Chapter II: A Desirable Standing

The Harvard college campus was not a particularly imposing place that fall of 1813, but it was improving. Young Samuel Joseph May arrived to find a little cluster of six red brick buildings plumped down in an almost barren yard. There sat Harvard Hall, giving some what meager housing to the college library of 15,000 volumes, commons, and recitation rooms; elegant little Holden Chapel now used for lectures; and four dormitories.(1) Harvard's new President Thomas Kirkland, had arrived just three years before, discovering the Yard itself a ragged commons boasting the college brew house, wood yard, and privies, a few trees and some erratic footpaths. Floating up to punctuate recitations would come squeals from the nearby college pig-pen, notably at slaughter time.

Kirkland had set to work briskly enough, putting this university out of the brewing business and relegating the houses of office to a more discreet spot behind a grove of pines. Now in the Yard elms were to be planted, regular paths laid out and the grass coaxed into something like a proper lawn. Already underway was a grand new structure, University Hall, and a feeling of excitement and change was in the air.(2)

Certainly the student body was a more diverse group than ever before. A quarter of May's fellow students came from Boston,(3) but added to the usual batch of Brahmin's sons came now a jostling swarm of merchants' boys idled by the same war that had paralyzed their parents' ships and counting houses. This unpromising assortment was being put to an unusual advanced education until peace should come and the sea lanes be opened again. They were, May found, "more inclined to business than to learning.”(4) A goodly number of them dropped out promptly with the peace of 1815 to appear again only in August for the monumental eating, drinking and general carousing of class reunion days.(5)

Mixing in were the bright but poor boys from the hill country, lured from farm or workbench to pass the entrance examinations, painfully managing to put themselves through on a variety of stipends as monitors, bell ringers, or president's freshmen. Adding a final exotic touch were the students from far-off places, southerners in swallow-tail coats and fine calfskin boots commanding admiration from the provincial Yankee boys for their fine manners and elegant ways. By 1820 near the end of that era of good feeling, more than a quarter of the students were coming from outside New England, a proportion not to be equaled for another thirty years.(6) Harvard was a place to rub off some of one's Federal Court bias.

There was, however, at least a delusion of outward uniformity in the required manner of dress. No student—be he Yankee, Yorker or fresh from South Carolina mansion house—could appear in anything but pants of blue, grey, dark blue or Black, topped with a prescribed waistcoat and a Black gown for all public occasions. The authorities permitted no gold or silver lace, cord or edging (here a heavy Puritan hand reaching out from the past), and assessed proper fines all round for any breach of the rules.(7)

Sixteen-year-old Sam May regarded the whole scene with a touch of condescension. The Yard seemed only a slight extension of the world he had managed so easily across the River Charles. He was stuffed with all the fine knowledge and scrupulous techniques necessary to the Harvard entrance examinations (. . . be thoroughly acquainted with the Grammar of the Latin and Greek languages. . . able to construe and parse Virgil, Salust, Cicero . . . familiar with Notation, Reduction and Simple Rule of Three . . . .)(8) and he set out rather grandly to decide which of his college courses might be worth studying and which might not.(9) The schedule was rigorous. The Prayer Bell at six was followed by morning prayers by recitation by breakfast at half after seven. Then to more recitation and study periods alternating through the day until five, thence to evening prayers, supper, and three or four more pages of Latin to get for recitation next morning at six. "You see, Sir," wrote one of May's classmates to a demanding father, "we have full employment."(10)

For all its rigor of scheduling, academic life at Harvard that fall of 1813 was not particularly conducive to original thinking or indeed to much thinking at all. Students ground in their lessons one hour, ground them out under the professor's nose the next. The premium was high on memory work, low on flights of fancy. Class work was almost entirely devoted to recitation with occasional comment from the professor; lectures were few and came primarily in special series arranged by separate subscription. The move to replace tutorial instruction with that of professors on endowed chairs was but recently underway. With the exception of one mathematics professor and two in medicine, not a single scholar with European training had ever been appointed to the faculty.(11)

Still several years in the future was the pilgrimage of Edward Everett, George Bancroft, George Ticknor and Joseph Cogswell to Gottingen that was to vitalize the Harvard intellectual climate with transfusions of German higher thought. The Harvard of May's years was well summed up by Tichnor, writing back from Gottingen in 1816:

. . . I cannot better explain to you the difference between our University in Cambridge and the one here than by telling you that it consists in the Library and that in Cambridge the Library is one of the last things thought and talked about—that here they have forty professors and more than two hundred thousand volumes to instruct them, and in Cambridge twenty professors and less than twenty thousand volumes . . . we are mortified and exasperated because we have no learned men, and yet make it physically impossible for our scholars to become such. . . .(12)

