William Vassall
English colonist William Vassall (1592–1656) is remembered both for promoting religious freedom in New England and commencing his family's ownership of slave plantations in the Caribbean.
A patentee of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Vassall was among the merchants who petitioned Puritan courts for greater civil liberties and religious tolerance.
A man of “great wealth,”[1] John Vassall (1548–1625) fitted out and commanded two ships against the Spanish Armada, assistance rewarded by Queen Elizabeth I with a grant of arms.
[10] In summer 1629, the Company sent “some fifty persons from Salem to begin the settlement of Charlestown.”[11] Two settlers were forced back to England when they attempted to establish an Episcopal church.
[5] While in Scituate, Vassall served on a council of war formed in September 1642 when settlers feared Narragansett reprisal,[26] and in 1643, he appeared on the list of men able to bear arms.
[44] In response to both the economic decline and the continuing codification of intolerance, merchants and entrepreneurs like Vassall and his associate Robert Child led efforts to make the colonies more tolerant and thus more welcoming to new residents and investors.
[45] In autumn 1645, the order suppressing Anabaptists and other non-Puritans was debated at a sitting of Plymouth’s Court of Elections where Vassall served as Scituate’s deputy.
William Bradford, who supported the law, agreed to “leave it to the next court, where it might be repealed if the Country saw fit.”[46] Vassall was “not content with having stopped the order’s progress” and proposed that Plymouth “allow and maintain full and free tolerance of religion to all men that would preserve the civil peace, and submit unto Government; and there was no limitation or exception against Turk, Jew, Papist, … or any other.”[47] A “majority of the General Court of Plymouth” were in favor of Vassall’s measure,[48] which would have passed had Gov.
[50] Ironically, a Plymouth leader who “utterly abhorred” the petition, Edward Winslow, ensured its preservation in a detailed 25 November 1645 letter to Winthrop.
Winthrop reports that Vassall’s petition was followed by one “to the same effect, much enlarged.”[51] Presented to the General Court at Boston on 19 May,[52] the Remonstrance of 1646 was signed by six merchants and entrepreneurs led by Dr. Robert Child.
Among the twelve charges, the men were accused of defaming the government, weakening the authority and esteem of laws, slandering the churches, and kindling discontent.
[70] Cotton’s sermon became widely known, and the pamphlet’s title, New-England’s Jonas cast up at London, reminded the “public of how the story of Jonah ultimately played out: namely that Jonah survived in the belly of the great beast” to be “vomited up on shore” to “fulfill his obligation to preach.”[71] Published in London on or before 15 April 1647, New-England’s Jonas appeared as a small 24-page tract of four interrelated sections, three of which reprint Bay Colony documents.
The title page identifies English MP Major John Child as the pamphlet’s sole author, but Edward Winslow claimed it was primarily William Vassall’s work.
[74] The tract begins with a brief preface by Major John Child, whose brother Robert was under house arrest in Massachusetts under the security of an £800 bond at the time of writing.
[75] Section one of Jonas is devoted to three documents related to the 1645 magistrates’ decision to overturn a vote for militia leader in Hingham, a controversy which led to an attempted impeachment of Deputy Gov.
In dramatic terms, they describe how God’s hand had turned against the colony, “blasting all our designs,” bringing many good estates “to the brinks of extreme poverty,” and “striking” others with “malignant sicknesses” and “shameful diseases.”[77] They offer the Remonstrance as a correction and call for (1) the establishment of English common law in Massachusetts; (2) the extension of the vote to all well-behaving freeborn Englishmen; and (3) access to sacraments for all Church of England members or the liberty to form churches of their own.
“Its importance lay in the fact that it afforded printed evidence that nowhere in it is any reference made to the King's Majesty, or of allegiance to any power on earth save that of their own Government.”[81] Section four of New-England’s Jonas is the eyewitness account intended “to refute the widespread belief that Vassal and his party narrowly escaped a prognosticated catastrophe while crossing the Atlantic by casting their petition into the sea.”[82] The tract’s postscript attacks Edward Winslow, sent by the Bay General Court to make their case against the right of colonists to petition Parliament.
[86] Taken together, the documents gathered in New-England’s Jonas show Massachusetts considered itself “entirely independent of the British Parliament in all matters of government”[87] and believed it exercised “absolute power” over its affairs, including the power “to rule, punish, pardon, etc.”[88] Vassall was among those who “denied this contention of the leaders.”[87] He was a signatory to the 1629 Bay Company Charter, which guaranteed “all liberties and immunities of free and natural subjects” to residents of Massachusetts as if they “were born within the realm of England.”[89] Vassall thus believed “any colonist had a right of appeal to England.
[96] By early 1648, William Vassall moved to Barbados to take advantage of the global "sugar boom and the reality of rapid and immense fortunes to be accrued.
English visitors to their home reported being "shocked" that the slaves “who waited on tables loaded in silver plate” wore “the scantiest of clothing, and that often in tatters.
[102] Because the English knew slavery to be brutal, they made it illegal to enslave Christians, and they "policed the line between slave and free by restricting access to baptism."
[5] Like their father, Vassall children John and Anna were “early to take advantage of the opportunity of settling in the West Indies and North America, … amassing great fortunes from slavery.”[107] One 2004 history of Virginia slavery cites the siblings, noting that by the mid-1700s, slave purchases “commonly took place in counties that attracted intercolonial immigrants," and they "often involved individuals, like Anna Vassal Ware," who moved from Barbados to Virginia, and her brother John, who lived in Jamaica.
Records held by the Center for the Study of the Legacy of British Slavery show that between 1714 and 1827, 27 Vassall descendants owned eighteen slave-labor plantations spread across parishes in western Jamaica.
[115] He “ostentatiously” paid his son Lewis's Harvard tuition with a cask of sugar produced by slave labor “worth more than the entirety of many of his classmates’ dues,”[116] and in 1728, he posted the bond for the purchase of land to build Trinity Church, Boston.
[124] Great-grandson William Vassall (1715-1800) differed from his siblings in expressing doubts about the “Christian morality” of keeping a “‘great number of slaves on his West Indian plantations.’” He wrote to Bishop Joseph Butler for advice and accepted his assurance that slavery was Biblically justified.
[125] William Vassall invested the wealth gleaned from his Jamaican plantations throughout New England, including Kennebec County, Maine, where the town of Vassalboro bears his name.
[126] William Vassall fled to England during the Revolution,[127] where he died, having spent many years arguing for "compensation for what he deemed the illegal confiscation of his properties in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
At 21, the younger John Vassall commissioned what would become Cambridge’s “largest and most elegant estate," a grand home on 90 acres where he lived in “princely style” with his wife, Elizabeth Oliver, daughter of Antiguan plantation owners.
[120] After the loyalist Vassalls fled their mansion in 1774, Gen. George Washington used it as his Cambridge headquarters, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later made it his home.
"[115] On 23 August 1825, Darby Vassall was "second Vice President of a banquet to celebrate the anniversary of Haitian independence, and offered this toast: "Freedom—May the freedom of Haiti be a glorious harbinger of the time when the color of a man shall no longer be a pretext for depriving him of his liberty."
