcony; the upper balcony is filled with 
 their friends and relatives; innumerable are the 
 
 245
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 ladies. Jones, the orator, proves equal to the oc- 
 casion; his speech wins great applause; yes, the 
 good old class did itself proud in choosing Jones 
 to represent it. And no wonder that Jones is going 
 to study law. Now for Robinson, a literary type of 
 grind, who has been moistening his lips in a harassed 
 manner during Jones's peroration. Our senior 
 fears that Robinson may break down, is immensely 
 relieved when he doesn't, and claps long and lustily 
 when he has finished. Smith's ode is effectively 
 sung to the air of " Fair Harvard " - to which the 
 ode is always written. 
 
 Then the senior rejoins his family and pilots 
 them to one of the big mid-day spreads; they stand 
 up in a great jam and eat lobster Newburg and cold 
 salmon, strawberries and ice-cream; he introduces 
 as many fellows as he can to his sister, so that she 
 may not hang heavy on his hands at Beck during 
 the dancing in the evening. His family go back to 
 the Copley-Plaza his mother is tired arid wants to 
 rest, and his sister wants to put on another dress for 
 the evening and he drops in at his club, where there 
 is a thirsty gathering, a large bowl of punch, and 
 some one playing the piano. Presently he goes to 
 join his class, assembling in the Yard; they march 
 down to Soldier's Field at the end of the long line of 
 
 246
 
 J2 
 O 
 
 5 
 
 Tj 
 
 5!
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 alumni, who form according to classes; the specta- 
 tors are all assembled in the bowl of the Stadium; the 
 seniors in their black gowns and mortarboards group 
 themselves in the center of the great semicircle and 
 seat themselves on the grass; the marshal calls 
 Brown, the Ivy Orator, to the platform. Brown's 
 first sentence brings a quick response of laughter; ap- 
 plause ripples up over the Stadium seats and sweeps 
 across the crowd. From that moment it is all easy 
 for Brown; he delivers his inconsequent humorous 
 remarks to an audience which, as one of the news- 
 papers the next day will observe, " punctuates them 
 with salvos of merriment." Brown's success is 
 particularly pleasing to our senior, who belongs to the 
 same club and regards him as the cleverest man in 
 college. But his greatest admiration is not for Brown, 
 but for the first marshal, who, after the Ivy Orator 
 has concluded, calls for the cheers for the presi- 
 dent, for certain professors, for the class; the first 
 marshal is a fellow who has greater qualities than 
 wit, humor, cleverness; he is the man of character 
 and personality, the object of more hero-worship 
 than anybody else in the class. " How I wish that 
 I had his future! " thinks our senior and perhaps 
 a dozen others have the same thought, submissive 
 to that flaming leadership. Yet they none of them 
 
 247
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 know what that future is to be. Youth is humble 
 before its heroes. 
 
 An old graduate springs up and leads the loudest 
 and wildest of all the cheers, and then suddenly 
 the air is filled with flying streamers, bright-colored, 
 shining in the sunlight, weaving back and forth be- 
 tween the throng on the ground and the throng in 
 the seats above. Confetti unroll their gleaming 
 ribbons in graceful arcs, bombs stuffed with bright 
 tissue paper scraps burst on ladies' hats or shower 
 their contents from aloft, there is screaming and 
 laughter and a frenzied, harmless battle. During 
 it the seniors march out, passing close under the 
 tiers of seats and exchanging missiles with the nearest 
 spectators. 
 
 Our senior secures his family and escorts them to 
 the Beck spread; there tables are placed on the 
 lawn; people seat themselves and eat more lobster 
 Newburg and cold salmon, strawberries and ice- 
 cream; Chinese lanterns are strung above; a 
 band plays in the pavilion, and a great crowd tries 
 to dance on a very rough floor. The sister changes 
 partners with gratifying frequency, but at last gets 
 into the doldrums, or so her brother anxiously 
 fancies; he rescues her and they stroll over to the 
 Yard. There they find another illumination from 
 
 248
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 Chinese lanterns, only more extensive, with great 
 numbers of people sitting and standing and walking 
 about, while in front of University a band plays and 
 an electric fountain leaps and splashes. The Glee 
 Club sings on the steps of Sever. Late in the evening 
 the tired family return to Boston, but our senior, 
 who is proud of his reputation as a night-owl, repairs 
 again to his club; the punch-bowl has been refilled 
 and some good fellows are sitting round it agreeing 
 that Class Day is a great day for the girls but a 
 devil of a bore for a man. 
 
