Confederates in Harvard's Memorial Hall

via

With the advent of the sesquicentennial, there has been a surge of interest in all things related to the Civil War. At Harvard, this has taken the form of intensified debates over the inclusion of Harvard's Confederate dead in Memorial Hall.

Memorial Hall via Wikipedia

Harvard's Memorial Hall was built in the 1870s as a monument to Harvard's Union war dead. It is a huge, gothic building that houses Annenberg Dining Hall, Sanders Theatre, and a memorial corridor lined with marble plaques that bear the names of 136 Harvard graduates who died while serving with the Union army. The plaque in the center of the transept declares,

This hall commemorates the patriotism of the graduates and student of this university who served in the Army and Navy of the United States during the war for the preservation of the Union and upon these tablets are inscribed the names of those among them who died in that service.

The controversy arises from the fact that the 71 Harvard graduates who died in the Confederate armed forces are not included in this memorial. When the cornerstone for the building was laid (1870), the prevailing sentiment was toward honoring only those soldiers who had fought against treason. During the reconstruction era, Cambridge was still proud to characterize the war as a sacred struggle over both union and slavery, as demonstrated in the sphinx monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery (1872), which bears the text,

AMERICAN UNION PRESERVED
AFRICAN SLAVERY DESTROYED
BY THE UPRISING OF A GREAT PEOPLE
BY THE BLOOD OF FALLEN HEROES

Yet, the reconciliationist narrative came to Cambridge as surely as it swept over the rest of the nation. By the time the 50-year celebrations rolled around, there were active efforts to include the names of Harvard's Confederate dead at Memorial Hall. Monuments erected at Yale and Princeton during this era jumbled the names of Union and Confederate dead and honored all as patriots.

In the past year, the campaign to include the Confederate dead in Memorial Hall has ramped up again. Many pro-memorialization advocates have latched onto the fact that Memorial Church (a different building on campus, built in 1932 to commemorate the WWI dead) lists the names of several Harvard men who died serving in the German army in WWI and one Divinity School graduate who died in WWII. Last fall, the Harvard Crimson ran a long article about the differences between the Memorial Hall and Memorial Church commemoration philosophies, in which it quoted Prof. Alan Dershowitz as saying,

The University needs to adopt a policy one way or the other. The current inconsistent standard is unacceptable, and it’s particularly unfortunate that the exception seems to be for a member of the Nazi army, one of the darkest regimes in human history, and a regime with which Harvard had too cozy a relationship.

While I tend to think that Prof. Dershowitz would probably rather see the deletion of German soldiers from Memorial Church than the addition of Confederates to Memorial Hall, others have come to the opposite conclusion. The Harvard Confederate Memorial Initiative is a small, but vocal organization dedicated to advocating for a Confederate memorial at Harvard. You can view their intro video here. Their cause has been getting some attention, not just from the Crimson, but from conservative media outlets like World Net Daily. Last summer, a WND reporter confronted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs over the Memorial Hall issue — Gibbs had no comment. The HCMI also has a Facebook petition (currently rather pathetic at about 130 "likes"). Executive Director Roger McCredie told the Crimson that the HCMI's goal is to correct the historical narrative of "South equal bad. North equal good":

If you want to talk slavery, we can talk slavery all day long and about how no one’s hands are clean from it—including the Fanueil family and the Brown family, both of whom made fortunes on the slave trade. This extremely skewed view of history and of historical perspective has become pandemic—it does not infect merely Harvard; it infects the entire educated and cultural edifice of the United States these days.

Now, I know Mr. McCredie has a particular political agenda to advance, but this sort of thing is rage-inducing. He seems to be confusing Harvard with a mediocre elementary school circa 1990. The Harvard curriculum is hardly trying to cover up Northern complicity in American slavery with courses like Sven Beckert's "Harvard and Slavery" or faculty research like Jill Lepore's New York Burning or events like last month's joint conference with Brown, which was called "Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development" and focused on slavery's role in national economic development after the Revolution. When someone claims that academic historians are ignoring or trying to cover up Northern slavery, I know that I can safely disregard everything else in his/her manifesto because he/she clearly has no grasp of what academic historians do. Northern slavery is one of the hottest things going in Early American history at the moment. People who pretend otherwise are willfully ignorant in service of their neo-Confederate politics.

