JOHN ADAMS WHEEE AMEEICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN <©uincp, xt$ famous 45roup of ^attiot^; €^m SDee&i^, i^ome^, anti 2De?tentiantiBf BY DANIEL MUNRO WILSON WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1902 W^ a COPYRIGHT 1902 BY DANIEL MUNRO WILSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published December, iqoz TO MY WIFE I DEDICATE THIS BOOK PREFACE My interest in the eminent men and women who have brought renown to old Braintree and Quincy increased rather than diminished with the pub- lication of "The Chapel of Ease and Church of Statesmen." Continued research, as far as devotion to other duties permitted, beguiled me ever more along the line of the development of the ideas of liberty and independence as illus- trated in the aspirations and deeds of Sir Harry Vane, the Rev. John Wheelwright, the Hoars, the Adamses, the Quincys, and the Hancocks. Here manifestly was a story of patriotic vision and achievement which had not been adequately told, at least in its continuity through so many successive generations of the leading families. As its various aspects claimed attention, a lecture or an article was written, and the whole finally wrought into the shape presented in these pages. This manner in which the book grew occasions a few repetitions; but these, it is hoped, will only deepen the local coloring. vi PREFACE To many persons I am indebted for gener- ous cooperation, and eagerness to make acknow- ledgment is the real excuse for this preface. The writings of Charles Francis Adams the younger, especially his " Three Episodes in Massachusetts History," — that fascinating nar- rative of the life of a town and of the evolution of a State in one, — have afforded a wealth of facts and suggestions. Mrs. Sarah H. Swan's too brief " Story of an Old House," pubHshed in the " New England Magazine," yielded helpful material ; and the researches of Mr. Lewis Bass and Mr. Edwin W. Marsh of Quincy, two " of the few remaining specimens of the antique stock," profited me much. Through the courtesy of Mr. Adams, Mr. J. P. Quincy, and Miss AHce Bache Gould, I was enabled to secure photo- graphs of treasured portraits which appear among the illustrations. To Mr. Fred B. Rice and Mr. Harry L. Rice I am also indebted for photo- graphs and efficient cooperation. Foster Bro- thers and Mr. C. B. Webster of Boston kindly furnished artistic reproductions of portraits and pictures of Quincy homes and scenes ; the " New England Magazine " cordially permits the incor- poration of the article on Tutor Flynt; and the Massachusetts Historical Society generously gave PREFACE vii access to its treasures, so well represented in the sketches of Miss Ehza Susan Quincy. To these and all others who rendered assistance, and they are many, I extend my most grateful thanks. Daniel Munro Wilson. Brooklyn, N. Y., November, 1902. CONTENTS CHAP. TAQK I. Freedom's Heirs and Heritage .... 1 n. License before Liberty 14 ni. Liberty checked 27 IV. Judith and Joanna 42 V. The Great Advocate of Independence, John Adams G2 VI. The Puritan President, John Quincy Adams . . 106 VII. Charles Francis Adams and the War for the Union 122 VIII. The Colonial Colonels 147 IX. Dorothy Q. and Other Dorothys .... 191 X. Tutor Flynt, New England's Earliest Humorist 228 XI. Perambulation of Quincy 250 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAQE John Adams. By Copley Frontispiece Original in Memorial Hall, Harvard University. John Hancock. By Copley 10 Original in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Site of Anne Hutchinson's Farm 28 Mouth of "Mount Wollaston River" 28 Rev. John Wheelwright. Artist unknown 32 Original in State House, Boston. First Church from Old Burying-ground 56 Coddington's Newport House 56 Birthplace of the Presidents 68 Sketch by Miss E. S. Quincy, 1822. Abigail Adams. By Blythe 76 Owned by the Adams family. Adams Mansion (Vassall House) 98 Sketch by Miss E. S. Quincy, 1822. Quincy Village 102 Sketch by Miss E. S. Quincy, 1822. John Quincy Adams. By Copley 108 Original in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Owned by the Adams family. Louisa Catherine (Johnson) Adams. Artist unknown . . 108 Owned by the Adams family. Adams Mansion 118 From a recent photograph. Drawing-room in Adams Mansion 118 Photographed during occupancy of C. F. Adams. Charles Francis Adams 122 From a photograph. Abigail Brown (Brooks) Adams. By W. M. Hunt . . . 124 Owned by the Adams family. John Quincy Adams o 140 From a photograph. Charles Francis Adams, the Younger 142 From a recent photograph. Charles Francis Adams, 2d 144 xii LIST OF ILLUSTKATI0:NS Abigail Adams of to-day 144 Older Quincy Mansion 148 Judge Edmund Quincy. By Smibert 160 Original in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Owned by the Quincy family. From a photograph copyrighted 1897 by Foster Bros. Older Quincy Mansion 162 Sketch by Miss E. S. Quincy, 1822. Edmund Quincy 172 From a portrait owned by Mrs. S. Andrews of Roxbury. Elizabeth (Wendell) Quincy. By Smibert 172 Owned by Mrs. William D. Hodges. Colonel Josiah Quincy, 1709-84. By Copley 176 Owned by Mr. J. P. Quincy. Later Quincy Mansion, built by Colonel Quincy 176 Sketch by Miss E. S. Quincy, 1822. Samuel Quincy, the Tory. By Copley 178 Josiah Quincy, Jr. By Stuart 180 Original in the Old State House, Boston. President Josiah Quincy. By Stuart 182 Original in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. From a photograph copyrighted 1897 by Foster Bros. Josiah Quincy, Mayor of Boston, 184(5-48 186 Josiah Quincy, Mayor of Boston, 1895-99 188 "Dorothy Q." Artist unknown 204 Owned by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Dining-room Older Quincy Mansion 212 Dorothy Hancock. By Copley 224 Original in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Owned by Mr. Stephen Bo wen of Boston. " Dorothy Q." of to-day 226 Tutor Flynt 230 From an oil painting presented to Harvard College in 1787. Tutor Flynt's Study 234 Photographed during occupancy of Hon. Peter Butler. Tutor Flynt's Chamber 240 Quincy Centre 250 Henry H. Faxon 254 The Abigail Adams Cairn 258 Birthplace of President John Quincy Adams .... 258 Residence of Mrs. John Quincy Adams 262 Quarries of the Granite Railway Company 264 Thomas Crane 270 Crane Memorial Hall 270 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii John Alexander (Gordon, M. D 274 Adams Academy 276 Presidents' Lane 276 Adams Street 278 City HospiTAii 278 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPEN- DENCE BEGAN freedom's heirs and heritage American independence, still the latest heroic achievement of humanity, and momentous enough to furnish the date for the beginning of modern history, presents itself to the ordinary imagina- tion as the swift and common aspiration of a united people. Popularly it is supposed that at once and everywhere throughout the thirteen colonies, government by the consent of the gov- erned suddenly flamed wide and far as a noble ideal to be realized. And this is true, in the main, if we regard chiefly the armed conflict, that tragic drama, which registered the height of revolt against the oppressive measures of a mad king and his " deluded ministers." Spon- taneous was the outburst of patriotic valor from the river St. Croix to Florida. "Don't fire unless fired upon!" cried Captain Parker as the British regulars deployed before his minute-men on Lexington green, " but if they mean to have war let it begin here." And 2 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN " begin here " it did, a continent in arms re- sponding to its first volley. But long before that fateful prelude many of those who now rushed to arms had cherished the thought of independence. Although not commonly held, it was in the air, as is the nature of the next high human attainment, fitfully con- centrating in regions far apart, and flashing out in electric disturbances. More than this, it may be safely asserted that in certain parts of the country the people were self-governing from the moment they set foot on these shores. They woidd abide no interference with their " just liberties," and, as Burke said, they " snuffed the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze." Independence ! It was no new thing to them when first flimg as a battle-cry in the face of British aggression ; they had never been any- thing but independent. True are the words of Mellen Chamberlain, who writes, " The mainte- nance of independence, rather than its acquire- ment, originated in a province, but at length, and mainly through the influence of John Adams, controlled the heart of the continent." To the same effect is the utterance of John Adams him- self. Up to him many looked as to the source of the idea of American self-government. With be- coming modesty, as well as conspicuous wisdom, he wrote, " Independence of English Church and State was the fundamental principle of the first FREEDOM'S HEIRS AND HERITAGE 3 colonization, has been its general principle for two hundred years, and I hope now is past dis- pute. Who, then, was the author, inventor, dis- coverer of independence ? The only true answer must be, the first emigrants." Of New England's " first emigrants " this is especially true. Plymouth colony was a pure democracy from the beginning ; and in the de- velopment of the Puritan settlements nothing is more marked than the resolute way in which unequal laws, favored at first by the few, were thrust aside, and the audacious persistence with which all interference by the mother country was opposed. The old ways of thinking and the habitual deference to social traditions faded away, now that they were removed three thou- sand miles from England, and left them free men in a wide world where only what was free eventually flourished. Governor Winthrop and others of the " better sort " brought with them remnants of the rule of the English squirearchy. They doubted the ability of the common people to govern themselves. " The best part of the people is always the least," was the sage utter- ance of Winthrop, " and of the best part the wiser is always the lesser." Soon, however, is it rue- fully noted by minister Ward that " the spirits of the people run high and what they get they hold." In town meetings (how Jefferson wished Virginia had them in the hour of controversy ! ), 4 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN where all had equal voice if not equal vote ; in independent churches, where differences between '' brethren " gradually disappeared in the leveling sight of God, they exercised the natural and un- constrained rights of man. What to them was the " divine right of kings," when plain men could draw their laws from an open Bible and their manhood direct from the Almighty ? Thus it was that supremacy in human affairs was shifted from the hereditary prince, who felt him- self chosen of God, to farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen, who were persuaded they also had something divine in them. " Kings were made for the good of the people," declared James Otis in 1762, " and not the people for them." Long before that time many were troubled in theu' minds to know what kings were made for anyway. In their conflict with the Crown the settlers modestly claimed only the rights and liberties of Englishmen. They asked for no more ; they would be contented with nothing less. As a matter of fact, however, they enjoyed a degree of freedom far beyond the dreams of the Eng- lishman at home. But they had one thing in common with the men over sea, — a boundless respect for law and written documents. So be- cause they had a king's charter with a big seal, they were supported in their belief that it was only the ancient liberties of the mother country FREEDOM'S HEIRS AND HERITAGE 5 for which they were contending". The first gen- eration had not passed away when Governor Win- throp recorded what seemed to be the common opinion, — that their charter endowed them with " absolute powers of government ; for thereby we have power to make laws, to erect all sorts of magistracy, to correct, to punish, pardon, govern, and rule the people absolutely." That charter was a miraculous document. There was not any- thing in the way of human rights that they could not get out of it. As Daniel W. Howe writes in " The Puritan Republic," "the colonists viewed the charter granted them as a sort of compact guaranteeing them the right to set up an inde- pendent government of their own." Given them by Charles I., they quoted it against Charles II. They openly defied that " Merry Monarch " in his occasional attempts to seriously play the king. They were actually in rebellion, " and there is not the slightest doubt," says Howe, "that they would have been in armed rebellion if they had felt themselves ' abel ' to maintain it with any assurance of success." What the colonists were interpreting in this momentous controversy was not the charter, but human nature. Our ancestral god Thor, in his drinking bout with the giants, imagined he was draining only the great horn he put to his lips ; but the horn was secretly connected with the ocean, and it was the universal flood he was 6 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN straining to drink dry. So in drawing upon the charter for their Hberties the men of Massachu- setts were not merely exhausting the hmited ele- ments of that instrument : they w^ere imbibing principles of absolute right and justice from that infinite source, the aspiring heart of man, where the divine and human are one. Charles II. and his ministers looked with utter amazement and impatience upon this performance, and when the Massachusetts General Court insultingly delayed yet again to send agents to treat of our " patent liberties," sheltering themselves behind the ludi- crous excuse that " proper persons were afraid of the seas, as the Turkish pirate had lately taken their vessels," the king wath a rough hand hur- ried the decree through the Court of Chancery which forever " canceled and annihilated " the precious charter. Two years later, in 1686, the first royal governor, Edmund Andros, arrived in Boston. Behind him was the undivided power of En Of land and the wrath of the narrow-minded James II. Resistance w^as useless. Massachu- setts, wdth a contumaciousness beyond that of every other province, had longest resisted the im- position of a royal governor. Now for all her braving of absolutism, she was to feel the full measure of oppression. With hardly another privilege left them than " not to be sold as slaves," her people lay prostrate. The thing their independent spirits had feared had come FREEDOM'S HEIRS AND HERITAGE 7 upon them. In bitterness of soul they meditated upon it — and waited. When time should serve they would rest in no neglect of their overlords across the sea ; they would trust in no charter, in no word of a king-, for their liberties. Of all these limitations they would free themselves when God should grant them opportunity. The mo- ment struck, so it seemed to them, when in the Revolution of 1688 the Stuarts were swept from the throne. Andros was seized, " bound in chains and cords," and for five weeks or more a Committee of Safety carried on the business of government. I3ut the end was not yet. Another charter was thrust upon them, and other governors were set to rule over them. Not as in the days of Andros were they again crushed beneath the yoke of ruthless despotism. Tyranny became trans- formed into something like the suzerainty which modern nations conceive may be in keeping with a high degree of civilization. It was at times quite reasonable. Indeed, England never ex- ploited the colonies for her own benefit, if we leave out the colossal selfishness of her com- merce. The " taxation without representation " was to raise money to be used entirely in the provinces. " Not a farthing was to leave Amer- ica." Yet, however mild the rule, it was not that of free men : it was not with the entire con- sent of the governed. Emanating from a remote 8 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN and unsympathetic source, from a government in which they had no representation, from the will of a monarch who claimed to own them and their lands, it was in the nature of things capri- cious. The men of the Bay would have none of it. They contested every measure which did not originate with themselves. While some of the other provinces basked contentedly in the smiles of the royal governors and " far-off splen- dors of the Crown," they were in perpetual con- flict with Dudley, Hutchinson, and the rest. And when at last the sternest repressive measures were imposed upon the colonists, and many coun- seled submission, the stubborn resistance of the patriots of Massachusetts increased in sublimest proportion. Even Benjamin Franklin, acting as commissioner from Pennsylvania, acquiesced in the Stamp Act and was prepared to solicit posi- tions of stamp distributors for his friends ; but Boston led Hartford and other places in the Puritan colony in tumult against it. Thus the free spirit of the men of Massachu- setts, long disciplined in a strife which seemed discouragingly unequal, — the massive weight of old-world absolutism darkly arrayed against the cherished light of a new-world dawning, — beckoned the heroic road to armed revolt. Kesolutely followed the other colonists, daring all for what was seen to be the common cause, re- sponding generously with that " swift validity in FREEDOM'S HEIRS AND HERITAGE 9 noble veins." It was the test of American man- hood and ideals, and in their triumph was regis- tered the faithfulness and valor of the patriots. For precisely this manifestation of worth was waiting the next disclosure in human develop- ment. Thrilled are we to-day as the significance of the event looms large in the expanding power of the United States, whose fame and conquests (alas, that they are not all peaceable ! ) — " shower the fiery grain Of freedom broadcast over all that orbs Between the northern and the southern morn." Independence dowered man with the gift of himself — with the right to be himself and to express himself. For all time now, and for the multitude, the way is open for the free unfolding of that supreme marvel and mystery, man's own being. Robust and self-assertive may be the manner in which democracy, in these too strenu- ous days, improves its chance. It is life, unmis- takably, free and aspiring life, with the moral ideal for permanent law. In the complete fiber- ation of human energy which almost appalls us; in the swift gathering of immeasurable forces; in the alignment of the new and the old so con- fusedly mingled, we may still see the command- ing power of America's ideas of independence and of the rights of man. These flung into the surging advance of civilization surely must in some fateful measure order its course and sub- due its turbulence. 