The story Americans have long told of their nation’s founding has a familiar cast and setting: young, white men in powdered wigs, alight with Enlightenment thought, pacing college greens and tavern floors, arguing their way toward independence.
In an artistic, modern retelling, a band of racially diverse young immigrants rap their grievances under stage lights in a Broadway-burnished hip-hop version of rebellion.
In both renderings, the colonial colleges are portrayed as hotbeds of revolutionary fervor.
It’s a compelling, dramatic narrative that largely credits these institutions with the ideas that fueled the fire of self-governance. It’s also not entirely true.
When the war broke out, not all faculty and students supported the patriotic cause. Some loyalist professors even decamped to England. The students, meanwhile, plodded along in their coursework — not so much in nation-building, but rather in the more traditional studies of Latin, Greek, mathematics, philosophy and rhetoric.
“The morning would be spent in recitations,” said historian Bob Allison. “They’re not getting radicalized here.”
On a mild spring afternoon in the Old Burying Ground just beyond Harvard Yard, among slate headstones worn soft by time, the Suffolk University history professor describes a very different reality of colonial student life in the late 18th century.
“The morning would be spent in recitations. They’re not getting radicalized here.”Robert Allison, Suffolk University
In the spring of 1775, weeks after the midnight rides of Paul Revere and William Dawes — the latter of whom rode through the Cambridge campus — Harvard did not erupt in rebellion. It emptied out.
The Harvard Corporation had voted to send students home early for summer break. Faculty, sensing what was to come after fighting began in nearby Lexington and Concord, had quietly moved the library to safer ground — north to Andover.
Allison notes there’s a well-worn saying that the American Revolution could be blamed on the Harvard College Library because it served as an incubator for revolutionary thought and radical ideas. But on campus, with students and faculty absent, there were no tea parties, political sit-ins or urgent economic seminars.
Instead, there was a military siege.
Within days, more than 1,500 Continental Army volunteer soldiers filled Harvard Yard. Six red-brick buildings, including Holden Chapel, were converted into barracks and offices. Metal roofs, doorknobs and door hinges were pried loose and melted down for bullets.
By July, George Washington had arrived to take command, setting up headquarters inside Wadsworth Hall, the residence of Harvard’s president. A college founded by Puritans in 1636 to train ministers and other professions had become a military outpost.
The students, meanwhile, were sent 15 miles west to the small rural farm town of Concord. There, about a hundred of them lived with locals and resumed their studies wherever space would allow: the town’s meetinghouse, the courthouse and an abandoned grammar school.
The faculty was not delivering lectures on rebellion or offering electives on independence. At the time, students were just as likely to complain about the quality of rancid butter and not being able to drink tea as they were the state of tyranny and British rule.
“They’re paying for this,” Allison said. “Some of the students who are less down with the whole patriot thing want to drink tea in the Commons and some of the students are protesting.”
Allison noted these arguments and protests took place outside of the classroom.
“They’re not having classes where they’re talking about current events,” he says. “Classes are really to study the classics and not to vent.”
Only after British troops evacuated Boston in June of 1776 would students return to Cambridge and resume their academic recitations and routines.
Beyond the clergy
When the 13 colonies declared independence 250 years ago this summer, there were just nine colleges in British America: Harvard University, Yale University, Dartmouth College, the College of William & Mary, Princeton University (then the College of New Jersey), Columbia University (then King’s College), University of Pennsylvania (then the College and Academy of Philadelphia), Brown University (then Rhode Island College) and Rutgers University (then Queen’s College).
These were small, insular campuses that together educated less than 1% of the colonial population. Their students were very young — sometimes the tender ages of 13 or 14 — with a pupil’s class rank heavily depending on their father’s status. Grounded in the classics rather than politics, tutors taught students not what to think, but how to think, argue, debate and defend an idea.
These schools were originally under significant control of the Church of England. Harvard was created for educating primarily clergy, and most of its early presidents were ministers.
As a result, for the first century of Harvard’s existence, the curriculum itself was relatively narrow by today’s standards. History and politics were largely absent.