Yet, admittedly, academic historians are notoriously awful about getting the word out about our work. Part of that is our fault (we generally for one another rather than for a wide audience and punish colleagues who try to engage with the public), part is the fault of the structure of history education at the k-12 level (holiday history controlled by politicized state committees and useless AP-driven fact cram later on), part is the fault of public figures who appeal to history as a cover for their own biases (see the entire Scalia oeuvre), and part is the fault of an incurious general public that can't be bothered to read anything more challenging than a David McCullough biography. As an historian with a commitment to public history, I think it would be a great idea to do some public outreach regarding Harvard's role in American slavery and its considerable ties to the Confederacy.

Therefore, I propose the following exhibit:

Remembrance

In the transept of Memorial Hall, two rows of rectangular display pedestals will stand along the East and West walls, each directly under a memorial panel and mirroring the panel in shape and size, though tipped at a slight angle so that visitors can view the contents easily. Each pedestal will display an object or text relating to Harvard's multifaceted role in creating, sustaining, and challenging American slavery and the war that ended it. A final pedestal will stand at the North end of the transept, under the stained glass window, bearing the names of the 71 Harvard students and alumni who gave their lives in support of the Confederacy and its cause — not in violation of their position as Harvard men, but in fulfillment of it.

Examples of objects that would go into these cases:

• J.T. Zealy / Louis Agassiz Daguerreotypes:

• In 1850, Harvard's most celebrated naturalist, Louis Agassiz, traveled to South Carolina, where he commissioned a series of photographs of African-born slaves and first-generation African-Americans in an attempt to gather evidence about racial types. Agassiz believed that various races were created separately, and his use of scientific methods, including these photographs, lent his ideas intellectual weight in antebellum America. The daguerreotypes — many of them depicting their subjects nude, in the poses now familiar to us from mug shots — are held by Harvard's Peabody Museum. They are not on display, partly because they are fragile and partly because they are ghastly. For more information, see Molly Rogers' Delia's Tears: Race, Science and Photography in 19th-Century America. This book reprints all of the images in full, something I would not do here, even if I had permission.
• Portrait of Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Frank Weston Benton (1893)

• Higginson, a fiery abolitionist who contributed openly to John Brown's cause, was a member of the class of 1841. He was a true radical and found that the reforms brought about by the Civil War fell far short of his hopes for racial justice. In 1904, he gave a Decoration Day speech in Sanders Theatre in which he suggested that Confederates might be included in the tablets in the transept. While some historians (David Blight) have argued that Higginson represents the erasure of abolitionism from Civil War memory, others (W. Scott Poole) argue that Higginson's remarks in 1904 "speak to his own disillusion about the possibilities of nationalism and his doubts about whether or not it could serve as a force for racial justice." Higginson's portrait (along with various quotations) would provide an unparalleled example of the complexity of Harvard's relationships with abolitionism and Civil War memory.
• Samples of "Negro Cloth" from Rhode Island 1839-1850 from Baker Library (Harvard Business School)
•  Many Harvard alumni and donors (ex: Francis Cabot Lowell, class of 1793) were industrialists who turned slave-grown Southern cotton into cheap cloth. Some of this material, like the samples above, were manufactured in order to be sent back to Southern plantations to clothe those same slaves. Several cases in this exhibit would be devoted to the Harvard/factory/plantation nexus.

Other cases would showcase other items related to Harvard's historical support of and entanglement with slavery — receipts for gifts from slaveowning or slave-industry alumni, a replica of the gravestone dedicated to Cecily (d. 1713, 13-year-old slave to William Brattle, class of 1680), a fragment of brick from an 18th-century college building built using slave labor, etc. An exhibit like this would probably be the fruit of research conducted in undergraduate seminars (like Prof. Beckert's) and by professors and community members as part of a commission similar to Brown's Committee on Slavery and Justice. Its catalog would probably go on to form part of a larger report by the commission laying bare Harvard's complicity. I know that a report from a steering committee doesn't sound like a very friendly way to get the word out, but there was plenty of interest in Brown's report, and Harvard's would make a bigger splash. People might not read the report, but they would read the NYT article about the report.

In this way, Harvard could engage in meaningful reflection on its institutional history. I think that a public exhibit in Memorial Hall would be a powerful way to write Harvard's Confederate dead back into its story, not with celebration, but with conscience. The point would be to bring context to the names already on the walls in the transept. They were the memorial that Harvard needed in 1870, but we need something more in 2011.

