Slavery at the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House: Why a Cambridge Mansion Tells It

Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, the mansion at 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, opened a series on how its own history meets the history of slavery. This introduction sets out why.

The northern myth

By the 1840s the United States was, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "a house divided against itself." Slavery had ended in the North decades before, while in the South it had become ever more bound into the economy and culture. Yet the whole country profited — from sugar to the cotton textile mills of New England.

After the Union won the Civil War, Americans told themselves and their children that the divide had always been there and that Northerners had always fought slavery. The evidence says otherwise: no region was innocent, and those who called for immediate abolition remained few well into the war itself.

An empire built on slavery

• 1619: the first Africans in what became the United States arrive in Virginia. Their legal status is uncertain, but by the end of the century chattel slavery is that colony's main source of labor.
• Britain's empire around the Atlantic ran on enslaved labor. By the early 1700s, the sugar islands of the Caribbean — "engines of profit" — were worth far more than the mainland colonies.
• 1772: the Somerset case confirmed that English law did not support slavery in England itself, yet the empire allowed it until 1833. It could not have existed without it.

Massachusetts, too

At the American Revolution, slavery was legal in every colony. In Massachusetts it was set on the road to extinction in 1783 by a court decision citing the new state constitution — but there is evidence that people were still held in bondage for at least another decade.

The house and its people

The series follows those connected with the house:

• the Vassall family, who built it, and the people they enslaved there;
• George Washington, who made it his headquarters, and his lifelong entanglement with slavery;
• the Longfellows and their friends, who supported abolition before the Civil War, and the tensions that caused in New England society.

The site's rangers also tell the story in short videos: the early history of 105 Brattle Street; Cuba, one of seven people John Vassall left enslaved when he fled the estate in 1774, and how she and her family helped found Cambridge's first Black community; and Washington's shifting views on race, slavery and freedom while headquartered here in 1775–1776.

Sources

Based on "Slavery at the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House: Introduction," Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.