10 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN But obedience to the best for which the fathers fought halts at times deplorably; sorrowfully we are all saying it. Liberty is both abused and denied, — ideals are contemptuously flouted by brutal greed ; the people are exploited ; and independence won in the political field is threatened with defeat in the industrial field. Too new are the far-reaching commercial and industrial combinations of the hour for us to rightly estimate their effect upon individual liberty. Yet we surely know enough to realize that we have entered upon the next great phase in the evolution of society, and to fear that under the sway of vast corporations, both legitimate and buccaneering, we may all become under- lings. " And we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves." The situation is, in its intensity, peculiarly American, the logical outcome of our first vic- tory for independence. Here human energies were earliest liberated, and here they have come to their most amazing development. Our in- dustrial leaders, our trust magnates, our million- aires, are they not of the people, men from the ranks, who are winners in a game the most of us play or applaud ? The sons of liberty in all this Yankee nation, alert, direct in methods, are applying the marvels of their inventive genius JOHN HANCOCK FREEDOM'S HEIRS AND HERITAGE 11 and organizing capacity to the fecund earth and an expanding commerce, in a passion to make a living, and a good one. The resulting opulence, grasped at by most, is being garnered in aston- ishing heaps by the shrewd and enterprising. A perilous state of affairs, we say ; but is it not the result of the ^^ American idee: to make a man and let him be " ? And is not the situation relieved somewhat by the splendid administra- tive ability and unprecedented generosity exhib- ited ? We seem at times to be but one remove from the reign of the ideal captains of industry, who will consider their endowments as sacred as those of prophet, or teacher, or Father of his country, and consecrate themselves, their methods, and their opportunities to the service of their race. However this may be, the way out of our troubles, it is not too much to say, will be won by the same free energy which has brought us to where we are, — that is indomitable. We may be astounded at its excesses ; we must marvel at its possibilities. Independence jealously upheld before trusts and political '' bosses," and unselfishly communicated, as a sacrament, to the nation's wards is, as John Adams prophesied with his parting breath, " Independence forever ! " In no other community in the colony of Massachusetts was the love of independence more central than in the North Precinct of the old town of Braintree, later set off and 12 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPEISTDENCE BEGAN named Quincy. Nowhere else was the right of self-government more tenaciously held, and no other spot is more sacredly devoted to free- dom by the sacrifices and cherished visions of its inhabitants. So typical in its development that C. F. Adams, the younger, illustrates by it the unfolding thought and institutions of Massa- chusetts; it is also renowned for anticipating be- yond other towns the manifest destiny of the colonies. There the word Independence had its earliest historical utterance, and there some of its most illustrious champions had their origin. John Adams, the great advocate of inde- pendence, and Samuel Adams, the " Father of the American Revolution," had in Henry Adams of Braintree the same progenitor. They were cousins in the fourth generation from that " first emigrant," Henry. Though Samuel was born in Boston, September 16, 1722, he was so closely associated with the Braintree cousins and so allied to them in the essential qualities of character that it is not going too far afield to include him within that group of famous persons who made the annals of this ancient town on the south of Boston so memorable with their high aspirations and devoted patriotism. These two are commanding figures, but other men, sons of old Braintree and Quincy, men whose names will never be obliterated from the splendid page which tells the story of the Kevolution, stood FREEDOM'S HEIRS AND HERITAGE 13 with them, shoulder to shoulder in the hour of conflict. We have but to name the Quincys and John Hancock, to indicate their high character and achievements. Add to these Abigail Adams and the " Dorothy Q." who married Hancock, and there is presented a group of distinguished patriots hardly excelled by that which made famous the far larger town of Boston. In the aspirations and heroisms of that little community of Braintree, now Quincy, was sur- prisingly manifested the genius of the Ameri- can people. There, if it may be said of any one place. Independence began. Its history is on a small scale the record of the development of the ideals of the Kepublic ; its great citizens in every critical period devoted themselves with entire unselfishness and telling powers to the service of the nation. Few towns can boast of annals more brightly colored, not only with the deeds of patriots, but with the surprises of romance ; not only with the sturdy enterprises of plain liberty-loving farmers, but with the debonair discourse and activities of the colo- nial gentility. n LICENSE BEFORE LIBERTY For a region predestined to witness the triumphs of sober, industrious men and women and aspiring patriots, that parcel of the green earth known as Quincy presented an opening scene so ludicrous, so opera bouffe in character, as to be prophetic of everything but the actual event. A set of scapegraces possessed it, who played out their fantastic tricks as if in illustra- tion of the kind of people from which no great nation can originate. Here, between serious Plymouth on the one side and Puritan Boston on the other, were wildly enacted two of the most ^^ singular and incongruous episodes " which light up New England history. Sir Christopher Gardiner, Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, and his "comly Yonge Woman " built their bower on a hummock overlooking the Neponset River, se- curing a retreat only too transitory from inquisi- tive Boston and a cold world, much disturbed because she had a past, and he lived a double life ; and little more than a mile away rises Mount Wollaston, that opprobrious hill, that " Mount Dagon " (as the brethren of Plymouth LICENSE BEFORE LIBERTY 15 and Boston vmited to call it) where Thomas Morton and his set of runagates let themselves loose in the freedom of the wilderness. Motley, in his romance of " Merry-Mount/' and Hawthorne, in his " Maypole of Merry- Mount," entertain us delightfully with the ex- ploits of Morton and his fellows. Grave History herself, in the " Three Episodes," while trying to tie to truth the untethered imaginations of the romancers, laughs out in delight and derision as she contemplates the uncouth hilarity of the rude settlers and the comedy of their suppression by Miles Standish and Governor Endicott. Mor- ton deliberately formed a band of free compan- ions out of the servants of Captain WoUaston, who in 1625 set up a trading-post on the shore. This was done while Wollaston was on a voyage to Virginia, where, if he did not sell anything else, he profitably disposed of some of the ser- vants, or of the years of labor yet to be fulfilled according to the bond of their indentures. Such a procedure, threatening to break up the Massa- chusetts settlement, troubled Morton, and at the same time furnished him with an argument to win the assent of the remaining servants to the scheme he had been hatching. He was an ener- getic man, a leader among them, being one of the gentlemen adventurers who had planned the expedition. Withal he was a poet ; that is, a good enough poet to throw off a tavern catch 16 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN or to indite a dubious ballad to the barmaid, and had professional training sufficient to be scornfully characterized by Governor Bradford of Plymouth as a " kind of a pettifogger of Furnevell's Inne." He described himself as " of Clifford's Inn, Gent." "This man/' writes Adams, " born a sportsman, bred a lawyer, in- grained a humorist and an adventurer, by some odd freak of destiny was flung up as a waif in the wilderness on the shores of Boston Bay." It was in the fall of 1626 that Morton induced the few unsold servants to throw off all allegiance to Captain Wollaston, and form a band of equals, with him at their head, to the end that they might get all profit in trade with the Indians and live as they pleased. So it came about that here in the shade of the solemn woods, here against the austere background of Puritanism, was exhibited a transplanted bit of the boister- ous animalism of the unregenerate Englishman of that day, who swaggered as kingsman and cavalier in contemptuous flouting of all Round- heads and sour fanatics. Here were " cakes and ale " for all, in the large log house which shel- tered them. And here on May Day, 1627, was set up, with abundant shouting and carousing, a mighty Maypole, eighty feet high, garlanded with ribbons and surmounted with the spreading antlers of a buck. Morton was " mine host " of the occasion. He furnished a barrel of beer and LICENSE BEFORE LIBERTY 17 stronger liquors in bottles, and affixed to the pole a poem, which, as he said, " being Enig- matically composed, pusselled the Separatists most pittifully to expound it." A song he made also ; and at the psychological moment when all had joined hands about the Maypole and were warmed with drink, a tuneful reveler " without any mitigation or remorse of voice " chanted the staves, the rest joining with ready chorus. Around it and around, in wild whirling, danced the Bacchanals and the " lasses in beaver coats." ^' Drink and be merry, merry, merry boys," they sanof, and the forest resounded to the refrain, — " lo, to Hymen now the day is come ! About the merry May-pole take a Roome." It was n't puritanical. The scandal of it amazed Plymouth and Salem. To be sure, Morton, in a serious moment, when he was bidding for sup- port against the Puritans, asserted that he " was a man that endeavored to advance the dignity of the Church of England," and wished it to be understood that the good time of the boys was tempered with " the laudable use of the Book of Common Prayer." Puritanism was all the more resolved to have none of them, and a little later, when they imperiled the entire colony by selling firearms to the savages, the abolition of misrule was no longer delayed. Suddenly Miles Standish and his invincible army descended upon Merry-Mount and captured Morton ; Endicott 18 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN with grim promptitude sailed over from Salem and hewed down the Maypole ; and finally, when Morton was being conveyed in a vessel to Eng- land, events were so timed that his house was burned in his sight, to the end " that the habi- tation of the wicked should no more appear in Israel." It was root and branch work, reso- lutely meant to be such. But do we not see, by the light of these modern days, that it was the Puritan, for all his assumed dominion, who was the sporadic and the passing ? His reign is over. It is now, as ever, " Drink and be merry, merry boys ! " Pleasure is in the saddle, and " It 's ride mankind ! " What of Sir Christopher Gardiner all this time, that gentle knight of romance, who was in the very storm centre of this raging of the deep- est passions of the human heart ? He, too, was swept from his chosen retreat, and suffered vicis- situdes as surprising as any that had hitherto befallen him in his adventurous life. His " coun- try seat " was near enough Merry-Mount for him to see the smoke of the destruction of its strong- hold, and it is not at all unlikely that he often enjoyed its camaraderie before it was scattered up and down the coast by Miles Stan dish. As- sent is to be yielded to Longfellow when, by the lips of " the Landlord," he says that Gardiner made small account of his professions to join the Puritan church; — LICENSE BEFORE LIBERTY 19 " And passed his idle hours instead With roystering Morton of Merry-Mount, That pettifogger from Furnival's Inn, Lord of misrule and riot and sin, Who looked on the wine when it was red." Brief was the knight's sojourn on these shores, but there is no doubt that every moment of the time he was an object of absorbing interest. He arrived here in April of 1630, about a month before Winthrop and his company began the settlement of Boston. The singularity of such a hermit in the wilderness immediately attracted the attention of the newcomers. There was an air of mystery about him ; his life and purpose were not above suspicion. Less than this was enough to arouse the piercing inquisitiveness of the Puritans. Where did he come from ? Why was he here ? Who was the '' comly Yonge wo- man " with whom he lived? He gave it out that he was weary of life in the Old World, su- perior now, as may be imagined, to its sins and vanities, and sought for himself and his " cousin, Mary Grove," rest in the peaceful wilderness. How touching this return to nature ! A little worldly pride remained, however, — blood will assert itself, — for he intimated that his father was brother to the famous Stephen Gardyner, Bishop of Winchester and lord chancellor of Queen Mary, whom Shakespeare makes Henry Vni. describe as of "a cruel nature and bloody.'' Mr. Adams, in his careful monograph 20 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN on Gardiner, contests so close a relationship. It is evident, he admits, that he was a man of culture, widely acquainted with the world, and a genuine knight. For this — and his cousinly relations — he certainly deserved the distin- guished consideration accorded him by Governor Winthrop and the other Boston magistrates. " It was Sir Christopher Gardiner, Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, From Merry England over the sea, Who stepped upon this continent As if his august presence lent A glory to the colony. ** You should have seen him in the street Of the little Boston of Winthrop's time, His rapier dangling at his feet, Doublet and hose and boots complete. Prince Rupert hat with ostrich plume. Gloves that exhaled a faint perfume. Luxuriant curls and air sublime, And superior manners now obsolete ! " For the " swagger " clothes in which Long- fellow arrays the knight, the Puritans would have no regard. They scorned with more than Carlyle's bitterness the " despicable biped " who trusted in appearances and was only ornamental. So when the shameful news came from England that he " had two wives now living at a house in London," they commended their prophetic souls with an " I told you so," and prepared to dis- cipline Gardiner at the earliest opportunity. The two wives had not lived long together. Con- LICENSE BEFORE LIBERTY 21 tinuous and amicable relations are not usual with such, outside of Mormondom. They had just foregathered. The first Lady Gardiner, whom he had married in Paris, hearing he had again married in England, hurried over in search of him. But she came too late, and found only the second Lady Gardiner anxiously looking up his whereabouts. Besides betraying and de- serting her, after the knightly fashion of King Charles's court, he had, so she declared, robbed her of " many rich jewels, much plate, and costly service." The wives joined in a petition that he should be sent back to England. Wife the first still loved him and hoped to convert him ; wife the second craved his destruction and a chance to express her mind to that ordinary wretch, Mary Grove, with whom he was now living in America. Gardiner, suspiciously alert, caught the rumor that the news of his double life was circulating in Boston and that the magistrates w^ere likely to ap- prehend him. Asa matter of record they had voted, summarily and regardless of anything that he might say in his own defense, to send him a pris- oner to England. From his home on a woody hummock on the south of the Neponset a sharp lookout was kept up and down the river, and at the first sight of the officers coming to arrest him, he was off, with a gun on his shoulder and " rapier dangling at his feet," and away into the wilder- 22 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN ness. Only the servants and Mary Grove, " the little lady with golden hair/' as Longfellow de- scribes her, were found in the house. Mary was arrested, and when brought before her stern judges quite baffled them, so " impertinent and close " was she, " confessing no more than was wrested from her by her own contradictions." " So," continues Dudley, " we have taken order to send her to the two wives in old England to search her further." It was about the end of March, 1631, that the descent was made upon Gardiner's home, and for a month or so he rano^ed the woods in the mud and chill of New England's early spring. Then the Indians, in- cited thereto by the governor of Plymouth, cap- tured him in the neighborhood of Taunton River. " When they came near him," wrote Bradford in his " Plimoth Plantation," " whilst he pre- sented his piece at them to keep them off, the streame carried ye canow against a rock, and tumbled both him and his pece & rapier into ye water ; yet he got out, and having a little dagger by his side, they durst not close with him, but getting longe pols, they soone beat his dagger out of his hand, so he was glad to yeeld ; and they brought him to ye Govr. But his hands and armes were swolen & very sore with ye blowes they had given him. So he used him kindly, & sent him to a lodging wher his armes were bathed and anoynted, and he was quickly % LICENSE BEFORE LIBERTY 23 well agayne, and blamed ye Indians for beating him so much. They said that they did but a little whip him with sticks." The Plymouth people passed him on to the Boston magistrates, together with a " little^ note booke that by accidente had sHpt out of his pockett, or some private place, in which was a memoriall what day he was reconciled to ye pope & church of Rome, and in what universitie he took his scapula and such and such degrees." Anticipate now what measure of retribution would be meted out by the stern Puritans to this dissembling CathoHc, this " Snake which Lay Latent in the Tender Grass," this faithless hus- band and violator of half the commandments. He himself looked for the worst they could do. Did he not have in mind all they had wrought upon Morton ? What actually ensued is the surprise of the whole episode, and the closing chapter of his New England experience is surely one of the drollest in colonial history. Governor Winthrop neither disciplined him nor sent him a prisoner to England, but used "him according to his qualitie," and ofave him the freedom of the town. He was saved by the mystery attendant upon his knightly presence among exiled separatists and wild sav- ages. This they could not quite penetrate. The " woman in the case " was no sufficient explana- tion, and they had respect for the unknown which yet lurked in the shadows of his career. 24 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN At last it leaked out (they intercepted his let- ters) that he was the secret agent of Sir Ferdi- nando Gorges, who was contesting before the Crown the right of the Puritans to great tracts of land north of Boston. Now that the heart of his mystery was plucked out, he became in their eyes a poor creature, and they suffered him to go up and down as he pleased. Like another Sir Philip Sidney, his knightly spirit resorted to poetry to relieve the tedium of exile. Here is a poem of his, composed, as Morton ironically ob- served, as a testimony of Gardiner's "love towards them that were so ill affected towards him : " — " Wolves in sheep's clothing, why will ye Think to deceive God that doth see Your simulated sanctity ? For my part I do wish you could Your own infirmities behold, For then you would not be so bold. Like Sophists, why will you dispute With wisdom so ? For shame, be mute ! Lest great Jehovah, with his power, Do come upon you in an hour When you least think, and you devour." Throuo^h the summer of 1631 he lived in Boston and at his home on the banks of the Ne- ponset, and then in the month of August he was associated once more with Mary Grove in a man- ner eminently proper and prosaic. How tragi- cally the romancers end her fateful destiny ! In " Hope LesHe " she is overcome with jealousy, sets fire to a barrel of gunpowder on board a ship in Boston Harbor, and in a moment " the LICENSE BEFORE LIBERTY 25 hapless girl, — her guilty destroyer, — his vic- tim, — the crew, — the vessel, rent to fragments, were hurled into the air and soon engulfed in the waves." Motley, in " Merry-Mount," brings her to despair, in which mood she steals from her guardians into a December landscape, where " the driving hurricanes wrapped her as she slept in an icy winding sheet, and the wintry wind sounded her requiem in the tossing pine branches." Then, more kindly, Mr. John T. Adams, in his " Knight of the Golden Melice," sends her back to Europe in noble company, as befitted one highly born, to end her days peace- fully as abbess of Saint Idlewhim. Lastly, Whit- tier, in "Margaret Smith's Journal," confesses he had not learned what became of Sir Christo- pher and the " young woman his cousin," while Longfellow melodiously sings that the governor " sent her away in a ship that sailed For Merry England over the sea, To the other two wives in the old countree, To search her further, since he had failed To come at the heart of the mystery." But what are the facts? Plain as the unearthed bones of neolithic man, precious to science, Mr. C. F. Adams, the younger, spreads them before us unadorned. Thomas Purchase, a pioneer of Maine, sailed into Boston in search of axes, fish- lines, etc., and a wife. He met Mary Grove, who found favor in his eyes. All in a week or two, as the need was, he courted and married her. 26 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN and then when they set their faces eastward the knight himself went with them. What sim- plicity and artlessness and frank abandon of social prejudices ! It was all proper enough — could it be anything else with the Puritans for sponsors ? And how deliciously level with the elemental needs of the natural man ! He needed shelter and comfort, and she had both to bestow. Their home was in that part of the Maine plan- tations now known as the town of Brunswick and celebrated as the seat of Bowdoin College, and here Gardiner abode till midsummer of 1632, when he returned to England. Only one trace of his life in the Purchase domicile remains. It is, however, luminous. Nine years after he sailed away Thomas Purchase was compelled by the court to pay for a fowling piece the knight had bought and for a warming pan he had borrowed in the name of his host. Most strenuously " T. Purchase denies ever au- thorizing Sir C. Gardiner to buy " either article ; but poetic justice was done. The cost of the warming pan which comforted the first partner of Mary Grove came, as was due, from the pocket of the second partner. " Considering all the circumstances of the case, the inclemency of the season and the place and the agency through which Sir Christopher's couch had been widowed, the intrinsic justice of the finding is apparent." Ill LIBERTY CHECKED The wilderness was left once more to its sa- cred silences and the summer's monody of wind and wave, and so had slept for four years, when the men of serious temper, fit founders of homes and builders of states, appeared upon the scene. Most of them migrated from Boston, where the earliest settlers, wrought upon by the keen earth- hunger of the Anglo-Saxon, were feeling crowded on their three-hilled peninsula. Some came di- rectly from ship in the company organized by the Rev. Thomas Hooker, which began to " sit down at the Mount," but were soon ordered elsewhere. Among these, it is probable, was Henry Adams, with his large family, who was contented to abide on the beautiful spot where first he had erected his rough shelter. Notable has he become as the earliest American ancestor of the Presidents. Interest then centred, however, upon two men who were among those of most consideration in the Boston settlement. Stout William Cod- dington and Edmund Quincy were granted large allotments of land by the town of Boston in 1635, and they now sailed over to " the Mount/' 28 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN ■where Boston " had enlargement," to bound out their quite baronial acres. Coddington was its treasurer, builder of its first brick house, and re- puted the wealthiest man in the community; while Quincy, inheriting name and blood from a long line of gentle ancestry running beyond a " Sieur de Quincy " to the age when " the galloping Normans came," was respected for his conspicu- ous intelligence, constancy, and worth. He first came to Massachusetts in 1628. It was after he returned here with his family, September 4, 1633, that he formed the partnership with Coddington. Their quality commanded the pick of the land. So, as the shore was most sought after, they set their bounds from the old Dorchester line at Squantum southwardly to Hough's Neck, and a mile or more inland. Large and pleasant and fruitful were the acres they acquired. Within their limits were the "Massachusetts Fields," the home and plant- ing-ground of the tribe of the Massachusetts, from which the bay and later the State were named. The crescent shore, shaded by the pri- meval forests to the wave-washed sands, more beautiful even than now delights the eye, did woo to " the pleasing content of crossing the sweet air from isle to isle over the silent streams of a calm sea," as that earhest of its explorers, Captain John Smith, declared. Inland the glori- ous landscape mounted, terrace above terrace, to the massive summits of the Blue Hills. SITE OF ANNE HUTCHINSON'S FARM MOUTH OF "MOUNT WOLLASTON RIVER" LIBERTY CHECKED 29 The most convenient and attractive spot for human habitation, in all this wide domain, was carefully sought out by the two friends. Just where " Mt. Wollaston river " ceased to be nav- igable, and the clear, fresh waters of a brook musically mingled with the brine ; where the land lay level, easy to plough or to build upon, and the gleam of a miniature lake was seen through the trees, they ended their quest. The treasurer of the colony, having means all his own (the peculator is a sport of recent growth), was the first of the two companions to build a farmhouse by the " sweet murmuring noise " and " fine meanders of the brook." We are quot- ing from Morton of Merry-Mount, whose bac- ehantic joyousness, as we must say to his praise, was frequently subdued to a sympathy with nature wholly modern. Is not this a quite sur- passing description of the very scenery upon which Coddington's eye fell? — "And when I had more seriously considered of the beauty of the place, with all her fair endowments, I did not think that in all the known world it could be paralleled ; for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty, fine, round, rising hillocks ; delicate fair large plains, sweet crystal fountains, and clear running streams that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweet a murmur- ing noise to hear as would even lull the senses with delight asleep." 