Revolution 250 Podcast
Revolution 250 Podcast
Josiah Quincy with Janet Uhlar
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Josiah Quincy, known as "Josiah the Patriot" was one of the brilliant lights of the Revolutionary cause in Boston. He came from a well-known and well-respected family and as a young lawyer he worked with John Adams to defend Captain Thomas Preston in his trial for murder stemming from the Boston Massacre. Learn more about this impressive young man who died in 1775, depriving a soon-to-be independent America of his passion for liberty and the rights of man. Janet Uhlar, author of Liberty's Martyr, a biography of Joseph Warren, and Freedom's Cost: The Story of Nathanael Greene, talks with us about the brief but brilliant life of Josiah Quincy, Jr.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Revolution 250 podcast.
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I'm Bob Allison.
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I chair the Rev 250 advisory group, and Revolution 250 is a consortium among 70 groups in Massachusetts looking at ways to commemorate the anniversaries of American independence.
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And our guest today is Janet Euler.
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Janet, welcome to the podcast.
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Thank you very much, Bob.
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and janet is a historian she's written two books so far on history one is freedom's cost the story of nathaniel green and the other is liberty's martyr the story of joseph warren and today we're here to talk about josiah quincy jr who is one of these great characters that we know too little about so what can you tell what so how did you get interested in josiah quincy
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I got interested in him in elementary school.
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My fourth grade teacher said whoever read the most books that year was going to get a prize at the end of the year.
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So I read the most books.
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I don't remember the prize.
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And I remember one book specifically, and it was Johnny Tremaine by Esther Forbes.
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And in that book, she brings forth historical characters that we all grow up knowing about, Paul Revere, Sam Adams, John Hancock.
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But she also brought forth Dr. Joseph Warren and Josiah Quincy.
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And I had never heard of them before.
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And I never heard of them throughout my formal schooling.
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And it was strange, especially since I grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts.
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So, yeah.
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So I began looking into them.
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Actually, when I had my own children, I was homeschooling and trying to put together some historical stuff for them and started investigating them.
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the two of them.
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And I was absolutely astonished by what I found and shocked that we don't know much about them because had they not accomplished what they did in their short lives, our history would be vastly different, I believe.
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It certainly would.
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And it's interesting that both Warren and Quincy died before the war began, but both had a tremendous impact in that decade before.
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And Quincy's, in fact, his nickname was the Patriot.
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Yes, absolutely.
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He was so consumed with the nation and patriotism and what was happening in Boston.
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Yeah.
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And so he was a lawyer and he was very, actually a very able lawyer.
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He and John Adams collaborated on the Boston Massacre trial.
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And that's something, you know, Bob, that saddens me because the reality of it was that the captain, the British captain of that guard that ended up going to trial for the massacre, came to young Josiah Quincy initially to ask his help.
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My understanding is the Tory attorneys had turned him down because it was just such a volatile situation and case.
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They didn't want to touch it.
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So he went to Quincy, who was only 26 years old at the time, and asked him.
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And it was Josiah Quincy who went to John Adams and asked for his assistance in the case.
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And further, and I think it's very sad, you know, HBO did the series John Adams, and they didn't include the fact.
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They skipped the fact of the trial.
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And here you have young Josiah Quincy defending the British, who he's politically opposed to.
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And his own brother is the court appointed or crown appointed solicitor general who's going against the British.
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And that's against his political standing.
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So a very dramatic scene that nobody's picked up on.
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And then Quincy's father also can't believe he's doing this.
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He writes asking why you're defending them.
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Yeah, all of them, Joseph Warren, all of them, you know, were a little bit upset about it.
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But Quincy's passion, again, for the rights of a man drove him to do it because if they were going to stand up for the basic rights of an individual, how could these British soldiers be denied a proper defense?
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Right.
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Right.
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It's really a profile in courage when Josiah Quincy takes this case against the advice of his father, who thinks he's throwing away his political career, and people like Joseph Warren, Samuel Adams, and others.
