Quincy, Massachusetts

“ Samuel Quincy, the subject of this memoir, was the second son of Colonel Josiah Quincy, and the brother of Josiah, Junior, and Edmund. He was born in that part of Braintree now Quincy, April 23, 1735. He graduated at Harvard College in 1754, and studied law with Benjamin Pratt.
Endowed with fine talents, Mr. Quincy became eminent in the profession of the law, and succeeded Jonathan Sewall as Solicitor-General of Massachusetts. He was the intimate friend of many of the most distinguished [368] men of that period, among whom was John Adams. ”

“ An ornamental villa has replaced his old house, which was burnt, and the homestead has gone to strangers. Close by Webster's is the grave of the early Pilgrim Governor Winslow, whose quaint old dwelling is near. Quincy is famous as 27 the home of the greatest families of the original colony of Massachusetts Bay—Quincy and Adams. The antique church of Quincy, known as the Adams Temple, has in the yard the graves of the two Presidents Adams, father and son. John Hancock, whose bold signature leads the Congress in the Declaration of Independence, was a native of Quincy. ”

“ You ask me also how it happens that I am living again "near by Quincy?" As true as you live, I never thought of the coincidence. If you please, we pronounce it "Kansee." When I read your question I laughed. I remembered that Abelard, when he was first condemned, retired to the Hermitage of Quincy, but when I took down Larousse to look it up, what do you think I found? Simply this and nothing more: "Quincy: Ville des Etats-Unis (Massachusetts) , 28,000 habitants." ”

“ Men of all parties united in just tributes to the memory of John Quincy Adams. The halls of Congress resounded with voices of apt eulogy. After a pathetic discourse by the Chaplain of the House of Representatives, the remains of the departed statesman were followed by his family and immediate friends, and by the senators and representatives of the State of Massachusetts, as chief mourners. ”

“ The constitutions of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are both the work of the people—one of the Union, the other of the State—not of the whole people by the phantom of universal suffrage, but of the whole people by that portion of them capable of contracting for the whole. ”

“ His health had failed seriously during the latter months of his residence in England, and his physicians strongly advised against his taking a winter voyage.
His sense of public duty, however, overbore all personal considerations, and he set sail on the 16th of March, 1775, and died off Gloucester, Massachusetts, on the 26th of April.
The citizens of Gloucester buried him with all honor in their graveyard; after the siege of Boston, he was removed and placed in a vault in the burying ground in Braintree. Josiah Quincy was barely thirty-one years of age when he thus died. ”

“ Therefore, until that portion of the citizens of Massachusetts whose rights were violated by the article in the Missouri compromise should be reintegrated in the full enjoyment and possession of those rights, no clause or article of the constitution of the United States should, within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, be so understood as to authorize any person whatsoever to claim the property or possession of a human being as a slave ”

“ Memorial paper in black and gray placed on many walls soon after the death of Washington. The example photographed was on a hall and stairway. (p.88)
Plate XXIX. Dorothy Quincy Wedding Paper.
On the Dorothy Quincy house on Hancock Street, at Quincy, Mass., now the headquarters of the Colonial Dames of Massachusetts. It was imported from Paris in honor of the marriage of Dorothy Quincy and John Hancock in 1775, and still hangs on the walls of the large north parlor. Venus and Cupid are printed in blue, the floral decorations in red. The colors are still unfaded. ”

“ He shows, from the history of Massachusetts, that the fundamental principle asserted in the fifth article of our declaration of rights, that all power resides originally in the people, is derived from the above-named writers, and explains how this power has been practically exercised by the people of that state. ”

“ It includes traces of the early settlements of Virginia, New England, Pennsylvania, and New York; of the causes of each, and the spirit in which they were made and conducted, and of the principles which they applied in their intercourse with the aboriginals of the forest. He then proceeds to give an account of the confederation of the four New England colonies, Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven, in 1643, with appropriate statements of the principles and conduct of the founders of each settlement, and of the character and motives of the leaders of each of them. ”

“ The Sanitary Commission received us with open arms and some delicious milk-punch, and in a few minutes we were under full steam out of rebeldom, Sergeant Holloway and I leaning on the guards, watching the foam fly past, and singing, sotto voce,—“We’re going home, we’re going home, we’re going home to die no more!”
We were two days on board the flag-of-truce boat. The next cot to mine was occupied by a man of a Massachusetts regiment, taken at the first Bull Run. He was almost a skeleton, and the worst case of chills and fever I ever saw. ”

“ A hundred years earlier, such safeguards as his would have secured any young man’s success; and although in 1838 their value was not very great compared with what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of starting a twentieth century career from a nest of associations so colonial,—so trogloditic,—as the First Church, the Boston State House, Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long after he had witnessed the solution. ”

“ Quincy made preparation for an immediate departure.
“Mrs. Hawkins, I must go to Boston at once with Mr. Merry. Will you have Andrew get a team ready for me? I will leave it at the Eagle Hotel. I know the way home.”
“You ought to,” said she. “You've druv it times enough.”
“What will you do with yourself all day, Alice? I must go to the State House on business, but I'll be back by six o'clock.” ”

“ Of the Quincy family, whose sedate jest it was that the estate descended from 'Siah to 'Siah, so frequent was the name "Josiah," the best known is perhaps the Josiah Quincy who was Mayor of Boston for six years and president of Harvard for sixteen. The portrait of his long, thin face is part of every New England history, and his busy, serene life, "compacted of Roman and Puritan virtues," is still upheld to all American children as a model of high citizenship. ”