30 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN This infinite loveliness, the blue heavens in their clearness, the wine-like tonic of the air, the wide freedom, were now Coddington's. His was the rapture which visits the soul of every rightly developed man who ventures into virgin realms of the palm or pine ; his " a melancholy better than all mirth," as in that solemn wilder- ness he founded a home for heart's love and for a fresh start for humanity. Directing and shar- ing the labors of the stout craftsmen who sailed over from Boston with him, he experienced the real divineness of work here in the open, in the plenitude of God's sunshine, — the elements in league with the mt of his brain and the strength of his hand. Toil like this, which means adjust- ment to nature, not triumph over prostrate fellow beings, makes men. What are we making in this commercial age, with its sharp competitions, its smart exploitations, its successes which dispense with conscience and are built upon defeat and death ? Money, delirious amounts of it, doubt- less, but not men, — not what in the sight of heaven's ideal you would exactly call men. The habitation which Coddington then built, about 1636, still stands. It is not large, but throughout it shows good work. The carpenters luxuriated in the abundance of timber, and sated their honest English love of solid construction by using a superfluity of beams a foot or more in thickness ; and there they are to-day, square LIBERTY CHECKED 31 hewed, and for the most part sound and hard as iron. In plan it is similar to a second house Cod- dington built in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1639, the year after he was driven from Massachusetts. Two stories and an attic in height we perceive it to have been, in spite of later alterations ; the upper stories overhanging the lower one in front, and the bulky chimney, visible on the outside, filHng up almost the entire breadth of the west end. In- side, the kitchen or general living-room was almost co-extensive with the entire floor ; and here is the capacious open fireplace six feet high, flanked by the roomy brick oven. What generous living is suggested by these ancient utilities ! Blazing logs heaped high with unstinted hand, homely, wholesome fare, making the strong stronger, pleasurably appeasing appetites made keen by natural toil under the open sky and in the free, unpolluted air. As Emerson says of his fellow campers in the Adirondacks : the plain fare after woodsman's toil " all ate like abbots." " And Stillman, our guides' guide, . . . said aloud, ' Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating Food indigestible : ' — then murmured some, Others applauded him who spoke the truth." In the second story were two chambers, the chief one, with fireplace as huge as that in the room below, reserved for Coddington. He never transferred his residence to " the Mount ; " this would have come later. Now, when his oversight 32 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN was needed, he left his brick house in Boston and stayed at the farm. Lawyer Lechford, who assisted Coddington to dispose of his estate, records in his " Note Book " that WilHam Tyng, the purchaser, stipulates that when he visits the farm he " shall have the use of the chamber which Mr. Coddington used to lye in for his lodging." The farm was generously stocked with cattle, and a great barn was built ; but Coddington was drawn thither by love of liberty, as well as by landlord cares. Here with his compan- ions — Sir Harry Vane, William Hutchinson, Rev. John Wheelwright, Edmund Quincy, and many another — he held high debate of the ways in which their dearly bought freedom should be maintained and toleration in religion be secured. It was the time of that bitter struggle in which the colony was so early involved, misnamed the " Antinomian controversy." In that conflict, says Adams, the nascent commonwealth was con- fronted with " the issue between religious toler- ation and compelled theological conformity." These choice spirits met from time to time in Coddington's farmhouse. Had they triumphed, our modern New England ancestor worshiper might now have an ideal to adore as worthy in all respects as in fond imagination he paints the Puritan. Baptists might not have been banished, Quakers and witches might not have been done REV. JOHN WHEELWRIGHT LIBERTY CHECKED 33 to death, and a hundred years of intellectual torpor and bigotry might not have blighted the fair promise of Massachusetts history. " It was plainly a period of intellectual quickening, — a dawn of promise." A woman it was, vivacious, witty, ambitious, who awoke in the infant colony that antagonism between the free spirit of man and dull formu- laries which latent or active is present in every generation. Mistress Anne Hutchinson, con- tumeliously snubbed for being " but a woman," was at first commended for explaining to her less enlightened sisters the ponderous sermons of the preachers. Earliest is she among those superfine and audacious reforming intelligences now dis- tinguished as " the Boston woman," and she was the first to gather in Boston a woman's club. All went well — the whole church flocked to her home — until, feeling that in this new land she was a chartered freeman, she uttered without restraint her soul's burden. She dared to speak " thoughts not usual among us," and actually had the effrontery to criticise minister Wilson and some other case-hardened clerics for being " under a covenant of works." Opposition was aroused and sides were taken. At this juncture there arrived in the colony the Rev. John Wheelwright, college mate of Oliver Cromwell, intrepid of speech, compact of the stuff martyrs are made of. Related to the 34 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Hutchinsons by marriage, and himself a free spirit, he at once zealously espoused the cause of the liberals. He was a minister after their own mind, and they were swift to propose that he be elevated to the Boston pulpit alongside Wilson and Cotton. Objections w^ere raised. A pain- ful situation impended through long Sabbath debates, which was reHeved finally by the peti- tion of the residents of " the Mount " that Wheelwright be granted them to gather a church there. It was a happy inspiration of the hberal leaders. " The Mount " was their elect settlement. Besides Coddington and Quincy, the Hutchinsons themselves had taken up farms here, and Atherton Hough — a magistrate and man of wealth, who owned the neck which now bears his name — was in sympathy with them, and Stout Deacon Bass of Roxbury was prepar- ing to join them. Behind this group and rein- forcing it was a wide sprinkling of settlers, — sturdy yeomen of England, selected from their fellows by freedom and a sincerer faith. Some of the earliest to arrive — like Henry Adams — were of Rev. Mr. Hooker's company, which landed in 1632. An air of romance and fine- spun idealism imparts itself to the movement as one thinks of the interest taken in it by young Sir Harry Vane, at this time governor of the settlement. Said Wendell Phillips in one of his speeches : " Carlyle admonished young men to lay LIBERTY CHECKED 35 aside their Byron for Goethe. I say, lay aside your Luther for your Harry Vane." Would this youthful ruler, "young in years, but in sage coun- sel old," have remained in the New World, would he have taken up broad acres of land at " the Mount," thrown in his fortunes with the Quincys, the Coddingtons, the Hutchinsons, the Adamses, if the liberal movement had been successful ? It is not improbable. Vane left England with the serious intention of uniting with the Puritans here and working out with them his conceptions of freedom and religion. On his departure a friend of his father, Mr. Gerrard, wrote to Lord Conway, " Sir Harry Vane has as good as lost his eldest son, who is gone to New England for conscience' sake. He likes not the discipline of the Church of England. None of our ministers will give him the sacrament standing, and no persuasions of the bishops nor authority of his parents will prevail with him. Let him go ! " Two months of Wheelwright's ministration had hardly elapsed when a committee of eight with Vane at their head " was chosen to consider of Mt. WoUaston business — how there may be a church and town there." For twelve months from December, 1636, Wheelwright labored with these congenial spirits. Manifestly a church after the new way of toleration and expanding ideas was rootincr itself in the virmn soil of the Puritan settlement. Worship in the outset, it 36 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN may be, consecrated the Coddington house, and here at first Wheelwright may have lodged. But early in the spring of 1637 a meeting-house was built. Its completion, Adams surmises, may have been celebrated on May 24, a day made a fast for humiliation and conference over the deplorable differences. Vane and Coddington, grieved and indignant at the harsh measures of the conservatives, turned their backs on this conference and kept the fast with Wheelwright at "the Mount." These were eventful days. The distractions had rapidly culminated almost to armed conflict. At another fast a few months earher. Wheel- wright had preached a sermon in Boston, in which he spoke about a " spiritual combat " and "spiritual weapons." His antagonists affected to beheve this was a concealed call to arms. They spread among themselves " a silent de- cree that Wheelwright was to be disciplined." There was a summoning of the " legalist " hosts from all the neighboring tow^ns. Minister Wilson mounted a tree and harangued the vot- ers. Boston was outnumbered. The General Court declared Wheelwright guilty of sedition ; Yane was defeated for governor ; Coddington and Hough were put out of the magistracy. Is it to be w^ondered at that they ignored the conference and resorted to Coddington's farm- house and Wheelwright's church ? LIBERTY CHECKED 37 Later Mrs. Hutchinson was arraigned for the meetings held at her house, — "a thing not toler- able nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for her sex/' — and banished. Wheelwright, " like Koger Williams, or worse," was banished. Their adherents were deprived of arms and otherwise treated with ignominy, and Coddington fled for freedom to Khode Island, where he became its first governor. Edmund Quincy, a little before this, had passed from earth. Had he lived, he too would have been forced into the deeper wilder- ness. As for Vane, indignation and sorrow con- tended in his heart for mastery. The cause he loved had lost its fairest opportunity. He himself was wounded in the house of his friends. Eng- land, still under the tyranny of Laud and Straf- ford, seemed less hostile, and thither he soon sailed. Thus, as Mr. Adams feelingly declares, ^' Massachusetts missed a great destiny, — and missed it narrowly, though willfully. It, ' like the base Judean, threw the pearl away, richer than all his tribe.' " So ended in defeat, in heart burnings and perse- cutions, those aspirations for larger liberty which in this New World should have had serene and continuously higher fulfillment. But to the sons and residents of old Braintree and Quincy it is matter for congratulation that the region comprised in their limits was the chosen scene for the first heroic attempt to realize the freedom 38 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN which lay implicitly in the motives of the " first emigrants ; " that a distinction it thus early ac- quired as the meeting place of the choice spirits who in fullest measure embodied the free in- tellectual activity of New England Puritanism. They were overwhelmed, cruelly despoiled, dis- persed in bitterest winter weather, — some north to the Piscataqua in New Hampshire, some south to the island of the Narragansetts. Their liberal ideas, however, rooted in many souls, remained and bore fruit. The church which in 1639 gathered together the remnant of Wheelwright's " Chapel of Ease," reinforced with later settlers, exhibited from the beginning the characteristics of independence and open-minded- ness. It is the church of the Adamses and of the Quincys, and of the Hancocks (father and son). As early as 1750 the liberalism of it is self-con- scious and aggressive. The Rev. Lemuel Briant, brilliant, incisive, progressive, drew down upon himself — as did his famous predecessor, minister Wheelwright — the active opposition of the ultra- conservatives. " Had he lived, he might have held his ground, and succeeded in advancing by one long stride the tardy progress of liberal Chris- tianity in Massachusetts." He neglected to teach the children of his parish the catechism, prefer- ring plain Scripture; he was guilty, said his opponents, of " the absurdity and blasphemy of substituting the personal righteousness of LIBERTY CHECKED 39 men in the room of the surety-righteousness of Christ ; '^ he praised moral virtue ; he protested against such interpretation of the Bible as affronted human reason. For this he was called " Socinian " and " Arminian," and a council of sister churches was summoned to try him. With an independence almost unheard of, he slighted the council and would not go near it. But as it declared there existed grounds for the complaints against him, a committee of his own church was appointed to consider the matter. Colonel John Quincy was at the head of this committee, and it reported a series of resolutions which may fairly be regarded as remarkable for the times. They were adopted by almost the entire church. In these resolutions the people defended their pas- tor's use of " pure Scripture " instead of the catechism, and they honored the right of private judgment, commending " Mr. Briant for the pains he took to promote a free and impartial examination into all articles of our holy reHgion, so that all may judge even of themselves what is right." Naturally such a community with such a church became the cradle of American Independence. John Adams, breathing the invigorating air of the place, is talking about independence at the age of twenty, and is the flame of fire ordained at birth to kindle the heart of a continent. And, indeed, we might go still farther back and find in 40 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN the utterance of a Quincy an earlier anticipation of this great princij^le. Miss Eliza Susan Quincy quotes from a letter of John Wendell, dated Portsmouth, N. H.J October 4, 1785, to this effect: Edmund Quincy, who died in 1737, on being asked " how soon he thought America would be dismembered from the mother country, replied that if the colony imj)roved in the arts and sci- ences for half a century to come as it had for the time past, he made no doubt in that time it would be accomplished." Held as a speculation, a vision, in times of England's indifference to her colonies, it was changed to a passion in the hour when she oppressed them. John Adams, a month before the battle of Lexington, might truthfully say, " That there are any who pant after inde- pendence is the greatest slander on the colony." None " panted " after it, — the issues were too serious, the stake too perilous ; but these great leaders were familiar with the thought, and when endurance ceased to be a virtue they flung it out as the battle-cry of their most cherished hopes. Deep rooted in a noble past was the idea of independence, — a view set forth by Christopher Pearse Cranch, a descendant of Richard Cranch, brother-in-law of John Adams, in a poem which he wrote for the two hundred and fiftieth anni- versary of the old First Church : — LIBERTY CHECKED 41 " Our fathers sowed with stern humility, But knew not what the harvest was to be. More light, they said, would issue from God's book, Not knowing 't was the deeper, wiser look The soul took of itself that gave them eyes to see. From the rough gnarled root they planted here. Through storm and sun, through patient hope and fear, There grew a fair and ever-spreading tree, With roots fast grappling in the granite rocks, Unharmed by cold or drought or tempest shocks; Fed by the sun and winds and seasons' change, It reared its trunk serenely tall and fair, Its boughs diverging in the upper air Of thought and liberty, Loaded with leaves and blossoms rich and strange, And promise of a fruitage yet to be In the long centuries of futurity." IV JUDITH AND JOANNA At the opening of the quiescent period which followed the storm of persecution, Judith, the young widow of Edmund Quincy, is " in the wilderness " (so runs tradition's phrase, pathetic in her case), holding the lands allotted to her husband, and occupying the house built by Cod- dington. Not immediately upon the departure of that exile, however, did she make her home at " the Mount." The sorrow of her widowhood was fresh upon her ; the children, Judith and Edmund, were quite young; and when the es- tate jointly owned by herself and Coddington was divided she lacked, it seems likely, the means to pay for the improvements. Captain John Tyng, Boston's wealthiest merchant, was the purchaser of the farmhouse and barn and five hundred acres of land. Eventually the portion which includes Merry-Mount passed by inheritance to that daughter of Tyng who married Thomas Sheppard, and by her was bequeathed to her grandson, John Quincy. It is now owned and occupied by Mrs. John Quincy Adams. When it was that the home farm on the banks of the JUDITH AND JOANNA 43 brook was acquired by Judith Quincy is uncer- tain ; but it is not long before we note that her name is used when the south hue near the bury- ing ground is bounded, and that the brook is changed in name from " Coddington's brook " to " Quincy's brook." The date cannot be much later than 1640, — the year when " the Mount " was incorporated as the town of Braintree, and when Henry Adams is confirmed in the occupancy of forty acres of land for "ten heads" on Cap- tain's Plain. Momentous are these beginnings. Farther back in time we may trace the lines of the Adamses and the Quincys, but here in the new town they made so famous there is a fresh start, and through the years that follow, the inter- mingling generations of them, responding to the highest demands of patriotism and intellectual and moral progress, exalt all that is best in social life and civil government by an endless " filiation of master spirits." Judith Quincy, authentic mother of a crescent race, and in the dubious day of small things its sole counselor, ranks with the best of her kind as an earthly providence. For six years she strove with the unfailing strength of woman's courage and patience to keep a home for her children, and now (about 1642), when the elderly Moses Paine proposed marriage, she accepted him. He is of Braintree, the possessor of many broad acres ; but it was only for a little while that his roof 44 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN sheltered them, and it was the least amount of his property that she ever enjoyed. He died in 164:3, leaving half his estate to his son Moses, a quarter to his daughter Elizabeth (who married the second Henry Adams), a quarter to his son Stephen, and the remainder to his wife Judith, — to be exact, he cut her off with twenty shillings. Thrifty were some of those old settlers, and they grudged parting with a penny to any but blood rela- tions. Was it now that Judith and her two children made their home in the Coddington house ? This seems likely, and a brighter day dawns for them all. John Hull, the future mint-master of the colony, looking up lands in Braintree, discovers daugh- ter Judith, that flower in the wilderness, and bears her to his Boston home. Hardly twenty years old was she when in 1647 he married her. Governor Winthrop performed the ceremony in Boston, — a choice company, no doubt, witnessing it, and rejoicing in it. But however celebrated, it was a quiet affair compared with the memorable wedding of their daughter Hannah. Who has not heard of it, and been dazzled by the stream of new pine-tree shillings which the prosperous mint-master poured into the big scales until they weighed down his plump daughter? Such was the dower she broug-ht to Juds^e Samuel Sew- all, her husband. This cherished story of our childhood is doubted by some, who marvel that JUDITH AND JOANNA 45 silver enough for the transaction should have been stored away by honest John Hull ; but the dilisrent calculator finds that the bride's dower was really .