“An Opinion of Our Own”: Education, Politics, and the Struggle for Adulthood at Dartmouth College, 1814–1819

Abstract

On the night of November 11, 1817, nineteen-year-old Rufus Choate rushed to Dartmouth Hall from his Hanover boarding room to answer a call of alarm from his classmates. Professors from Dartmouth University, an institution recently created by legislative action, “had violently attacked” the student library under Choate's care “and, after an unsuccessful attempt to force the lock, literally hewed down the door” with an axe. Choate, who rejected these professors as figures of authority, joined his peers to temporarily lock the intruders in an adjoining room while they removed their books. News of the incident enraged the already volatile debate about the future of Dartmouth. Because the library riot involved generational violence, the professors accused the students of immaturity in an effort to exclude them from the Dartmouth debate. But students found that claims of immaturity could cut both ways. Although students occupied a liminal position between dependence and independence, it was not despite their youth, but because of it that they influenced the outcome of the case. The library riot, then, is important not only for understanding the social context of the Dartmouth case, but also the ways young men interpreted the meaning of youth and maturity in the Early Republic.