“ He walked along the beach, savagely kicking his toes into the white sand. "Johnnie!" She had called him Johnnie. And the way she had looked at him, too! Again John Quincy felt that sharp pang in his heart. Foolish, foolish; better go back to Boston and forget. Peaceful old Boston, that was where he belonged. He was an old man out here—thirty, nearly. Better go away and leave these children to love and the moonlit beach.
Miss Minerva had gone in the big car to call on friends, and the house was quiet as the tomb. John Quincy wandered aimlessly about the rooms, gloomy and bereft. ”

“ It might be said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of ‘Wensley’ (it came so near being a first-rate novel) , and by his Life of Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to the New York Tribune. ”

“ He liked the Adams side best, but for no other reason than that it reminded him of the country, the summer, and the absence of restraint. Yet he felt also that Quincy was in a way inferior to Boston, and that socially Boston looked down on Quincy. The reason was clear enough even to a five-year-old child. Quincy had no Boston style. Little enough style had either; a simpler manner of life and thought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling. The flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams used to light his own fires in the early morning was still on the mantel-piece of his study. ”

“ Whoever the future historian of the Anti-Slavery movement may be, he will not be able to compile a correct history of this great struggle, without consulting the writings of Edmund Quincy, a member of one of the wealthiest, patriotic, and aristocratic families in New England: the prestige of his name is a passport to all that the heart could wish. ”

“ Smart young officer rushes up: “Hallo, Captain Quincy! thought it must be you. How are you?” “Well,” said I, “I’m glad you thought it was I; but whether it’s you or not I’m sure I don’t know, for I should say I had never set eyes on you before.” “What, you don’t know the man you identified yesterday?” And it turned out to be a lieutenant of a Western regiment, and fellow-prisoner, all of whose clothing in the Libby consisted of shirt, trowsers, and army blanket pinned over his shoulders. ”

“ There are ever so many things in the house today to call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath. Take away its Hoars, Lowells, Holmeses, Adamses, Wendells, Hancocks, Sewalls—to mention only a few of the Quincy connections—and what, indeed, becomes of New England? ”

“ And through the minor harmony of dripping leafage and fulsome roads and drench-stained houses came a fret of chill, too slight to retrieve the season from its languor, yet real enough to stultify the warmth.
This was the setting of Quincy’s birth.
In from Main Street and away from the salt air that fluttered toward it like a curtain’s fringe, a paltry, sordid stretch of lights; a road much rutted by last summer’s traffic; a straggling array of shops, saloons, dim and bedraggled with the rain—the heart of Harriet, Long Island. ”

“ It is astonishing to enumerate the notable public men, who have been influential in establishing our national policy, who have come from Quincy. There is no town in this entire country which can equal the record. What other town ever produced two Presidents of the United States, an Ambassador to Great Britain, a Governor of the Commonwealth, a Mayor of Boston, two presidents of [Pg 44] Harvard University, and judges, chief justices, statesmen, and orators in such quantity and of such quality? ”

“ In 1801 the overthrow of the Federalist Party drove her and her husband to America, and she became at last a member of the Quincy household, but by that time her children needed all her attention, and she remained there with occasional winters in Boston and Washington, till 1809. Her husband was made Senator in 1803, and in 1809 was appointed Minister to Russia. ”

“ CHAPTER XIX. — BOYHOOD TO MANHOOD
Until he was fourteen years of age, young Quincy attended the public schools in Fernborough and Cottonton. While in England he had had a governess and later a tutor, so that when he reached America he was much farther advanced than Fernborough boys of his own age. Methods in the New England town were different, however, and his Uncle Ezekiel was satisfied to have him keep pace with the others, and not arouse antagonism by asking for any special promotion. ”

“ Now—I come into this harbor, I look around me, and I get the oddest feeling. I feel that I've been here before."
The girl's face was sympathetic. "Other people have had that experience," she told him. "Choice souls, they are. You've been a long time coming, but you're home at last." She held out a slim brown hand. "Welcome to your city," she said.
John Quincy solemnly shook hands. "Oh, no," he corrected gently. "Boston's my city. I belong there, naturally. But this—this is familiar." He glanced northward at the low hills sheltering the Valley of the Moon, then back at San Francisco. ”

“ When he reached the post office he found a letter from his father, informing him his mother and sisters were going to New York for a two weeks' visit and would very much like to see him if he would run up the next day.
Quincy's mind was made up instantly. He drove to the hotel, left the team, with instructions to have it ready for him when he came down on the express that reached Eastborough Centre at 7.15 P.M., ran for the station and caught on to the back platform of the last car as it sped on its way to Boston. ”

“ Quincy went to England doing much to promote the good of his country.
He died upon the homeward voyage in 1775, in sight of American shores. His son Josiah, three years old at the time of his father's death, was educated at Harvard University, became a lawyer, a member of Congress, and having filled acceptably various other offices, was at length elected President of Harvard, which position he held for fifteen years. He had a son Josiah, also a graduate of Harvard, and again the fifth Josiah in the line is a graduate of the same institution. ”

“ They did not remain in New York but took the first train for Boston. They were driven to the Mount Vernon Street house.
“I knew you were coming,” cried Maude, as she ran eagerly down the steps to meet them.
“Who has turned traitor? I pledged them all to secrecy,” cried Quincy.
“Harry told me, and I had a cablegram from Florence.”
“Did she use my name? If so, we are undone and the reporters will swarm like bees.”
“You are safe,” said Maude. “The message read: Brother found. Keep quiet.”
Tom was prevailed upon to remain in Boston until Quincy could go to Fernborough. ”