President Andrew Jackson receives an honorary degree from Harvard.

John Quincy Adams refuses to attend the event, declaring that he would not be a witness to his Alma Mater honoring a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly spell his own name. But Josiah Quincy Jr., son of Harvard’s president, does attend and subsequently describes Jackson as a “Knightly personage . . . [and admitting] I was not prepared to be favorably impressed with a man who was simply intolerable to the Brahmin caste of my native State.”