Henry Dunster Harvard president: a Lancashire-born graduate of Magdalene College Cambridge who arrived in Boston in the summer of 1640 with no particular plan, was appointed to run the colony’s failing college within six weeks of landing, and spent the next fourteen years building it into a functioning institution before being forced to resign for the offence of thinking honestly about a theological question.
He stepped off the ship having never set foot in the New World before. He was thirty years old. Massachusetts had been debating whether to abandon Harvard College entirely after the disaster of its first head, and Dunster was available, educated, and not Nathaniel Eaton. Within six weeks the colony had appointed him. What he made of the position over the years that followed was, by any reasonable measure, the foundation of American higher education. What the colony made of him in the end was an example of the costs of intellectual honesty in a community that needed its certainties undisturbed.
Lancashire origins and a Cambridge formation
Henry Dunster was baptised on 26 November 1609 at Bury in Lancashire, the son of Henry Dunster Senior, a yeoman farmer of modest means, and his wife Joan. The family was recognisably of the middling sort: substantial enough to educate a promising son, without the resources to set him up independently in any of the professions that required money as well as learning. Bury had a grammar school. Dunster attended it. He was good enough to go to Cambridge.
He matriculated at Magdalene College Cambridge in 1627 and took his BA in 1630 and his MA in 1634. Cambridge in the 1620s and 1630s was producing a steady stream of young men whose Puritan convictions made their futures in the Church of England uncertain. Archbishop Laud’s campaign against nonconformity made life difficult for ministers who held Reformed convictions, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been absorbing the overflow since 1630. Dunster returned to Lancashire after his MA and served as a curate at Bury for several years. He was thirty and going nowhere fast in the established church when he decided to follow the emigrants west.
The institution Nathaniel Eaton left behind
The Harvard that Dunster inherited in 1640 was not an institution in any meaningful sense. Nathaniel Eaton, the college’s first head, had been dismissed in 1639 after a trial established that he had beaten his students with a walnut tree cudgel, starved them, and diverted the college provisions to his own household. The student body had scattered. The Master’s house stood empty. The General Court spent most of 1639 and 1640 debating whether Harvard was worth continuing at all.
It was worth continuing because New England needed trained ministers. A colony that intended to govern itself according to scripture could not do so indefinitely without men who could read Hebrew and Greek and preach from the text. That argument won, and Dunster was the beneficiary. The Harvard University history records the full context of the founding decade; what matters for Dunster’s story is what he found when he arrived: a house, a library assembled from donations, and a problem.
Elizabeth Glover and the printing press
One of the first things Dunster did as president was marry well. Elizabeth Harris was the widow of the Reverend Jose Glover, who had sailed for New England in 1638 with the intention of establishing a printing press in the colony and had died at sea before he could use it. Elizabeth arrived in Massachusetts with five children, the disassembled press, and a typesetter named Stephen Daye who had contracted to operate it. Daye set up the press in Cambridge and in 1640 produced the first item printed in British North America: a broadsheet of colonial oaths. Later that year the press produced the Bay Psalm Book, a metrical psalter translated by Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John Eliot, which became the most reprinted book produced in the colonies in the seventeenth century.
Dunster married Elizabeth Glover in 1641. She died in 1643, leaving him with her five children as well as the children of their brief marriage. He remarried in 1644. The press, now operated by Stephen Daye’s son Matthew Daye, remained in Cambridge throughout Dunster’s presidency and remained closely associated with the college. Dunster was active in its use, and the connection between the first printing press in British North America and the first college in British North America was not accidental: both were instruments of the same Puritan intellectual project.
The first graduating class, 1642
Nine students received their degrees at Harvard’s first commencement on 23 September 1642. They were Benjamin Woodbridge, George Downing, William Hubbard, Henry Saltonstall, John Wilson Jr., Jeremy Houchin, Samuel Bellingham, Tobias Barnard, and John Bulkley. All nine had completed the course of study Dunster had assembled in the two years since taking over: a curriculum modelled closely on the Cambridge BA, covering logic, rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, ethics, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and the three biblical languages of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic.
