Financial Beneficiaries

What being a 'financial beneficiary' means

Each individual identified here has a unique connection to enslavement. In many cases, the alumnus, their parents, or their grand-parents owned enslaved people. Each case is different however, so we encourage you to read an individual's profile to understand how they benefitted from enslavement.

Our role as historians in compiling this database has been to record the past, not to judge it. Being a 'financial beneficiary' does not necessarily mean a person owned enslaved people, or approved of either the slave trade or slavery itself. As the designation suggests, it instead means that a member of the College benefitted financially - either at first hand or through their family - from enslavement. In some cases, the financial beneficiary owned enslaved people and lived in British West Indies or Virginia for much of their life. In other cases, the financial beneficiary was born after the emancipation of enslaved people in 1836, and had little or no contact with their relative(s) who owned enslaved people.

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The financial beneficiaries have been grouped by the primary location to which they were connected by enslavement. In many cases, this was the colony in which they or their family primarily owned enslaved people. Clicking an individual's name takes you to their profile.