Roger McCredie and others who call for the names of Harvard's Confederate dead to be added to the rolls of honor in Memorial Hall argue that Harvard should acknowledge its role in the development and maintenance of American slavery. I agree. But simply adding the names of Harvard's Confederates would not just acknowledge that role — it would perpetuate it. If Harvard were to take such a bold and public step in favor of a reconciliationist narrative that argues that the Civil War was about personal valor and sacrifice, rather than a struggle over treason in defense of slavery, the institution will have lent its considerable cultural capital to the mythology of the Lost Cause. It will have arrayed what arms it has on the side of a white supremacist, anti-intellectual movement that is stuck in the mindset of the 50th anniversary while the rest of the nation observes the 150th. Luckily, I think there is very little chance that this will happen, particularly under the administration of President Faust, who is, after all, a scholar of the Civil War with a particular interest in memorialization. If the names of Harvard's Confederate dead are added to Memorial Hall — and I hope they are — they must be part of an effort to confront Harvard's institutional complicity, not an attempt to prolong it.

Harvard Admissions Exam

This version of the Harvard Admission Exam (1869) has been going around among the graduate students. It includes sections on Latin and Greek translation and grammar, History and Geography, Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry.

Take a shot at the History and Geography section (no Wikipedia!):

More Press for Tangible Things!

More press for Tangible Things (the exhibit half of the course I helped develop and am teaching for this semester): Boston Globe.

More Press for Tangible Things!

Now our course/exhibit is on Radio Boston!

More Press for Our Course!

From the Harvard Gazette.

Tangible Things, ctd.

The Harvard Crimson profiles our exhibit.

Tangible Things

This semester, I will be the head Teaching Fellow for a new GenEd course at Harvard called Tangible Things: Harvard Collections and World History (co-taught by Professors Laurel Ulrich and Ivan Gaskell).

The purpose of the course is to get students into the archives/museums and get them thinking about how the disciplinary categories arose (and how valid they are).

Along with regular lectures and sections, we have a fabulous exhibit that is open to the public. The core of the exhibit includes objects from many different collections and is on view at the Historical Scientific Instruments gallery in the Science Center through the end of May. We have also placed guest objects in museums and libraries all around campus.

See our write-up in Curated Magazine.

Gravestone of the Day: Samuel Epes

Samuel Epes, 1760, Cambridge, MA

I am too lazy to transcribe this myself. Here is the William Thaddeus Harris' transcription:

Samuel Epes was a promising young lawyer and politician who died of consumption in 1760. His mother married Harvard President Edward Holyoke after the death of Samuel's father in 1741, when Samuel was eight years old. Holyoke considered Samuel a son — his diary contains entries such as "August 20 [1746] Sons John Holyoke and Samuel Epes first attended school in Boston."

I have not been able to find a translation online. My high school Latin is rusty, but this also looks like another way to say died: "Animam sjus in Jesu sinum expiravit." That must be something along the lines of "His soul expired in Jesus." Sinus means a curve or fold, so maybe something like Jesus' embrace? Does maceratus mean "to chew"? Tabesco means "to waste away," which makes sense because he died of consumption, but "to chew" seems a little graphic.

Red-Tailed Hawk on Campus

I wish I could carry my big camera around campus on a daily basis, but I can't manage it and my computer at the same time. That means I have only my non-zooming cell phone to capture fun things like this red-tailed hawk. There is a pair of hawks on campus — they are always screeching, but very rarely perch so low to the ground.

I would have had an amazing pic if I had had my Nikon. Perhaps I need a mid-sized, mid-powered option.

A Very Confusing Epitaph

I found a mystery in Groton, MA last weekend. See what you can make of this epitaph:

Usually, I would interpret the "he" of "he was educated at Harvard College" as referring back to Col. John Bulkley, but that cannot be. He can't have graduated from Harvard in 1769 and died in 1772 at age 69. I've looked through Sibley's Harvard Grads and the oldest students were in their early 20s.

I can only assume that the second half of the epitaph refers to the younger John Bulkley (b. 1749), who was indeed a member of Harvard's class of 1769. This makes sense — the second half clearly eulogizes a young man.

It's strange, though. The Park family would have known the Bulkleys, so perhaps this epitaph was not confusing to them, but it departs rather significantly from the usual pattern of epitaphs. If there is a verse or eulogy beneath the vital information, it is almost always dedicated to the principal honoree. I've never seen anything like this one before.

