Some presidents of Harvard have striven for academic freedom, some for expansion, most for money. Yet in the annals of 324 years of College history one president stands out for another interest. Josiah Quincy strove for academic freedom, wrestled with financial problems and helped the College expand--but throughout the 16 years of his reign, his primary concern was inculcating an outmoded Puritan ethic of moral conformity and behavioral excellence.

The stormy story of Josiah Quincy and his relation to Harvard is one of a man who staunchly believed in an outworn heritage and tried to impose it upon unwilling students. Two antagonistic forces provided the drama of his regime: the carefree attitude of students and the rigid demeanor of a president who sought to mold his undergraduates according to his strict canons of respectability.

Quincy's "heart's desire," his son recorded, "was to make the College a nursery of high-minded, high-principled, well-taught, well-conducted, well-bred gentlemen, fit to take their share, gracefully and honorably, in public and private life." In his attempt to reach this goal, Harvard's fifteenth President failed miserably. His policies incurred the wrath of the undergraduates and culminated in the great riot of 1834 and the subsequent dismissal of the entire sophomore class.

In the 1830's and 1840's, Harvard was a considerably less genteel spot than the College rules would lead one to expect. For amusement, almost every undergraduate joined a club, and these existed often only for bacchanalian orgies. The best remembered organization of the period was the "Med. Fac.," which Quincy unsuccessfully tried to suppress in 1834. Secret meetings of the Med. Fac. were highlighted by libations from a silver chamber-pot or by hazing of unknowing freshmen; the administration railed against the breeches of discipline this body created, but did not suppress it until this century.

Another attraction leading student minds from Quincy's strait-laced code of ethics were the Boston pubs and easyhouses. The Charles River toll bridge provided easy access to the city, and the hope that students could be confined to College grounds rapidly evaporated. Why be a gentleman all the time, students in the 1830's must have asked themselves, with Boston merriment only a bridge away.

Some of the College's practices directly encouraged what President Quincy considered sinful. Commencement exercises were little more than excuses for feasting and drinking, and since they were open to the public, crowds streamed from all parts of New England to enjoy Harvard's liquid hospitality. Class Day also bore a resemblance to a Dionysian revel.

Such proceedings naturally grated against Quincy's rigid ethics. He felt that the only cure would be suitable discipline for the offending undergraduates--but his clamping down produced even greater disorder. Quincy became a martinet, the "Tiberius" of the College. "His policy toward the students, an alternate cuffing and caressing, ended in making him the most unpopular President in Harvard history since Hoar," wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Quincy knew what was right--the Puritan code of upright moral behavior--and attempted to impose this upon the naturally unwilling student body.

Throughout the 92 years of his life, Quincy always held to his definition of correct behavior. And this almost always brought him success, with the singular exception of his sojourn at Harvard. As a Congressman, reform mayor, historian, and Federalist leader he had few peers; when the Corporation selected Quincy as the fifteenth president of the College it was on the basis of a distinguished record of public service.

Josiah's Puritanical training started right at the cradle. His widowed mother, fearful of "hurtful indulgence," would rouse him from slumber and dip him three times in a tub of frigid water. At the tender age of six, he entered Phillips Academy in Andover, probably since his grandfather had founded it. His academic training consisted of memorizing hymns, Greek and Latin grammar, and attending sermons. Although Quincy described the Puritan restrictions as "wearisome and irksome," he learned them well; he remained a teetotaler and habitually rose at 4 a.m.

Entering Harvard at 14, he followed the regular curriculum: "a little Latin and less Greek, and not much mathematics, with a sprinkling of rhetoric, logic, metaphysics, and ethics." At his graduation in 1790, he delivered the English Oration, highest academic honor in the class. His moral character, according to testimony of his classmates, stayed at the same high level.

Quincy decided to enter law and apprenticed himself to Mr. William Tudor for training, not only in legal niceties but also in political maneuvers. Josiah was born and remained a Federalist, although the party collapsed 40 years before his death, and despite his relatively late start in politics, he advanced rapidly.

There was one chink in Quincy's Puritanical armor, however--a woman. Within a week after he heard Eliza Morton sing songs of Burns, he became secretly engaged to her--an engagement which lasted over two years. Although he took the usual precautions, such as checking upon her family connections and her property, Quincy apparently over-threw all the precepts his mother had instilled in him for love of Miss Morton. He never revealed his engagement to his mother until a few months before the wedding; the ceremony itself took place in New York, far from his Boston home.

The Federalist Party first took note of Quincy after his flaming July 4th oration in 1798, which lambasted the French Directory and its attitude toward the fledgling United States. Edmund Quincy, Josiah's son and very partial biographer, enthused over the speech: "The effect which his oration produced upon the audience in the Old South Church was long remembered by those who heard it, for the fiery enthusiasm it aroused, and the passionate tears it drew forth." Quincy stood for Congress in the election of 1800, and, like the rest of the Federalists, went down to defeat. Democratic newspapers pointed out that Quincy was only 28 years old and called for a cradle in which to rock him.

For the next three years, Quincy devoted himself to his practice, his wife, and his studies. The Puritan Ethic did not permit idle time; Quincy's dairy is replete wtih statements such as, "I resolve, therefore, in future to be more circumspect--to hoard my moments with a more thrifty spirit--to listen less to the suggestions of indolence, and so quicken that spirit of intellectual improvement to which I devote my life." In addition to copious readings in the classics, he spent a great deal of time learning French, studying botany, keeping an extensive diary, and attending to affairs legal and political.

In the spring of 1804, Quincy was elected to the state senate and that fall to the national House of Representatives, the year when the Democratic Republicans "received the unexpected compliment of the vote of Massachusetts."