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Now, he was young, but he had already been compiling the records of the courts, that is, he had been transcribing the records of the Superior Court, which is a massive undertaking.
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It is.
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He had a passion for the law.
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And even as an undergrad at Harvard, we're talking 14, 15, 16, 17-year-old here, he was going to as many trials as he could to write down what he was hearing at the trials.
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This, of course, was before stenographers or anything like that.
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So we do have a record of some of the trials because of young Josiah Quincy.
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Yes.
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And then he also keeps a journal.
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The Colonial Society has just published several volumes of his writing.
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So Quincy's Southern Journal is one of the really striking documents because I think he goes south to recover his health because he's suffering from tuberculosis.
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That's right.
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Yes, he did.
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And he went down by sea, took a ship down south.
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He went as far as South Carolina, then came back by land.
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And on the way back, he stopped at the different colonies and kept a journal.
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He was journaling about all sorts of things, about slavery.
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He was journaling about politics, about the court system in each colony.
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And he was also, as he did this, kind of solidifying the committees of correspondence within the colonies and between the colonies.
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which I propose was a vital thing he did in order to unite the colonies.
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Yeah.
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So it's not simply for his health.
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He's actually performing a very valuable political service.
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Right.
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He never seemed to do anything just for himself.
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He was always too bold.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Now, has he married?
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Is he married?
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Does he have children?
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He did get married to Abigail Phillips, Phillips Academy.
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Her brother founded that.
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And they had three children.
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Two of them died in infancy and only one survived.
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And we'll talk about his trip to Great Britain and about how that affected his family.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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OK, good.
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So he does go to Great Britain.
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Then why don't we talk about that?
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He, um, of course he had tuberculosis and he would have times when he was feeling good and times when he was feeling poorly and the winter season seemed to affect that certainly.
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Um, the inner group of the Patriot leaders in Boston at the time wanted to send somebody to Great Britain.
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basically to give accurate information to their friends in Great Britain and to get accurate information and bring it back to the colonies.
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And the members were basically afraid to go because as soon as they got there, they could be arrested, you know, and it wouldn't be good for them.
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And
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Josiah Quincy kind of pushed himself into it and said, look, you know, I think I'll be okay if I go.
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It would be safest for me.
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He had defended the king's troops, which was in favor.
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His brother was solicitor general for the crown, which, you know, would be favorable.
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And he was already dying.
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So if they threatened him with, you know, charging him with treason, he already had a death sentence on him.
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So he volunteered to go and also in the hopes that his health would improve in Great Britain.
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And so he made this secretive trip and it was highly secretive.
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And anything he wrote from Great Britain back to the colonies, whether it be to Sam Adams or to his wife or to his father, he used an alias name.
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And there were actually things that he refused to put in writing.
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that he said he would only speak them to either Samuel Adams or Joseph Warren.
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Wow.
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Now, he also meets with Benjamin Franklin when he is in London.
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He did.
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Benjamin Franklin actually went to school with his father to the Latin school in Boston.
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So they had that family connection.
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And, yeah, he did spend a lot of time with Benjamin Franklin when he was in London.
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So this is in 1774 when he's in London?
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Yes, and now are they trying to prevent a breach or are they trying to speed a breach up with Great Britain, do you think?
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The hope was to prevent it, I believe.
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I mean, at all costs, they didn't want to go to war.
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Even Joseph Warren in his writings frequently talks about growing with Great Britain like the oak and the ivy, you know, this type of thing that they were hoping, but
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He got to the point where they realized it couldn't happen.
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They had to break away.
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Now, you said he's not going to write down what he is doing there.
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So how can we reconstruct what he is doing when he's in Great Britain?
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He kept a journal.
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He always journaled or his day book.
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So we know different things he was doing, who he was meeting with.
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obviously he's not putting great detail in it about some things for fear could fall into the wrong hands.
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And this was the type of thing that he said he would only, um, you know, speak verbally to Adams or Warren.
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Right.
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Right.
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So, um, so what happens to the journals after he dies?
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What, what happens with those documents that he has been writing for his papers?