£500, which in silver would weigh exactly one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Thus the story and the figure of Hannah are both saved. An original touch seems commonly to have gone with the benefactions of the genial mint-master. For his wife he named the most bleak, windy, and surf-buffeted headland between Cape Cod and Sandy Hook. Stormy Point Ju- dith ! Does the title record a compliment that failed? Or was it a distant, a safely distant, allusion away off there in the Narragansett country, where he had acquired land from the savages, to the occasional ebullition of feminin- ity warranted once in a while by the offensive serenity of the best of husbands? The com- pliment theory will have weight with all who have not lost faith in masculine consistency, for besides being an honest man and captain of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, he was a " saint " no less, and his wife was well content to walk daily in the light of his halo. " This outshines them all," declared Rev. Mr. Willard, enumerating his virtues in a funeral sermon, " that he was a saint upon earth ; that he lived like a saint here, and died the precious death of a saint." However, Judith was worthy of hun, and she, too, in a quaint obituary, rudely 46 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN printed, with a black border and epitaph (a copy was preserved by Miss E. S. Quincy), received the praise of the " elect lady/' — " Mrs. Judith Hull of Boston, in New England, Daughter of Mr. Edmund Quincey ; late wife of John Hull Esq., deceased. A Diligent, Constant, Fruitful Reader and Hearer of the Word of God, Rested from her Labors, June 22, 1695, being the seventh day of the Week, a little before Sun-set, just about the time She used to begin the Sabbath. An7io ^tatis Slice 69." Into such a delightful circle Judith the elder, the twice widowed, was welcomed. The father of the mint-master, Robert Hull, hale and hearty at fifty-five, is captivated by his son's mother-in-law, who is fair and forty-six, and their marriage is duly celebrated. Happily did they live together in his Boston home till her death, the 29th of March, 1654. Indeed, he took Judith's entire family into his capacious affections, and in his will he not only provided for his own children, but left lands in Braintree to " Son Edmund Quincy." Judith, with a mother's considerateness, had deferred her own happiness till that of her other child, Edmund, was secured. His troth was plighted to Joanna Hoar, and they were married the 26th day of July, 1648. He was only twenty- one years of age when this event took place ; but the impatient Robert Hull must not be kept JUDITH AND JOANNA 47 waiting too long, and Judith was determined that she would see the youthful couple well established in the old home before she left it. And now with entire freedom of mind she might take this step, for Edmund and Joanna were an ideal pair. Tall and comely was he, as the men of his race have been in every generation since ; mature also for his years, made so by ceaseless strife with the wilderness. " A man quickly grows old in battle," declared the youthful Napoleon. Not less admir- able, as one delights to believe, was his bride. Indeed, if Joanna was her mother's daughter in the essentials of mind and character, her price was above rubies. The mother of Joanna, herself a Joanna, was a true Roman matron, schooled in tribulations, unfailing in fortitude, the heroic founder of an enduring race. " Great mother " her contempo- raries called her, deliberately carving the words on the table monument which marks her last resting place in the old Quincy burying ground. " Take care of Joanna Hoar ! " was the last in- junction of the late Judge E. R.Hoar to his friend C. F. Adams, the younger. He deeply desired to do her honor. He was proud to look up to her as the great ancestress of his own race, and of many another family distinguished in American history. Mr. Adams, who takes pleasure in numbering himself with " the tribe of Joanna," writes that " she is the common origin of that remarkable 48 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN progeny in which statesmen, jurists, lawyers, orators, poets, story-tellers, and philosophers seem to vie with each other in recognized eminence." For freedom in religion she fled to these shores. Her husband, Charles Hoar, had been sheriff of Gloucester, in England, — a man of substance, and much regarded. Both were Puritans. It was after her husband's death, which occurred in 1638, that the intrepid wddow, with five children, forsook her pleasant Gloucester home with all its comforts, and braved the perils of the sea and the hardships of the wilderness, to worship God according to her conscience. She arrived here in 1640, and settled immediately in Brain tree. Her daughter Margery within a year married the able young minister of the Braintree church, Henry Flynt ; John, the eldest son, ancestor of Judge E. R. Hoar and his brother, Hon. George F. Hoar, removed first to Scituate and then to Concord ; and Joanna, as has been related, mar- ried Edmund Quincy. With another son, Leonard, there are connected the dramatis personoi of a notable tragedy. He himself is distinguished as the third president of Harvard College, and the first of its graduates to be thus honored. He was " designated in his father's will to be the scholar of the family and a teacher in the Church, although by his coming to New England he missed the proposed matricu- lation at Oxford, yet satisfied fully the spirit of JUDITH AND JOANNA 49 the paternal wish." After graduating from Har- vard in the class of 1650 he returned to England, where he continued his studies at the English Cambridge, receiving a degree. Soon after he was presented by Sir Henry Mildmay — one of the regicides, then lord of the manor — with the benefice of Wanstead, in Essex. For wife he married Bridget, the daughter of John Lord Lisle and Lady Alicia Lisle. With her he came again to New England July 8, 1672, having been called thither with a view to settlement over the South Church, Boston. But he brought with him a letter signed by thirteen dissenting minis- ters of London and vicinity commending him as a suitable person for the presidency of Harvard, then vacant, and, despite one or more formidable rivals, he was installed in that office December 10, 1672, Lord Lisle, his wife's father, was president of the High Court of Justice appointed for the trial of King Charles I., and became Lord Commis- sioner of the Great Seal. " He for some reason did not sign the death warrant of Charles L, but was chosen by Cromwell one of the Committee of Seven, who prepared ' a draft of a sentence, with a blank for the manner of his death.' " It was enough. At the Restoration his was the first name in the list of those excepted from the act of indemnity. Fleeing from England with a price set upon his head, he was tracked by assas- 50 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN sins, who murdered him at Lausanne, in Switzer- land, August 11, 1664. The fate of Lady Alicia was even more tragic. Twenty years later she was haled before the " bloody assize " of the infamous Chief Justice Jeffreys, charged with aiding and concealing in her dwelling on the day after the battle of Sedge- moor Richard Nelthorpe, a lawyer, and John Hicks, a clergyman, accused of being refugees from Monmouth's army. " She declared her- self innocent of guilty knowledge, and protested against the illegality of her trial, because the supposed rebels to whom she had given hospi- tality had not been convicted. She was then ad- vanced in years, and so feeble that it was said she was unable to keep awake during her tedious trial. Jeffreys arrogantly refused her the aid of counsel, admitted irrelevant testimony, excelled himself in violent abuse, and so intimidated the jurors, who were disposed to dismiss the charge, that they unwillingly at last brought in a verdict of guilty. She was hurriedly condemned Ho be burned aHve ' the very afternoon of the day of her trial, August 28, 1685 ; but owing to the indignant protests of the clergy of Winchester, execution was postponed for five days, and the sentence was ' altered from burning to beheading.' This punishment was exacted in the market place of Winchester on the appointed day, the implacable King James XL refusing a pardon, although it JUDITH AND JOANNA 51 was proved that Lady Lisle had protected many cavaliers in distress and that her son John was serving in the royal army; and many persons of high rank interceded for her, among whom was Lord Clarendon, brother-in-law to the king. Lady Lisle was connected by marriage with the Bond, Whitmore, Churchill, and other families of distinction, and her granddaughter married Lord James Russell, fifth son of the first Duke of Bedford, thus connecting this tragedy with that of Lord William Russell, * the martyr of English Liberty; " The Hon. George F. Hoar in 1892 paid a visit to Moyles's Court, the ancient home of the Lisles, and made notes, which with the above details were wrought into an account of " The Hoar Family in America and its English Ances- try," by Henry Stedman Nourse. Interest in the Lady Alicia is so much deepened by these notes that the temptation to quote a few of them is not wisely to be resisted : — " Saturday, October 22d, Mr. Hoar, with two ladies, went from Southampton to Ringwood, about twenty miles, and drove thence to Elling- ham church, about two miles and a half. The church is a small but very beautiful structure of stone, with a small wooden belfry. The tomb of Lady Alice Lisle is a heavy flat slab of gray stone, raised about two or three feet from the ground, bearing the following inscription : — 52 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN " * Here Lies Dame Alicia Lisle and her daughter Ann Harf eld who dyed the 17th of Feb. 1703-4 Alicia Lisle Dyed the second of Sept. 1685.* *' Lady Lisle was carried on horseback by a trooper to Winchester. The horse lost a shoe, and fell lame ; she insisted that the trooper should stop at a smith's and have the shoe re- placed, and on his refusing declared that she would make an outcry and resistance unless he did, saying she could not bear to have the horse suffer. The blacksmith at first refused. He said he would do nothing to help the carrying off Lady Lisle, but she entreated him to do it for her sake. She said she should come back that way in a few days ; the trooper said, ' Yes, you will come back in a few days, but without your head.' "The body was returned to Moyles's Court the day of the execution ; the head was brought back a few days after in a basket, and put in at the pantry window ; the messenger said that the head was sent afterward for greater indignity." So, while here in a small frontier settlement, the daughter and her people are living peaceful, uneventful days, there in old England the father is a fugitive, the mother a prisoner, and both ultimately suffering the extreme vengeance of a Stuart. Among the eight great historical paint- JUDITH AND JOANNA 55 ings by E. M. Ward, R. A., which adorn the corridor leading to the House of Commons, the third in the series represents Lady Lisle' s arrest for relieving the two fugitives from Monmouth's defeated army. Strange, is it not, that dwellers in a peaceful hamlet in this western world should be so intimately related to the chief actors in some of those Old World tragedies I Tranquillest lives they seem to be living ; no word comes down to us revealing the turmoil of their hearts, and yet the tardy letters from be- yond the hmitless seas burdened their souls with, woe upon woe. To him who can look beneath the surface, all this and more is visible. The New World, too, furnished its measure of dark- ness to that shadow of sorrow which falls from every son of man who walks in the light of life. Leonard Hoar, the Harvard president, aroused bitter opposition by espousing, as it is supposed, the " Half-way Covenant." This, which suffered persons baptized in infancy to become church members without formal confession, was the far- thest step for the liberals of those days, and may indicate his affinity with the tolerant spirit of Henry Flynt of Braintree and his fellow thinkers. The " sour leven " of advanced ideas was still fermenting there. At all events the students fell away from the president, and " set themselves to Travestie whatever he did and saidy and aggravate everything in his Behavior 54 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN disagreeable to them, with a design to make him Odious." They were countenanced by certain per- sons who '^made a figure in the neighborhood/' with the result that he was forced to resign. This so wrought upon Dr. Hoar that, as Cotton Mather writes, "his Grief threw him into a Consumption whereof he died November 28^ 1675, in Boston." " A solemn stroke ! " records Increase Mather. His remains were interred in the burying ground of Braintree, now Quincy, where those of his wife and mother were ulti- mately laid. Bridget, his widow, now about thirty-six years old, remained single a year, to a day, when she married Hezekiah Usher, a Boston merchant. He turned out to be a crotchety, willful sort of man, with whom she could not live on any endurable terms. So her resolved heart deter- mined on a voyage to England, whither, it may be, she felt summoned to perform some sacred last things in memory of that father so recently slain and to comfort her mother. Providential was this step ; for when her mother, so cruelly treated, needed her most, there she was at hand to lavish upon her the tender ministries of love. Later, when William and Mary came to the throne, she and her sister succeeded in having the attainder against her mother reversed. Usher had enough good sense to realize his loss, and, as Sewall wrote, " goes down the bar- JUDITH AND JOANNA 55 bor with his wife and her daughter and weeps at taking leave." Not till her husband's death, in 1697, did she return to Boston. Then, through the efforts of Judge Sewall and " cousin Anna [Joanna] Quinsey we introduce Madam Usher to Mr. H. Usher's House and Ground on the Common." Here she dwelt till " she de- parted this life the 25th of the last month (May, 1723) being Saturday at about two o'clock in the afternoon after about a fortnight's Indispo- sition, and according to her express desire was Intere'd at Brantry May 30th in the Grave of Dr. Leonard Hoar, her first Husband, and her younger daughter Tryphena, and the Doct^^- Mother and Sisters. The Corps was attended about half a mile in the street leading thither- ward by the Bearers, being the Honble Wm. Dummer, Esqr., Lt. Gov. and Com'd'r in Cheif, Sam'l Sewall, Penn Townsend, Edward Brom- field, Simeon Stoddard, and Edmund Quincey, Esq'rs, and many others, principal Gentlemen and Gentlewomen of the Town, Mr. Leonard Cotton being the principal Mourner. It pleased God to afford us a very comfortable day for the Solemnity, wherein the Executors Colo. Quincey Mr. Flynt, and others Gen't with several Gentle- women of her cheif acquaintance proceeded to Braintry on Horse back and in Coaches. The distance is very little above ten miles." No other lady of the land could have had more 56 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN respect shown her, and Judge Sewall, who wrote this account for Mrs. Bridget Cotton, her daugh- ter, in London, says farther, they " gave my wife and I gloves." '' Eat at Judge Quincys and then we return home." And Joanna, the great mother of these and other striving souls, what of her all these years ? Fortunately she had been spared the pain of witnessing the distresses of her children, and of being saddened by the violent deaths of her connections over sea. She passed away half a century before her daughter-in-law, on December 21, 1661. Uneventful, calm, and full of good works we may believe her life to have been in this new land. For Leonard, before he returned to England after graduating from Harvard, and for John, before he removed to Scituate on his way to Concord, she made a home in Braintree. After that we know not whether she had a home of her own. Welcome she would be in the home of parson Flynt, who married her daughter Margery, or in the Quincy farmhouse, where daughter Joanna was the gracious mistress. At the parsonage dame Margery's school for " in- structing young Gentlewoemen," to say nothing of her rapidly increasing family, left scant room for long visits, but at the Quincy home there would be sufficient accommodations, and, in ad- dition, the congenial companionship of Madam Judith Quincy Paine. Judith and Joanna to- RESIDENCE OF GOV. CODDINGTON, NEWPORT, R. I., 1641. FIRST CHURCH FROM OLD BURYING-GROUND Hoar tombstones at left JUDITH AND JOANNA 57 gether, abiding under the same roof : is it not a conjunction happy enough to have been ordained in the scheme of things ! Sisters they in like sorrows, and with equal fortitude bearing the buffets of the same rude world ; mothers they, made one throug^h minofling- lines of children's children stretching in crowned lives to the latest age. Judith, when she removed to Boston as Mistress Hull, may have left Joanna sage coun- selor of the young couple in the old home. Frequently would she return thither till her death, in 1654. The remains of Judith were interred in Boston, those of Joanna in Braintree, but the thouo^ht of their characters is one in the reverential reo^ard of a thousand descendants. To this elder Joanna, and some of her more notable connections, a monument was erected a few years ago in the old burying ground in Quincy, by Senator George F. Hoar. From the same spot another memorial was dated more recently, in which the shade of Joanna is repre- sented as addressing this generation. Its nature is best described in words taken from an address upon the character of Judge E. R. Hoar de- livered by Charles F. Adams, the younger, before the members of the Massachusetts Historical So- ciety, February 14, 1895. " Shortly after my re- turn from a trip to Europe, nearly six months ago. Judge Hoar drove over to my house in Lin- coln one bright September Sunday, and after 58 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN some pleasant talk drew from his pocket a paper which he proceeded to read to me. Dated from Quincy, where Joanna Hoar lies buried in the ancient graveyard by the side of her son Leonard, it was a supposed communication from her, writ- ten in the quaint olden style, and addressed to Mrs. Agassiz, the president of Radcliffe, convey- ing a gift of $5000 to endow a scholarship to assist in the education of girls at the college, ' preference always to be given to natives, or daughters of citizens of Concord,' and to bear as an endowment the name of ' the Widow Joanna Hoar.' " Altogether it was a delightful bit of fan- ciful correspondence, kindly as well as reveren- tially conceived, and most charmingly carried out; and our old friend enjoyed it keenly. It appealed to his sense of humor. He chose to give with an unseen hand, and to build his me- morial to his first New England ancestor in his own peculiar way." QuiNcy, September 12, 1894. To Mistress Louis Agassiz, President of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Honored and Gracious Lady, — This epistle is ad- dressed to you from Quincy, because in the part of Brain- tree which now bears that name, in the burial place by the meeting house, all that was mortal of me was laid to rest more than two centuries ago, and the gravestone stands which bears my name, and marks the spot where my dust reposes. JUDITH AND JOANNA 59 It may cause you surprise to be thus addressed, and that the work which you are pursuing with such constancy and success is of interest to one who so long ago passed from the mortal sight of men. But you may recall that wise philosophers have believed and taught that those who have striven to do their Lord's will here below do not, when transferred to his house on high, thereby become wholly regardless of what may befall those who come after them, — "wee, haec coelestia spectantesy ista terrestria contem- nunt." It is a comforting faith that those who have " gone forth weeping, bearing precious seed," shall be permitted to see and share the joys of the harvest with their succes- sors who gather it. I was a contemporary of the pious and bountiful Lady Radcliffe, for whom your college is named. My honored husband, Charles Hoar, Sheriff of Gloucester in England, by his death in 1638, left me a widow with six children. We were of the people called by their revilers Puritans, to^ whom civil liberty, sound learning, and religion were very dear. The times were troublous in England, and the hands of princes and prelates were heavy upon God's people. My thoughts were turned to the new England where precious Mr. John Harvard had just lighted that little candle which has since thrown its beams so far, where there seemed a providential refuge for those who desired a church without a bishop, and a state without a king. I did not, therefore, like the worshipful Lady Radcliffe, send a contribution in money ; but I came hither myself, bringing the five youngest of my children with me, and arrived at Braintree in the year 1640. From that day Harvard College has been much in my mind ; and I humbly trust that my coming has not been without some furtherance to its well being. My lamented husband in his will directed that our youngest son, Leonard, should be " carefuUie kept at Schoole, and when hee is fitt for itt to be carefuUie placed at Oxford, and if ye Lord shall see fitt, to make him a Minister unto his people." As 60 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDEXCE BEGAN the nearest practicable conformity to this direction, I placed him carefully at Harvard