Mary Holyoke Pearson before 1809, by William King (active 1785-1809) In 1780, while still serving as P.A.’s first headmaster, Eliphalet Pearson married Pricilla Holyoke (1739-1782), daughter of Edward Holyoke, who had been president of Harvard College for the thirty-two years prior to his death in office. Thirteen years Pearson’s senior, Mary herself died shortly after giving birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter, Mary Holyoke Pearson. Three years later, Pearson married money: Sarah Bromfield (1757-1831), whose father, Henry Bromfield (1751-1837), owned a successful shipping firm that, among other activities, exported tobacco produced by slave labor in Virginia. [1] One year into that second marriage, Pearson left Andover, having been hired to be Harvard’s Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages. Eventually, though, his classes became so small he was asked also to teach English grammar and rhetoric, and to correct English exercises and themes. [2] It wasn't his teaching style or personality this time that prevented him from connecting well with students. The idea of mastering the old languages was losing favor with undergraduates, and the year after Pearson's arrival back at his alma mater, Harvard made the study of Hebrew optional. [3]
Perhaps no one could have foretold it at the time, but the decision signaled the beginning of a radical change in Cambridge, where Unitarianism would eventually dominate and conservative Calvinist Congregationalists like Pearson would be shown the door. Certainly no one could have foreseen that Pearson would leave Harvard in a royal huff, return to Andover, and from there plot his revenge.
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“The pleasure of hating, like a poison mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; … What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at?”-- William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating” (1826)
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1. His first father-in-law had a connection to slavery, too. A plaque affixed to Harvard's Wadsworth House on April 6, 2016, reads: "Juba & Bilhah [no surnames recorded]/Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of President Edward Holyoke/(1737-1769)." https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/04/harvard-acknowledges-slave-connections Retrieved May 4, 2022.
2. Robert H. Pfeiffer, “The Teaching of Hebrew in Colonial America,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 45, No. 4, Tercentenary Issue (April 1955), 82.
3. Ibid.
Perhaps no one could have foretold it at the time, but the decision signaled the beginning of a radical change in Cambridge, where Unitarianism would eventually dominate and conservative Calvinist Congregationalists like Pearson would be shown the door. Certainly no one could have foreseen that Pearson would leave Harvard in a royal huff, return to Andover, and from there plot his revenge.
***
“The pleasure of hating, like a poison mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; … What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at?”-- William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating” (1826)
______________
1. His first father-in-law had a connection to slavery, too. A plaque affixed to Harvard's Wadsworth House on April 6, 2016, reads: "Juba & Bilhah [no surnames recorded]/Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of President Edward Holyoke/(1737-1769)." https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/04/harvard-acknowledges-slave-connections Retrieved May 4, 2022.
2. Robert H. Pfeiffer, “The Teaching of Hebrew in Colonial America,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 45, No. 4, Tercentenary Issue (April 1955), 82.
3. Ibid.
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