But then something happened. I pulled out a manuscript from the genealogical files and began to type it. It's by typing it that I actually read it carefully. This manuscript was 23 pages of legal-size, double-space treatise on the life of John, called The Great Leverett. It did not have an author or a date. Its typewritten nature, with some things changed by pencil afterward, suggested the early days of typewriters, when you didn't want to use a whole new piece of paper just because you got one letter wrong. It was full of such pencil marks. And the author clearly missed a few typos too; things like ot written for to, etc., things you don't always catch when reading.
The twenty-three pages focused mostly on the Leverett administration at Harvard, which had several controversial issues, and which was important in the history of Harvard. It did not list a compendium of sources but appeared to have most of the facts right; it wasn't careless research. It had very little about his personal life but a lot about his enemies and allies within Puritan Boston and the College itself. I realized that I knew much of it already from the research I have already done.
And this is where I got the idea to combine my personal knowledge with the outline of his professional career and write his biography. Actually I had that idea anyway, but delving into his presidency as I just did as I retyped the document, made me more sure that I could do that.
The problem is, the authorship of the document is still unclear. I am more and more convinced that it's Frank the geologist, who kept track of family issues, spent some time in Boston in the 1930's, and took an active interest in all things Leverett. Furthermore, Frank kept an active correspondence with my great-grandfather Will, so this document could very easily have been given to Will by Frank, or by relatives after Frank's death, all of whom knew that Will valued and collected family documents and historical information. For whatever reason, it ended up in Will's hands and thus came down to me.
I think it's important to note that back in those days (1930's), one didn't have copy machines, so if one wrote a small treatise on the career of one's distant ancestor, one didn't have many choices of what to do with it. This was true for Frank, apparently, or at least the writer as we know it. There is no record of The Great Leverett being published anywhere, or being online anywhere, that I know of. The information that he gathered, somewhat surface but correct, a good but unsubstantiated history of the early 1700's at Harvard, is only on that typewritten document and nowhere else that I can tell. If there is another copy of this document he would have had to type it out separately, though I'm not discounting that possibility. Since family genealogy was a hobby, not a profession, he didn't publish it, he simply kept it or passed it along to Will (his cousin).
I, however, can publish it, and that's because it's easy in the modern day, once you type it, and that's the best way to make the information available to as many people as possible. I want people to know what I've learned and I want his work to not be in vain, in the sense that though much of what he found out is public, it's not really collated anywhere that I know of or collected into a single book.
John Leverett was the father of secular (non-religious) education in the colonies, although Harvard wasn't the only school and wasn't the only place where his kind of reforms were catching on. He believed in diversity and enforced it, and by finessing a difficult situation involving a bequest from a Baptist, he was able to keep and use the money and at the same time keep the Puritan opposition at bay in the community, thus ensuring Harvard's survival and managing a difficult polarized political environment.
I will write about it, you'll see. It won't have the cover you see above. 18th Century Leveretts will have a different cover, yes, but John will have his own book, if I can pull this all off.
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