John Vinal “continues to keep a private School”

Back in September I quoted John Adams’s account from 17 Apr 1764 of meeting a man who had taken the smallpox inoculation before him:

My Unkle [Dr. Zabdiel Boylston?] brought up one Vinal who has just recoverd of it in the natural Way to see Us, and show Us. His face is torn all to Pieces, and is as rugged as Braintree Commons.

That couldn’t have been very encouraging.

That man was John Vinal (1736–1823), the usher, or assistant teacher, at Boston’s South Writing School under Abiah Holbrook.

The Boston Athenaeum has a painting of Vinal, apparently copied from an earlier canvas around 1900. I’ll have to look for smallpox scars the next time I see it.

On 15 May Vinal petitioned the Boston town meeting “that an allowance may be made him, in consideration of the Straits and Difficultys he has been reduced to by means of the Small Pox.” After some debate the town voted to pay Vinal £15 on top of his usual salary of £50.

That was just one way Vinal augmented his town salary. Like other town teachers, he offered private lessons. As early as 1756 he advertised an evening school for adults. This 15 Sept 1760 Boston Evening-Post notice lays out his subjects:

John Vinal
Hereby gives Notice, that he intends an Evening-School will be opened as usual, at the South Writing School, the 29th of this Instant, where Persons may be taught Writing, Arithmetic, Algebra, &c. also Book-keeping, in so plain a Method, that any Person of a common Capacity, may in a short Time, at a small Expence, be able to keep his own Accompts with Exactness.

In the 3 Oct 1763 Boston Post-Boy Vinal promised to cover “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic vulgar and decimal, Navigation and several Branches of the Mathematics; also the Italian Manner of Bookkeeping.”

That still left some free hours of the day. The boys at the town schools went home for their midday dinners, and then again at the end of the day. Master Holbrook probably had his own private pupils come into the South Writing School at that time, so where did that leave Vinal?

He hustled over to a space that yet another teacher, Richard Pateshall, used for private lessons in “the Rudiments of the Latin Tongue” along with English reading, spelling, and arithmetic. While Pateshall was out, Vinal went to work teaching children, as shown in this 30 Apr 1764 Boston Post-Boy ad:

John Vinal,
Hereby gives Notice, that he continues to keep a private School, opposite William Vassall’s Esq; where Youth may be instructed in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic in the best Manner, from XI to XII o’Clock, A.M. and from V to VI o’Clock, P.M. Misses may also be taught Spelling. Those who send their Children, may depend upon their being faithfully instructed.

That ad appeared less than two weeks after Adams saw Vinal’s smallpox-ravaged face. A lesson the youth would never forget.

TOMORROW: Moving up.

The Flight of the Cambridge Loyalists, part 3

When the ministry in London chose supportive gentlemen for the Council under the Massachusetts Government Act, one was William Vassall (1715–1800, shown here with his son Leonard wanting help with homework).

William was the last male in his generation of Vassalls, thus the head of a wealthy Anglican family that generally supported the Crown.

However, he wasn’t a politician, and former governor Thomas Hutchinson called him “naturally timid.” And since marrying Margaret Hubbard, he was living on her very nice estate in Bristol, Rhode Island.

On 25 August, Gov. Thomas Gage wrote to Secretary of State Dartmouth that William Vassall was among three men who “plead age and infirmities, but I believe choose to avoid the present disputes.” Those disputes were taking the form of angry rural crowds pressuring the new-fangled mandamus Councilors to resign or leave town.

Some of William’s relatives witnessed the even bigger crowds in Cambridge on 2 Sept 1774, later dubbed the “Powder Alarm.” His niece Elizabeth was married to Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, and his sisters Susanna and Anna were the wives of George Ruggles and John Borland, respectively.

And then there was William’s nephew John Vassall, owner of the richest estate in Cambridge—now the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

As a rich country gentleman, John Vassall had the usual appointments of justice of the peace and militia colonel. But he’d never sought to serve in a political office.

Until that week. On the morning of 2 September, Gov. Gage wrote to Dartmouth:

I have given Your Lordship in my letter of this date, the names of several of the New Council who desire to resign their Seats; and I have now the honour to transmit you the names of Three Gentlemen who desire to be of the Council, vizt.—Mr. John Vassall of Cambridge, Mr. Eliakim Hutchinson, and Mr. Nathaniel Hatch.

John Vassall probably thought that by joining the Council he would not only be supporting his king but also stepping up act as head of the family.

When he wrote, Gage didn’t know that thousands of men with sticks were marching along the road in front of John Vassall’s house. Nor did those men know that John Vassall had volunteered to be on the Council.

At that moment only John Vassall knew how close he was to receiving a summons from those thousands of men, as Joseph Lee and Samuel Danforth did. By the end of the day, he and his wife must have heard from their siblings, Elizabeth and Thomas Oliver, about the threatening crowd that surrounded the lieutenant governor’s house and demanded he resign.

In 1784, John Vassall told the British government’s Loyalists Commission: “He was afraid of the Mob who knew his principles & he went to Boston a Day or two after Govr. Oliver’s House was attacked.” 

On 23 Feb 1775, the Boston News-Letter published a long article about how various Loyalists had been driven from their homes. It said: “Col. Vassall, of Cambridge, from intolerable threats, and insolent treatment to his friends and himself, has left his elegant seat there, and retired to Boston, with his amiable family, for protection.”

The lack of specific examples of “insolent treatment” and Vassall’s report of leaving Cambridge within a couple of days after the “Powder Alarm” suggest that there may not have been many real confrontations. But there was a lot of real fear.

In the fall of 1774 the London government sent a writ of mandamus appointing John Vassall and others to the Council. On 15 December, Gov. Gage wrote back: “Messrs. Erving, Vassal and Hatch have accepted the honour conferred upon them, but desire that it may be kept secret for a time, and that they may not be called upon till they are prepared.”

The next Council meeting Gage convened was on 17 July. But Vassall didn’t participate. In 1784 he told the Loyalists Commission that “he was never sworn in owing to an Accident which made him lame.” Natural timidity might have run in the family. 

“The Cause of His Being Assaulted”

As a foretaste of my presentation at Longfellow National Historic Site this evening at 6:30, here’s an item from the 6 Oct 1774 New York Journal, reporting news from Providence, Rhode Island, datelined 24 September:

We hear from Bristol, that on Tuesday, night last [i.e., 20 Sept], William Vassal, Esq; of that place, in returning home with his Lady from a visit, was assaulted by a number of men, who threw stones at his chaise, which they much injured, and attempted to stop the carriage; but having a fleet horse, he got safe home, and next morning set out for Boston.—

He was suspected by some to be unfriendly to the liberties of America, which we are told was the cause of his being assaulted.

Vassall was suddenly unpopular with his neighbors because in mid-1774 the London government had appointed him to the Massachusetts Council, which had until then been an elected body. Because of the writ of mandamus that named those men, the new body was called the “mandamus Council” or, by Patriots, the “new-fangled Council.”

It’s a bit odd that Vassall was named to that Council because by 1774 he was living mostly in Rhode Island, on his second wife’s estate. The ministers in London probably didn’t know that. They just knew that he was rich, Anglican, and loyal to the Crown.

Which was also apparently enough for people in Rhode Island to stone William Vassall’s chaise. After all:

• The Massachusetts Council wasn’t really their concern.
• He had already refused the appointment, and never attended a Council meeting.

By this date, in fact, Gov. Thomas Gage had written to London about a replacement for Vassall. What name did he have in mind? That’s one thing I’m going to talk about this evening.