College, to such purpose that he graduated therefrom in 1650, became a faithful minister to God's peojDle, a capable physician to heal their bodily dis- eases, and became the third President of the College, and the first who was a graduate from it, in 1672. My daughters became the wives of the Rev. Henry Flint, the minister of Braintree, and Col. Edmund Quincy of the same town : and it is recorded that from their descendants another President has since been raised up to the College, Josiah Quincy (tarn carum caput), and a Professor of Rhe- toric and Oratory, John Quincy Adams, who as well as his sons and grandsons have given much aid to the College, as members of one or the other of its governing boards, beside attaining other distinctions less to my present purpose. The elder of my three sons who came with me to Amer- ica, John Hoar, settled in the extreme western frontier town of English settlement in New England, called Con- cord : to which that exemplary Christian man, the Rever- end Peter Bulkeley, had brought his flock in 1635. In Mr. Bulkeley's ponderous theological treatise, called " The Gospel Covenant," of which two editions were published in London (but whether it be so generally and constantly pe- rused and studied at the present day, as it was in my time, I know not), — in the preface thereto, he says it was writ- ten "at the end of the earth." There my son and his posterity have dwelt and multiplied, and the love and ser- vice of the College which I should approve have not been wholly wanting among them. In so remote a place there must be urgent need of instruction, though the report seems to be well founded that settlements farther westward have since been made, and that some even of my own posterity have penetrated the continent to the shores of the Pacific Sea. Among the descendants of John Hoar have been that worthy Professor John Farrar, whose beautiful face in mar- ble is among the precious possessions of the College ; that dear and faithful woman who gave the whole of her humble JUDITH AND JOANNA 61 fortune to establish a scholarship therein, Levina Hoar ; and others who as Fellows or Overseers have done what they could for its prosperity and growth. Pardon my prolixity, but the story I have told is but a prelude to my request of your kindness. There is no authentic mode in which departed souls can impart their wishes to those who succeed them in this world but these, the record or memory of their thoughts and deeds, while on earth ; or the reappearance of their qualities of mind and character in their lineal descendants. In this first year of Radcliffe College, — when so far as seems practicable and wise, the advantages which our dear Harvard CoUege, " the defiance of the Puritan to the sav- age and the wilderness," has so long bestowed upon her sons, are through your means to be shared by the sisters and daughters of our people, — if it should so befall that funds for a scholarship to assist in the education of girls at Radcliffe College, who need assistance, with preference al- ways to be given to natives, or daughters of citizens of Con- cord, Massachusetts, should be placed in the hands of your Treasurer, you might well suppose that memory of me had induced some of my descendants to spare so much from their necessities for such a modest memorial : and I would humbly ask that the scholarsliip may bear the name of The Widow Joanna Hoar. And may God estabUsh the good work you have in charge ! THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE, JOHN ADAMS It was in the year 1640 — just about the time Mistress Judith Quincy removed from Boston " into the wilderness '' of Brain tree— that Henry Adams was confirmed in the occupation of the forty acres " for ten heads " in the same settle- ment, by grant of the town of Boston. The Adams family have never lacked heads, whether one regards quantity or quality; and now, in robustness of body and brain and abundant pro- geny, was founded this other line of true New Enofland men and women, to which centuries are as years, and which in every age of America's history has signally advanced its high destiny. This first Henry was in the newly incorporated township a man of mark, — its first brewer (an important ofiice among Englishmen brought up on the nut-brown ale), and also first clerk and clerk of the writs. All this would go to show that in 1640 he was no recent settler, but a rooted and firmly established inhabitant. The when and whence of his arrival, however, are both in dispute. President John Adams, who THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 63 should know, had the following incised on a tomb he erected in 1817 to his ancestors : " In memory of Henry Adams, who took his flight from the Dragon persecution in Devonshire, in England, and alighted with eight sons near Mount Wollaston." As nowhere else is there record of " the Dragon persecution," it is surmised that ^^ the Dragon of persecution " is the original tradition. Another descendant in these later days, the Rev. H. F. Fairbanks, favoj-s the flight from Devonshire, because the name of Henry Adams has been for two centuries or so on an " ancient parchment roll " which connects him with a distinguished house of that region. No less is it attempted to show than " that Henry Adams was a descendant of Lord ap Adam and his wife Elizabeth de Gournai, who lived in the latter part of the thirteenth and early part of the fourteenth century, and that through Eliza- beth de Gournai he was descended from Matilda and William the Conqueror, and through Matilda from the Counts of Flanders on the one side, be- ing derived from the Capetian kings of France, and on the other side from Charlemagne, the great emperor of the West." Little did John Adams know of this, and as little would he have cared for it. Writing to Miss Hannah Adams, the historian, who referred to the " humble obscurity " of their common origin, he vigorously declared that, could " I ever 64 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN suppose that family pride were any way excusable, I should think a descent from a line of virtu- ous, independent New England farmers for a hundred years was a better foundation for it than a descent through royal or noble scoundrels ever since the flood." An eternal verity! — then cherished chiefly in Puritan circles, and heard in the prescient utterance of a Cromwell, a Milton, a President of pure democracy, but now an illus- trious truism the world over. Numerous in the colonies were these " nobles by the right of an earlier creation." A better population in phys- ical soundness, purity of life, intelligence, and high human aims had never before been brought together. Lafayette, on his farewell visit to these shores, remarked, in pleased surprise, that the immense crowds which greeted him in the streets of towns and cities seemed like a picked popula- tion out of the whole human race. " Seems ! " Monsieur le Marquis ? " Nay, we know not seems ! " They were in truth a selected peo- ple. In their uneventful days they lived simplest lives, in kindly, honest brotherhood, independent, industrious, sincerely trying to do the Lord's will as they understood it ; and when the great hour arrived which summoned them to show what of valor and truth was in them, the test was met with prompt and natural evolution of latencies into the white flash and flame of patriotic daring and transcendent wisdom. From the farm and THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 65 the shop, with scarce a transformation, came heroes, captains, statesmen of renown, and women instinct with miraculous wit and devotion, who took their preordained places, outranking the best the courts and cabinets of the nations might produce. Such were the people from whom John Adams sprang. In every fibre of his strong, rugged, and original character, he was a typical man of the free common people of the best New England towns, — a genuine son of the Puritan, fearing God, and knowing no other fear ; a right seed of the " sifted grain " planted here in the New World to make a new and more puissant nation. The elements which came so conspicuously to the sur- face in him were latent in his forefathers, and have been strenuously manifested in many an Adams since. They are Puritans all, clear and direct in character, with not a trace of devious- ness, relying upon principle, and not at all upon human dexterity, and never feeling at home un- less their feet are upon the solid and eternal verities. So fixed, they rather enjoy defying the world of the shifty and the unstable. "Come one, come all; this rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I." Another theory with regard to the arrival of Henry Adams in this country is that he was of the devoted company of that renowned minister, the Rev. Thomas Hooker, which, fleeing from 66 AVHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Braintree in Essex County, England, arrived here in the summer of 1632, and began " to sit down " at " the Mount." While actively preparing for the coming of their pastor and others of the brethren, they were ordered by the General Court to remove to Newtown, now Cambridge. All did not remove. Enough, indeed, remained to influ- ence the settlers at a later date to change the name of " the Mount," when it was incorporated as a town, to that of their dear old home in Eng- land, Braintree. If Henry Adams was num- bered with this remnant, his word and that of the four of his eight sons who were of age at that time would have been potent in the naming. It was a vigorous and ambitious family. Four, at least, won military titles, and one came to be a deacon. When in 1646 the father died, most of the sons sought on the frontier larger fields to plough and plant, and went to Concord and Med- field and other distant towns. Of interest is it to note that Lieutenant Henry Adams, the eldest son, married before his removal Elizabeth Paine, daughter of that Moses Paine who in 1643 mar- ried Judith Quincy. Thus early in the history of these two families did they come into relation- ship. Joseph, the seventh son of the original Henry, remained on the farm. He was born in England in 1626. It is through him and his son Joseph that the family tree of the Adamses came to its % THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 67 finest enlorescence. No inconsiderable man was the elder Joseph, — farmer, brewer for the town, selectman, and father of twelve children. The mother of the children was Abigail Baxter, of good stock too; and when her son Joseph mar- ried he honored brilliantly the Adams instinct for wiving superior women, thus early devel- oped, and took to his heart and home Hannah Bass, daughter of sturdy John Bass of Brain- tree and Ruth Alden of the poetic Priscilla lineage. Thus through solid, intelligent, God- fearing men and women the race ascended to John, the deacon, born in 1691, son of the sec- ond Joseph. " He was beloved, esteemed, and revered by all who knew him." No formal and feckless deacon he, but a manly and militant one, made lieutenant in the militia, and serving the town as selectman for many years, '' almost all the business of the town being managed by him." Seven children were born to him. The eldest of them, whom he named John, needed only to be sent to college to start him in a career which ended in the Presidency. " If my grand- father himself," wrote John Quincy Adams, " had received the same education, he would have been distinguished either as a clergyman or as a lawyer." The house in which John Adams was born is as typical of its Idnd as were its inhabitants of their kind. It is the plain, square, honest block 68 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN of a house, widened by a lean-to, and scarcely two stories high, commonly built by the farmers of the period. Such are still to be seen throughout New England, gleaming white under the cathedral elms. Homely, are they ? Yes ; but like their com- panions, the huge granite boulder and the outcrop- ping chif, they fit harmoniously into the rugged landscape. The Adams homestead, built in 1681, was adopted at once by inclusive Nature and woven into the even texture of her scenery. In front of it ran the old Plymouth highway, and behind and on both sides stretched away the wide fields of the farm, picturesquely sprinkled with orchard trees and occasional pines and elms. The majestic sweep of the forest-covered slopes of Penn's Hill, near at hand, and the more distant terraces of the Blue Hills bounded the vision. Now, among the modern cottages of a thriving town, it seems humble enough and out of place, with only the neighboring house — in which John Quincy Adams was born, and the homestead of the solid old Field family — to keep it in coun- tenance. But in human interest what other habitation in all this broad land may surpass it ? Here is the real Cradle of American Independence, — here, and in the house adjoining, where John and Abigail Adams began their married life, and in which their illustrious son came into being. In the simpHcity of these surroundings great THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 69 souls, to use the words of Milton, were " inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue, stirred with the high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages." It is one of the shrines of this great republic. The home in which Wash- ington was born was destroyed by fire when he was three years of age. The frail cabin in which Lincoln first saw the light soon crumbled to dust. But here stands the veritable roof -tree under which was ushered into being the earhest and strongest advocate of independence, — the leader whose clear intelligence was paramount in shaping our free institutions, the founder of a line of statesmen, legislators, diplomats, historians, whose patriotism is a passion, and whose integrity is like the granite of their native hills. Piously is the ancient building cared for by the Adams Chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution, and its original appointments preserved for the sight of reverent pilgrims. It was on the 19th of October, 1735, that the home of the Adamses was blessed with the son who brouo'ht it fame. Another home but a mile away, the home of Parson Hancock, was similarly blessed on the 12th of January, 1737, by the birth of another John. To the Rev. Mr. Han- cock, with no eyes to look into the future, the two Johns are but two boys making happy two households, and brief is his record of baptism, — 70 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN " John, son of John Adams, October 26th, 1735 ; " " John Hancock, my son, January 16th, 1737." But the son of the deacon and the son of the minister were to be joined in what momentous transformations ! As boys they played together, perhaps went to the same school, and of a Sunday sat, the one in the minister's pew and the other in the deacon's, at either side of the pulpit, and furtively pitied each other as the sermon length- ened. When the Rev. Mr. Hancock died, in 1744, his son was adopted by the rich Thomas Hancock of Boston, brother of the minister. But later John Adams the lawyer aided with his legal talent John Hancock the merchant, and together they wrought for liberty in the Provin- cial Congress and in the wider field of the Con- tinental Congress. It was a daring project for the parents of John Adams in their straitened circumstances to send him to college ; but he was their first-born, and the promise of attaining high things was in him. They cherished the hope that he would become a minister, — " wag his pow in a poopit," — fond dream of Puritan households. What an " Orson of parsons " the robust and explosive John Adams would have made ! Fortunately for the peace of a church, which, to quote his own words, wanted in a parson mainly " stupidity, irresistible grace, and original sin," he developed liberal opinions on some disputed THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 71 points in divinity. In this crisis of his fate, upon graduating from Harvard, he took to teaching for subsistence, and to the law for vocation. Now, in the name of all the gods at once, let us be thankful that this invincible Samson was preserved by a happy foreordination for the creation of a new nation, and not for the shaking of pillars in the temple of the Philistines ! In this very year of his decision we find his prescient patriotism surmising that the seat of empire may be trans- ferred to America ; " that it may be easy to obtain mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for our- selves is to disunite us." From teaching and law study in Worcester he returned in 1758 to Braintree. " Rose at sun- rise," reads a sample record in his diary, " un- pitched a load of hay, and translated two more leaves of Justinian." He is socially inclined, and with farm chores and study mingles chat and tea with neighbors, and smokes a friendly pipe with his cousin. Dr. Savil, next door. He even amuses himself and displays his Latinity by reading Ovid's " Art of Love " to the doctor's wife as he leans over the fence. He frequents Parson Wibird's bachelor quarters in the Spear house, still stand- ing on Canal Street, and exhausts the contents of that gentleman's mind, " stuffed Tvith remarks and stories of human virtues and vices, wisdom 72 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN and folly." But above all, the most stimulating conferences on liberty, and at the same time the most distracting encounter of wits, is to be found in the home of Josiah Quincy, in the Hancock parsonage, and in the Quincy mansion, occupied by Edmund Quincy. There, with the Quincys and Jonathan Sewall and John Hancock and many another known to fame, he talks politics, law, literature, plays cards, flirts a bit, and de- means himself generally in a quite human fashion. He is ambitious to excel, and bears his part with such exuberant energy as to be plagued after- ward with comj)unctious visitings of conscience. " I have not conversed enough with the world," he records, " to behave rightly. I talk to Paine about Greek, — that makes him laugh. I talk to Sam Quincy about resolution and being a great man, and study and improving time, — which makes him laugh. I talk to Ned [Quincy] about the folly of affecting to be a heretic, — which makes him mad. I talk to Hannah and Esther about the folly of love, about despising it, about being above it, pretend to be insensible of tender passions, — which makes them laugh." He was not really cynical with regard to the tender passions ; he was only smitten. The five lovely daughters of Judge Edmund Quincy, and the adorable Hannah, daughter of Colonel Josiah Quincy, aroused in him the unutterable, not to be awkwardly laughed away. Now shy, and now THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 73 boisterous, as is the way of a young man charmed by a maid, he first fluttered around Esther, and then fell a victim to the enchantments of Hannah. To her he was about to propose — the words were trembling upon his lips — when he was inter- rupted by the fateful intrusion of a merry party from the mansion. He drew back as from an abyss which might have swallowed ambition, study, promotion, patriotism. His youth and penniless condition w^ere responsible for this revul- sion of f eehng. Now in strenuous study he seeks an antidote to cleanse his bosom of that perilous stufP, — " no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness." John Adams took himself too seriously, as is the defect of the Puritan temper. He was really devouring books, besides doing a man's work, almost, on the farm. About this time, 1761, his father died, and the direction of affairs fell to him as the eldest son. Now, also, he entered upon his first performance of public duties. There prevailed in his town a sort of compulsory municipal service which has some significance in the light thrown back upon it by the disinter- ested attitude of generations of the Adamses. This service now summoned John Adams to bear his part. " In March," he says in his diary, " when I had no suspicion, I heard my name pronounced [at town meeting] in a nomination of surveyor of highways. I was very wroth be- 74 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN cause I knew no better, but said nothing. My friend, Dr. Savil, came to me and told me that he had nominated me to prevent me from being nominated as a constable. ' For/ said the doctor, ' they make it a rule to compel every man to serve either as constable or surveyor, or to pay a fine.' Accordingly, I went to ploughing and ditching . . . and building an entire new bridge of stone be- low Dr. Miller." Charles F. Adams, the younger, comments with satisfaction upon this method, and declares that the community has a right to the services of its best men, " the best in a prac- tical sense, and that its claim should be enforced, when public opinion does not suffice, by other means." This, he thinks, would be one factor in solving the great problems connected with the government of all towns and cities. However this may be, the early Quincy method and the words of Mr. Adams throw light upon a princi- ple the Adamses have invariably followed. They have never sought public office, and they have never refused public service, however humble. John Adams was not only road surveyor but selectman. John Quincy Adams, after he had been President, did not hesitate to accept the com- paratively humble position of representative to Congress, declaring that in his opinion " an ex- President would not be degraded by serving as a selectman of his town if elected thereto by the people." And his son, Charles Francis Adams, THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 75 our great minister to England during the civil war, when approached by his fellow townsmen who wished him to serve on the school board or in the bank, responded simply, " I am very busy with my literary work, but if my fellow citizens think I can serve them in that capacity I will ac- cept the office." It is the chivalry of citizenship, the fulfillment of the royal