The venturesome New England quartet was to bring thousands of maps, books and charts back to swell the Harvard collection, together with an enthusiasm for the European intellectual renaissance that was to shake Harvard from tits eighteenth century torpor and inspire a whole new movement in American thought. In the fall of 1813, however, Everett was still a tutor at Harvard and Bancroft was just starting out as a freshman along with May. Except for an occasional bright boy like Bancroft who approached his elders easily, there was little communion between faculty and student body.(13) They regarded each other uneasily, met primarily on formal occasions when the rules were understood ahead of time, and generally managed to stimulate and interest each other as little as possible.(14) If any student went to meet a professor except on demand, he kept it a secret.

Certainly young May was not one to seek out faculty members sub rosa for extra intellectual stimulation. He was entirely too wound up in vast enjoyment of good music, good friends and an all round good time. When he began his autobiography years later, he dwelt lovingly on the friends he made at Harvard but neglected entirely to mention any of the faculty, an oversight corrected later by his studious classmate George B. Emerson who eventually edited May’s papers and put in a long footnote on the faculty, eulogizing his own favorites.

Except for the monumental Andrews Norton, the little faculty was earnest but undistinguished. There was Levi Frisbie, professor of Latin, with eyes so weak he must sit in the classroom shielding them with a handkerchief. Professor Frisbie would never read again, but his memory appeared phenomenal. If a good scholar hesitated for a moment over the niceties of a translation, the best and most elegantly appropriate phrase would soon pop out from under the handkerchief. There was Dr. Hedge, kindly and pleasant, author of the famous logic, and Professor Popkin who taught Greek and carried an odd device called an umbrella. If one survived into one's junior year, there would be john Farrar, professor of natural philosophy and astronomy, so eloquent a lecturer that he could make a devout student like Emerson forget it was time for dinner.(15)

Eclipsing them all, even in 1813 when he was only 17 years old, was Andrews Norton, then college Librarian and soon to be named Dexter professor of sacred literature. Destined to route the Calvinists in behalf of liberal Unitarianism by force of sheer logic, Norton was to win his title "Unitarian Pope" from Carlyle through his ardent defense of common sense and John Locke against the wilder onslaughts of the Germanizing transcendentalists.(16) One of the few professors to leave a discernible mark on May's mind and career, Norton was to exercise a major hand in shaping the young Bostonian's philosophy. Fifty years later May could still recall the almost unparalleled respect and confidence Norton inspired.(17) Presiding over the entire establishment was the genial President Kirkland, now just well underway in creating what later alumni called Harvard's Augustan Age. Sympathetic and gentle, Kirkland seemed to know at any moment what might be happening in his student's lives, and called them frequently into his office for admonition, reassurance or fatherly advice. "He loved his work, he loved his students," said May's classmate, Samuel Eliot, "they were not merely students, but his students, his sons, and as he loved them, so they loved him. For this the College had been waiting almost two Centuries."(18)

Though easy-going and careless, apt to scribble a sermon on a scrap of paper and then forget to copy it off legibly enough to read, Kirkland was forgiven for such inattention to detail by the solid citizens who governed the college. A good many of them, idled by the War of 1812, spent more time than they otherwise would have in the affairs of the Corporation. They found much to admire in a man who was not only to raise the reputation of the institution, infusing it with a new power and intellectual vigor, but to bring into its treasury a goodly amount of wealth as well. Bachelor and Federalist, Kirkland was a great in First Family homes, was Boston's candidate for the presidency in 1806, and became the Brahmin idea of scholar and gentleman.

In 1813 administration and faculty under the vigilance of the Corporation composed a close little group, adhering still to eighteenth century patterns of thought but preparing almost indiscernibly for the intellectual awakening that was to come. Their graduates were to be sober, serious men, impatient of any preoccupation with the arts, and adept at logic and argumentation. These graduates had learned to think, sedately and prudently, and to write with force, style and some grace. They were destined to play prominent roles as scholars, statesmen and financiers, well blessed with the good of this world and confident of their position in the next.