 The next morning our senior is busy dismantling 
 his room, packing away his things. In the afternoon 
 he marches with his class again to Soldier's Field, 
 this time to the Harvard- Yale baseball game, which 
 he views from the " cheering section." 
 
 There is a big dinner at the club that night where 
 old graduates shake him by the hand and wish 
 him well, and he and his friends drink to one another's 
 success. And afterwards he visits different fellows 
 in their rooms, sits on their window-seats in the cool 
 night air, and shares their silences. Some of them 
 give him their photographs, and ask him for his, 
 and that touches and pleases him. It is late when 
 he gets back to his own room; the bared walls and 
 the swathed furniture and the half-filled trunks 
 
 249
 
 THE STORY OF HARVARD 
 
 enforce upon him the imminence of his departure. 
 Poignantly he realizes that this is the last night he 
 will ever pass in these rooms, that an important 
 chapter in his life is closed. And he looks back and 
 thinks how little he has made of his splendid oppor- 
 tunity, and wishes with a sincere and humble heart 
 that he might have those four years over again. 
 
 He wakes to the morning of Commencement. 
 On his way through the yard to join the academic 
 procession, he walks slowly, trying to fix the appear- 
 ance of everything in mind, the gray squirrel frisk- 
 ing on the trampled grass, the sadly lopped elms, 
 the young saplings which may have grown beyond 
 his recognition when he next revisits Cambridge. 
 Fellows are trying to be gay and cheerful, but every- 
 where there is an undertone of melancholy. 
 
 The black-gowned procession starts for Sanders 
 Theatre. Two hours later the senior comes forth, 
 a senior no longer, a graduate, a Bachelor of Arts, 
 carrying his roll of parchment tied with crimson 
 ribbon. He has heard the Latin Valedictory and 
 the Commencement oratory, he has witnessed the 
 conferring of the honorary degrees, and he has joined 
 in the applause for each distinguished guest who 
 has risen and stood during the president's measured 
 words of tribute. The young Bachelor of Arts, start- 
 
 250
 
 FRESHMAN AND SENIOR 
 
 ing out to make for himself a career of service and 
 achievement, knows that he will never receive such 
 a distinction at his Alma Mater's hands, but hopes 
 with a sober heart that his future may be at least 
 more worthy of her than his past. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 251
 
 INDEX 
 
 A. D. Club, 216, 218 
 Abbott, Edward Gardner, 189 
 Abbott, Henry Livermore, 189 
 Adams, John Quincy, 105 
 Adams, Samuel, 76, 79 
 Advocate, The Harvard, 211 
 Agassiz, Alexander, 219 
 Allen, Thomas, n 
 Allston, Washington, 100, 101 
 Andrew, John A., 164, 191 
 Andros, Edward, 36 
 Angier, Charles, 99 
 Ap thorp House, 87 
 
 Barber, Jonathan, 134, 135 
 Barnard, Tobias, 23 
 Bartlett, William Francis, 196 
 Bellingham, Samuel, 23 
 Bernard, Francis, 77, 79 
 Bowditch, Nathaniel, 122 
 Bowdoin, James, 96 
 Boylston Hall, i 
 Brewster, Nathaniel, 23 
 Briscoe, Nathaniel, 17, 18 
 Brown, Charles Brooks, 184-187 
 Bulkley, John, 23, 28 
 Burgoyne, John, 85, 86, 87 
 