motto " I serve ; " honored also by the late John Quincy Adams, who for nearly a score of years officiated as moder- ator of the town meeting, and by the present Charles Francis Adams, who as a member of the school committee, did so much to introduce the improvements known as the " Quincy system." But to return to John Adams : what besides bridge building is he doing in these formative days ? Most important event, — he is so taken with the superb Abigail that neither studies nor patriotic visions appear for a moment as rivals. " Would you know how first he met her? " No such homely and explicit answer can be given as the one humorously set down by Thackeray in his poem on Werter and Charlotte. She was the daughter of the Rev. William Smith, minister of the church in the neighboring town of Weymouth, and he may have seen her first in the solemn setting of the parson's pew. The road between the towns was well trodden, and a companion of John Adams — Mr. Richard Cranch, no less — married her elder sister Mary in this very year. 76 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN But one is inclined to the opinion that acquaint- ance began in the animated circles of the Quincy mansion. Abigail was connected with the Quin- cys by marriage. Her grandmother was Mrs. John Quincy, who lived on the farm at Mount Wollaston, which adjoined that of Judge Ed- mund Quincy on the seaward side. Here she was a frequent visitor. Indeed, much of all she knew was taught her by her grandmother. " Her excellent lessons," wrote Abigail later, "made a more durable impression on my mind than those which I received from my own parents." Of course she would be often at the mansion, at- tracted there by its life and gayety ; and there, still cherishing his heroics against marriage, hus- tling, and chat, John Adams met her and sur- rendered unconditionally. John and Abigail on the 25th of October, 1764, were married. In several aspects it was a great triumph for the young lawyer. His profession had told against him, for one thing. According to Puritan ethics it was an unnecessary, an un- sanctified calling, almost ; fuller of quirks to set rogues free than of rules to effect their punish- ment. Consequently, among the officious of the Weymouth parish there were dissatisfied mur- murings. The facetious parson Smith was quick to improve the occasion with a " timely " sermon. Upon the marriage of his eldest daughter to Richard Cranch he had preached upon the text, ABIGAIL ADAMS THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 77 " And Mary hath chosen that good part, vrhich shall not be taken away from her." Now, imme- diately after the marriage of Abigail, he surpassed himself with a deliverance from the text, " For John . . . came neither eatinof bread nor drink- ing wine ; and ye say, He hath a devil." With this paternal absolution the young couple began their married life in the home they had been preparing. It was the house close to the one in which John was born. By what wealth of heart's devotion, patriotic fervor, noble self- sacrifice, was that home consecrated ! Abigail brought to it a spirit as clear and ardent as that which burned in the breast of John, the " white fire" of his flaming zeal for Hberty and the rights of man. He was educated far beyond her, for it was the " fashion to ridicule female learning," and she was never sent to school ; but a New England home, the Bible and Shakespeare were enough to draw out and enrich the rare powers with which she was originally endowed, and to make her one of the greatest women of the age, a helpmeet for one of its greatest men. In the high thinking of that home, the idea of independence, floating already in the free spirit of the first settlers, was clearly formed and ex- plicitly uttered. So, when the fateful moment struck, the man was there to fling the creative word among the glowing souls of a people, and, like the central element which originates a sun, 78 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN it drew all " celestial ardours " to itself, and a new luminary among the galaxy of nations rolled into order and orbit. Onward from his twentieth year he never wa- vered in his conviction that his country was des- tined to be free and independent. His was that large view of human events, that vision of things to come, which belongs to the morally sagacious. How quick he is to detect in any true word, or aspiration of a genuine man, the heralding of the new day ! While yet a student of law, in the year 1761, he hangs upon the eloquence of James Otis as he argues against the " Writs of Assist- ance " and takes those notes of the address which are the best which have been handed down to this generation. His sympathetic conclusions even then outran the thoughts of the elder patriot. Recalling his impressions, fifty years later, he wrote, " Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Inde- pendence was born." Not a word of independ- ence, however, appears in Otis's fervent denun- ciation of that " kind of power, the exercise of which, in former periods of English history, cost one king of England his head, and another his throne." It is a plea for " English liberty " against a misguided parliament, and it is plain that John Adams fluncj into that moulten torrent the glowing hopes of his own ardent soul. THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 79 Fast upon the heels of this act of tyranny came a second, "the Stamp Act." In the thrill of indignant resentment which possessed the colo- nists when they heard of the passage of the act, John Adams came to the front. " I drew up a petition to the selectmen of Braintree/' he wrote in his diary, " and procured it to be signed by a number of the respectable inhabitants, to call a meeting of the town to instruct their representa- tives in relation to the stamps." Boston, in May, 1764, even before the act had been voted by parHament, had denied, in resolutions drawn up by Samuel Adams, the right of parHament to tax the colonies without their consent. This was the first dehberate protest. Now, in 1765, with that protest unheeded, backed though it was by other provinces, the people arrayed themselves so menacingly against the act that parliament was forced to recede. From Virginia's House of Burgesses, in May, rang through the land Patrick Henry's impassioned " if-this-be-treason " speech. Massachusetts called for a general Congress, and mobs everywhere terrorized the officials appointed to distribute the stamps. The Braintree meet- ing was held on the 24:th of September, Nor- ton Quincy acting as moderator. John Adams modestly records, " I prepared a draught of in- structions at home, and carried them with me. The cause of the meeting was explained at some length, and the state and danger of the country 80 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN pointed out ; a committee was appointed to pre- pare instructions, of which I was nominated as one. My draught was unanimously adopted with- out amendment, reported to the town, and ac- cepted without a dissenting voice. . . . They rang through the state and were adopted in so many words ... by forty towns, as instructions to their representatives." That " explanation of the cause at some length," what was it but the earliest of those clear, forceful and statesmanhke utterances which made him the " Colossus " of the debates on Independence ? To Patrick Henry ten years later he wrote, " I know of none so com- petent to the task (of framing a constitution for Virginia) as the author of the first Vu'ginia reso- lutions against the Stamp Act, who will have the glory with posterity of beginning and conclud- ing this great revolution." Perhaps the Virginia orator would have spoken as generously of John Adams could he have heard the echoes of his ad- dress in Braintree town meeting. Both had a " just sense of our rights and liberties," and both gave wings to that battle-cry of the Revolution, " No taxation without representation." On May I6th, 1766, the glorious news was announced in Boston that a vessel belonging to John Hancock had brought the tidings that the Stamp Act had been repealed. Into " atmospheric existence " thus highly charged with moral and patriotic electricity a son THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 81 was born July 11, 1767. The next day, as was then the practice, parson Wibird was called in, and the child was baptized. Grandmother Smith was there, and she requested that he should be named after her father, the aged John Quincy, who then lay dying in his home at Mount Wollas- ton. Long afterwards President John Quincy Adams wrote as follows of this transaction : " It was filial tenderness that gave the name. It was the name of one passing from earth to immor- tality. These have been among the strongest links of my attachment to the name of Quincy, and have been to me through life a perpetual admonition to do nothing unworthy of it." Elevated was life in this " little hut," but it was real, genuine, beautifully domestic. The scene of it, visible there now to any pious pilgrim, and reverently preserved in many of its antique appointments by the Quincy Historical Society, assists the imagination to realize its noble sim- plicity. The dining-room or general living room, with its wide open fireplace, is where the young couple would most often pass their evenings, and in winter would very likely occupy in measureless content a single settle, roasting on one side and freezing on the other. The kitchen, full of cheerful bustle, and fragrant as the spice isles, how it would draw the children as they grew up, the little John Quincy among them ! Here they could be near mother, and watch her with absorb- 82 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN ing attention as she superintended the cooking, now hanging pots of savory meats on the crane, and now drawing from the cavernous depths of the brick oven the pies and baked beans and In- dian puddings and other delicacies of those days. We can more easily imagine the home scene when we read these words written by Mrs. Adams to her husband : " Our son is much better than when you left home, and our daughter rocks him to sleep with the song of ' Come papa, come home to brother Johnnie.' " " Johnnie ! " is the dig- nified President and " old man eloquent " that is to be. John Adams was not permitted to enjoy without interruption the dear delights of home in " still, calm, happy Braintree." To extend his legal practice he removed his family to Boston. There, in that centre of revolutionary agitations, he min- gled with Samuel Adams, and Otis, and Josiah Quincy, Jr., and Dr. Warren, and other kindred spirits ; there he spent evenings with the Sons of Liberty in Thomas Dawes's hall, near the Liberty Tree ; there the British troops, put into the town to overawe it, drilled before his house ; and there, about nine o'clock of the 5th of March, 1770, he was alarmed by the ringing of bells, and hurry- ins: out was informed that the British soldiers had fired on the inhabitants, and had killed some and wounded others, near the town house. This was the " Boston Massacre," and during the night THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 83 Captain Preston and his soldiers were arrested. " The next morning, I think it was/' writes John Adams, " sitting in my office near the steps of the town house stairs, Mr. Forrest came in, who was then called the Irish Infant. With tears streaming from his eyes he said, ' I am come with a very solemn message from a very unfortu- nate man. Captain Preston, in prison. He wishes for counsel, and can get none. I have waited on Mr. Quincy, who says he will engage if you will give him your assistance.' I had no hesitation in answermg that counsel ought to be the very last thing an accused person should want in a free country." Why John Adams, a patriot, should render this service to the oppressors of his peo- ple, amazed many of his fellow citizens ; but he himself, speaking of it later, declared it to be " one of the most gallant, manly, and disinter- ested actions of my whole life." To the great detriment of both his health and his law practice he was carried deeper and deeper into the whirl of patriotic agitation. The coming storm now lowered darkly, and was visible enough in the imposition of new taxes, in assaults upon the independence of the judiciary, in the Boston Tea Party, and the vengeful Port Bill. Antici- pating the worst, John Adams moved his family back to Braintree. How much he longed to abide with them in peace, if that might be, is expressed in his diary : " I should have thought 84 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN myself tbe happiest man in the world if I could have retired to my little hut and forty acres, which my father left me in Braintree, and lived on po- tatoes and sea-weed the rest of my life. But I had taken a part, I had adopted a system, I had encouraged my fellow citizens, and I could not abandon them in conscience and in honor." That system was the Independence of his coun- try, now more clearly held as inevitable, but at that time a thought too daring to be accepted by many. His cousin, Samuel Adams, had come to a like conclusion soon after 1768 ; besides him, however, few or none went with John Adams. These two were joined in pleading that the courts be opened, when Governor Hutchinson closed them for not complying with the Stamp Act. They had then employed the most radical argu- ments, contending that neither taxes nor laws should be imposed upon freemen by a legisla- ture in which they were not represented. Again they were united in a matter of vital importance : in 1774 they with two others were appointed delegates by the Massachusetts Assembly to the First Continental Congress, to be held at Phila- delphia. Of one mind with regard to the attitude the country must take eventually, they soon learned how far in advance they were of the ideas commonly held. Delegates paled at the word Independence. Regiments of British troops were here in America, and more were coming, to THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 85 enforce submission to unjust laws, yet the idea of separation must not be mentioned. This very Congress of protest, in an address to the king, used the words, " Your royal authority over us and our connection with Great Britain, we shall always carefully and zealously endeavor to sup- port and maintain." The Adamses were as yet powerless to advance their great idea. How- ever, they had only to abide their time ; coming events were to be their great allies. Abigail Adams, left in the Braintree home, is on "the firing line," a witness of all the occur- rences which, in so tragic a manner, were to co- operate with her husband. She is aflame with indignation at the oft-repeated tales of the inso- lence of Gage's troops in Boston ; she is the inspiration of her patriot neighbors ; she is in correspondence with Warren and other leaders. When the storm is let loose in the whirlwind passion of Lexington and Concord, her home is the centre of excitement. The minute-men stream along the highway to invest Boston ; the militia are drilling on the common by the meeting- house ; the shores are guarded. One morning, on the appearance of three sloops and a cutter, "the people come flocking this way, every wo- man and child driven off from below my father's, my father's family flying." Still later she writes, " My house is in confusion ; soldiers coming in for lodging, for breakfast, for supper, for drink. 86 WHERE AMERICAN mDEPENDENCE BEGAN . . . Sometimes refugees from Boston, tired and fatigued, seek an asylum for a day, a night, a week." Mr. Adams, now attending the Second Congress, is anxious, and counsels her if real danger threat- ens, to fly to the woods with the children. She is " distressed but not dismayed." The excitement swells and rises towering to the 17th of June, 1775, when, as Mrs. Adams writes, " the day, perhaps the decisive day, is come on which the fate of America depends." At early dawn the town is awakened by the heavy cannonading of the British ships, firing against the breastworks thrown up on Bunker Hill. " The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing we cannot eat, drink or sleep." Taking with her the little John Quincy, now about eight years old, she climbs the neighboring Penn's Hill, and looks toward Boston. " It was a clear June day," writes the younger C. F. Adams, " and across the blue bay they saw against the horizon the dense, black column of smoke which rolled away from the burninof houses of Charlestown. Over the crest of the distant hill hung the white clouds which told of the battle going on beneath the smoke. There was, withal, something quite dramatic in the scene ; but, as the two sat there, silent and trembling, the child's hand clasped in that of the mother, thinking now of what was taking place before their eyes, and now of the husband and THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 87 father so far away at the Congress, they Httle dreamed of the great future for him and for the boy, to be surely worked out in that conflict, the first pitched battle of which was then being fought out before them." Next day, writing to her husband, she says, " My bursting heart must find vent at my pen. ... I have just heard that our dear friend Dr. Warren is no more, but fell gloriously fighting for his country ; saying, better to die honorably in the field, than ignominiously hang upon the gallows. Great is our loss. . . . It is expected [the British] will come out over the Neck to-night, and a dreadful battle must ensue. Almighty God cover the heads of our countrymen, and be a shield to our dear friends ! " At the very hour in which Abigail Adams and her son were watching the battle of Bunker Hill, John Adams, with sagacious forethought, was securing the election of Colonel George Wash- ington of Virginia as commander-in-chief of the forces of the colonies. At a stroke he thus united North and South, and committed all the colonies to the war for liberty. Henceforth these two, George Washington, the great captain of the Revolution, and John Adams, the great statesman of the Revolution, loom conspicuous in those troubled times, and cease not their mighty labors till they have won freedom and independence for a people, and established in strength this vast Republic of the West. 88 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN To secure the pledge of the whole country to take up the cause and the army of New England was certainly a great achievement ; it was no less an achievement to induce the whole country to speak with one voice the word Independence. Before the battle of Lexington he hardly dared breathe the thought in the hearing of Congress. Almost all the members were averse to such a step. His ideas are contemptuously spoken of as the rad- ical and leveling ideas of Massachusetts. He is "avoided like a man infected with the leprosy." "Even Washington," declares John Fiske, "when he came to take command of the army at Cam- bridge, after the battle of Bunker Hill, had not made up his mind that the object of the war was to be the independence of the colonies." In the same month of July, 1775, JefPerson said ex- pressly, " We have not raised armies with designs of separating from Great Britain and establish- ing indej)endent states. Necessity has not yet driven us into that desperate measure." John Adams, meanwhile, schooled himself to exercise patience, which was not exactly one of his vir- tues, and with suppressed passion waited for the hour that was sure to strike. " I am obliged to be on my guard," he writes, " yet the heat within will burst forth at times." Stubborn strength of will is, however, one of the very elements of the Adams make-up, and he fought on. Lexing- ton and Concord and Bunker Hill fought with THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 89 him ; these and the rejection by the King of the " olive branch " petition, forced a hearing of his great thought. The burning of Portland assisted, so also did the publication of " Common Sense," by Thomas Paine. In March, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote : "I am charmed with the senti- ments of ' Common Sense,' and wonder how an honest heart, one who wishes the welfare of his country and the happiness of posterity, can hesi- tate one moment at adopting them. I want to know how these sentiments are received in Con- gress. I dare say there would be no difficulty in procuring a vote and instructions from all the Assembhes in New England for Independ- ency." And now, in May, Virginia adopted those fa- mous instructions to her delegates in Congress " to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent states." Thus encouraged, John Adams, on the 15th of May, urged successfully the adoption of a reso- lution recommending all the colonies to form for themselves independent governments. In the preamble, which he wrote, it was declared that the American people could no longer conscien- tiously take oath to support any government deriving its authority from the Crown. This preamble, as Fiske says, " contained within itself the gist of the whole matter. To adopt it was virtually to cross the Rubicon." " The Gordian 90 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN knot is cut at last ! " exclaimed John Adams. The thoughts of men, of whole provinces, now rapidly crystallized. Richard Henry Lee, "tall and commanding in person, with the noble coun- tenance of a Roman, the courage of a Caesar, and the eloquence of a Cicero," submitted to Congress, on the 7th of June, 1776, a motion embodying the instructions of Virginia. In the precise lan- guage, almost, of the Virginia Convention he moved, " That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States ; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." The mo- tion was seconded, as a descendant of Patrick Henry writes, " by the glorious old John Adams," and "Massachusetts stood side by side with Virginia." Debate followed, but the decision was postponed for three weeks. Then, on the 1st of July, Congress