Benjamin Wadsworth

BA, Harvard University MA, Harvard University Harvard University President

With Benjamin Wadsworth, we reach the Ws in our alphabetical listing. The end is in sight—only seven monsters to go after this one. What’s sad and distressing is not that there are still three remaining profilees who owned and/or trafficked in slaves, and another who was born too late to be a slaver but was still an out-and-out racist, but that there are countless others waiting in the wings, far too many to shoehorn into this compact^* volume.

Wadsworth, the tenth president of Harvard (1725–1737), was one of three men known to have owned slaves while holding that distinguished post. He followed Increase Mather (father of Cotton Mather), the seventh Harvard president, and preceded Edward Holyoke, the eleventh. On the Harvard edifice that bears his name, Wadsworth House, where he lived with his wife and slaves, there is now a plaque commemorating those slaves, Titus and Venus, and Holyoke’s slaves as well, Juba and Bilhah.

We’ll leave it at that. Except, no. We won’t leave it at that. We’ll add that it’s a puzzlement why Harvard didn’t at least at some point expand its motto, “Lux et Veritas” (“Light and Truth”), to “Lux et Veritas et Servitutem” (“Light and Truth and Enslavement”). We’ll leave it at that.

Except for one more detail about Benjamin Wadsworth. We quote from Opposition and Intimidation: The Abortion Wars and Strategies of Political Harassment by Alesha E. Doan:

One of the earliest documents referring to abortion practices in America can be traced to a declaration written by Benjamin Wadsworth—future president of Harvard College—in 1712. He wrote that those responsible for contributing to an abortion, either directly or indirectly, were guilty of murder in God’s eyes.

Leaving aside the issue of how he knew what was in God’s eyes, it strikes us that Wadsworth’s position was remarkably similar to that of many Donald Trump supporters in the Year of Our Lord 2017: antiabortion, pro–racial subjugation.*

Either Wadsworth was three hundred years ahead of his time or…