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Um,
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Well, first, when he made the trip back, he was asked by the Continental Congress and the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to come back to bring any information he had because things were getting to a boiling point.
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And he agreed to do that.
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So he set sail in March to come back with the information.
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And, of course, now he's traveling over the ocean in the cold winter.
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Right.
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And his health deteriorates quickly.
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Right.
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He has a sailor in attendance with him at the end who he dictates a couple of letters to, one to his wife, one to his father, and expresses to the sailor about the information he had only for Adams or Warren.
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And three days from the coast of Massachusetts, he died of tuberculosis.
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Oh, my goodness.
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Oh.
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Those, whatever he had to say, went with him to the grave.
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His letters were passed on to his mother and father.
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And his granddaughter, well, his son and his granddaughter kept the journals and put them together and had them published.
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His granddaughter had them published.
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Wow.
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So we're talking with Janet Euler about Josiah Quincy.
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And Janet Euler is the author of biographies of Nathaniel Green and Joseph Warren.
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And Josiah Quincy is one of the really important characters who looms large in the decade before the war for independence starts.
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And now his son goes on to have a political career as well.
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He does.
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His son went on to be mayor of Boston, president of Harvard.
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There were, starting with his father, Colonel Josiah Quincy, there were six Josiah Quincy's in descendancy.
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And all of them actually were very active politically and with education as well.
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President had three become mayors of Boston.
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Right.
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Yes.
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Now, you also, you give a talk where you talk about him as a spy.
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I wonder if you could elaborate on Josiah Quincy, the spy.
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That would be when he was in Great Britain because he's trying to get this information.
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He can't put it in writing.
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He's got to bring it back himself or, you know, sign under alias names.
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So he was acting in that capacity to some degree while he was there.
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And one of the things he had to put in the letters shortly before he died was that he had been deceived, I think is how he put it.
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So don't really know what he meant by that either.
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Well, well.
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Well, I guess if you're a spy, that's in the nature of doing this.
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Yeah.
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Now, is the city of Quincy named for Josiah Quincy or is it named for the Quincy family?
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It's named for his.
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It's a relative.
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It's Abigail Adams's grandfather, Colonel John Quincy, who it's named for.
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OK, so it's a relationship then between the Quincy's and the Adams's.
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Yes.
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Abigail was second cousin to Josiah.
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And then you have Dorothy Quincy, who would marry John Hancock, who was first cousin to him.
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And even a closer relationship when you think of it, their fathers, they were brothers, Edmund Quincy and Colonel Josiah Quincy.
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And in business together.
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And when Colonel Josiah Quincy would travel basically the world, they were in the merchandise business.
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Edmund Quincy.
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would take care of both families.
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And both families lived very close to each other at all times so that one brother could oversee both families.
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So Dorothy, Mrs. Joan Hancock, and Josiah would have been more like a brother and sister.
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Interesting, interesting.
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And so there was a, is there still a Quincy home in Quincy?
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There are two Quincy homes in Quincy.
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There is the Dorothy Quincy homestead, which is where Dorothy Quincy was raised.
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And of course, Josiah Quincy would have spent a lot of time there because the two families were combined so often.
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His father, Colonel Josiah Quincy, had purchased the home that John Hancock was born in, which was within, you could see both houses, you know, clearly they were very close.
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That burnt to the ground, and he built another house over in the Wollaston area of Quincy, which is still standing.
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It is the Colonel Josiah House, Josiah Quincy House.
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Now, in the Abigail Phillips, is she also related to Jonathan Phillips, who is the first mayor of Boston, or is that not a relation to him?
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I don't know, to tell you the truth.
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I know she was related to the Phillipses of Phillips Academy.
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Okay, okay, pretty good.
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We're talking with Janet Euler about Josiah Quincy, a no longer forgotten patriot, since we're talking about him.
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Now, does he write much for the press during the time he is active in politics?
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Oh, absolutely.
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He frequently would write for the press, and again, when
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These men would write for the press often.
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They would use alias names, not name themselves for fear of coming back on them.
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But yes, he did.