taking up the " resolution respecting independency " once more, John Adams led off in a speech of surpassing eloquence, and a " power of thought and expression which," said Jefferson, " moved the members from their seats." He was the " Colossus of that Congress," as Jefferson again testifies, the " Atlas of Inde- pendence," as Richard Stockton declared. He compelled conviction, and, at last, on the 2d of July, the flame in his own soul fused into a THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 91 single molten current the aspirations of a peo- ple, and amid the glow of noble, daring, and fervent speech, the resolutions of independency were unanimously adopted. The preparation of the immortal Declaration had been previously submitted to a committee consisting of Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston, and on the evening of the 4th of July, it was adopted with equal unanimity. Elated and thankful was John Adams. In a burst of exultation he wrote to Mrs. Adams : " The 2d day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore." So the event has been celebrated, but the 4th of July, the date of the adoption of the Declaration, is the one the people recognize as the culminating moment of the great event. Then there suddenly rose " in the world a new empire styled the United States of America." Trumbull's picture of the signing of the Declaration is true to the life. John Adams, 92 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN viewing it in Faneiiil Hall in his later years, re- called that, when engaged in signing it, a side conversation took place between Harrison, who was remarkably corpulent, and Elbridge Gerry, who was remarkably thin. " Ah, Gerry," said Harrison, " I shall have an advantage over you in this act." " How so ? " inquired Gerry. " Why," replied Harrison, " when we come to be hung for this treason, I am so heavy, I shall plump down upon the rope and be dead in an instant ; but you are so light, that you will be dangling and kicking about for an hour in the air. The indomitable patience, the conquering per- sistence, of John Adams at Philadelphia, were equaled by Abigail's display of heroic virtues at home. She sustained him by her affection and by her reenforcement of his convictions. " Let us separate from the King's party," she exhorts. " Let us renounce them and instead of supphca- tion as formerly, let us beseech the Almighty to blast their counsels and bring to naught all their devices." She is " farm woman," guiding wisely the sowing and the reaping which is to bring her children bread : she is the strength of her distracted neighbors, through terrors by night and day, through want, and through the horrors of a pestilence. Her home, indeed, is a centre of life and hope and inspiration. All this is luminous in those remarkable letters which have THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 93 done so much to make known her great virtues and to extend her fame. During these exciting years of her husband's absence the young John Quincy is a great comfort to her. The Httle fellow when barely nine years old fearlessly be- comes her " post rider/' going on horseback unat- tended over the eleven long miles of the coun- try road to Boston for letters. And now she is to lose both the boy and his father. Word comes to John Adams, in November of 1777, then home hardly a month from Congress, announ- cing his appointment to the court of France. So on a February morning Mr. Adams and his boy drive down to Norton Quincy's, near the shore. The mother did not accompany them, feeling, it is likely, hardly equal to a second leave taking. It was a rough mid-winter voyage, in a vessel far from staunch, and there was no lack of excite- ment from perilous storms and possible Eng- lish cruisers. Mr. Adams exhibited much forti- tude and practical wisdom, and he testified that " Johnnie behaved like a man." In this, as in all his missions abroad, John Adams comported himself magnificently, upholding with audacious courage the rights and honor of his native coun- try. He was as unyielding in his demands for consideration as if he had the America of to-day behind him, and secured, in treaties of peace and commerce, concessions his colleagues had deemed impossible. 94 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN After an absence of eighteen months he re- turned to Braintree, August 2, 1779, landing on the very beach of the Mount Wollaston farm, close to Norton Quincy's house, from which he had embarked a year and a half before. So use- ful a citizen was not long permitted to enjoy the repose and delights of his home. Hardly a week had passed by when the town voted to send a delegate — but one, though others were called for — to the convention which was to frame a State constitution, and " the Hon'ble John Adams, Esq., was chosen for that purpose." The convention instructed him to draw up a draught for its consideration, and this, as Mellen Cham- berlain writes, furnished the model for the Con- stitution of Massachusetts and other States, and from it was adopted the form of the general government in the Constitution of the United States. "Fifty millions of people to-day live under a constitution the essential features of which are after his model." John Adams was not allowed to remain with the convention long enough to present the model himself. He was again sent abroad, and the draught was passed over to his associates on the committee, James Bowdoin and Samuel Adams. He again went to France ; this time to assist in the negotiations for peace. While still abroad he was in May of 1785 appointed our first min- ister to the English court. At that time he was THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 95 in London, where his wife had joined him the year before. " I remember her/' wrote Josiah Quincy, describing her departure, "a matronly beauty, in which respect she yielded to few of her sex, full of joy and elevated with hope. Peace had just been declared. Independence ob- tained, and she was preparing to go from that humble mansion to join the husband she loved at the Court of St. James." Upon their return to America Mr. Adams was immediately appointed once more a delegate to Congress, but before he had time to serve his country in that capacity he was elevated to the position of Vice-President. This office, as was then the rule, went to the person who received the second highest vote for President. Washington and John Adams, one in character and patri- otism, united to lead the New Republic on its untried way ! What an exalted illustration was that of the ideal of representative government, the choice of the best men for rulers ! Loyally Adams labored with Washington through the eight years of his administration, and then, in 1797, he himself was elected to the Presidency. Four stormier, more exacting years had not fallen to his lot than these in which he was now put foremost to assist the country to adjust it- self to its internal and external relations. Wash- ington's second term had been more harassing, perturbed, and exacting than the first. The 96 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDEXCE BEGAN country was restless in the uncertainty of its attitude toward England and France in their gigantic conflict ; the raw material of free citi- zenship was not yet consolidated into a nation ; local attachments had not been modified, nor jealousies expelled by the power of a wider patriotism. All these excitants of irritation, augmented, were bequeathed to the administra- tion of John Adams. Through bitterest parti- san strife, through the selfish intrigues of the French, through the domineering of the Eng- lish, he never was less than noble. Passionately he resented what he felt to be injustice, impa- tiently he girded at plain stupidity. The Adamses are born that way ; they are not conspicuous for meekness. But the welfare of the country was his supreme care, and for that he esteemed no sacrifice too great. His administration, it is not to be denied, was admirable in its strength. With the vigorous practical sense so characteristic of him, he saw things just as they were, measured accurately the human elements and tendencies in the great adversaries that threatened from foreign shores, instinctively divined the right and the possible. Consequently the lines of his policy took on a permanent character not to be set aside by the "' peaceable coercion " or other theories of his successor. He held the new nation to its predes- tined course with firm grasp, however strong the THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 97 sweep of deflecting currents or wildly tempestuous the seas. Time has justified his chief measures, and none more than the inception of that navy which in these later days has gained for our na- tion so much renown. This was congenial work, for there was deep in him an irrepressible Ber- serker element. The rage of fight was easily aroused in him for a just cause. " Above all, war, for a profession," is what he thought of in start- ing out in life, and while the Revolution lasted, his hand itched to grasp the sword. For a republic so divinely born, and watched over still by the venerated founders, the amount of original sin developed was surprising. Jeal- ousies, misunderstandings, intrigues, party pas- sions, were sorrowfully proportionate, in volume and intensity, to what humbles us in these degen- erate days. And most unexpected of all, for its touch of ingratitude, was the uprising of " un- girt " democracy against the straight-laced, dig- nified, and ideal statesmanship of Washington and Adams. John Adams failed of reelection to a second term. He was deeply hurt ; cut to the heart. Frank and open as the day, and altogether devoted to his country, he hated with a perfect hatred the undero^round schemino; and self-seek- ing which he was persuaded had confused and perverted the judgment of the people. Majestic as Lear in his indignation and wrath, he turned his face eastward, not waiting to greet his sue- 98 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN cessor, Thomas Jefferson. Discourteous, was it ? Pardonable, for all that, as the fling of an hon- est man who could not bring his soul to dissem- ble in a last official function. The disappointment over his defeat for a second term was almost balanced by the joy of return to " still, calm, happy Braintree." That part of it in which he lived had been set off in 1792, and called Quincy, after John Quincy, whose name Mr. Adams had given to his own son. Not to the " little hut " did he return, how- ever, but to a habitation more in keeping with his station. This was the house of Leonard Vas- sall, a West India planter, which, after the Rev- olution, had been sequestrated as Tory property. It was built in 1731, and Mr. Adams bought it in 1785. The Vassalls were genteel people, and rigid Episcopalians. Mr. Vassall, before his mar- riage, made a will with the provision that his widow should have the use and improvement of his real estate so long as she continued " a pro- fessed member of the Episcopal Church of Eng- land." The house in Quincy was used as a sum- mer resort, and still contains one room paneled from floor to ceiling in solid St. Domingo mahog- any. Originally a small dwelling, it has been added to until the earlier structure is almost lost in the wide front and deep gabled wings of the later structure. Here John Adams and his wife were to spend ^ (J n .n CO o- r^ C/j ^^ f^ W ■n It ^^ < ^ Q < >. ^ THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 99 the remainder of their days, honored by their townspeople, visited by eminent foreigners and by adoring Americans. Here they celebrated their golden wedding, and here too, marvelous to relate, was celebrated the golden wedding of their son John Quincy Adams, and that of their grandson, Charles Francis Adams. What testi- mony is this to the vitality of the Adams family ! John Adams never seemed to have any declin- ing years. In his retirement he continued to rise as early as four or five o'clock, often building his own fire. When the weather permitted he walked up the lane opposite his house to the top of " Presidents' Hill," twice every day, to see the sun rise and set. And on Sunday, whatever the weather, he attended divine service at the church of his fathers. With sympathetic observation he noted the continuous advance of a more genial and spiritual religion gaining upon the leaden atmosphere of New England theology. Excellent were his opportunities in this regard, for the ablest ministers in Massachusetts sought ex- changes with Parson Whitney of the Quincy church. Josiah Quincy, in his " Figures of the Past," conducts us into the old meeting-house, crowded with its farmer folk, its village aristo- cracy, its judges, captains, and distinguished visi- tors ; and we can almost see in the front pew on the right of the broad aisle the dignified form of the President. 100 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN " An air of respectful deference to John Adams seemed to pervade the building. The ministers brought their best sermons when they came to exchange, and had a certain conscious- ness in their manner as if officiating before roy- alty. The medley of stringed and wind instru- ments in the gallery — a survival of the sacred trumpets and shawms mentioned by King David — seemed to the imagination of a child to be makinof discord togfether in honor of the vener- able chief who was the centre of interest." In the rural surroundings of his Quincy home John Adams met Lafayette for the last time. When they were both younger they had associ- ated on intimate terms in France and in America. Together they had gone through the great strug- gle for American independence, and now when that struggle was all behind them, and Lafayette as well as himself was advanced in years, they were to meet again for a moment, and then to part forever. With much emotion the President waited for his guest. When Lafayette appeared he rose to meet him, and the two venerable men threw their arms about each other's neck, and lifted up their voices and wept. Afterwards Lafayette visited the Quincys. " That was not the John Adams I remember," he said, — a thought which also came to Mr. Adams, who said, " That was not the Lafayette I remember." Forty years had made a great difference. Two THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 101 little ofrandcliildren of the President, Elizabeth C. Adams and Isaac Hull Adams, begged to be al- lowed to remain in the room, and saw the whole scene. EHzabeth is living to-day (1902, aged ninety-four), and her memory of all that took place then is vivid, and connects us directly with that distant time. She occupies the old house of their father, Chief Justice Thomas Boylston Adams, on Elm Street, Quincy. In his last days John Adams became recon- ciled to Thomas Jefferson, and together they carried on a friendly correspondence : now at the solemn close they were to be associated in a man- ner strikingly dramatic and appropriate. "On the 4th of July, 1826," writes C. F. Adams, the younger, " the town celebrated with special re- joicings the fiftieth anniversary of Independence. It was celebrated as its sturdiest supporter had fifty years before predicted it would be, as ' a day of deliverance, with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations.' " On that fair glad day — in the midst of peace and prosperity and political good feeling, with the sound of joyous bells and boom- ing guns ringing in his ears, with his own toast of " Independence forever " still lingering on the lips of his townsmen — the spirit of the old patriot passed away. His last words were, " Thomas Jefferson still survives." But Jeffer- son, too, had passed away a few hours earlier on that memorable Independence Day. 102 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN "His beloved and only wife/' Abigail, had died some eight years before this, on the 28th of October, 1818. That union of more than half a century had been as ideal as our humanity may illustrate. " They survived in harmony of sen- timent, principle, and affection the tempests of civil commotion ; meeting undaunted and sur- mounting the terrors and trials of that Revolu- tion which secured the freedom of their country, improved the condition of their times, and bright- ened the prospects of futurity to the race of man upon earth." So enduring, so perfect, so benefi- cent generally had been this union that it seems as though in the scheme of things they should have lived together to the end, and in a day have been summoned to that eternal companionship in which, neither marrying nor given in mar- riage, they are " like the angels which are in heaven." The desolation of the years of sepa- ration bore heavily upon John Adams, but he was sustained by his Christian faith and habitual acceptance of all which the Divine order imposed. Besides the famous John Quincy they had four other children : Abigail, born July 14, 1765, who married H. W. Smith ; Susanna, born December 28, 1768, who died in 1770 ; Charles, born May 29, 1770, who married Sarah Smith, and Thomas Boylston, born September 15, 1772, who married Ann Harod. Moved, as John Adams expressed it, " by the THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 103 veneration he felt for the residence of his ances- tors and the place of his nativity, and the hahitual affection he bore to the inhabitants with whom he had so happily lived for more than eighty-six years," he left his large and valuable library to the town of Quincy, and gave lands for the sup- port of a school for the teaching of the Greek and Roman languages, and, if thought advisable, the Hebrew. In 1871 the Academy building was erected on the site of the house in which John Hancock was born. A gift as generous was also made to the ancient First Church, with which he and all his ancestors had been activly connected, enabling it to build in place of the old wooden structure a stately stone temple of worship. It was finished in 1828, and under its portico his remains and those of his wife were eventually entombed. There, in a square chamber solidly walled with granite, and closed with iron doors, they rest side by side in two immense granite sarcophagi, " till the trump shall sound," as a mural tablet within the church declares. In connection with this Quincy celebration of the Fourth, John Adams sent to his fellow citi- zens of the United States his last deliberate mes- sage on Independence. The following letter, now first brought to light, has been preserved among her family papers by Mrs. Abigail Whitney, formerly of Quincy, but now living with her daughter, Mrs. WilHam R. Poison of Brooklyn, 104 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN N. Y. Mrs. Whitney is the widow of William F. Whitney, a nephew of the Captain John Whitney to whom the letter is addressed. The italics fol- low the underscoring of the dictation, and make more manifest the fact that the aged patriot was conscious that these were his last words upon the great principle to which he had devoted his life. How weighty they are with his soul's conviction 1 What force of will constrained the trembling hand to write the signature, perhaps his last ! QuiNCY, June 7, 1826. Captain John Whitney, Chairman of the Committee of arrangements, for celebrating the approaching Anniver- sary of the 4:th of July in the town of Quincy. Sir, — Your letter of the 3*^ Instant, written on behalf of the Committee of Arrangements, for the approaching cele- bration of our National Independence, inviting me to dine, on the Fourth of July next, with the citizens of Quincy, at the Town Hall, has been received with the kindest emo- tions. The very respectful language with which the wishes of my Fellow Townsmen have been conveyed to me by your Committee, and the terms of afEectionate regard toward me individually, demand my grateful thanks, which you will please to accept and to communicate to your Colleagues of the Committee. The present feeble state of my health will not permit me to indulge the hope of participating, with more than by my best wishes in the joys and festivities and the solemn services of that day ; on which will be completed the fiftieth year from its birth, the Independence of these Uiiited States. A MEMORABLE epoch in the annals of the human race ; des- tined, in future history, to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political in- THE GREAT ADVOCATE OF INDEPENDENCE 105 stitutions by which they shall, in time to come, be shaped by the human mind. I pray you, sir, to tender in my behalf to our fellow citi- zens my cordial thanks for their affectionate good wishes, and to be assured that I am ^2^^^ y^-c^^ ^MJ^ (Arrrg^ VI THE PURITAN PRESIDENT, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. John Adams lived long enough to rejoice in the election of his son John Quincy Adams to the Presidency. Modestly, in a brief note, the one writes of his election, devoutly the other gives his patriarchal blessing. Such a conjunction stands alone in our history. It so afPected the imagination of some opponents that they flung out insinuations of a revival of monarchical insti- tutions in this bringing in of " John the Second of the House of Braintree." But it was by his own strength of character, his wide intelligence, his exalted virtues, and his measureless service, that John Quincy Adams won this tribute from the nation, and not because he was the son of his father. Great men were they both ; among the. greatest whom America honors. Do we curiously inquire which was the more towering figure ? It were no easy task to try to set one above the other. The elder may have excelled in original power, but the younger surpassed in learning. In both was the moral earnestness of the Puritan, and the indomitable will which forces the subject brain and heart to do marvels, and wrests from THE PURITAN PRESIDENT 107 the gods gifts for man before they are quite due. Through what a strange and varied career John Quincy Adams chmbed to equal eminence with his father ! In foreign lands