The name is absent

American Colonial Colleges 251

Ministery to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall
lie in the Dust.”

In the fall of 1636, the General Court or legislature of
Massachusetts Bay, presided over by twenty-three-year-old
Governor Harry Vane, voted £400, almost one quarter the
total tax levy for that year, “towards a schoale or coiledge.”
In the fall of 1638, a few weeks or months after the College
had opened in a small dwelling house at Cambridge, there
died in nearby Charlestown a young graduate of Emmanuel
College named John Harvard, leaving half his fortune
(some £750) and all his books (some 400 volumes) to the
College, which was promptly given his name. The first fresh-
man class (Harvard, 1642) had one advantage that was
shared by the Class of 1916 at the Rice Institute, there were
no sophomores or upper-classmen to haze and torment them.
But they had a poor time of it for all that. These pioneer
American freshmen were half-starved by Mistress Eaton,
the first Master’s wife, and imposed upon by her corps of slut-
tish servants, who drank their beer, consumed their cheese,
and slept in their sheets. And for scholastic or disciplinary
lapses, they were flogged frequently and unmercifully by
Master Nathaniel Eaton. Just as the second college year
was opening, things came to a head. Eaton had a dispute
with his assistant, who talked back, whereupon the muscular
president proceeded to “reform” him with a walnut tree
cudgel “big enough to have killed a horse,” says a contempo-
rary chronicler. The Eatons were haled into court, and cross-
questioned. Mrs. Eaton expressed her regret that the
students should have been served sour bread and stinking
fish, “and for their wanting beer a week together, I am sorry
that it was so,” said she, “and should tremble to have it so
again.” That confession was enough for the Puritan
magistrates. Flogging they were used to at the English col-

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