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Updated October 2, 2025, at 7:29 p.m.

A group of Harvard-affiliated researchers presented an extensive report Thursday on the people enslaved by the Vassall family, whose members were affiliated with the University and lived at the Longfellow House in Cambridge.

The report, spanning more than 260 pages, chronicles the lives of Cuba and Anthony Vassall and their children, who were enslaved by the Vassall family. The document describes in new detail the Black Vassalls’ efforts to win freedom, start their own businesses, and later advocate for abolition.

“They were always big players in a broader story,” said African and African American Studies lecturer Carla D. Martin, the project’s co-principal investigator, in an interview after the Thursday webinar. “The big focus change that we did was, we made them the center.”

The scholars conducted their research on the Vassalls independently of Harvard’s own slavery research effort, the $100 million Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative. The report will inform future visitor programming at the Longfellow House, a national historic site known as Washington’s Boston headquarters during the Revolutionary War and later as the residence of the famed poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Cuba and Anthony’s family were among thousands enslaved by the Vassalls between 1747 and 1774. Samuel Vassall, an ancestor of the Vassalls, also led the Guinea Company, which held a monopoly on the West African slave trade in the 17th century and helped make the slave trade a major industry.

“The white Vassalls were important slave traders,” said Caitlin G. DeAngelis, Martin’s co-principal investigator, in the presentation. “They weren’t minor slave traders or incidental slave traders.”

The Vassalls also had deep ties to Harvard. Many of the family’s sons attended the University — and were known to pay their tuition in plantation goods like molasses or sugar. The Vassalls were also connected by marriage to the Royalls, another slaveowning family who endowed Harvard’s first law professorship, and whose crest was used by Harvard Law School until 2016.

The report detailed how Cuba and Anthony saved money to buy their daughter’s manumission. It also covers how when the white Vassalls fled Cambridge to seek protection from the British army during the American Revolution, Cuba and Anthony’s family stayed behind on the property — even after it was converted into the headquarters for George Washington.

After the revolution, the Black Vassalls went on to own land and businesses in Cambridge, and eventually became heavily involved in the abolition movement in Massachusetts. Over the years, the Vassalls contributed to causes like the African Society, a Boston group that provided health insurance and funeral benefits to African Americans, and the Massasoit Guard, a militia group formed to protect enslaved people fleeing to the north.

The researchers began their work on the report in 2022.

A document from that year lists the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative as a partner on the project, and several of the researchers were employed by Harvard or previously worked on the Legacy of Slavery effort.

But DeAngelis and Martin said the project was independent and received no input or funding from the University. And unlike the Legacy of Slavery initiative, the researchers contacted and worked closely with descendants — inviting them on research trips to Harvard’s Houghton library and to the Caribbean, where the majority of the Vassall family’s holdings were located.

“I think that’s the only ethical way to do this work,” DeAngelis said. “That is our role as researchers — to use our expertise and to use our skills to pursue the things that are important to the descendants.”

The Legacy of Slavery initiative, meanwhile, has been mired in controversy. In September 2024, the project’s lead researcher, Richard J. Cellini, accused Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara N. Bleich of instructing him “not to find too many descendants.” Harvard has denied that Bleich issued any such directive.

Since then, Harvard has laid off its research team and outsourced the project entirely to the genealogical firm American Ancestors. Cellini has also launched his own independent effort to research Harvard’s ties to slavery and has been reaching out to descendents when he learns their ancestors were enslaved by University affiliates.

Martin said she hoped the research would support not just future efforts to study Harvard’s history of slavery, but also help descendants.

“Our hope is that this will support future researchers, but that it will also inform the descendant community as they attempt to better understand their links to these places,” said Martin.

—Staff writer Sophie Gao can be reached at sophie.gao@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at alexandra.kluzak@thecrimson.com.