New Research on the Vassall Mansion in Cambridge

The Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site is unveiling a special history study researched over many years and in multiple countries. It adds tremendous detail to a dimension of that Cambridge mansion that people have long known about more generally.

That mansion in Cambridge was built in 1759 for John Vassall, heir to wealthy slave-labor plantations on Jamaica. It was not only erected with the profits of slavery, but it was staffed by enslaved workers for two decades.

While John Vassall took his family to England in the first year of the Revolutionary War, at least one family he had enslaved, led by Tony and Cuba Vassall, stayed behind to gain their freedom and found an African-American community nearby.

Black History at the Vassall Estate by Caitlin DeAngelis, Carla D. Martin, Rayshauna C. Gray, Aabid Allibhai, and Eshe Sherley digs into that story from every possible angle, using archives in the U.S. of A., Jamaica, Antigua, and Britain. The story it tells extends from the origins of the (white) Vassall family fortune through the political activity of the (black) Vassall family in the ante-bellum republic.

Two events in the next month will illuminate those findings for the public.

Thursday, 25 September, 6 to 7 P.M.
Black History at the Vassall Estate
Caitlin DeAngelis, Carla Martin, Rayshauna Gray, Aabid Allibhai, and Eshe Sherley
Online, free with registration

A new landmark study documents and analyzes the Black experience at 105 Brattle Street and in the wider Cambridge community from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. The authors will introduce the project, share key findings, and take you behind the scenes of their research and writing process.

This study is remarkable not only for the history it documents—much of it appearing in print for the first time—but also for the breadth of research behind it. In partnership with lineal descendants of the Black Vassalls, the authors consulted sources spanning New England, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean over the course of more than three years. Research of this scale is rare, and even more rarely presented in a format accessible to all readers.

Everyone who registers for that event will receive a digital copy of the study, which is also available for downloading here.

Sunday, 12 October, 1 to 3 P.M.
In Search of Darby Vassall: Tour of Cambridge & Beyond
Denise Washington and Joel Mackall
Free with registration

Starting at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters, travel by trolley in greater Cambridge between seven stops with a Vassall descendant and an educator. Each stop reflects a key location in the life of Darby Vassall (1769-1861), a lifelong community activist who endured slavery and seized freedom with his family in Revolutionary Cambridge. Early dinner provided after the tour.

“The Past and Present Here Unite” and “Who Are My Ancestors?”

If you’re interested in seeing and hearing me as a talking head in a documentary film, check out “The Past and Present Here Unite,” a video introducing the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site created by Argentine Productions.

A decade ago, I wrote a study for the National Park Service about Gen. George Washington’s use of that house in 1775–76, and most of my commentary for this movie pertains to that period. But I also shared some observations on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and how he shaped American memory.

Alongside that video, the same filmmakers produced “Who Are My Ancestors?: The Descendants of Cuba Vassall,” which you can watch at this page. It explores the family of Cuba Vassall, a woman enslaved by the Royall and Vassall families until the Revolutionary War. She had a longer connection to that site than Washington did, and her son Darby was prominent in Boston’s antebellum campaigns for human rights.

New Database of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Petitions

Yesterday saw the official debut of the Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions. This online database is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Archives and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, Center for American Political Studies, and Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Two years in the making, the collection offers views of 3,500 documents filed with the Massachusetts General Court from the 1600s to the 1800s. I saw a Twitter message saying that some of those petitions appears to have never been opened before being digitized.

Boston 1775 reader Nicole Topich, who worked on the project, alerted me to a number of items from the database relating to people discussed on this blog. For example, I’ve been passing on news about the identification of a young African-American portrait artist named Prince Demah. His mother Daphne appears in several documents because she was part of the estate confiscated from the Loyalist merchant Henry Barnes.

The state told the men it appointed to administer that estate to pay her from its earnings. The second of those men, Simon Stow, ended up suing his predecessor with the state’s encouragement. In June 1789 Stow complained to the legislature that he was still paying Daphne and thought she could live more cheaply in the countryside, but she was refusing to leave Boston. The legislature excused Stow from that responsibility. Two years later, Daphne petitioned directly, describing herself as having been “born in Africa,” “purchased by Henry Barnes, Esqr.,” and too old to support herself. The legislature authorized Joseph Hosmer to pay for her expenses on the state account.

