Welcome to Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site. The land
that this house sits on has seen human history for over 3,000 years. Archaeological evidence
tells us that Native Americans lived here off of the rich abundance of the Charles River. They
were here first when English colonists came and created an agricultural settlement in the 1630s.
Soon after that point the character of the town shifted and a few families started to establish
estates here in the countryside. Today I'd like to share the interwoven tale of those families,
the people they enslaved, and the wealth that built old Cambridge.
This house was built in 1759 by John Vassall Jr. We know that because in
this room there's an original fire back with the date of the construction of the home.
At that point in his life John was a 21 year old recent Harvard graduate
who had inherited an enormous family wealth: sugar plantations in Jamaica,
property here in New England, and a long history of human bondage.
Between 1675 and 1833 the Vassal family enslaved thousands of individuals on their
plantations in Jamaica. They used the money from that sugar industry to help
build some of the oldest buildings in Cambridge,
give extravagant gifts to Harvard, and buy their way into British aristocracy.
Slavery in the northern colonies was intertwined with that in the Caribbean.
In fact they're one in the same system. Oftentimes the people
who were doing back-breaking labor on sugar plantations in Jamaica were the same people
or ancestors of the people who were enslaved in the wealthiest homes here in New England.
Many of these slave-holding families were also loyalists,
meaning colonists who decided to remain loyal to the British crown during the American Revolution.
As tensions rose in the fall of 1774, John Vassall and all of his neighbors decided to
leave this neighborhood and go into Boston where British troops were protecting people like them.
John Vassall left behind seven individuals who he had previously enslaved. We know their names: two
men were Malcolm and William, there were two women named Cuba and Dinah, and three children as well.
These individuals are present in 1775 when General George Washington took the abandoned home as his
first headquarters of the American Revolution. Cuba lived here with her husband Tony and their
six children on a small parcel of the Vassal estate that they farmed for their own subsistence.
Tony even did some work for the Continental Army and was paid for his services.
We can trace Cuba's individual story through historic records. We know that she was born
in Antigua and was previously enslaved by the Royall family, in-laws of the Vassals.
Eventually she was brought to Massachusetts and then here to the John Vassal estate in 1769.
When their loyalist enslavers fled this family's status was put into limbo. Were they free? Would
someone come back to enslave them? They didn't stick around to find out the answer.
Tony and Cuba on at least two different occasions petitioned the Massachusetts
General Court to be allowed to have a small bit of the Vassal estate, now abandoned,
so that they could take care of their own family. The first of those in 1780 was denied;
instead they were given a pension of about 12 pounds to take care of their family.
In the most stirring of these legal documents it states, "though dwelling in a land of freedom
both himself and his wife have spent almost 60 years of their lives in slavery
and one hopes that they shall not be denied the sweets of freedom." Now using the surname Vassal,
the family went on to buy a one-acre plot of land near Porter Square. Eventually that property grew
and became part of Lewisville, a thriving Black community near the Cambridge Common.
This estate was sold and sold again, and eventually was owned by a man named Andrew
Craigie. He's the one responsible for expanding the footprint of this house in the 1790s.
And it was his wife, eventually widow, Elizabeth Craigie,
who rented out two of the rooms to professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of Harvard in 1837.
Tony and Cuba's story wasn't written into the enabling legislation that made this a national
historic site. Regardless though, their lives and the history that surrounds them is just as
vital to the site's significance. One thing's certain: the formerly enslaved Vassal family
had a more enduring and resilient impact on the history of Cambridge than that of their namesake.