Col. John Bulkley and John Bulkley, Jr.

d. 1772 and 1774

Groton, MA

Observations

Tutor Hopkins: Today, we will practice using material objects as historical sources. When you are approaching an object, the first thing you should do is take some time to look at it carefully. Try to rid your mind of preconceptions and just make concrete observations about the object. Anything goes — just tell everyone what you see.

Undergrad #1: It's made of stone.

Tutor Hopkins: Ok, good. Does anyone know what kind of stone?

Undergrad #2: Slate?

Tutor Hopkins: You're right — it's a nice, fine-grained slate. What else?


Undergrad #3: There's a skull with wings.

Undergrad #4: And some Latin on the top.

Tutor Hopkins: Great. We're looking at the material, the iconography, and the language. Who here speaks Latin and can translate for us?

Undergrad #5: Remember Death? Time is fleeting?

Tutor Hopkins: Yep. Time flies. What else do you see?

Undergrad #6: There's an ornate floral design on the bottom.

Undergrad #7: And the top is bumpy.

Tutor Hopkins: Is this the same design aesthetic as the Georgian buildings Prof. X showed you?

Undergrad #8: No — it's sort of symmetrical, but not really geometric like the buildings.

Tutor Hopkins: Keep looking. Anything else jumping out at you?

— silence —


Tutor Hopkins: Anything surprising or unexpected?

— silence —


Tutor Hopkins: Anybody?

Undergrad #1: It's kind of . . . small.

Tutor Hopkins: I suppose. I'm a little surprised that no one has noticed the GIANT BREASTS on the borders. There are eight of them.

Undergrads #2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8: Oh! I saw those, but I didn't think they could really be . . . you know.

Tutor Hopkins: Were you expecting to see GIANT BREASTS on a gravestone from 1710?

Undergrads: No. (nervous giggling)

Tutor Hopkins: The first lesson of using objects as sources: make concrete observations without hampering yourself with expectations. You may find some strange and unexpected things.

(Very attentive undergrads go on to spend a lovely hour noticing things in the graveyard.)

Sunset Over Harvard Yard

Cow and Tubas

Today, Prof. Harvey Cox celebrated his retirement with a Jersey cow and an all-tuba brass ensemble. The story is getting some press coverage.

The cow was very calm, even with a hundred people crowded around.

Hollis Professor to Graze Cow on Harvard Yard

Yes!!!

At Harvard, the most distinguished professors are awarded the status of "University Professor." Among the honors and regalia bestowed by this rank are several special privileges: they may carry swords to class, collect firewood on the yard, and graze cows there.

One week from today, University Professor Harvey Cox will celebrate his retirement by exercising his right to graze a cow on Harvard Yard.

I will be there with my camera.

Throat Distemper @ Cambridge, 1740

In June of 1740, a deadly epidemic of "throat distemper" gripped the town of Cambridge, MA. A few adults and many young children succumbed to the disease, most between June 22 and June 25.

On June 23, Harvard dismissed its students early, sending them home in hopes that they would not fall ill. This precaution seemed prudent, especially since President Holyoke's and Steward Bordman's families were among those hardest hit.

Many of the victims of this epidemic are buried in the Harvard Square burying ground.

“Those Known Parts in that Unknowne Worlde”

Here's my take on the prompt, "1,000 words on the burning of Harvard Hall."

The city of Boston did not appear anywhere in John Speed’s 1627 atlas, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World. Completed three years before John Winthrop’s fleet sailed for Massachusetts Bay, Speed’s compilation featured a map of “AMERICA with those known parts in that unknowne worlde” that included detailed street plans of Cuzco and Havana, but left most of North America blank. In an attempt to fill the vast emptiness between Hudson Bay and “The Virginian Sea,” Speed covered the land with the names of explorers, perhaps as talismans against the uncharted void. To the north and west, the continent faded vaguely into a coastless abyss.

Less than a century after Speed sent his atlas out into the world, a copy found its way into that unmapped wilderness. In 1723, the fledgling college at Cambridge, Massachusetts listed a copy among the treasures of its growing library.  Though Harvard Hall housed several thousand volumes, few were more alluring to students than Speed’s illustrated folio. If none of the nearly 100 maps caught a particular student’s fancy, the supplementary engravings — bare-breasted personifications of the elements, voluptuous women and gallant courtiers displaying their national costumes, fanged sea monsters prowling the coastlines — surely did. Thomas Hollis, one of Harvard’s great benefactors, complained that “boyish students” enjoyed valuable atlases too much, charging that they “take them to their chambers, and teare out pictures & maps to adorne their walls.”

