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. In 1647, he and John Child published New-England’s Jonas cast up in London, a tract describing the efforts of colonial petitioners. By early 1648, Vassall moved to Barbados to establish a slave-labor sugar plantation. He and his descendants were among the Caribbean's leading planters, enslaving more than 3,865 people before Britain abolished slavery in 1833.
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Family
William Vassall's paternal grandfather, Huguenot Jean Vassall, sent his son John to England from the family's native Normandy when religious dissension arose. A man of “great wealth,” 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. In 1618, he purchased two shares of stock in the Virginia Company at a cost of £25.10, beginning a centuries-long family tradition of investment in colonial enterprises. William was the son of John Vassall and his second wife, Anna Russell. He was baptized in Stepney, Middlesex, on 27 August 1592. On 9 June 1613, he obtained a license to marry Anna King in Cold Norton, Essex. The couple had ten children; five daughters (Judith, Frances, Anna, Margaret, Mary) and one son (John) survived to adulthood.
Massachusetts: 1628–1630
In March 1628, brothers William and Samuel Vassall were among the original patentees of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Both were named Assistants in 1629. Initially, William Vassall took an active role in company leadership. In 1629, he was appointed to the committee to consider the division of lands and to the committee to resolve orders. On 26 August 1629, he was among the twelve men who signed the Cambridge Agreement and pledged to be ready “to embark for the said plantation” by 1 March 1630.
In summer 1629, the Company sent “some fifty persons from Salem to begin the settlement of Charlestown.” Two settlers were forced back to England when they attempted to establish an Episcopal church. John and Samuel Brown asked William and Samuel Vassall to represent them in the dispute. Attorney John Winthrop spoke on the company's behalf, defending the Browns’ removal. This was Vassall's first confrontation with Winthrop on the issue of religious tolerance. Winthrop always won. The Company confiscated the Browns’ private letters, and the “principle was virtually laid down that the Episcopal form of worship would not be tolerated in the colony.”
At a 20 October 1629 meeting of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Winthrop was elected Governor, and Vassall was reelected as an Assistant. On 23 March 1630, they were among the eight men who attended the last Court of Assistants held in England, aboard the flagship Arbella at port in Southampton. Within months, Vassall would sail to New England in the same fleet that carried Winthrop and the other Assistants, perhaps aboard the Lyon. In total, fifteen ships transported about 1,500 people to Massachusetts in 1630. Their emigration initiated an event known as the Puritan Great Migration when as many as 21,000 people emigrated to New England between 1630 and 1640.
According to Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, “Mr. Vassal, one of the Assistants, and his Family” returned with the Lyon when it was sent back to England for provisions in July, a month after its arrival. The Vassalls—including four children aged one through eleven—were not alone on the return voyage. Dudley notes that some fled the colony “out of fear of famine” and others “out of dislike of our Government.” When the family returned to an economically stable New England in five years, they chose to make their home not in Massachusetts Bay, but in its more tolerant neighbor to the south, Plymouth Colony.
Scituate, Plymouth: 1635–1645
The Vassalls’ third transatlantic crossing was aboard the Blessing in summer 1635. The family stayed with Rev. John Eliot in Roxbury, while Vassall claimed an extensive tract of “very advantageously situated land” in the new Plymouth settlement of Scituate. In 1636, he built one of the first homes in the village, naming it “Belle House,” and on 27 November, he joined the village church.
Vassall's estate was “by far the largest tract allotted to any one settler,” and Scituate's minister, Rev. John Lothrop, was among the fifteen freemen who asked the court to reduce its size, arguing that their allotments were too small for sustenance. On 1 January 1637, the court decided in favor of the freemen and reduced Vassall's lot by 200-300 acres. The decision required the freemen to maintain a ferry. They apparently failed to do so, for on 2 April 1638, the court granted Vassall 200 acres “to keep a ferry over the north river” and set its rates. Vassall's efforts to enlarge his land continued, and on 3 December 1638, he was granted an additional 150 acres “provided he take the oath of fidelity.” He took the oath on 1 February 1639, and on 3 June, the court settled “his differences with his neighbors at the harbor” and made final the 150-acre addition. On 3 December 1639, Vassall received permission to make an oyster bank in the North River near his estate, West Newland. Use of the bank by others required his license.
While in Scituate, Vassall served on a council of war formed in September 1642 when settlers feared Narragansett reprisal, and in 1643, he appeared on the list of men able to bear arms. Because he owned one of the few surveying instruments in the colony, Vassall was sometimes called upon to set bounds between disputing landowners. But Vassall was best known for causing, not resolving, controversy, and he became a leader in the dispute that permanently split the Scituate Church in two.
The issue of baptism had long made the Scituate Church “inharmonious,” and when Rev. Lothrop moved to Barnstable in October 1639, more than half the congregation moved with him. The seven male members who remained—Vassall among them—were themselves divided. Four of the seven called Charles Chauncy to be their minister. Vassall led the opposition against Chauncy, which ostensibly centered on the issues of baptism and communion. Chauncy believed baptism required full immersion, even for infants, and held “sprinkling” to be “unlawful.” Vassall agreed with colony leadership and most New England ministers that “immersion or dipping was lawful—but in this cold country, not so convenient.”
New England Petitions: 1645–1646
By the early 1640s, “the New England economy was turning downward.” Plymouth Colony, harder hit economically than Massachusetts Bay, was “rapidly and irretrievably declining.” Migration “stopped” in 1640 with England's establishment of the Long Parliament, as Puritans no longer feared persecution in their homeland. That year, the number of people returning to England outpaced the number of new arrivals. In 1642, following the outbreak of Civil War, an estimated “seven to ten percent of colonists, including nearly one-third of clergymen, returned to England to assist in the war effort.”