The class of 1642 was small but it was functional proof that the college worked. Woodbridge returned to England and became a minister in Berkshire. George Downing, the nephew of John Winthrop, went into politics and eventually became a diplomat and an MP, giving his name to a London street that would later house the First Lord of the Treasury. William Hubbard became a Massachusetts minister and historian. Nine men in, nine men out, with degrees that English universities recognised without hesitation: it was a beginning.
Building a college: curriculum, hall, and tradition
The curriculum Dunster established was not improvised. It was the Cambridge BA substantially translated to a New World context, adjusted for the specific requirements of a Puritan ministry. Students read Ramus’s logic, William Ames’s Medulla Theologiae, the scriptures in their original languages, and the classical authors that any Cambridge man of the period would have encountered. The four-year course led to a BA; a further three years of residence and continued study led to an MA. Both degrees followed the Oxbridge model closely enough that English universities recognised them without question.
The physical college was equally deliberate. Old Harvard Hall, the first purpose-built college building, was completed around 1644. It was a timber-framed structure of two storeys with a hall, a library, a buttery, and student chambers. Thomas Shepard, the Cambridge minister who had been one of Harvard’s most consistent supporters, helped organise the fundraising. The building stood until 1764, when fire destroyed it and the library that John Harvard had given the college its name to protect. The annual commencement, established in 1642, became the fixed point around which the college’s year organised itself. Ministers, magistrates, and merchants attended. The degree ceremonies established Harvard as a public institution, not just a Puritan seminary, and Dunster cultivated that identity deliberately.
The question that could not be unasked
By the early 1650s Dunster had begun to doubt the scriptural basis for infant baptism. This was not an eccentric position in the wider Protestant world: the Anabaptist tradition had built an entire church on the conclusion that baptism required adult faith and voluntary assent, and European scholars had been arguing the point for a century. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that conclusion was not merely heterodox. It was a threat to the structure of the covenant community. Infant baptism was the mechanism by which each new generation entered the visible church. To question it was to question the validity of every church membership in the colony.
Dunster did not keep his doubts private. In July 1653 he interrupted a baptism at the Cambridge church and publicly objected to the ceremony. He was arraigned before the magistrates and convicted of disturbing church ordinances. The pressure on Harvard’s overseers was immediate. Dunster was too valuable to prosecute aggressively, but the college could not be led by a man who had become a public symbol of doctrinal nonconformity in a colony that required conformity as a condition of civic life. He was asked, quietly at first and then less quietly, to resign.
The resignation and the winter that followed
He resigned in October 1654, fourteen years after his appointment. He petitioned the General Court for permission to remain in his college house through the winter while he arranged accommodation elsewhere. The petition was refused. The Dunster family left Cambridge in the winter of 1654 to 1655 and settled at Scituate in Plymouth Colony, which maintained a somewhat more tolerant attitude toward religious dissent than Massachusetts Bay. Dunster preached at Scituate and continued his scholarly work until his death on 27 February 1659. He was forty-nine. His will distributed a modest estate among his children. His remains were buried at Scituate.
In 1869, Harvard College exhumed his remains and reinterred them in the Delta area of Harvard Yard: an acknowledgment, more than two centuries late, that the man who built the institution deserved to lie within it. Charles Chauncy, who succeeded him as president, continued Dunster’s curriculum without modification. The institution survived its founder’s expulsion and did not in any way acknowledge the cost of that expulsion for the man who had incurred it.
Genealogy research note
The principal archive for Henry Dunster’s papers is the Harvard University Archives, which holds the Dunster Papers (call number HUG 1331): correspondence, accounts, and personal documents including letters relating to his dismissal and the family’s subsequent financial circumstances. The Papers are partially digitised through Harvard’s HOLLIS catalogue and accessible to remote researchers.
The nine graduates of the class of 1642 are documented in the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue, the standard reference for all Harvard graduates from 1642 onwards, held at the Harvard University Archives and partially available through Harvard’s digital collections. The Quinquennial is the starting point for any researcher tracing a Harvard ancestor from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. For the full framework of Harvard genealogy research, see Harvard In Memoriam volumes.