Similar issues arose in the case of Tony (Anthony) and Cuba (Coby) Vassall, who had been enslaved to different members of the Vassall family in Cambridge. (As a child, Cuba had worked at the Royall House in Medford.) In 1780 the couple petitioned the legislature to be granted land from the John Vassall estate so as to support themselves. Tony stated that since the war began:

he and his family have since that time occupied a small tenement, with three quarters of an Acre of land, part of Mr. John Vassall’s estate in Cambridge and has paid therefor a reasonable rent, and all the taxes that were assessed upon him. . . .

the earlier part & vigour of their lives is spent in the service of their several masters, and the misfortunes of war have deprived them of that care & protection which they might otherwise have expected from them—

the land Your Petitioners now improve is not sufficient to supply them with such vegetables as are necessary for their family use, and their title is so precarious that they can’t depend on a continued possession of the same—

they might however promise themselves a tolerable subsistence by their industry & attention, if this Honble Court would grant them a freehold in the Premises and add one quarter of an acre of adjoining land to that which they now improve.

The following February, the legislature responded by voting Anthony Vassall a £12 annual pension but no more land. After his death, in 1811 the widow “Cuby” requested that the pension continue; her plea eventually succeeded, but she died the next year. Their son Darby, who reportedly met Gen. George Washington when he arrived at the John Vassall house to use it as his headquarters, lived long enough to sign a petition against the Fugitive Slave Law in 1861.

The database also contains digitized documents that don’t appear to have a direct connection with slavery. For instance, there are several petitions from Samuel Adams the wire-worker in the 1850s asking for compensation from the state for losses he sustained in the Shays Rebellion over sixty years before. They show Adams gathering pages of signatures in support of his cause, just as the opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law would do.

The Vassalls’ Pension and Tonight’s Lecture in Medford

On 17 June 1858, an anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Massachusetts Historical Society held a special meeting at the house of member Henry W. Longfellow. Members shared some documents about the first owner of that house, John Vassall.

Massachusetts judge Lemuel Shaw recalled a case from early in his legal career that started when the state confiscated that property because Vassall was an absent Loyalist:

The estate having been confiscated by the Government because its owner was a Tory, when the commissioners were putting it up for sale, an old colored man, a slave, who had long served in the Vassal family, stepped forth, and said, that HE was no Tory, but a friend of liberty; and having lived on the estate all his life, he did not see any reason why he should be deprived of his dwelling. On petitioning the General Court, a resolve was framed, granting Tony a stipend of twelve pounds annually.

About 1810 (after Tony’s death), Cuba, his widow, went to the State Treasurer to get her stipend; but it was found that the resolve did not include herself. Mr. Shaw, then a member of the House, presented her petition for the continuance of the grant. It met with favor, and the annual sum was voted to Cuba during her natural life.

Shaw’s extemporaneous recollection wasn’t completely accurate, and reflects the dismissive racism of his time (referring to Tony and Cuba Vassall only by their first names), but it’s impressively close. The Massachusetts legislature responded to Tony Vassall’s petition by voting to pay “the sum of twelve pounds in specie, or a sum in bills of credit equivalent, to the said Anthony” each year.

Tony Vassall died in 1811, receiving obituaries in the Boston Repertory and Columbian Centinel. His widow Cuba petitioned for the pension to continue, and on 28 Feb 1812 the legislature granted her $40 per year. But she died only a few months later.

Tonight I’ll discuss the lives of Cuba Vassall and her mistress Penelope (Royall) Vassall at their first home in Massachusetts, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford. Later they lived on “Tory Row” in Cambridge; Penelope was John Vassall’s aunt and neighbor, and in the early 1770s Cuba was his property. I’ll discuss how the Revolution disrupted those old relationships and sent both women off on new paths. That talk starts at 7:30. Admission is free for members, $5 for non-members.

Living Conditions in Cambridge in the Spring of 1775

The second chapter of my report Gen. George Washington’s Headquarters and Home—Cambridge, Massachusetts is titled “The Arrival of the Provincial Army on the Vassall Estate.”

As I described last week, the Loyalist planter John Vassall and his family left his Cambridge home in September 1774. They probably expected to return after Gen. Thomas Gage quelled the nascent rebellion in Massachusetts. Another Vassall family remained behind: Tony, Cuba, and some of their children, enslaved to John Vassall and his nearby aunt Penelope.

The first sections of that chapter lay out what I could find out about that African-American family, who took the surname Vassall. Tony and Cuba both petitioned the state for pensions in their old age based on their service to the estate. One son, Darby, lived long enough to appear as a living relic of the Revolution at Abolitionist rallies and to see the opening of the Civil War.

The next couple of sections describe life in Cambridge as provincial militiamen flooded into the town on 19 Apr 1775 and were replaced by a New England army by the end of that month. Gen. Artemas Ward took a house near Harvard as his headquarters, and it looks like all the empty mansions on Tory Row were pressed into service as barracks.

Pvt. Caleb Haskell of Newburyport recorded arriving in Cambridge on 12 May and taking “our quarters at Bolin’s (a tory) house”—John Borland’s, now in the middle of Harvard’s Adams House dormitory. Five days later, Pvt. Nathaniel Ober said his company was in “Judge [Joseph] Lees house at Cambridge,” now headquarters of the Cambridge Historical Society. On 15 May, records of the Committee of Safety mention “three companies at Mr. Vassal’s house.”