From the beginning Sam fit uncomfortably into the mold. His freshman year was a miserable one. His college career almost ended in disgrace before it was well underway. On arrival he had brashly decided which courses would never be of any use to him, and had resolved to waste no time in studying them. By the spring of his freshman year he had fallen to a low place scholastically, and had become dissatisfied with school and thoroughly unhappy with himself. (19)

At this dismal point the subjects for the Bowdoin Prize dissertations were announced. One of the most prestigious of the Harvard competitions, the Bowdoin prize contest had been held annually since 1794 "for the advancement of useful and polite literature. . . "(20) To secure "impartiality in the judges and calmness in competitors," the names of the entrants were not announced until after the prizes were awarded, and then only those of the winners. Thus was to be secured vigorous industry and exertion of mind, while all the evils of competition, "jealousy, envy, suspicion of unfairness and mortification of public failure," were avoided.(21) It was a competition particularly pleasing to the Cambridge mind. No freshman had ever won one; no freshman was expected to try.

Young May decided to enter. If he won, he confided to his father, he would instantly have "a desirable standing in the class, which it will be much easier to maintain than to acquire, for if it should fail I shall be obliged to establish my character by a long series of almost imperceptible gradations, which is extremely discouraging and irksome."(22) It was a typical May stroke. If one could achieve the heights at one bold leap, why climb up painfully via the discouraging and irksome?

He set about work briskly, chose "The Causes of the Diversities of National Character" as his subject, kept his intention a profound secret. If his room-mate found out, he would tell everybody and ruin everything. May's library charge lists suddenly came to life—Kaime's Sketches of Man, Montesquieu on the spirit of laws, Sidney on government. During the term he wrote steadily and stealthily. In spring vacation he copied off his essay in the lavish hand that was to be his through life.(23) Signing it "Juvenis of the Freshman Class", he deposited it in the appointed place, and set out to wait anxiously through the long, hot summer. Classes droned on at their regular pace, but he found his whole intellectual life at fever pitch. He studied his hated Greek with unparalleled intensity, read 30 pages of history a day, and wrote smugly to his father that "No one sleeps more sweetly than he who when he puts his head on his pillow can look back on the past day and see nothing left undone which ought to have been done." There was a new kind of tranquility in these days, but night and early morning could think of nothing but his essay. (24)

Finally one August morning in chapel, President Kirkland rose, requested all to be seated, and to hear the judgment of the corporation on the Bowdoin Prizes. Thirty-one had been entered. All had been read and deemed meritorious, but preference had been given to four, including that of Samuel J. May of the freshman class!

May felt like sinking through the floor. His friends crowded around, congratulating this new kind of freshman,(25) and from that moment May's rehabilitation of reputation was underway. Winning the Bowdoin was the "great event" of May's college life. Despite his great pleasure in the accomplishment, he found his "cup of joy was not unmixed. Some contemptuous remarks came to my ears, and the cruel insinuation that it must have been written for me by another."(26)

It was like May to take faculty honors in stride but to fret about what his classmates thought. A man who could fill his college memoirs with names and detailed descriptions of all his friends without ever mentioning the name of a professor was not material for the scholar's life. He kept academic matters under respectable control after that, checked an occasional book from the library, and kept out of trouble with the faculty except for one warning about an illegal coat. He managed to graduate a presentable thirteenth or fourteenth of a class of 67,(27) but found his chief joy in live friends rather than dead savants.

After that first miserable year with a room-mate he could not trust, May decided to room with his cousin Samuel Sewall. They found it a happy arrangement for the rest of their college years. "Chumming", it was called. They lived in old Hollis, an imposing Georgian brick structure trimmed in white and punctuated with oriel windows as well as massive chimneys for all the fireplaces needed to heat the student rooms. Built in 1736 by the province of Massachusetts Bay, Hollis was arranged on the medieval chamber and study system. It had survived conversion into barracks for colonial troops in 1776,(28) and the high spirited occupancy of hundreds of Harvard boys before and afterwards.

The class of 1817, May and Sewall shortly found, was a fine one in which to make friends. May was soon known as one of the most cheerful and popular. "Everyone who met him was drawn towards him", recalled Sewall.(29) May's name inevitably found its way into almost every one of the memoirs Harvard men of that era felt it their duty to write in their declining years. Their class was considered outstanding, boasting as it did the names of George Bancroft, sterling historian; Caleb Cushing, ambassador and statesman; Samuel Eliot, father of the Harvard president, Charles W. Eliot, and May, philanthropist and reformer. "Of my classmates", May reminisced, "a number have since become distinguished men, as may be seen by recurring to the Catalogue; and we considered ourselves, as a whole, a superior set of fellows.”

