Edward Holyoke

BA, Harvard University img MA, Harvard University img President, Harvard University

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Edward Holyoke was born into a wealthy family in colonial Massachusetts—wealthy enough, in fact, that Mount Holyoke, the actual mountain,* as well as the town of Holyoke, were named after his grandfather. Edward graduated from Harvard in 1705 at age sixteen, picked up his MA three years later, worked at Harvard for several years as a librarian and then an instructor, and in 1716 finally left Harvard to become pastor of a church in Marblehead. He stayed away from Harvard until 1730, when the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay lured him back by appointing him the ninth president of Harvard, in which post he stayed until his death in 1769.

Holyoke was a good college president. Among other improvements, he navigated the school away from the religious orthodoxy under which it had been founded, strengthened math and science teaching, introduced a physics lab, raised money, added to the infrastructure, and introduced merit-based admissions.

But here’s the thing. While he was president of Harvard, Edward Holyoke owned two human beings of African extraction. They lived in the presidential residence, Wadsworth House, along with Holyoke and his family. Their names were Juba and Bilhah. They did not have last names.

In 2007, Harvard students* of diverse ethnic backgrounds initiated an investigation into the school’s relationship with slavery over its first couple of centuries. According to the Harvard and Slavery website,

Much of what they found was surprising: Harvard presidents who brought slaves to live with them on campus, significant endowments drawn from the exploitation of slave labor, Harvard’s administration and most of its faculty favoring the suppression of public debates on slavery.

Nothing can be done to change that history, of course, but dredging it to the surface and finding ways to criticize and memorialize it may help current and future Harvard dwellers feel better about themselves. One tangible result of the investigation is the large plaque on display at Wadsworth House that Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust* unveiled in April 2016. It pays tribute to what Faust called the “stolen lives” of Juba and Bilhah, as well as those of Titus and Venus, who were slaves of Holyoke’s predecessor and presidential-house eponym Benjamin Wadsworth.

Among many others, the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,* was there to bear witness to the event.