Seth Kaller, Inc.

This interesting broadside in Latin issued for Harvard University’s 1771 commencement lists Latinized names of 62 graduating students, the largest number who graduated until 1810.[1] It is dedicated to Provincial Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver.

Richard and Samuel Draper had published the Theses for the classes of 1763 to 1766, and Richard Draper alone for those from 1767 to 1770. As printers to the governor and council, the Drapers represented the conservative colonial government. In contrast, Isaiah Thomas, whom the students chose to publish the Theses in 1771, published The Massachusetts Spy, the most radical newspaper published in Boston. Thomas gave voice to the growing anti-British sentiment developing in the colony. The students’ choice of printer developed into a public controversy in the pages of contemporary Boston newspapers.[2]

Among the graduates are Jacob Bacon (1751-1816), who served as a surgeon’s mate in the American Revolutionary War; Isaac Bangs (1752-1780), whose diary from 1776 provides the best soldier’s account of the defense of New York City; he died in the service in Virginia four years later; James Bowdoin III (1752-1811) the son of merchant and future Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin, who gave liberally to Bowdoin College, chartered in 1794 in Maine and named for his father; Thomas Edwards (1753-1806), the Judge Advocate General for the Continental Army from 1782 to 1783; Dr. Walter Hastings (1752-1782) served as a minuteman at Lexington and Concord, attended the wounded at Bunker Hill, and served as a surgeon with the 8^th Massachusetts; General Israel Keith (1751-1819), who served as aide-de-camp to John Hancock (1780-1783) and later practiced law and built an iron furnace in Vermont; Joseph Pearse Palmer (1750-1797), who served as quartermaster general of the army around Boston in 1776; Samuel Phillips Jr. (1752-1802), who manufactured gunpowder and paper during the Revolutionary War, founded Phillips Academy in Andover in 1778, and served as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in the last year of his life; Winthrop Sargent (1753-1820), who later served as first Secretary of the Northwest Territory (1788-1798) and first Governor of the Mississippi Territory (1798-1801); and Dr. John Warren (1753-1815), younger brother of Joseph Warren, who served as a surgeon in the Continental Army and was a founder of the Harvard Medical School, begun in 1783.

Many of the class members became ministers throughout New England, and several were Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, including Major Daniel Murray (1751-1832) of the King’s American Dragoons, who settled in New Brunswick and then Maine after the war, and Lt. Samuel Paine (1748-1807) of the Associated Loyalists, who settled in England after the war.

HARVARD COLLEGE. Broadside. List of Graduating Students and Theses for Disputation. Boston, Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, ca. July 1771. 1 p., 14 x 19? in.

Inventory #26415.01       Price: $1,850

Historical Background
The Theses broadsides display propositions, used in the Commencement tradition of public student disputation that began at Harvard College in 1642. Henry Dunster, who served as Harvard’s first president from 1640 to 1654, instituted the practice within a larger effort to model the college after European universities.

Behind the printed broadsides was a multi-stage process that involved both students and faculty. The Latin theses were academic statements created by the graduating students to reflect the scope of their undergraduate study. The Theses fit within a curriculum that emphasized public discourse and syllogistic debate and ranged between approximately 50 and 250 propositions in most years. This broadside includes theses in technology, metaphysics, theology, logic, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, and physics.

Printed at the expense of the graduating class, the Theses were posted in advance, and graduates were expected to be able to defend them upon request on Commencement Day. The faculty selected certain students to discuss and dispute specific Theses publicly as part of the day’s exercises.

Beginning with the first Commencement in 1642 through 1810, Theses were printed as broadsides. They were supplemented from 1791 onward by the Order of Exercises for Commencement, printed in English. The last Order of Exercises was printed in 1810, and subsequent Theses were distributed as quartos until they were replaced in 1821 by a Commencement program. Generally, the ceremony for students receiving their Bachelor’s degrees occurred in the morning and was followed by the Master’s degree ceremony in the afternoon.

The students of the graduating class paid for the printing of the Theses in a broadside form and by the late-eighteenth century published about three thousand copies each year.

The Class of 1771 initially included 56 students, the largest ever admitted to that time. Several additional “involuntary transfers from the Class of 1770” enlarged its ranks. Those students had been involved in a student riot in April 1768 against several tutors. The students were expelled, and some were later readmitted after submitting letters confessing their guilt and asking for readmission.

Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780) was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College in 1727. He served in the Massachusetts General Court from 1737 to 1739 and from 1742 to 1749. He also served as a member of the Governor’s Council and as a judge of probate and justice of the Common Pleas. He served as Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1758 to 1771 and as Governor from 1769 to 1774, the first eighteen months as acting governor.  In 1761, a new governor appointed Hutchinson as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, which outraged many attorneys, including James Otis and John Adams. Hutchinson took an increasingly loyalist position, as Massachusetts and the other colonies asserted their rights and discussed independence. He traveled to London in 1774 to defend himself against patriot criticisms. He never returned to Massachusetts, and his properties, like those of other loyalists, were seized and sold. He wrote a three-volume history of Massachusetts, but the final volume was published after his death.

Andrew Oliver (1706-1774) was born in Boston into a wealthy merchant family and graduated from Harvard College in 1724. He went into business as a merchant with his brother in Boston. He went into politics and became a leader of the Hutchinson-Oliver faction, which dominated politics in colonial Massachusetts. In 1765, he was commissioned to administer the Stamp Act, but public opposition forced him to resign his position. When his brother-in-law Thomas Hutchinson became governor in 1771, Oliver became lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. When letters he and Hutchinson wrote in the late 1760s were published in 1773, a storm of protest arose against both of them. These protests and the death of his wife took a serious toll on his health, and he died in March 1774 to the delight of the Sons of Liberty, who marked his funeral with protests and violence.

Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) was born in Boston and apprenticed to printer Zechariah Fowle, with whom he formed a partnership in 1770. They published The Massachusetts Spy, but after three months, Thomas continued the publication alone. The royal governor ordered the attorney general to prosecute Thomas for his Whig views, but the grand jury refused to indict him. In 1774, Thomas published the Royal American Magazine for a short time. Three days before the Battle of Concord, in which he participated, Thomas moved his presses from Boston to Worcester. Thomas continued publication of the Massachusetts Spy there until 1802, with gaps from 1776 to 1778 and from 1786 to 1788; published and sold books; and built a paper mill and bindery. In 1802, he transferred the business to his son.  From 1775 to 1803, Thomas published the New England Almanac, which his son continued until 1819. In 1786, he was the first printer in the United States to use music type, and in 1791, he printed folio editions of the Bible and Isaac Watts’ Psalms and Hymns. He began a project on the history of printing in 1808, and he published it in two volumes in 1810. His grandson published a second edition in 1874.  In 1812, Thomas founded what became the American Antiquarian Society, and he donated 8,000 volumes from his collection and one of the most valuable files of newspapers in the country to the Society. On his death, he bequeathed his entire library and collection of early American newspapers to the American Antiquarian Society.

Condition: Very Good; professionally mended