For this superior set there were rather restricted means of entertainment. To keep them at their books and curb the distressing tendency to riot, the corporation set a demanding schedule. Even on Saturdays there was chapel and a recitation before one could conveniently escape across the West Boston Toll Bridge to visit relatives, real or imaginary. May could enter his name in the President's Freshman's book as visiting bona fide family, but he and the others were expected to be back in time to enter their names again at eight in the evening and pass the Sabbath eve sedately in their own rooms.(30)

Nonetheless no collegians ever managed to enjoy themselves more. Class football was just taking hold, and a monumental battle every fall between freshmen and sophomores went on for weeks every day at the noon hour. When he was 70 years old, May was still limping out into school grounds to teach the children how to play proper Harvard football, and of course he had to send to Boston to get a proper football to do it with.(31) There was also cricket and a game called in that pre-Doubleday era, "bat and ball.” There was bathing in the river at high tide in the summer time, and, for those who could afford it, a stable full of dubious nags for riding.

May was no rider; he was always awkward around horses. But he did love to sing, and the college spawned a flock of singing societies, orchestras and choirs. In his junior year, he was launched with some distinction into the glamour of a military life. Brave in breastplate, gun strap and cockade, he found his first junior theme returned with a mark of special approbation by the officer,(32) who promoted him to sergeant of the college company. It was a great day in 1817 when the Harvard Washington Corps paraded before President James Monroe in his grand tour of the northeast.(33) The old Virginia colonel, it may be surmised, enjoyed the parade ground performance fully as much as he did the other exercises of the day which featured a salutatory oration, "remarkable for its purity and classic elegance," given the pride of the class, Caleb Cushing, entirely in Latin.(34)

May had a "bump of combativeness" that was very well developed, Phrenologist Orson Fowler assured him in later years. May, who had in the years since his Harvard days turned into an ardent non-resistant, was somewhat amused by this analysis, but he always did feel a little nostalgic about that blue and white uniform with the dashing cockade.(35)

Aside from the president's visit, the outside impinged only occasionally on the tight little cosmos in the Yard. In 1814 the Harvard boys were dispatched to King's Chapel to participate in the service of Thanksgiving for Napoleon's first exile, and in February of 1815 when the brig "Favorite" arrived in the New York harbor bearing news of the treaty of Ghent, the Harvard boys broke from their customary cordon of discipline and celebrated gloriously with the rest. The college company fired the federal salute, the singers sang an anthem at prayers, and the colleges were brilliantly not to say extravagantly illuminated for an entire hour in the evening from eight until nine.(36)

It was really only at commencement time that the college doors opened and the outsiders came thronging in. The banks in Boston closed for the day, and gentlemen, old Harvard or not, took rooms in Cambridge to entertain their friends. There were booths, fairs and horse races, the entire occasion becoming one grand public festival for all of eastern Massachusetts. (37)

In the tide of general lavishness, parental purse strings were loosened, and fond fathers of graduating seniors spared no expense for the fashionable commencement spread. On the hot August day in 1817 when Sam was graduated, the Mays were invited to a monumental affair given by the parents of Sam's classmate, Stephen Salisbury. The Salisburys had dinner for 100 under a tent in a green field, and guests were plied with meats, puddings, tarts, cakes, ice cream, oranges—"everything of the very best quality"—down to madeira, porter, claret, brandy and rum. Father Salisbury, who had spent Stephen's college years spouting admonitions concerning prudence, caution and thrift, paid for this extravaganza without recorded complaint a total of $780.02 Stephen's average bill for an entire quarter at college usually ran to something under $40.00.(38)

Probably the opportunity for unbounded good fellowship with classmates he loved and respected was the major opportunity Harvard College offered Samuel May. Certainly the main effect of his college years was not one of intellectual stimulation. He could produce a perfectly respectable piece of scholarly research; (in 1856 he could still cite a source and compose a proper footnote) but these were academic grace notes, embellishments only to a life of practical, out-going activity. True to his Boston upbringing, May usually managed to avoid anything that would require aesthetic skills. He hated fiction, despised going about looking at art galleries, and appreciated music only when there was a rousing tune you could hum to. The college had him for four years. It could not make him a scholar, but neither did it make him a doctrinaire.

What it did manage to do for him was vital. As a classmate of young Thomas R. Sullivan, grandson of the Boston merchant prince, May was included in parties of the Boston elite where he mingled pleasantly with Eliots and Otises, and on one memorable occasion met Daniel Webster. Shortly after he left Harvard, he was invited to Nahant, favorite country resort of Boston's first families, to teach first family children and preach to their elders on Sundays. Thanks to a Sewell bearing and a Harvard degree, May moved easily into his lifelong orbit, one in which he did not hesitate to differ with Cabots or to write long admonitory letters to Lowells.(39) May's college experience confirmed his claim to a position in the Boston hierarchy; it helped make possible his eventual acceptance into the national establishment.