 Channing, William Ellery, 100, 
 
 101, 102, 103, 104 
 Chauncy, Charles, 10, 29-33 
 
 Child, Francis James, 200 
 Choate, Joseph H., 153 
 Class Day, 143, 226, 245 
 Colman, Benjamin, 50, 51, 54 
 Commemoration Day, 195 
 Commencement, 27, 47, 48, 55, 60, 
 
 77, 78, 87, 103, 141, 142, 250 
 Commons, 68, 69, 70, 75, 76, 118, 
 
 119, 138, 139, 203 
 Creighton, Mandell, 207 
 Crimson, The Harvard, 211, 212 
 Crowninshield, Caspar, 151 
 
 Dalton, Edward Barry, 226 
 
 Dane Hall, 128 
 
 " Dickey," The, 214, 215 
 
 Divinity Hall, no, 148 
 
 Downing, George, 23, 24, 25, 28 
 
 Dudley, Joseph, 36, 47 
 
 Dudley, Paul, 47 
 
 Dudley, Thomas, 14 
 
 Dunbar, Charles Franklin, 200 
 
 Dunster, Henry, 10, 10-22, 29, 30 
 
 Dwight, Wilder, 169-173 
 
 Eaton, Nathaniel, 17-19 
 
 Eliot, Andrew, 80 
 
 Eliot, Charles William, 197, 199, 
 
 200, 201, 202, 209, 219 
 Elletson, John, 10 
 Emerson, R. W., 115, 226 
 
 253
 
 INDEX 
 
 Everett, Edward, no, 127, 146, 
 153-156, 159, l6 4, 210 
 
 Felton, Cornelius C., 159, 164 
 
 Oilman, Samuel, 145, 210 
 Goodwin, William Watson, 200 
 Gore, Christopher, 4 
 Gore Hall, 4 
 Grays Hall, i, 16 
 Greenwood, Isaac, 58, 59 
 
 Hancock, John, 79, 81, 89-94, 98 
 Harvard, John, 10, 15, 16, 65, 204, 
 
 207 
 
 Harvard, Robert, 10 
 Harvard Crimson, The, 211, 212 
 Harvard Hall, First, 32, 62-65 
 Harvard Hall, Second, 66, 83, 145 
 Harvard Magazine, The, 210 
 Harvard Union, The, 217 
 Harvard Washington Corps, 109, 
 
 204 
 
 Harvardiana, 210 
 Hasty Pudding Club, 102, 213, 
 
 215 
 
 Higginson, Henry L., 182, 217 
 Hill, Adams Sherman, 200 
 Hill, Thomas, 159, 161 
 Hoar, Leonard, 33-35 
 Holden Chapel, 62, 78, 98 
 Hollis, Thomas, 49-53, 59, 65, 80 
 Hollis Hall, 2, 62, 66, 67, 99, no, 
 
 122 
 
 Holmes, John, 99, 123 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 127, 210 
 Holmes Field, 6, 7, 205 
 Holworthy, Sir Matthew, 106 
 
 Holworthy Hall, 2, 6, 105, 106, 
 
 i9, !33, l6 4, 2l6 
 Holyoke, Edward, 58, 62, 71, 77, 
 
 94 
 
 Hubbard, William, 23 
 Hughes, Thomas, 194 
 Hutchinson, Thomas, 79, 81 
 
 Indian College, The, 31 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, 131 
 James, William, 200 
 Jarvis Field, 7 
 
 Kirkland, John Thornton, 107- 
 
 no, 116, 125, 127, 128 
 Kossuth, Louis, 158 
 
 Lafayette, Marquis de, 127 
 Lampoon, The Harvard, 211, 212 
 Lane, George Martin, 200 
 Langdon, Samuel, 82, 87-90 
 Law School, no, 200, 201 
 Leverett, John, 45~49> S 1 , 94 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 164, 184 
 Locke, Samuel, 78, 82 
 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 4, 161, 202 
 Lowell, Charles Russell, 173-184, 
 
