“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.

Following News Stories about Historical Memory

In August, I passed on news about the sudden closing of a small post office near James Madison’s Montpelier.

The stated reason was an exhibit on segregation in another part of the building, though that exhibit has been up for years. The action came shortly after a dramatic change of leadership at Montpelier.

The latest report from that part of Virginia is that the post office has reopened as suddenly as it closed.

Another story about how we publicly remember the Revolutionary era that I’ve followed involves the far-from-hagiographic murals about George Washington in San Francisco’s George Washington High School. This month N.P.R. ran a story by Jon Kalish about the choices schools face with those and other historic murals which people find problematic for different reasons.

In addition, a documentary on the Washington High School controversy by Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow called “Town Destroyer” premiered in California. Here’s the movie’s trailer.

Closer to home (my home), Christ Church in Cambridge is currently the home for an art installation titled “Here Lies Darby Vassall.” It remembers a man born enslaved in one of the “Tory Row” mansions along Brattle Street before the Revolution. He reportedly met Washington when the general moved into the house where his parents were working.

As an adult Darby Vassall maintained a business in Boston and was active in the local abolitionist movement. He died on the eve of the Civil War and was buried in the tomb of the family that once owned him and his own family.

Nicole Piepenbrink’s art installation “Here Lies Darby Vassall” can be viewed from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. until 6 November.

Online Talks about Patriots of Color and Their Legacy

This month, the Boston Public Library and the National Park Service are teaming up for two online events that look at the Revolutionary War and its legacy.

Tuesday, 12 April, 6:00–7:00 P.M.
Patriots of Color
online

More than 2,100 men of color from Massachusetts served the Patriot cause during the American Revolution. They served as militiamen in emergencies, and as professional soldiers who marched in campaigns from Boston to Saratoga, from Monmouth to Yorktown.

As the nation plans for its 250th anniversary, join National Parks of Boston staff and interns as they share their emerging research that explores select life stories of Patriots of Color during and long after they served on the Revolutionary battlefields.

Register for this event through this link on this page.

Tuesday, 26 April, 6:00–7:00 P.M.
Connecting Past, Present, and Future: The Descendants of Darby Vassall on the Legacy of Slavery and Freedom
online

In 1774, the family of Darby Vassall—enslaved in Cambridge and surrounding towns—seized their freedom. Vassall dedicated the rest of his life to the struggle for freedom, education, and equality for greater Boston’s black community.

In this virtual program, join Vassall’s descendants for a conversation on the significance of surfacing the past, present, and future. Members of the Lloyd family and other descendants will reflect on the process of finding their ancestors’ history, and the critical importance of making this history—of the legacy of slavery, the value of freedom, and the beauty of the struggle—known to this and future generations.

Staff from the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site and other historical organizations will also briefly discuss collaborative efforts to research and memorialize the legacy of the Vassall family and slavery in greater Boston.

Register through this page.

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.

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.

Harvard Preoccupied

Yesterday I went to Harvard’s Houghton Library to look at an entry in the journals of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. To be precise, I went to see if the poet’s brother had transcribed one word correctly when he published those journals.

I’ve researched at Houghton before [starting when I was about ten—long story], but not for a few years, so I needed a Special Collections card from the Library Privileges Office.

The only problem was that Harvard Yard is closed to outsiders, the university administration’s response to the small “Occupy Harvard” movement. A person needs a Harvard identification card to get into the Yard, even if he’s there to pick up a Harvard identification card.

I phoned ahead to the Library Privileges Office to ask how they’re handling that paradox. A friendly fellow told me to tell the police officers at the gate that I wanted to go to the Library Privileges Office in the Widener building. Depending on the individual officer’s priorities, he or she would either send me on to the office or escort me there.

Unfortunately, word of that arrangement hadn’t reached all the officers. In fact, I found that only one person per gate was aware of it. And the only gate where it’s supposed to apply is the Widener Gate. After multiple inquiries, an officer told me to go straight into the back door of Widener and speak to the security guard. The security guard then told me to go straight out of the building again and around to its front.

But by then, you see, I’d broached the special police line. I could go anywhere in the Yard. But all I wanted was my card, and I still had the regular library security process to navigate. I went up the big steps, filled out the form, sat for the photo, got my card, and headed to Houghton.

So it’s possible for outsiders to visit the university for research—it may just take more polite persistence than usual. My particular experience yesterday might have been shaped by the cold rain, making the police officers reluctant to leave the awnings set up for their protection to escort me anywhere. On the other hand, I probably earned some brownie points by helping the gents at Widener gate hoist their awning up high enough for a van to drive underneath. It’s a weird situation, and everyone’s probably improvising as we go along. (I never saw the protesters.)

