Between the founding of Harvard University in 1636 and the defeat of the Confederacy 229 years later, the university’s top leaders enslaved more than 1,600 people.
That revelation, contained in a database released by Harvard Tuesday, vastly expands the known ties between the country’s preeminent university and its most ignominious institution: slavery.
Harvard says its investigation is ongoing, and the final tally of people enslaved by Harvard officials is likely to be many times greater than the 1,613 identified so far.
“It could be 100x, it could be 5x,” said Lindsay Fulton, the chief research officer at American Ancestors, the Boston-based genealogy group carrying out the research.
The researchers have identified nearly 3,000 university leaders, faculty, staff, and board members from the relevant centuries who potentially could have owned slaves. So far, they have confirmed that at least 259 definitively did — and are still digging through wills, church documents, municipal records, and Harvard’s own archives in a search that is certain to unearth further ties.
“We are just getting started on what’s going to be a very comprehensive research project,” said Sara Bleich, a Harvard vice provost who is overseeing the project.
For Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard historian and creator of the show “Finding Your Roots,” the research conducted so far “is restoring the identity of 1,600 people who heretofore were invisible, who had no names, who had no existence.”
The slavery research project is part of Harvard’s broader Legacy of Slavery Initiative, which began four years ago with a report on the university’s ties to slavery and a promise to spend $100 million on various forms of redress. It includes partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and a planned memorial for enslaved people.
Harvard says it will also try to identify as many living direct descendants as possible and “engage and support” them in some kind of reparative work connected to education and information-sharing. The university has all but ruled out monetary reparations.
Harvard undertook the Legacy of Slavery initiative in a notably different political context. Planning began in 2019 when the Black Lives Matter movement was ascendant and reparations were discussed before a US congressional committee. Since then, the Republican Party, led by the White House, has made universities, especially Harvard, a target of investigations and funding cuts over, among other things, their stated commitments to diversity and social justice.
The Harvard initiative followed somewhat similar efforts by Brown, Georgetown, and the University of Virginia. But while those universities investigated and publicized their institutional ties to slavery, Harvard embarked on something more comprehensive: attempting to identify every Harvard affiliate who enslaved people and every person who was enslaved, as well as finding as many of their living direct descendants as possible — a number that is likely to reach tens of thousands or more.
“Our commitment to truth means that we must embrace it even when it makes us uncomfortable or causes us pain,” then–Harvard president Lawrence Bacow said at the launch of the project in 2022.
The slavery research project was beset by controversy and infighting from early on. Originally, Harvard hired Richard Cellini, who conducted the research on Georgetown descendants, to run an in-house staff.
But Cellini and Harvard leaders clashed over the scope of the work. He wanted to include all members of the university’s two governing boards, the Board of Overseers and the Harvard Corporation. Some at Harvard questioned including overseers who, in the university’s early history, were appointed by the Massachusetts government (ultimately overseers were included).
The enslaved people identified in the research so far were forced by Harvard presidents, treasurers, deans, and academics to work in Boston, Cambridge, the American South, and abroad, Harvard’s researchers found.
After Harvard fired him last year, Cellini also accused the university of slow-walking the work, a charge the university denied. Harvard shuttered his office and transferred the work to American Ancestors.
Another point of contention was how and when to contact living descendants — and what to do for them.
For Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center and a professor of African American studies at Princeton, any plan should include “economic compensation” for descendants.
“Harvard was the first university to benefit from the enslavement of people of African descent. It’s the most powerful university in this country and it can figure this out,” he said. “This is not a problem of imagination. It’s a problem potentially of political will or commitment to real justice.”
Muhammad also said Harvard should “seriously consider establishing preferential admissions to descendants based on the normal process that they already have in place for legacies,” he said, referring to legacy admissions for students who are descended from Harvard alumni.
Bleich, the vice dean overseeing the genealogical research, said that Harvard is “doing reparative work, which can take many different forms.”
“It’s really important to underscore that we are an institution of higher learning,” she said, meaning Harvard’s obligation can be more educational than economic. According to the 2022 report that launched the project, “engagement with direct descendants should include things like information sharing, dialogue, knowledge exchange, education support,” she added.
“All of it has this steady focus on research and education. That’s our bread and butter, that’s what we do best,” she said.
Harvard also is not currently considering offering preferred admissions status to descendants. “We are not there yet,” Bleich said. “That’s the honest answer. We are just not there.”
Georgetown began offering preferential admissions status to descendants of people enslaved by and sold by the university. But few students have enrolled under the program.
“It was not successful,” she said. “I think there was a feeling that privileging admissions was something that would only be available to very, very few direct descendants.”
So far, Bleich said, one of the project’s greatest contributions is unearthing the names of enslaved people.
“I myself am descended of enslaved people. And the families just like mine that are associated with this work are going to know the names of their ancestors,” Bleich said. “That is huge.”
Gates, who is also the director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, serves on the initiative’s advisory council and considers the genealogical research to be especially valuable.
“There’s a Jewish proverb that I like to share with my guests on ‘Finding Your Roots,’” Gates said in an interview. “And it goes like this: Every human being dies twice. Once when breath leaves their body, and once when there’s no one left to say their name.”
As in the history of Jews, Gates said, African American genealogy is ruptured by violence and dispossession.
Family trees and identities were wiped out by "the ways that slavery conspired to reinforce the fiction that Black human beings were not really human beings, but something different, something less than white people," he said.
The Harvard research into enslaved people is the “beginning of the process of plucking them from historical obliteration,” Gates said.
The work is painstaking and could take years to complete. Researchers began by compiling the list of nearly 3,000 Harvard staff, faculty, and board members. This was the easier phase of the work, but still not trivial.
Then they searched through those individual’s records, including wills. Sometimes they found enslaved people described as “servants.” In other instances, they were listed as personal property. Many of the enslaved people were known only by first names and many of the names were commonly used: Prince, Cesar, Cicero. So records must be cross-checked to trace the biographies of individuals.
Eventually, researchers hope to trace the lineage of enslaved people to the present. But in some cases, this may be impossible. The records of enslaved people are sparse, especially during the Colonial era when Harvard was founded.
One man, named Boston, was enslaved by Edward Hutchinson, a colonial merchant who served as Harvard treasurer for three decades beginning in 1721. Boston married an enslaved woman, Sabee, in 1737, and they had five children, researchers found. The last confirmed record about Boston is a reference to the birth of his youngest child in 1745.
Another document, from the following year, refers to the death of “a Negro man of Mr. Hutchinson’s.” The researchers believe that man may be Boston.
No later record of his life is known to exist.
Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.