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How did he get to know Joseph Warren?
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Joseph Warren was his physician.
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Yeah, and they belonged to the same groups, the same clubs, the political clubs that were organized in Boston.
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Was Quincy a Mason?
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I don't know that he was, his father was, and his brother was.
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I have never actually seen anything stating that Josiah Jr.
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was.
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And that's an interesting thing you brought up because as far as Joseph Warren goes, who I hope we talk about in another podcast, that was a huge thing and had an influence really in things that happened in Boston, more than people realize.
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Now, do you think his defense of the British soldiers hurt him in the eyes of people like Warren or Samuel Adams?
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Absolutely not.
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No.
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I mean, ultimately, I think they had more respect for him because he was living by what he believed.
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Everybody had these inalienable rights, including these British soldiers.
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So he was putting it into practice what they were trying to teach the people, if you will.
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Now, you mentioned that when he goes to South Carolina, he writes about slavery.
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Can you tell us any of the things he might have said or what position he was taking on that?
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He was against slavery, deplored it, really.
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And he would write about the way the different colonies treated their slaves, South Carolina being the worst among them and kind of getting progressively better as he went north.
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But yeah, he was absolutely against slavery.
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Do you know if the Quincy's owned any people?
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We're not sure.
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I know there was documentation of a runaway slave at one point named Josiah Quincy.
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Now, whether that slave belonged to the Quincy family or just happened to have that name, I don't think it's ever been determined.
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Interesting.
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Did they also have a farm?
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It sounds like they were a pretty well-established family.
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They had a lot of land.
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Their ancestor, Edmund Quincy, excuse me,
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Edmund Quincy had come over in the 1600s and had been given a huge amount of land in what is now Quincy.
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And of course, this passed down to his children and then to eventually to Edmund and Colonel Josiah Quincy.
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Now, I know, Janet, in addition to being a historian, you're also a nurse.
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And I think tuberculosis is one of those diseases which once was so endemic, and now it's really under control.
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I can't remember if you can tell us a little bit about this terrible disease such as Iaquinzi had.
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It was a horrible disease and, of course, no cure for it back then.
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So it would actually, usually it affected the lungs.
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It could affect other parts of the body as well.
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And the early symptoms would have been a cough, you know, that would last a few weeks and exhaustion, fatigue.
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And when you look at his life and think that he was suffering with this for a number of years, his older brother had died from it.
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His older brother, Ned, went to the West Indies to try to get better and on his way actually died of tuberculosis and was buried at sea.
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And that was only in 1768.
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So then Josiah is ill and ultimately when he was dying with it, it would have been a horrific, horrific experience in that your lungs fill up with fluid and you're actually drowning in your own fluid.
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It's called consumption too.
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It was, yes.
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The white plague, which is, is it caused by a virus?
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It is caused by a bacteria.
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I'll pry wrong on this now.
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But it is treated today easily enough.
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But if you don't get it fast enough, you could still die from it today.
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And it's contagious by droplet infection.
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So it easily passed on.
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Right, in an enclosed area, which a lot of people were, yes.
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So how does he, you know, his brother Samuel becomes the prosecutor, he is the defense lawyer.
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I'm just wondering about
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the family dynamic.
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And you can tell us in a bit what happens to Samuel Quincy after this.
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The Colonel is on the Patriot side.
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And one son, at least, is loyal to the crown, and one who dies isn't.
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So what happens with the Quincy family after the war?
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Well, we have before the war, as I said, the oldest son dies of consumption.
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When in April, when things were coming to a head at Lexington and Concord, Samuel Quincy, who had the crown appointment as Solicitor General of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he actually leaves Massachusetts.
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And he didn't realize it, nor did his younger brother, Josiah, that they probably passed each other in the ocean, one coming back from England and the other one heading in that direction.
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And Samuel would never return.
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to America again.
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So the father, in fact, lost three sons and all three of them, tragically enough, died at sea.
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Even Samuel would die at sea eventually in his old age.
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Wow.
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So were there any Quincy sons left then after that?
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Samuel had sons.