Meanwhile he was graduating at the age of 20, his beliefs and opinions still immature, his outlook optimistically vague. In the Harvard Divinity School he would find a profession and form the philosophy that would guide his life.

Footnotes

(1) Benjamin Thomas Hill, "Life at Harvard A Century Ago As Illustrated by the Letters and Papers of Stephen Salisbury, Class or 1817", Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1909-1910. (Worcester: Publication of the Society, 1911), p. 197.

(2) Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936). pp. 215-6.

(3) Timothy Dwight, " Boston at the Beginning of the 19th Century", Old South Leaflets, VI (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, Old South Meeting House, n. d.), p. 14.

(4) Mumford, May Memoir, p.29.

(5) "The Class of 1817", a manuscript volume preserved in the Harvard Archives, gives mention to William F. Cary who left college at the "Peace of 1815" but faithfully turned up in 1863 for the 50th anniversary of the admittance of his class to college.

(6) Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, pp. 198-201; Samuel A Eliot, A sketch of the History of Harvard College and of its Present State (Boston: C.C. Little and J. Brown, 1848), pp. 79-80.

(7)College Laws of 1807, cited in Hill, Life in Harvard, p. 216.

(8) Laws of Harvard College for the Use of the Students at Cambridge (Cambridge: University Press, 1814), p. 3.

(9) Mumford, May Memoir, p.30.

(10) For student schedules see the Salisbury letters, pp. 210, 218, 227-228; also George B. Emerson, Reminiscences of an Old Teacher (Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1878), p. 17

(11) Morrison, Three Centuries of Harvard, p. 224.

(12) Ibid, p. 226.

(13) Mark Anthony DeWolfe Howe, The Life and Letters of George Bancroft, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1908), pp. 25-26.

(14) Andrew Preston Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, quoted in Howe, Bancroft, pp. 25-6.

(15) Brooks, Flowering of New England, p. 38-40: Emerson, Reminiscences, p. 29, and Mumford, May Memoir, pp. 33-35.

(16) Brooks, Flowering of New England, p.40; Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, p. 253.

(17) May to Charles Eliot Norton, October 18, 1867, Harvard University.

(18) Quoted in Morrison, Three Centuries of Harvard, p. 197.

(19) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 30.

(20) Historical Register of Harvard College, 1636-1936 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 70.

(21) Eliot, Harvard Sketch, p. 92-93.

(22) May to Colonel Samuel May, June 29, 1814. This is the earliest extant May letter, complete with youthful rhetorical flourishes and sober assurances of his attempts at industry and virtue. Harvard University.

(23) The prize essay is still preserved in the Harvard archives along with such memorabilia of the May college career as his library charging lists, and records of his brief encounters with the faculty.

(24) May to Colonel May, June 29, 1814.

(25) The only good friend who was not there was George B. Emerson. He had been experimenting with the idea of sleeping just four hours a night, but the omniscient President Kirkland found out about it and sent him home to rest and recover his health.

(26) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 33.

(27) Ibid., p. 33.

(28) From a memorial plaque on the side of the building.

(29) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 40.

(30) Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, p. 208. The rumor got started once that the college was going to cut Boston Saturdays to one per month. That was almost enough to start another riot. Salisbury Letters, p. 211.

(31) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 247.

(32) Salisbury Letters, p. 227.

(33) W. P. Cresson, James Monroe (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1946), p. 288.

(34) Salisbury Letters, p. 234.

(35) For a good description of phrenology and an excellent chart clearly showing the bump of combativeness, see Frank Croft, "Phrenology Had All the Answers," McLean' s Magazine, September 24, 1960, pp. 26-28.

(36) Salisbury Letters, p. 220.

(37) Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, p.42.

(38) Salisbury Letters, pp. 244-246.

(39) For one occasion on which May differed with a Cabot, see below, p. 47, f.n. His last recorded contact with a Lowell came on April 26, 1861, when he submitted a manuscript written by a friend to James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. May not only recommended the piece to Lowell; he advised him to publish it in three monthly portions, and indicated precisely the pages to be included in each section. Should the article prove unsuitable for the Atlantic Monthly, said May, in the tone of an older Brahmin addressing a newcomer on the scene, Lowell was personally to dispatch it to a magazine that could use it. May to "Prof. Lowell", April 26, 1861, Harvard University.