Private Journal, Volume Third [of] James Mills Peirce Digital

James Mills Peirce (1834-1906), mathematician and educator, taught at Harvard University from 1861 until his death in 1906. He received his AB in 1853 and AM in 1859 from Harvard University, then worked as a tutor in mathematics from 1854 to 1858. While still a tutor, he entered the Harvard Divinity School, graduating in 1859. After two years working as a minister, he returned to Harvard as an assistant professor of mathematics. In 1869, Peirce’s former classmate Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard and immediately appointed Peirce as University Professor of Mathematics. In 1885, he became Perkins Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy.

While a student at Harvard, Peirce was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, and he remained a patron of the arts throughout his life. His obituary in The Cambridge Chronicle describes him as "an inveterate playgoer" who was "famed for his keen artistic perception and his aesthetic taste."

Professionally, Peirce is credited with helping to develop Harvard’s graduate education program. He served as secretary of the Academic Council from 1872 to 1889, then became Harvard’s first dean of the Harvard Graduate School, a position he held from 1890 to 1895. He then served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1895 to 1898. In mathematics, his main fields of interest were quaternions, linear associative algebra, and higher plane cures; for many years gave popular lectures on these subjects, and published several works. Peirce was the grandson of Benjamin Peirce (1778-1831), Harvard librarian, and the son of Benjamin Peirce (1809-1880), AB 1829, Harvard professor of astronomy and mathematics.

Historian Jonathan Ned Katz first posited in his 1976 book, Gay American History, that one of the 19th century’s most significant defenses of homosexuality, though signed anonymously, was probably written by Peirce. Further evidence backing this theory was provided in a 1978 academic paper published in the Journal of Homosexuality by Hubert C. Kennedy.

The letter, which was published in the first English edition of Sexual Inversion by sexologist Havelock Ellis and poet John Addington Symonds in 1897, is introduced as follows: “Prof. X., in a letter to Symonds (who described him as ‘an American of eminence, who holds a scientific professorship in one of the first universities of the world’), has carried to the furthest extent the theory of the sexual indifference of the genital impulse, and the consequently normal nature of homosexuality” (Ellis & Symonds, 1897, p. 273). The letter itself begins: “I have considered and enquired into this question for many years; and it has long been my settled conviction that no breach of morality is involved in homosexual love; that, like every other passion, it tends, when duly understood and controlled by spiritual feeling, to the physical and moral health of the individual and the race, and that it is only its brutal perversions which are immoral.” (Ellis & Symonds, 1897, p. 273; reprinted in Katz, 1976, p. 375–376).

Peirce never married and died of pneumonia in 1906, one week after submitting his resignation from his faculty position at Harvard.