After this Lockean statement, the circular went on to show the facts of Quincy's unjustifiable act. First, President Quincy was accused of saying to a group of several students, "We want no Southerners here; we cannot prevent your coming, but we don't want you; go somewhere else." Second, they attacked Quincy's call for public justice. "Mr. Quincy has formed a determination which no prudent man can approve. . . . He is about to introduce into academic discipline the full vigor of Criminal law." After affirming that they did not object to the laws of the institutions, only Quincy's methods of putting them into execution, the Juniors concluded: "Now nothing can be more evident than the unfitness of such a character for the direction of a mere literary institution."

The Senior class circular pushed this same line of reasoning but in a longer, and more eloquent form. The reason for their circular, they stated, was to refute the President's Circular "which contains a statement not belived by the students generally to be full and correct, and which they think is calculated to make a false impression on the public mind." After relating the events as they saw them, the students substantiated the Juniors' charges agains President Quincy and added one of their own: that Quincy actually told Barnwell when he arrived at Harvard that he did not like his attitude, and he had better watch out. In the end they commented in a vein of fairness "that the fault lies by no means upon the students alone. . . . We cannot but think that the renewal of the disturbances was owing to a want of discretion on the part of the President."

George Moore, who was a Senior but took no part in writing the document, seemed to agree with the judgments about the immediate events. He spoke with nodding approval in his Diary of "many of the classes thinking that Barnwell was unjustly expelled."

The newspapers of Boston at that time also took to editorializing about the incident. The Boston Courier, which was the paper read by those of the Federalist or Whig disposition, stated its whole-hearted agreement with President Quincy and the Gov- ernment of the University. On the other hand, the Boston Transcript, a Jacksonian paper edited by several recent graduates, put their sympathies with the students. "We have just heard of a new act of the wise men who guide the councils of our Alma Mater. . . ," the Transcript stated, "which threatens to ruin that ancient Institution."

But in another sense the disturbances at Harvard had deeper and more serious causes than those revealed in the escalation of tactics by both sides. Thus, the senior circular, while it spent most of its effort identifying the faults of President Quincy, eventually came to the short but essential conclusion: "Perhaps the circumstances which we have revealed have been only the immediate occasion of the recent disturbances. The causes have been long in operation."

Though the Juniors did not recognize any such causes, they wrote their circular in the height of their passion against President Quincy.

On the other side of the academic fence, the Government of Harvard College never recognized any connection between long range cause and events in the disruption either. Their tactic for the short range was to quell the disturbances, and their attitude to the larger issues was to chalk the protests up to poor manners and bad tempers.

Only the report which was submitted to the Governing Boards by former President John Quincy Adams made any effort to discover any cause for the events. Marking the extreme nature of the disturbances at Harvard, and recalling no previous such incident at the College, Adams finally connected a cause to these unusual events. Said Adams, drawing up all the venom he had for Andrew Jackson who had defeated and slurred him six years before, and then been given a Harvard degree, "the temper of the age" has affected students to consider themselves "in a standing rather of equality than of subordination to their instructors." It was the new age of equality that Quincy cited as the cause. At least in doing this he fingered a deeper reason for the extraordinary events.

Harvard's official Historian has made the only substantial and removed judgment of the event to date. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his definitive study of Harvard written for the tercentennial celebration at Harvard in 1936, and appropriately called Three Centuries of Harvard, reviewed the narrative of the events.

In a tender-as-possible comment Morison first says "Quincy never regained his popularity after that." But afterwards Morison goes on to state that the College never became a top rate institution until Eliot's presidency in 1869. He also expresses the notion that all students were unsatisfied with the kind of instruction that they were receiving at this time. And he subtly suggests that this may be the cause of the students' revolt. Morison never condemns anyone directly. But in his analysis he agrees in substance with a letter which the Boston Transcript republished in their paper with approving remarks. The Transcript's letter, apparently from a recent graduate, suggested (believe it or not) eight proposals which it thought would help the College run without further incident. The proposals included suggestions to abolish grading and end competition. It suggested strange new ways of dealing with faculty-student relations. The letter ended with the signature of "reform."

What emerges from all this is a judgment about past events. What one is faced with are similar events within the present crisis.

What one must keep in mind, however, is the comment by one student when he heard the narrative in this paper, "and they kept telling us it never happened at Harvard before."

(The documents cited here are from the Harvard Archives, and quotations have been reprinted with their kind permission.)