An unidentified soldier arriving from Norwich, Connecticut, sometime before late May wrote back home:

There is about 250 soldiers in this House, and we are not much crowded, but I wish they were out, all except our company. This building that we are in belonged to one of the Tories, but he has gone and left this building for us. It is the finest and largest building in town…

I can’t tell whether that was John Vassall’s mansion or another, but it gives a sense of the crowding. A January 1776 report suggested that the Continental Army put twenty soldiers to a room at Ralph Inman’s estate.

As for living conditions, teenaged fifer John Greenwood recalled, “we had to sleep in our clothes upon the bare floor. I do not recollect that I even had a blanket, but I remember well the stone which I had to lay my head upon.”

In late May, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress decided to clear the John Vassall house of soldiers so the Committee of Safety could use it. The committee was working out of the same house that Gen. Ward was using. I couldn’t find clear evidence that the Committee of Safety actually moved into the Vassall house, though. I wish I had.

On 22 June Col. John Glover marched his regiment from Marblehead to Cambridge, and Gen. George Washington later wrote that the Marbleheaders were in the Vassall house before he moved in. There’s also an order from Gen. Ward for Lt. Col. William Bond to “occupy one room, in the south-east corner of Col. Vassall’s house, upon the second floor, for the sick belonging to said regiment,” originally commanded by Col. Thomas Gardner. So it looks like soldiers were still being assigned to the Vassall house whenever the army needed space.

Committee of Safety records link two men to the larger estate. Joseph Smith was “keeper of John Vassal, Esq’s farm” on 27 May, and Seth Brown was “the keeper of the colony horses” in Vassall’s stables on 24 June. Of course men I wanted to trace would be named Smith and Brown, right?

But I’m inordinately proud that I was able to identify those two. Joseph Smith was a Cambridge farmer born in 1740; his brother Parsons (1743-1816) supplied milk to Washington’s headquarters. Seth Ingersoll Browne (1750-1809) was a refugee from Charlestown who later tended bar at the Punch Bowl Tavern in Roxbury.

TOMORROW: One Connecticut officer tries to find quarters for his regiment.

Upcoming Talks in Sudbury and Medford

Yesterday’s posting offers a chance to mention two talks I’m looking forward to giving next month.

On Monday, 5 November, I’ll speak to the Sudbury Minutemen about “The Powder Alarm,” the militia mobilization in September 1774 that marked the end of royal authority in most of Massachusetts. That will start at 8:00 at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury.

Here’s some of Dr. Thomas Young’s commentary on the event to Samuel Adams, who had left Boston for the First Continental Congress:

That treacherous, sneaking and cowardly action, of seizing our Province powder set all the Country in a flame. Every one now feels the matter coming home to him. It gave me much pleasure to see the behavior of the people at Cambridge. When Doctr. [Joseph] Warren and I arrived there Judge [Samuel] Danforth was addressing perhaps four thousand people in the open air; and such was the order of that great assembly that not a whisper interrupted the low voice of that feeble old man from being heard by the whole Body.

And when their Committee had heard and were satisfied wt. Collo. [David] Phips’s vindication of his conduct and promise to call in his Venires and marshalled them to receive the information and take their minds upon it they kept their particular stations for three hours in the scorching sun of the hottest day we have had this summer. Such patient endurance is certainly a principal ingredient in the composition of that character emphatically stiled a Good Soldier.

Danforth was a long-time member of the Council, newly reappointed by the London government under a writ of mandamus. Phips was the sheriff of Middlesex County; the day before, he had helped the army take control of the gunpowder and two small cannon assigned to the local militia. The crowd demanded that they and other royal appointees in Cambridge resign their posts and not to support Gen. Thomas Gage’s further actions. Young’s “Venires” remark referred to another aspect of the people’s resistance: refusing jury service and shutting down the courts.

As I described yesterday, this gathering had a big effect on John Vassall and his extended family, some of whom were targets of the crowd’s anger. On Wednesday, 14 November, I’ll talk about that Vassall family, as well as another Vassall family they left behind—their enslaved household workers.

The venue for that event is the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford (shown above). John Vassall’s aunt Penelope grew up on that estate as the daughter of the elder Isaac Royall. When she married and moved to Cambridge, she brought an enslaved girl named Cuba. The start of the war sent Penelope Vassall fleeing with her daughter and son-in-law, though the two women eventually returned. It also left Cuba Vassall, her husband, and their children free—but they had to build lives in an uncertain new society.

“Penelope Royall, Cuba Vassall, and the Families of Tory Row” will start on 14 November at 7:30 P.M. Admission is free for R.H.S.Q. members and $5 for non-members.