The Lancashire origins of the Dunster family are documented in the Lancashire Parish Register Society’s published transcripts, which include Bury baptisms, marriages, and burials from the early seventeenth century. The Lancashire Archives at Preston hold additional family and estate records for the Bury area. Dunster’s Magdalene College Cambridge entry is in John Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses, available through British History Online, which records his matriculation year, degree dates, and subsequent career. The broader framework for searching historic university records is covered in How to find your ancestors in historic university records.
The New England Historic Genealogical Society holds extensive collections relating to the founding generation of Massachusetts Bay Colony families, including those of Dunster’s students and colleagues. Their AmericanAncestors.org database is subscription-based but includes digitised early Massachusetts probate and church records that document individuals named in this article.
Named individuals in this article on Henry Dunster Harvard president
| Name | Dates | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Henry Dunster | 1609-1659 | President of Harvard College 1640-1654; Lancashire-born graduate of Magdalene College Cambridge; built first permanent Harvard building and established first graduating class |
| Joan Dunster | fl. early 17th century | Mother of Henry Dunster; wife of Henry Dunster Senior, yeoman farmer of Bury, Lancashire |
| Elizabeth Harris Glover | d. 1643 | First wife of Henry Dunster; widow of Rev. Jose Glover; brought first printing press to New England; died 1643 |
| Jose Glover | d. 1638 | Minister; commissioned and transported first printing press to New England; died at sea before reaching Massachusetts |
| Stephen Daye | c.1594-1668 | Typesetter; operated first printing press in British North America at Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1638 |
| Matthew Daye | c.1620-1649 | Son of Stephen Daye; continued operating the Cambridge press after his father |
| Richard Mather | 1596-1669 | Minister at Dorchester, Massachusetts; co-translator of the Bay Psalm Book 1640 |
| Thomas Shepard | 1605-1649 | Minister at Cambridge, Massachusetts; consistent supporter of Harvard and of Dunster’s presidency; helped organise fundraising for Old Harvard Hall |
| John Eliot | 1604-1690 | Minister at Roxbury, Massachusetts; co-translator of Bay Psalm Book; known as the Apostle to the Indians for his mission work |
| Charles Chauncy | 1592-1672 | Dunster’s successor as Harvard president 1654-1672; continued Dunster’s curriculum without modification |
| Benjamin Woodbridge | 1622-1684 | Harvard class of 1642, first graduate; became minister at Newbury, Berkshire, England |
| George Downing | c.1624-1684 | Harvard class of 1642; diplomat, soldier, and MP; nephew of John Winthrop; Downing Street, London, named for him |
| William Hubbard | c.1621-1704 | Harvard class of 1642; minister at Ipswich, Massachusetts; historian; author of General History of New England |
| Henry Saltonstall | 1642-1686 | Harvard class of 1642; son of Sir Richard Saltonstall, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony |
| Nathaniel Eaton | c.1610-1674 | Dunster’s predecessor as head of Harvard College; dismissed 1639 for beating students and misappropriating college provisions |
Further reading for Henry Dunster Harvard president
- Harvard University Archives, Dunster Papers HUG 1331 (https://holliscatalog.harvard.edu) — The primary archive for Dunster’s correspondence and personal papers, including documents relating to his resignation. Search HOLLIS for call number HUG 1331.
- Alumni Cantabrigienses via British History Online (https://www.british-history.ac.uk) — John Venn’s four-volume alumni register for Cambridge University records Dunster’s matriculation at Magdalene College, degree dates, and subsequent career. Free to search.
- Lancashire Archives, Preston (https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/libraries-and-archives/archives-and-record-office) — Holds parish registers, estate records, and family papers for the Bury area covering the Dunster family’s Lancashire origins. Online catalogue available.
- New England Historic Genealogical Society (https://www.americanancestors.org) — Holds digitised Massachusetts Bay Colony records including early probate, church membership, and land records relevant to the individuals named in this article. Subscription required.
- Massachusetts State Archives (https://www.sec.state.ma.us/) — Holds the General Court records documenting Dunster’s appointment, the proceedings against Eaton, and Dunster’s later petition to remain in his college house through the winter of 1654.
