As 1804 drew to a close, Massachusetts Federalists could be forgiven for thinking that it had been a very bad year, the latest among many. The country again stood on the verge of war with England, while Bonapartist forces swept across Europe. Closer to home, buoyed by the immense popularity of the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson had been elected by a wide margin to a second term as president. Even the Bay State had cast its electoral votes for the Republican ticket; of all New England, only Connecticut had remained steadfastly in the Federalist camp. In the Senate, Massachusetts found herself represented by independent-minded John Quincy Adams. A year earlier, Adams had defeated staunch Federalist Timothy Pickering just in time to make himself the sole New England Federalist to vote in favor of implementing the acquisition of Louisiana, thereby rendering Massachusetts complicit in her own subjugation by the slaveholding Virginia interest. More dispiriting, Alexander Hamilton lay dead on the field of honor, shot by Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States, losing Federalist candidate for governor of New York-and, it was rumored, the man who would have delivered his state into the Northern Confederation when the High Federalists led New England out of an increasingly untenable union. To heap insult on injury, as the year reached its dismal end, Harvard College, the institutional center of Massachusetts Federalist political culture, found itself under siege from within. Since the August 1803 death of Professor David Tappan, the university had faced a vacancy in the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, the oldest endowed university chair in the United States.2 Then, in late September 1804, Harvard President Joseph Willard died as well. The year-and-a-half-long struggle to fill these vacancies exposed a fissure in New England Federalism, a rift that played itself out as theological liberals and trinitarian Calvinists struggled for control of the university. Politicians and clergy who had previously worked together to combat the twin evils of democracy and infidelity now ranged themselves on opposite sides of the religious question, with the dominant High Federalists casting their considerable weight on the side of the liberal clergy, making possible their ultimate victory. In doing so, they revealed a great deal about the peculiar social and political synthesis that distinguished the Massachusetts Federalists from other wings of the party and about the forces that led to their defeat in public life. The conventional view of the Harvard dispute has focused on the revolutionary (albeit, to the outsider, somewhat parochial) changes that followed in its wake, treating the affair as the first skirmish in what is known to historians of American religion as the Unitarian controversy.' The initial phase of that ostensible revolution came with the February 1805 election of Unitarian Henry Ware as Hollis Professor; it was completed a year later, in March 1806, with the election of theologically liberal Professor Samuel Webber as university president. Both Ware and Webber replaced traditional Calvinists in their respective posts. Little more than twenty-five years later, the Massachusetts Standing Order had collapsed and the state's Congregational churches had split into two separate denominations, with trinitarian Congregationalists on one side and Unitarians on the other. Most discussions of the Harvard controversy have focused almost entirely on the appointment of Ware to the Hollis Professorship; these accounts treat the choice of the university president as an afterthought in what was primarily a theological dispute between those who believed in the orthodox Calvinist doctrine of the trinity and those who did not. More than thirty years ago, Conrad Wright challenged one aspect of this dominant interpretation with an elegant reconstruction of the complex sequence of events that led up to Ware's election. Wright demonstrated that the Harvard Corporation, which bore initial responsibility for the choice of the Hollis professor, engaged in a good deal of give-and-take and that its fellows were willing to compromise, even offering to link the appointments of professor and president in order to secure ideological balance in the university administration. …