WIREFRAME ONLY - NOT YET DESIGNED
1712 - 1780
Jonathan Ashley was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1712. He was 14 years old when his father sent him to Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut amd only 20 years old when he was ordained as Deerfield’s minister in 1732. Hierarchical and social assumptions of the day nonetheless ranked the newly-minted Yale graduate among Deerfield’s most prominent families. The town, which by Massachusetts law was required to support a minister, offered Ashley generous terms that included a guaranteed annual salary as well as land and money to purchase a substantial dwelling. The offer was not merely an inducement for Ashley to take the job. The terms would help ensure that Deerfield’s pastor would be able to conduct and maintain himself and his family in the style befitting a man of his station in life. Ashley further enhanced his status by marrying Dorothy Williams, a union that allied him with one of the region’s most powerful “River God” families.[ii]
Profession, income and family connections all placed Jonathan Ashley at the top of the hierarchy in his town and region. He acted accordingly, renovating the older home on the house lot he acquired at the north end of the village street. By replacing the house’s original large center chimney with two, smaller chimneys on each side of the house, Ashley was able to create a stylish center hallway in keeping with the genteel public image he and his family were expected to present. He remodeled the two front rooms to provide an appropriate backdrop for receiving and entertaining visitors and purchased three enslaved people--Jin, Cato, and Titus--whose presence and activities also supported the manners and lifestyle expected of Connecticut River Valley elites. Jin and her infant son arrived in the Ashley household nine months after Dorothy lost her first child. Jin and Cato served the Ashley family for the rest of their lives while Titus was enslaved in the household for ten years until Ashley sold him in 1761. [iii]
From his early days as a young minister until his death in 1780 at age 68, Ashley cultivated a stern and forbidding persona. During the Great Awakening of the 1740s, he opposed theological attacks on the authority of ministers by radicals like Jonathan Edwards in Northampton (a cousin by marriage.) Yet, surviving evidence suggests that in contrast to his austere demeanor, Ashley cared deeply for his family. In 1738, days after the death of his first child, a nine-month-old son, Ashley preached a sermon in which he expressed the anguish of parents whose faith was tested through the death of a child: “our all seems to Be taken away with them: our very Souls Seem to be Torn to pieces – the Springs of Nature all Loosened – our Life is often too much Bound up in theirs and we can hardly Bear to part with them.” “How much easier,” asked the minister and grieving father, “would iit
be often to have our houses, our lands, and our all taken if our friends might be Spared – but yet there is no case whatever in which God more often tries men than in this.”[iv]
In company with other New England ministers of the time, Jonathan Ashley both participated in and justified the practice of slavery. According to the influential Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather, writing in 1696, enslaved people
...are better Fed & better Clothed & better Managed by far
than you would be if you were your Own men. All that now remains for you is to
become first the Good Servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, & then of those
that have purchased you. . . .
Though you are in Slavery to men, yet you shall be the Free-men of
the Lord, the Children of God. Though you are Fed among the Dogs, with the Orts
[offal; scraps] of our Tables, yet you shall at length Lie down unto a Feast
with Abraham himself in the Heaven of the Blessed. Been’t you Discouraged; it
will be but a Little, a Little, a Little While, and all your pains will End in
Everlasting Joys. [v]
Decades later, in January 1749, Jonathan Ashley delivered a lecture to African Americans in Deerfield admonishing them to be "contented with your state & condition in the world":
Servants who are at the dispose & command of others, who it may be are despised in the world, may be the Lord’s freemen & hiers [heirs] of Glory. You must be contented with your state & condition in the world, and not murmur and complain of what God orders for you. You must be faithful in the places God puts you & not be eye servants- in vain to think to be Xts [Christ’s] freemen & be slothful servants. If you are Xts [Christ’s] freemen, you may contentedly be servants in the world. If you are not Xts [Christ’s] freemen, you will be slaves of the Devil. [vi]
Ashley almost certainly failed to convince Deerfield's enslaved community to be "contented" in their enslavement. Later that year, Prince escaped from the house of his wealthy enslaver, Joseph Barnard. Ashley's life-long, conservative commitment to the status quo placed him at odds with Whigs (Patriots) in Deerfield and surrounding towns at the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783). He died in 1780, an ardent Loyalist in the midst of heated controversy that divided the town into pro- and anti-Revolution factions. [vii]
[i] Amelia F. Miller, The Reverend Jonathan Ashley House, Deerfield, Massachusetts (Deerfield, Massachusetts: Heritage Foundation [Historic Deerfield;, Inc.] 1962,), p. 9; Barbara A. Mathews, “Family, 18th Century Style: The Ashleys of Deerfield” Historic Deerfield Magazine, Autumn 2013, Vol. 14, pp. 7-8.
[ii] Ibid, pp. 11-12.
[iii] Ibid, p. 8.
[iv] Cotton Mather, A Good Master Well-Served. A Brief Discourse on the Necessary Properties & Practices of a Good Servant in Every-Kind of Servitude; and of the Methods That Should be Taken by the Heads of a Family, to Obtain Such a Servant (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1696.)
[v] Jonathan Ashley, notes from an unpublished sermon to the enslaved residents of Deerfield, Massachusetts, January 23, 1749, The Historical Magazine and Notes and Queries concerning the Antiquities, History and Biography of America, Vol. I, Second Series, pp. 142-143 (March, 1867).
[vi] Mathews, “The Ashleys of Deerfield”, p. 12; Miller, The Reverend Jonathan Ashley House, pp. 27-31.