In 1644, the Bay Colony enacted a ban against Anabaptists and other non-Puritan Protestants, and in summer 1645, Massachusetts magistrates attempted to extend the law to other colonies in the New England Confederation, including Plymouth. 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.
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. He “singly objected” to the matter being heard in a Court of Elections, but despite “a whole day's agitation,” the order was allowed. Vassall was again present when the General Court sat a week later. Several Assistants, absent in the previous session, called for the order to be “defaced and crossed.” Gov. William Bradford, who supported the law, agreed to “leave it to the next court, where it might be repealed if the Country saw fit.” 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.”
A “majority of the General Court of Plymouth” were in favor of Vassall's measure, which would have passed had Gov. Bradford not blocked a vote, claiming religious liberty “would eat out the power of godliness.” Bradford's “arbitrary action” gave the court's conservative minority “time to maneuver effectively” against the proposal. Leadership so opposed the Vassall's plan that it omitted any mention of it in official documents. Ironically, a Plymouth leader who “utterly abhorred” the petition, Edward Winslow, ensured its preservation in a detailed 25 November 1645 letter to Winthrop.
New-England’s Jonas cast up at London: 1647
Shortly before the Supply sailed in early November 1646, Boston's Rev. John Cotton delivered a sermon, declaring that “the Remonstrance would be as a Jonas to the ship carrying it and exhorted the ship's master to throw it overboard should a storm arise so that the ship might be saved.” When the ship found itself in stormy seas (as expected in a winter crossing), several passengers remembered his words. To calm one “distracted” passenger, Fowle gave the woman a spare copy of a Boston petition, which she tossed into the sea. But, as a “gentleman” eyewitness—almost certainly Vassall himself—writes in a 1647 pamphlet, “the storm did not leave us upon the throwing of the Paper,” and the ship encountered “many great storms” before they arrived in Bristol on 19 December. 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.”
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. Scholarship since the colonial period has credited both men, and the U.S. Library of Congress lists both Child and Vassall as the authors of New-England’s Jonas.
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. 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. John Winthrop.”
Section two of New-England’s Jonas begins with the complete text of the 1646 Remonstrance. For nine full pages—some 2,900 words—the Remonstrants used the rhetoric of Puritan preachers against the colony itself. 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.” 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.
Slave Plantation, Barbados: 1648–1656
Brothers William and Samuel Vassall invested in “nearly all aspects of English Atlantic colonization during the first half of the seventeenth century,” and “slavery formed an integral part of the Vassall’s colonial operation.” Samuel Vassall financed ships running the Middle Passage and was the major shareholder of the Guinea Company, founded to supply enslaved labor to the colonies. 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." He purchased land in St. Michael and people to work it. "From that point, the family built its wealth by running slave-labor plantations in the Caribbean." Vassall also represented “the interests of several New England merchants on the island.” He served as commissioner of the highways in 1652, and in 1655, “he was appointed a commissioner for implementing the Navigation Acts.”
The Vassalls’ “family life in St. Michael was one of lavish magnificence," although the people they enslaved were subjected to the "crudest" of conditions. 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." Sugar slavery was “hugely profitable,” despite being “one of the most deadly forms of slavery ever invented.” “Returns from the commodities produced by enslaved people were so great that it was profitable to work African men, women and children to death.” On average, workers died within seven years of enslavement. 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." When courts began emancipating slaves who converted to Christianity, "slave owners adapted: they introduced a new language of exclusion based on 'whiteness' rather than Christian status."
Vassall made his will in Barbados on 13 July 1655. One-third of his estates in Barbados, New England, and elsewhere went to his only son, John; the remaining two-thirds was divided evenly between his daughters. Vassall's wife Anna King is unnamed in the document. Vassall chose son John as his sole executor and directed son-in-law Nicholas Ware, husband of Anna, to remain on the plantation, acting as manager until John's order or arrival. Vassall did not sign the document, but “made his mark” in the presence of witnesses, suggesting he suffered injury or infirmity.
Legacy
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.” 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. “These migrations and the economic and familial ties they cemented lay at the core of Virginia’s slave trade."
In 1669, John Vassall was granted 1,000 acres near the mouth of the Black River in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, where he bought an additional 4,000 acres in 1672. The Vassalls continued to expand their ownership of people and land 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. Vassalls owned ten plantations in St. Elizabeth: Content, Lower Works Pen, Luana, Middle Quarter, Middlesex Pen, New Savannah, Pond Pen, Top Hill Pen, Vineyard Pen, and Y.S; three plantations in Hanover: Abingdon, Green Island River, and Newfound River; two plantations in Westmoreland: Friendship and Greenwich, and Sweet River Pen; and one plantation in St. James: Seven Rivers.
Wills probated between 1714 and 1827 identified 3,282 individuals enslaved by the Vassalls. Following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 and the subsequent Slave Compensation Act 1837, Vassall descendants claimed full compensation for six properties and 583 enslaved people. That data does not include those enslaved during the Vassalls first 66 years as planters, nor does it fully account for those enslaved by the family in Jamaica or in their homes overseas. Thus, in addition to the documented 3,865 men, women, and children enslaved by William Vassall and his descendants, hundreds more remain uncounted and unknown.
Plantation wealth made William Vassall's descendants prominent in the colony he had helped found.
Grandson Leonard Vassall (1678–1737) commissioned the building of a mansion in Quincy, Massachusetts. Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams later made Peacefield their home. 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,” and in 1728, he posted the bond for the purchase of land to build Trinity Church, Boston. Leonard Vassall's slave ownership at probate was 131 people, including 51 children; 73% of his total wealth was the value of the people he enslaved.