In the cold cells under Harvard Hall’s leaky roof, generations of the colony’s future leaders drifted off to sleep under Speed’s engravings and dreamed of a world beyond Cambridge. For aspiring merchants, Speed promised splendid Indian kingdoms “aboundant in sundry sorts of spices” and illusive southern continents rich in “either Land, people, or Comodities.” For budding philosophers, the atlas provided maps of the real Cambridge, framed by the colleges’ ancient coats of arms and portraits of richly-robed scholars engaged in learned discourse. Young politicians admired the grandeur of London, prospective ministers traced the contours of the Holy Land, and would-be soldiers searched out the names of famous battlefields. At Harvard, on the fringes of the “unknowne worlde,” Speed’s maps formed a bulwark against the precarious isolation of a still-vulnerable colony.

The most important pages in Speed’s atlas were his detailed maps of England. As the first world atlas published in English, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World placed the British Isles at the center of the world, rather than relegating them to the periphery. No other atlas in Harvard’s library devoted a hundred pages to detailed maps of the English counties or included historical maps like Speed’s “BRITAIN As it was DEVIDED in the tyme of the Englishe Saxons.” For New Englanders, an intimate knowledge of the streets of Canterbury, the villages of Oxfordshire, and the territories governed by Hengist of Kent strengthened their claim to Englishness. Though most of Harvard’s students had never set foot on fair Albion’s soil, any who studied Speed’s atlas could imagine that he knew the land as well as any man born there. The colonists’ identity as Englishmen informed their understanding of their legal rights, their history, and their relationships with their French Catholic neighbors. Thus, the material trappings of that Englishness — shillings, livestock, linen shirts, and maps of Britannia — had resonance beyond their prosaic utility.  They were signposts of civilization in a world that remained unsubdued.

—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—*—

On the evening of January 24, 1764, the priceless atlas lay quietly on its shelf as the Governor’s Council met in Harvard’s library. An epidemic of small pox had driven the gentlemen out of Boston and the college, empty of students during the winter vacation, seemed the best alternative meeting place. Most members of the General Court and many of the Governor’s Council knew Harvard Hall well; they were once the very students who had exasperated Thomas Hollis with their youthful irreverence. Perhaps one of the councilmen, remembering Speed’s atlas from his student days, sought it out and perused it during a break in the proceedings. If so, he would have been the last to touch it.

In the dark hours after the Council adjourned, a coal continued to smolder in the library fireplace. Outside, a howling snowstorm blew in from the west, but inside, a spark caught and spread, engulfing the dry leaves of five thousand beloved books. The atlas was among those lost, its ink-etched oceans no match for the accidental flames.

By the time a neighbor noticed the smoke and raised an alarm, the fire was unquenchable. Every available man, including Governor Bernard and members of the General Court, worked through the night to save the college, but they succeeded only in containing the blaze. When dawn broke over the harbor, Hollis, Stoughton, and Massachusetts Hall were singed and Harvard Hall was a smoking heap of rubble. Not a single page of Speed’s atlas, either from the folio or from the map-decked walls of the students’ dormitories, escaped the conflagration. As the Massachusetts men, sooty and sweating despite the relentless snow, surrendered their fire buckets, they watched the cloud of smoke drifting eastward, over pox-riddled Boston, over the stormy harbor, and toward an invisible England.

On the Burning of Harvard Hall

Guest post by Pete L'Official. Prompt: 1,000 words on the burning of Harvard Hall.

3 February 1764.
Cambridge.

Oh, Father!

Never in his few and humble days has your son and servant been more happy to possess the least among his brethren! You, Father, in your eminent wisdom and bottomless faith, have laboured to instill within this mind and body, the least (aged) among your sons, a certain rigor of spirit and a nigh-heroic asceticism, and it is today, among days, on which I must write in commemoration of your parsonical parsimony.

For it was at your sage insistence that I not only make my way at the College, as have my brothers before me, but to do so with the utmost monastic economy. Fond were you in my youth of the quip, "One ought be gaunt of frame yet not frugal of faith." So often you preached, from your Scarborough pulpit, "Slenderness of pocket and possession breeds no sparing piousness."  And of course, I would be remiss in omitting your favoured parcel of counsel: "Lean and lanky ought be the spirit, rangy and rawboned ought be the soul, meager and modest ought be the purse: in scarcity do we find Salvation." Many, many were your ministerial witticisms! I took copious notes.