As for Longfellow’s journal, his handwriting is ambiguous; brother Sam didn’t make an obvious error. However, from other sources I feel confident that the poet received a visit not from “Mrs. Vassal” but from “Mr. [Darby] Vassal.”

Christ Church in Cambridge Turns 250

In August, one of the stops on my walking tour of Cambridge as a seat of civil war was Christ Church, the city’s oldest surviving house of worship. At the time, however, the building looked decidedly modern because it was sheathed in scaffolding and dust walls.

As the photo at the left shows, that construction concluded this fall in time for the church’s anniversary. This Associated Press dispatch in the Boston Globe explains:

The building, designed by famed Colonial architect Peter Harrison, opened Oct. 15, 1761, two years after Anglicans in Cambridge founded the congregation so they could attend a church closer than King’s Chapel in Boston. The original members wanted to it look like a typical limestone church found in southern England. But, lacking the stone, it was painted tan and the boards were molded to look like masonry to resemble it as best it could.

Members decided the same look would be “quite of a leap of faith” today, Allen said. The new coat of platinum gray paint matches the traditional New England Colonial style, though few colonists welcomed the church when it first opened.

And as the Revolution approached, suspicions deepened about the wealthy Tory congregation and its loyalty to the British crown. The congregants were eventually forced to flee, and the building became a barracks across from Cambridge Common, where the Minutemen assembled before the Battle of Bunker Hull and during the Siege of Boston.

The church did hold a few notable services during the war years. In 1775, Martha Washington, an Anglican, arranged for a New Year’s Eve service, which was also attended by her husband, George Washington, who would become president 14 years later. Then, in 1778, it opened for a funeral for a British prisoner of war who’d been accidentally killed. But this became an occasion for the church to be trashed by townspeople in a wave of anti-British sentiment.

The pulpit, pews and a communion table were destroyed, the windows were shattered and shots were fired — a bullet hole that remains inside is thought to have been left by the outburst.

On 15 October, the Christ Church congregation will celebrate the 250th anniversary of their building. This week I’ll share some sources about its history.

TOMORROW: Martha Washington’s service.

Gen. Washington’s Welcome to His New Headquarters?

According to a story told in nineteenth-century Cambridge, when Gen. George Washington came to his new headquarters in the John Vassall house, one of the first people he met was a child—a black child still legally enslaved to the absent Loyalist owners of that house.

The first appearance of this story in print was in a New England Historical and Genealogical Register article about Longfellow House published in 1871:

An anecdote is related of one of these [slaves], called Tonie Vassall, who, when Washington in 1775 took possession of Mr. Longfellow’s house, was found swinging on the gate. Learning that Tonie belonged to the place, the General, to set his mind at rest for his future, told him to go into the house and they would tell him what to do and give him something to eat.

Feeling the value of his freedom, Tonie inquired what would be the wages, at which Washington expressed surprise at his being so unreasonable at such a time as to expect to be paid.

Tonie lived to a great age, and when on one occasion he was asked what he remembered of Washington, said he was no gentleman, he wanted [a] boy to work without wages.

Decades later, the Cambridge historian Samuel F. Batchelder pointed out that Anthony Vassall was thought to be over sixty years old in 1775, and thus could not have been a “boy…swinging on the gate” that July. The long-lived former slave who told this anecdote about Washington, Batchelder wrote, must have been Tony’s son Darby Vassall (1769-1861).

Obviously, the transmission of that anecdote is hazy. Nonetheless, I think it contains a germ of truth because in nineteenth-century America George Washington was so revered that there was no advantage to making up stories that put him in a bad light—especially if one was a poor black man.

Given the risk in telling such an anecdote, Darby Vassall must have been strongly motivated to do so, most likely by his memory of a difficult encounter. Vassall’s unusual perspective on Washington is probably also why his contemporaries recalled and repeated the tale.

It’s also conceivable that the person who met Gen. Washington was the grown-up Tony Vassall, ready to work for wages, and the white chroniclers who recorded the story told by him and his family preferred to imagine him as a “boy.”

Either way, there’s no evidence in the headquarters accounts or Massachusetts records of Tony Vassall’s family being paid to work for Gen. Washington. But somebody maintained the Vassall fields, gardens, and orchards in those months, and documents show Tony Vassall and his family remained on the estate in the later 1770s. Most likely they received food and other necessities in exchange for their labor, and were treated as property belonging to the estate and therefore unpaid.

(Thumbnail of vintage postcard of the Longfellow House’s front gate above courtesy of dejean.com’s gallery of photos from the Maynard Workshop.)