 226 
 
 Lowell, James Jackson, 177, 226 
 Lowell, James Russell, 107-109, 
 
 132, 135, 143, iS9, l6 3, 164, 205, 
 
 2O7, 2IO 
 
 Lowell, John, 96 
 Lyceum, The, 210 
 
 Magenta, The, 211 
 Marti-Mercurian Band, The, 78, 
 109 
 
 254
 
 INDEX 
 
 Massachusetts Hall, 46, 62, 64, 
 
 66, 94, 95, no, 145 
 Mather, Cotton, n, 20, 35, 38, 
 
 4<>-45, 53, 54 
 
 Mather, Increase, 36, 38-44 
 Mather, Samuel, 28 
 Med. Fac. Society, 122, 123 
 Medical School, 200 
 Memorial Hall, 203, 207, 239 
 Mitchell, Jonathan, 28 
 Monthly, The Harvard, 211 
 Motley, John Lothrop, 121, 164 
 
 Newell Boat Club, 221 
 Norton, Charles Eliot, 200, 207 
 
 Oakes, Urian, 35 
 
 Otis, Harrison Gray, 122 
 
 Otis, James, 79 
 
 Pa'rkman, Francis, 147, 149, 164 
 Peabody, Andrew P., 128, 131, 
 
 133, 136, 154, 156 
 Peabody, Everett, 166, 167, 168 
 Peirce, Benjamin, 49, 68, 69 
 Pepys, Samuel, 23, 24 
 Perkins, Stephen George, 190, 226 
 Phi Beta Kappa, 98, 125, 155 
 Phillips, Wendell, 163 
 Phips, Sir William, 37 
 Pierce, John, 142 
 Popkin, John Snelling, 132-134 
 Porcellian Club, 102, 215 
 Prescott, William Hickling, 108, 
 
 "3, "5 
 Prince, Nathan, 59 
 
 Quincy, Josiah, 116, 119, 128-131, 
 142, 145, 147, 153, 206 
 
 Rebellion, The Great, 129 
 
 Register, The, 210 
 
 Rogers, John, 35 
 
 Russel, Cabot Jackson, 192, 195 
 
 Saddler, Rupert, 172, 173 
 
 Salisbury, Stephen, 117 
 
 Saltonstall, Henry, 23 
 
 Sanders Theatre, 203, 204, 245 
 
 Sargeant, Thomas,- 34 
 
 Savage, James, 226 
 
 Sever Hall, 3 
 
 Sewall, Joseph, 53, 54 
 
 Sewall, Samuel, 34 
 
 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 4, 
 
 200 
 Shaw, Robert Gould, 150, 178, 
 
 189-194, 226 
 
 Soldier's Field, 217, 246, 249 
 Sparks, Jared, 157-159, 164 
 Stadium, The, 224, 225, 247 
 Stiles, Ezra, n 
 Storer, Ebenezer, 92, 93, 96 
 Story, Joseph, 74, 100-102 
 Stoughton Hall, First, 43, 46, 64, 
 
 66 
 Stoughton Hall, Second, 67, 105, 
 
 no 
 
 Stoughton, William, 38, 42, 43 
 Sumner, Charles, 125, 164 
 
 Thayer, F. W., 223 
 
 Ticknor, George, 112, 113, 144 
 
 University Hall, no, 141, 145 
 
 Varsity Club, 217, 218 
 Vincent, Strong, 187-189 
 
 255
 
 INDEX 
 
 Wadsworth, Benjamin, 54, 55, 58, 
 
 94 
 
 Wadsworth House, 55 
 Ward, James, 29 
 Ware, Henry, 107 
 Washington, George, 83, 84, 99, 
 
 154, iSS 
 
 Webber, Samuel, 105, 107 
 Webster, Daniel, 146 
 Weld, Joseph, 29 
 Weld Boat Club, 221 
 
 Whitefield, George, 57 
 Whitney, George, 126, 127 
 Willard, Joseph, 95, 104, 105 
 Willard, Samuel, 44 
 Willard, Sidney, 104 
 Wilson, John, 18, 23 
 Winthrop, John, 14, 20, 29 
 Woodbridge, Benjamin, 22 
 
 Yale College, n, 45, 158, 218-224 
 Yearwood, Richard, n
 
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