You see, Father, on this day and for nearly a fortnight, Harvard-Hall, as our fine and goodly President Holyoke has so described in his own letter published just Yesterday in the Massachusetts Gazette, "the only one of our ancient buildings which still remained and the repository of our most valuable treasures," is burned to the ground. Stay your concern for my Self and the health and humour of my classmates, for the 24th day of January was a time of vacation, and none – neither student nor tutor – were compromised in their person by that evening's flames. Whether it be true as President Holyoke has said that this catastrophe was birthed in a Beam under the Hearth in the great Library, where a fire had been kept for the use of the General Court of Boston is a fact whose validity pales in comparison to the enormity of the loss of Knowledge contained in those 5000 volumes reduced to ash.

But more to the pointe: Father, rejoice and be glad that your loyal son and servant lost naught but his bedstead and cord, a looking glass, and but a third of a barrel of Cyder in the grand conflagration. "What luck!" say some. Nonsense! I, as might you, respond: Such thrift! Such constraint! Such gloriously spare devotion! I can hear your agreement from here.

The evidence of my own steely, unostentatious Virtue, learned of course from your Word and by your Deed, and as represented in the paucity of goods lost by me to the flames, is surely – by your own keen ecclesiastical Logic, Father – of an inversely proportional relation to what must be the scant virtue of my brethren who have lost so much to the fire.

Page upon page of catalogues are currently being filled by the many accounts of my College peers of their losses. You, Father, would scarcely believe the Extravagance of some of my schoolmates. Young Joseph Willard's personal library seems to have been quite well-stocked: lost to it were such volumes as "Bailey's Dictionary," "Hill's Lexicon," "Edwards on the Affections," and doubled "latin Ditto[s]," amongst many others. Yet Young Willard was also quite the clothes hound! Pray tell, what vow of poverty could allow for "Two pair of Wosted Stockings," or a "Banyand" more commonly found in the far-off lands of India? And what need could but one man have for "Six Chairs" and "Thirty Glass Bottles"? And what of the well-appointed room of my good fellow Nicholas Pike (of whose father, the Rev. James Pike of Somersworth, New Hampshire, perhaps you know) who is now without a half dozen Chairs, "Chiney & Earthen Ware," a "Case of Knives and Forks," a "Chest & 2 Double Locks, 2 Tables," and a "Grid Iron, Chafendish, & Snuffers," all of which were among the least of his losses. Quite comfortable, seemed Young Pike's existence, yet what Self-Respeckting young minister should allow himself the seductive play of Chocolate upon the tongue -- and a pound of that sweet, candy Temptress, hoarded, no less!

And God Save the Barnard Brothers! Two of each thing was rightly the province of Noah – and surely to Noah alone! Should not two brothers be able to share one copy of "Clark's Introduction to making Latin?" Such wastefulness there is in keeping "2 Bibles," "2 Greek Testaments," "2 Greek Grammars," "2 Cole's Dictionaries," "2 Virgils," "2 Tulleys," "2 Hebrew Psalters"...indeed, the list goes anon and on. In this student's humble opinion, their personal collection could rival that of the destroyed Hall itself! And what gall to expect even partial repayment on an incomplete cord of wood? A clever and righteous man might ask these brothers-of-plenty to make restitution for providing the hungry fire with even more fuel! And Father, lest I go too far, Manners and Modesty halt me from speculating at the provenance and propriety at this fine Institution of the listed 4 books of a "Gentleman's Magazine." Our prayers, be with them!

These are but a few of the accounts that we plan to submit to the House of Representatives so that the "sufferers" -- as we have so called ourselves -- of this fire may be paid restitution. Yet it is not without a heavy heart that I must now consider why Providence has seen fit to wound my brethren in this way. Is it that your warning words have come to fruition? That my fellow students' acquisitive nature had damned the College to fast retribution from Our Higher Power? This certainly seems in evidence and you will have been proven right, not for the last time. Yet why, if relative to my fellow brothers-in-faith, I was most virtuous by remaining the least possessive, was I not spared any loss whatsoever? Or am I merely asking too much of Our Lord, and indeed have already been spared enough? And what say you of Satan in this matter, or more generally? Alas, there are too many questions. Father, it is for these reasons why I now seek your counsel.

Your faithful son and servant,
John Tompson.