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We don't hear much about them.
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Josiah had one son.
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He actually had three children.
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Two of them died in infancy.
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His daughter was just a few months old when he left to go to Great Britain.
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And she died only two weeks before he died.
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So his wife is faced with this double tragedy.
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And she has the one son left, who is Josiah Quincy III, and would go on to become the mayor and the president of Harvard.
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So what does she do after her husband's been away for a year or two and then dies?
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And so what happens to Abigail Quincy after her husband's death?
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She went to live with her family in Norwich, Connecticut, and stayed there for a while.
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She never remarried.
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She lived, I think it was 23 years after Josiah's death.
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She died in 1798, I believe it was.
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And what she had told her son, Josiah III, was that upon her death, she wanted to be placed in the tomb next to her husband, who she still passionately loved.
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And what we do know, we don't know the details, if there was actually any service, any wake, anything like that.
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What we do know is Josiah Quincy III, at around midnight on the night she died,
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carries her body in March down and places it in the tomb next to his father's body.
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Wow.
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So this is in Quincy?
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It's in Quincy.
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Yeah, Hancock Cemetery.
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Yeah, in Quincy.
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Across from the church where the Adamses are buried.
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Yes, yes.
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And then his father, Josiah Jr., had put in his will that he wanted his father to be buried with him as well.
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And when his father passed away, rather than be buried in the tomb with his son out of respect, he had his body placed at the base of his tomb.
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Oh, my goodness.
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Wow.
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This is fascinating stories about these people, the Quinzies and their circle.
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We're talking with Janet Euler, who is the author of Freedom's Cost, the story of Nathaniel Green, and Liberty's March, or the story of Joseph Warren.
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And I'm hoping that soon there will be a story of Josiah Quincy that you'll be sharing.
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He is someone who deserves to be more widely remembered.
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He should be, yes.
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So and you said you were just talking this morning to a group of fifth graders about the revolution.
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So how receptive are they to the stories you're telling?
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They were wonderful.
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They were great.
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They're studying the American Revolution.
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It was my grandson's class, the combined fifth grade classes.
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And they were very receptive.
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A lot of questions, a lot of input on their part.
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It was great.
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What kinds of questions did they have?
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They were asking questions about why the war started, you know, and we were talking about the things that these forgotten patriots did.
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We focused in on Josiah Quincy and Joseph Warren in the pre-revolution.
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And so they had questions about, you know, what they accomplished.
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And we talked about had they not accomplished what they did, had they not accepted the challenges put to them, our history would be vastly different.
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Oh, it definitely would be, yes.
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How do you account for Josiah Quincy becoming such an advocate for the rights of men and becoming such a patriot at this young age?
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It's hard to say.
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His upbringing, I would think.
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Just why him more than others, I'm not sure.
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But he did...
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end up giving the commencement speech when he got his master's degree in law from Harvard.
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And he gave the commencement speech on patriotism, on liberty.
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And following the speech, normally being an attorney now, he would get the long robe of the barrister.
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But his speech was so filled with zeal for patriotism that the governor of this colony failed to give him the barrister's robe.
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But he accepted it.
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Yeah, he accepted it, went on with it, and it didn't affect his legal profession.
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In fact, he probably had one of the best legal practices in Boston at the time.
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Now, which governor was that?
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It was Bernard and Hutchinson at the time.
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Yeah, governor and lieutenant governor.
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So they would have been at the commencement when he is giving his... Right.
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Probably...
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not not happy with it and of course it was a huge event those commencements people from all over would come to those events so yeah he was reaching a lot of people and one of the people that he did reach with that was of course sam adams who would be at every commencement and watching the young men that were coming out of harvard yes so is this how he got connected with samuel adams it seems to be the the way he did and was invited into the inner circle of the patriot leaders yeah
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So he and Warren and Adams also write the Boston kind of report at the end of 1772, which is calling on the towns to get together and oppose British policy.
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So it seems like very quickly he's becoming a rising figure, even as he's tragically dying.
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Right.
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He actually, the first writings we see of him in the newspapers are in 1767.
