If Ever Harvard Were Fun

Harvard students could seek solace in the fact that although our social life is sometimes abysmal, at least we party harder than our predecessors did in the 1850’s. But then along comes Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Class of 1859, who died a century ago but whose newly-published journal sheds light on drinks and debauchery at the Harvard of top hats and functional fireplaces.

“Many students today think that Harvard students during the 19th century were dull,” says Harvard Senior Archivist Brian A. Sullivan. “The fact is that they may have been much more out of control.”

Sullivan is the editor of If Ever Two Were One: A Private Diary of Love Eternal, a collection of Abbot’s diary entries and love letters from his days at Harvard during the 1850s until his suicide in 1903.

Many of the entries put a damper on the pride we take in our 21st century revelry. Abbot, a former resident of Hollis, writes that on the night of March 17, 1857 he returned home from the Class of 1859 Dinner at 4:00 a.m. after a night of drinks and merriment.

But Sullivan equates him with an average Harvard student of today—he stayed out late, was the victim of pranks and carried on a long-distance relationship. Abbot even belonged to a freshman society (“Anonyma”) which occasionally got drunk together.

During his freshman year, sophomores targeted Abbot’s room to steal bed slats and dump off watermelon rinds. According to the diaries, the rogues stuffed a “quill filled with powder” into Abbot’s keyhole to stink up the room. Sometimes, they just dumped buckets of water on the old chap.

Unlike today, Abbot didn’t go running to the proctor for a warm cup of tea and a warrant for a dean’s warning.

“DRIVEN” AND “SENSITIVE”

In 1996, Sullivan discovered Abbot’s personal memoirs in the student life section of the Harvard Archives.

“This is one of the best personal journals we have,” Sullivan says. “It even has dialogue, and you normally don’t see that kind of thing.” If Ever Two Were One includes a dialogue Abbot had with Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1837, on the craft of poetry, and other entries suggest he was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Class of 1821, as well as Thoreau.

When Sullivan took on the task of whittling 1600 pages of diary entries down to a readable size, he was struck by Abbot’s character.

“He was intensely driven and deeply sensitive, with an extraordinary command of language,” Sullivan says. “The moral concerns this guy had were so profound...so different from what we see today.”

In one incident, Abbot calls the student body to an assembly and declares himself to be a “systematic deceiver”—for wearing eyeglasses to make himself appear smarter.

Francis Abbot’s great-great-granddaughter, Sue Kriegsman, says she was shocked when she learned of Sullivan’s project and his findings on her ancestor.

“It brought him to life,” says Kriegsman, a digital library projects manager at Harvard. “He was no longer a distant character or photograph—now I know his likes and dislikes.”

A MAN OF HIS TIME

Abbot’s diary provides a window into his persona, but also into a Harvard of ages past.

The journal suggests that students bonded with members of their graduating class to a far greater degree, through class suppers and football games. Today, classes achieve the greatest moment of unity at the ever awkward (and sober) freshman ice-cream social.

“The class feeling was incredibly intense at the time, for the College was so much smaller,” Sullivan says.

In 1860, Abbot’s wife, Katie Lauren, became pregnant, and he wrote to tell her not to buy a cradle—the Abbot baby would be the first from the Class of 1859, and it was customary for the class to donate one.

Harvard has since evolved from free cradles to condoms.

BEYOND IVY WALLS

There’s no mention of condoms in the loving correspondence between Abbot and Katie, which composes the bulk of the book. Constantly separated, the couple wrote hundreds of gushy love letters, which Sulllivan describes as “shrouded in allegory and metaphor.”

Sullivan said modern students could empathize with Abbot’s long distance relationship.

“He was...in a relationship with a separation factor and was able to overcome it like many people here do,” he says.

The letters also convey Abbot’s unusual views on gender equality. “He was pretty liberal and always wanted his wife by his side rather than by his feet,” Sullivan says.

Abbot would become a philosopher and minister after moving beyond Ivy walls. But after the deaths of five of his eight children and his beloved Katie, Abbot penned his final entry on Oct. 22nd, 1903—a suicide note. Two days later, Abbot imbibed poison over his wife’s grave, exactly 10 years after she had died.

Sullivan acknowledges the tragedy of Francis Abbot’s diary, but he believes that we should focus on the way in which he wrote about his life.

“Harvard students should read this collection, value their experiences here and document them,” says Sullivan. “What’s scandalous today becomes quaint and humorous later.”