By the mid-1700s, though, students were increasingly reading John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton, absorbing arguments about knowledge, ethics and natural law. Yet despite the revolt rising around them, faculty held firm to discipline and classical tradition.
Still, something was brewing behind the scenes on campus as some restless minds sought something more than recitation.
“They debated current politics,” said University of Wisconsin historian David Hoeveler, author of Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges. “They debated theoretical political questions like: ‘Is it ever legitimate to rebel against the supreme government if that government is failing the public?’”
Again, historians say, just not in class.
The most provocative thinking about democracy and self-governance at the time unfolded elsewhere: in libraries, in student-run societies, in coffeehouses and taverns. There, young men like Samuel Adams (a Harvard graduate), Alexander Hamilton (educated at Columbia) and James Madison (of Princeton) tested theories about liberty and power long before they would help build a nation.
“The field that gained great popularity among the faculty and the students was what we would call ‘political economy,’” said historian John Thelin, a retired professor at the University of Kentucky and author of A History of American Higher Education. “It was a mix of government, economics and some historical background.”
Given how few people actually attended colonial colleges, Thelin noted, their outsized presence in the leadership of the Revolution is striking.
“They weren’t required for that involvement,” he said. “They sought it out.”
With titles like “Is the pope the antichrist?” and “Is it moral to sell Africans?” Harvard student theses reflected the intellectual curiosities of the day. Faculty, staff and college leaders at Harvard enslaved more than 70 people during the 17th and 18th centuries. But the boldest ideas challenging slavery and tyranny often formed off campus, beyond the reach of faculty and a formal curriculum.
While at Harvard, Samuel Adams, class of 1743, was already giving talks on resistance during commencement decades before the war. At Princeton, James Madison wrote a lengthy poem attacking Loyalists. These cases were in the minority, though — seeds of what was to come.
The mythology surrounding the Revolution and colonial colleges has its limits. In a dramatized scene from the Broadway musical Hamilton, Aaron Burr needles the title character and future Treasury secretary, who got a scholarship to attend Columbia after being rejected by Princeton.
There’s no historical evidence Hamilton ever punched a Princeton bursar, as he claims in the musical. But sharp-elbowed debates did help shape the spirit of the revolution and the ideas of liberty and self-governance that would define it.
And whereas the colleges themselves were not exactly loud engines of revolution, they were something more enduring: training grounds for young minds that would carry those ideas and arguments into the world.
Back in the Old Burying Ground in Harvard Square, historian Robert Allison pauses at a weathered headstone near the edge of the cemetery and reads the inscription aloud:
“Here lies the body of Mr. John Stearns.
He died in the service of his country, August 22, 1775
in the 23rd year of his life.”
Allison points out Stearns was not a Harvard man — but his father, Rev. David Stearns, had graduated in the class of 1728, becoming the minister in Lunenburg.
His older brother Jonathan, also a Harvard graduate, and a lawyer, would remain a Loyalist — and ended up fleeing their hometown.
Standing at the headstone, if you manage to tune out the traffic and leaf blowers, reality comes more into focus. The war was physically fought mostly by young, uneducated men like John Stearns while college graduates would go on to dominate the political life of a new nation — figures like Thomas Jefferson of William & Mary or the eight signers of the Declaration of Independence who were Harvard alumni.
The Revolution transformed colonial colleges culturally.
Looking back, Allison finds a lesson today for students, professors and politicians who might be tempted to always see American campuses as political battlegrounds.
Higher education, he suggests, works best as a place where students encounter ideas that unsettle them — rather than as an indoctrination factory for radical ideology.
“It’s not as though they go home and say, ‘Hey, you know what? All men are created equal,’ or ‘We do have a fundamental right to govern ourselves,’” he said. “The purpose of this college wasn’t to necessarily enlighten, but to prepare them for positions of leadership.”
And, Allison said, studying Harvard and the eight other colonial colleges — even though the classroom curricula would lag a few paces behind the ideas of the day — offers a chance to understand the nuance of a nation their students and alumni are still helping to build.