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So yeah, pretty young.
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And he was like this brilliant star flashing across the sky, you know, so much energy and just, yeah, he was gone.
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So do you think, I don't know if we like to speculate or if we don't like to speculate about how things might have been different had he lived?
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Oh, absolutely.
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Speculate.
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Had he lived, had he been healthy?
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I think he would have been part of the continental Congress.
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I think he may have been our first Supreme Court Chief Justice.
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You know, I mean, he was a genius in law and he had such a passion for the law that I could easily see him getting appointed to that position.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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The Colonial Society, in addition to his journals, has reprinted Quincy's reports.
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That is, these reports he wrote, which have been they were in print, but on 19th century paper that was crumbling.
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So it was really and we the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts was happy to get a set of these really important documents that show that what was happening in the courtrooms in the 1760s and 1770s in Suffolk County and in Massachusetts.
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very, very good court reporter.
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And as you said, really a genius at the law, understanding the law.
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Absolutely.
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And like I said, when he did his Southern tour and he wanted to study the way the different colonies, you know, had, had their courtrooms and their laws, which might've been different from Massachusetts being different colonies.
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So he was fascinated by all of that.
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Yeah.
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So how did he and John Adams get along after the massacre trial?
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Did they have much to do with each other?
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Yeah, because they were in that inner core, that inner group.
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They did, but he got forgotten because he's dead at 31, Josiah Quincy.
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John Adams kind of gets all the credit and the glory for the Boston Massacre trials.
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I mean, it was a great tragedy, like I said in the HBO series, that when they showed the Boston Massacre trial, that they didn't put the factual thing of the two brothers in.
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face-to-face in that courtroom.
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It would have been a marvelous, marvelous story.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But again, it was called John Adams and not John Adams.
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It was, it was.
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But it's just tragic that we forget the ones that died early on.
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And as I said, definitely for Josiah Quincy, between
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his, um, helping to establish the committees of correspondence, even between the colonies.
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Um, he's the one that wrote the reaction to the Boston port bill that circulated in, in Europe.
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Um, he just, and, and the defense of the British soldiers also, because it proved that this was a belief and ideal they had for all men, not just for the colonists.
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And, um,
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It really, if he hadn't done these things, I really think our history would be different.
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I do.
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It would, because he very clearly makes the case, and as you said, it's not just for us, that these human rights are universal.
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And this is what they're making their claim about.
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It's not, we don't want you to kick us around.
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We don't want anyone to be kicked around.
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These fundamental human rights are really what Quincy is advocating, in which the revolution really is meant to secure.
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And I think had he lived, again, going back to that, because he had such
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strong feelings against slavery, that might have been something that was brought to the forefront to deal with sooner than it was.
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Yeah, because here he is going to South Carolina and seeing people who are political allies, but he's absolutely appalled at the institution of slavery.
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Absolutely, absolutely.
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So I can see if he had lived that that would have been discussed.
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Yes.
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So we have been talking with Janet Euler, who has written a biography of Nathaniel Green, Freedom's Cost, and a biography of General Dr. Joseph Warren, Liberty's Martyr, and now has been talking with us about Josiah Quincy, someone who does deserve to be more widely remembered.
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Anything else we should add, Janet, before we let you go?
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Well, you know, it's what I tell the children today, that what we do, choices we make,
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whether or not we accept the challenges we're faced with can define a lot, define us and could define history.
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So it's important to be aware, to know our history and to be willing to do what we need to do to keep these freedoms.
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absolutely so thank you very much for joining us and thank you thank you to jonathan lane our producer and i want to thank you know janet when we started doing these podcasts we thought we'd have a few of our friends in and around boston listening we have folks all over the world who are
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regular listeners so i'd like to thank well all of them but more specifically this week our friends in quincy massachusetts and quincy illinois as well as apple valley california and old bridge new jersey and all points between and if you're in one of these places and would like to get some of our rev 250 material send an email to jonathan lane j lane at revolution 250.org so thank you janet and now we will be piped out on the road to ball