and in Washington the greater part of his life was lived, far distant from his native town ; nevertheless it was in Quincy that the pure gold of his inherited nature received the royal stamp which the friction of years only wore brighter. As a boy, standing there on Penn's Hill with his mother, his soul thrilling in response to the thunders of Bunker Hill, he was established in the elements of character which made the man. Dutiful, unselfish, sensible, fine in every instinct, " wisdom his early, only choice," he was about as near the ideal child of an ideal Puritan home as New England might produce. Not in any priggish or formal sense was he this. He was a genuine boy, unhurt by the serious at- mosphere of his home ; full of life, loving the woodlands, playing at soldier with the Colonials who camped in his father's barn on their way to the front, and finding it hard among so many distractions to get down to his books. Indeed, he thought he would rather work on the farm than study. After a day's test at ditching he went back to his dry Latin grammar with much content. He matured rapidly, that is the point, for he was teachable and the right principles were in him. While yet a boy he w^as manly. He 108 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN astonished even his mother. When she was united to him in London, he then sixteen years of age, she cried out that his appearance " is that of a man, and in his countenance the most perfect good humor ; his conversation by no means de- nies his stature." And why should he not be all this ! Europe had been an open page before him. At Paris, at Amsterdam, at Leyden, his eyes were filled and his soul was fed with scenes and books and the ways of men. When not quite fourteen he actually found himself launched upon a diplo- matic career, going to Russia v^dth envoy Dana, and back at Paris, serving as additional secretary to Jefferson, Franklin, and his father in negoti- ating the final treaty with Great Britain. How fascinating this life must have been to him ! and now that his father was minister to the Court of St. James, and his mother residing in London with him, what a temptation there was to continue it ! And he might have done so, but for that Puritan conscience of his. Oxford, se- questered " in the quiet and still air of delightful studies " allured him. Subscription to the Thir- ty-Nine Articles, however, stood in the way, an obstacle not to be surmounted. He could not so stultify himself as to sign what he did not believe, nor would his father encourage such stultifica- tion. This, and the conviction that in America he could " get his own living in an honorable manner," and " live independent and free," de- JOHN QUINCY ADAMS LOUISA CATHERINE ADAMS THE PURITAN PRESIDENT 109 cicled him to return home and enter Harvard Col- lege. Along these lines his nature, according to its kind, unfolded in fresh surprises of fortitude, resourcefulness, noble daring, and passion for justice. Sturdily independent as he was from the beginning, and disciplined to do his duty at all costs, he was yet tolerant where tolerance was a virtue ; friendly too in that early day, with a fine flavor of poetry and a deep sense of piety refining all his aspirations. Stern and grim he came to be ; but it was the bitter conflict thrust upon him that made him so. And what a fighter he was ! How prompt and hard he hit ! How fearless, facing alone a host of foes ! A hero, grand among the great figures of the world; our Cromwell ! America's completest realization of Puritanism in its strength ! Let us recall the earlier picture, however, — the young man of thirty, so intellectual, so ideal, spiritual, as painted by Copley ; for this is the year in which he married Louisa Catherine John- son. She was the second daughter of Joshua Johnson, then American consul at London, and a niece of Governor Johnson of Maryland, signer of the Declaration and justice of the Supreme Court. Mr. Adams met her in London, where by request of Washington he, the minister to the Hague, had gone to assist in some negotiations. They were married on the morning of July 26, 110 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN 1797, in the Church of All Hallows, Barking. Their honeymoon abroad seemed destined to be brief, for John Adams was elected President soon after this, and he and John Quincy both felt that a nice regard for the proprieties of politics called for the resignation of the son. But Washington wrote promptly to President Adams urging him to retain John Quincy, " the most valuable public character we have abroad, and the ablest of all our diplomatic corps." So he continued in his mission to the Hague till the election of Jefferson, four years later. Ended apparently was his public career, at least for some time, and he sturdily turned to the practice of law. But it was only the quiet moment before the tumult of the storm, — the brief calm dividing between the life of plain, if masterly, sailing, and the deadly, unremitting struggle with the black rage of elemental pas- sions let loose from the pit. And the marvel of it is, he never lost his hold on the helm, and, however baffled, never failed to bring his ship to the course laid down by conscience. For politi- cal honesty and lofty patriotism history will be searched in vain for a statesman surpassing him. The hip-h Roman manner was bettered in his Christian devotion to ideal right. " He never knowingly," as John T.Morse, Jr., declares, " did wrong, nor even sought to persuade himself that wrong was right." And vigorously was this virtue THE PUKITAN PRESIDENT 111 manifested, — not cloister-like, but frankly and ruggedly, and mixed with wholesome human an- ger. There was the man for the times, every inch of him, " the Baresark marrow in his bones " ! Just the man for these times too, if we had the wit to perceive it ; but our idols must be machine made, patterned according to party creed, no uncalculable touch of the Almighty's hand in them. Almost always when John Quincy Adams's name is uttered, deprecatory hands are raised at remem- brance of his relentless scoring of contemporaries. It was "thorough ;" that word, dear to Puritan- ism, is graphic, — no one was left out, and he had an instinct for the vital defects of opponents. In that diary of his, one of the most remark- able ever written, both for volume and the value of its information, his denunciations are flung right and left impartially. Be it noted, however, that this is never done cynically. Angrily and bitterly he strikes out, and it is all because his victims seem to fall so far below the ideal when ideal men and measures were so sorely needed. For this he never spared others, he never spared himself. " The stars were not clean in his sight." His high ideals were his glory and his sorrow. " Never did a man of pure life and just purposes," says Morse, " have fewer friends or more enemies than John Quincy Adams." Tender-hearted as he was, it was no less than 112 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN tragic. " An age of sorrow and a life of storm/' are the words he wrote late in life under his own portrait. These ideals, so largely responsible for the lamentable issue, were not poor limited preju- dices, puritanical in the popular sense, but high and humane, — genuine revelations of the eternal, worthy visions for the man who nobly aspires and a nation which renews the hope of the world. Naturally they made him impatient with what seemed the life-wasting distractions of some and the degenerate self-seeking of others. While in Ghent, laboring for the most favorable terms of peace, he cannot withhold his scorn when, rising at five in the morning to begin the work of the day, he hears parties breaking up and leaving Mr. Clay's room across the entry, where they have been playing cards all night long. His self-restraint and self -discipline gradually enveloped him in a reserve which was taken to be lack of sympathy and excess of aristocratic pride. The genial current of his soul seemed to the undiscerning to be frozen. But no leader in our democracy ever dedicated himself more entirely to the de- fence and establishment of equal rights. He would not truckle to any, nor with false bland- ishments seek to win the plain man of the people. He respected himself, and he respected others as highly as himself. The sacredness of the human soul he felt as deeply as did his favorite minister. Dr. Channing. He was in the grandest sense THE PURITAN PRESIDENT 113 an absolute democrat. As Theodore Parker elo- quently declared, " he fought, not for a kingdom^ not for fame, but for justice and the eternal right ; fought, too, with weapons tempered in a heavenly stream." Every day was begun with the reading of a chapter or two in the Bible, and every day was closed with that petition learned at his mother's knee, " Now I lay me down to sleep." Greatest and last of the Puritans was he, a figure growing ever greater in the ethical per- spective of human advancement. He could be no partisan. He was too much of an American for that, as was soon made plain. The Federal- ists of Boston drew him from his retirement by electing him in 1802 to the state Senate, and in 1803 to the national Senate. At the out- set he voted for what he thought was wise and right, without regard to the claims of party ; and when the Federalists threw themselves abjectly at the feet of England, fearing the selfish in- trigues of France, he would have no part in the humiliation. " Put your trust in neither France nor England ; let America trust itself," was his counsel. The increasing arrogance of the Brit- ish, their impressment of our seamen, their de- struction of our commerce, enraged him. Better resistance, though almost hopeless, than supine endurance of such wrongs. Culminating atrocity ! The English gunboat Leopard opened her broad- 114 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN sides upon our unprepared frigate, the Chesa- peake, killing and maiming her seamen, and dragging from among them four men charged with being British subjects. Adams summoned the Federalists to crowd Faneuil Hall with an indignation meeting, and when they delayed he did not hesitate to attend a similar meeting of the Jeffersonians. For this he was branded as a traitor to his party, and his successor to the Senate was nominated insultingly early. Cost what it might, this was the kind of thing Mr. Adams was always ready to do. His reverence for his country and her institutions was so pro- found he could do nothing unworthy of them. Madison appointed him minister to Russia, and through four years he illustrated there the simple democratic dignity of his people. As one of the commissioners at Ghent to secure the treaty of peace which ended the war of 1812, his claims are as bold as if he represented the undoubted victors in that conquest. Audaciously he " goes one better " whenever the British raise their terms in the diplomatic "game of bluff," actu- ally insisting that Canada should be ceded to the United States. A treaty was secured so advan- tageous to this country that the EngHsh ruefully declared that better could not have been obtained had the Americans been triumphanto In 1815 he was appointed envoy extraordinary and min- ister plenipotentiary to Great Britain. America % THE PURITAN PRESIDENT 115 was SO heartily disliked and contemned that he was shown the most studied disfavor. Imper- turbably, however, he went about his duties, and with great intelligence and tact won for his coun- try all the consideration that was possible. It was, however, as Secretary of State that his faith in his country found completest expression. The world must be '' familiarized with the idea of considering our proper domain to be the continent of America." He secured Florida, he furthered the acquisition of Louisiana, he wrote to our minister at Madrid " that it is scarcely possible to resist the conviction that the annexa- tion of Cuba to our federal republic will be indis- pensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union," and he warned the Czar that " we should contest the rights of Kussia to any territorial establishment on this continent." In short his one grand idea was " that we should assume dis- tinctly the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments." Here is the first ap- pearance in our history, as C, F. Adams, the elder, notes, of the policy so well known afterward as the Monroe Doctrine. Father of it was he, basing it upon the righteous principle of " the consent of the governed, affirmed in our Declaration of Independence." Then came the trying time of his election to the presidency. Mean personal politics, intrigue, 116 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN slander, marked the contest. All this only served to set in clearer light the lofty character of Mr. Adams. He kept himself aloof from the strife, and would " do absolutely nothmg for his own election." He had pursued the course Emer- son praises in Michael Angelo, " to confide in one's self and be of worth and value ; " he had served his country as well as he knew how, and with absolute devotion. Would the people ap- preciate this ? He hungered for their favorable verdict ; no one better deserved it, yet his high spirit so revolted at the mere suggestion of bid- ding for votes that he retired behind a more distant reserve than ever. " If the people wish me to be President I shall not refuse the office, but I ask nothing from any man or any body of men." It was not indifference ; it was not affectation of pride. It was the feeling that the fine bloom of honors bestowed in a democracy resides essentially in the spontaneous confidence of the people. He would have this or nothing. And when the vote turned out disappointingly small he frankly declared he would refuse the of&ce if by so doing another opportunity would be afforded " the people to form and express with a nearer approach to unanimity the object of their preference." His respect for the people was as high as his own self-respect. Late in life he said, " I have never sought public trust ; but public trust has always sought me. And when THE PURITAN PRESIDENT 117 invested with it I have given my whole soul to the performance of its duties." No great measures marked the presidency of John Quincy Adams, but was it not glorified by his simple confidence in the higher principles of election on the one hand, and his entire reliance upon merit in all appointments to of&ce on the other ? Sturdily he kept to his determination to retain every person his predecessor had placed '' against whom there was no complaint which would warrant his removal." And for new ap- pointments he considered alone the fitness of the men to serve their country, and not their party affiliations. " It was magnificent," but as is often enough said, it was not practical politics, and in- vited his defeat for a second term. His man- hood and his pure patriotism suffered no defeat, whatever befell officialdom. Ideal democracy never had more superb exemplification. Would that the country could have kept to that high standard ! The subsequent debauchery of the public service by the spoils system is a suffi- ciently costly warning that neither the people's honesty nor their freedom will be preserved to them until they return to the just principles of President John Quincy Adams. The sun of his poHtical life, as he records, was now setting in the deepest gloom. He had labored for the welfare of the nation, and not at all for his own advancement. Honestly could he 118 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN write, " I have devoted my life and all the fac- ulties of my soul to the Union, and to the im- provement, physical, moral, and intellectual of my country." And what is his reward ? To be flung aside contumeliously, and to see the smart and the unscrupulous triumph over him ! He returns to Quincy at the age of sixty-two, poor in pocket, and solicitous that in the quiet of a country town he may find something to do, so that his '' mind may not be left to corrode itself." Ungrateful and dull of soul the people who permitted this ! Such words surge to the front, expressive of heartfelt indignation. But the people were neither ungrateful nor dull. They were only hostile, in a growing combination of them. The South, gradually consolidating in defense of slavery, had discerned in John Quincy Adams a spirit inimical to its institution. Their prophetic soul had indeed found out their great antagonist. As early as when he was Secretary of State he had recorded in his diary that " slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union." " Oh, if but one man," he cries, " could arise with a genius capa- ble of comprehending, and an utterance capable of communicating those eternal truths that be- long to this question, to lay bare in all its wicked- ness the outrage upon the goodness of God, — human slavery ! " Little did he think then that he was that man. But now, when his career ?"^. •^ THE PURITAN PRESIDENT 119 seemed closed, and at the end of days, he was called forth to battle with the giant wrong, and wrought such deeds for justice against over- whelming numbers as no known congress or par- liament of men had ever witnessed. A crowded life, intense, valiant, achieving, he had lived out to what would, in the usual order of things, seem a consummation. It proved to be but the intro- duction to the epoch of his career. The best was to come. The suggestion was made to him in 1830 that he might be elected, if he wished, to the national House of Representatives from the ninth Massa- chusetts district, which included Quincy. Would it degrade an ex-President to accept such a posi- tion ? Mr. Adams " had in that respect no scruples whatever. No person could be degraded by serving the people as a Representative in Congress. Nor in my opinion would an ex-Pres- ident of the United States be degraded by serv- inof as a selectman of his town, if elected thereto by the people.'' A few weeks later he received a very flattering vote, and for sixteen years he filled that office, making proud the hearts of the residents of the district by his magnificent repre- sentation of their ideals of freedom. It fell to him in the very beginning to present a petition for the abolition of slavery in the Dis- trict of Columbia ; but it was not till 1835, when the annexation of Texas began to be mooted, 120 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN that the slave question loomed large on the hori- zon, and he came to the front. He became the valiant defender of the right of petition, pre- sented more petitions, and the South blundered in applying the " gag law." It was a grievous assault upon our free institution. How the " old man eloquent " defied it, and portrayed the ini- quity of it and the system it shielded ! His parliamentary knowledge, his merciless invective, his quick intelligence, his grim composure, found out all the weak points in the array set against him, and now stung them to madness, and now held them at bay writhing impotently. " Num- bers could not overawe him," writes Morse, " nor loneliness dispirit him. He was probably the most formidable fighter in debate of whom parha- mentary records preserve the memory." For ten years he endured the strain, almost alone at first, and then gradually winning adherents, until, on December 3, 1844, a majority swept the tyran- nous rules from the House. " Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God ! " was his rever- ent acknowledgment. His work was now done. Human strength could go no farther. His voice was still heard for freedom, his clear mind could still pass upon measures in debate, but there were no more triumphs for him. On February 21, 1848, he rose as if to address the Speaker of the House and immediately fell unconscious. He was carried to the Speaker's room, and late in the THE PURITAN PRESIDENT 121 afternoon, coming to himself for a moment, he said distinctly, " This is the last of earth ; I am content." On the evening of the 23d he passed away. " I know few things in modern times," said Theodore Parker, " so grand as that old man standing there in the Honse of Representa- tives, — the compeer of Washington ; a man who had borne himself proudly in kings' courts, early doing service in high places, where honor may be won ; a man who had filled the highest office in the nation's gift ; a President's son, himself a President, standing there the champion of the neediest, of the oppressed : the conquering cause pleased others, him only the cause of the con- quered." His remains were removed to Quincy, and there they lie with those of his wife in a granite chamber adjoining the one in which rests the dust of his parents. Imposing was the gathering of statesmen, scholars, and neighbors in the Stone Temple at the funeral. The exalted emotions of the hour still throb in Whittier's stanzas : — " He rests with the immortals ; his journey has been long : For him no wail of sorrow, but a paean full and strong ! So well and bravely has he done the work he found to do, To justice, freedom, duty, God, and man forever true. " Strong to the end, a man of men, from out the strife he passed : The grandest hour of all his life was that of earth the last. Now 'midst his snowy hills of home to the grave they bear him down The glory of his fourscore years resting on him like a crown." VII CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION " Another for Hector ! " The words of the loyal old Highlander, and the answering rush of his stout sons, one after another, to defend their chief, come to mind as one thinks of the re- curring summons of America to her offspring of the Adams race, and their prompt and effec- tive response, " Another for the Union ! " And where John Quincy Adams fell at his post stands Charles Francis Adams, resolute, valiant, ade- quate. He is at the front when the press of foes is perilous, and is as level to the emergency as any of his kin. Our great minister to England during the Civil War, what dangers he averted ! " None of our generals in the field," said James Russell Lowell, " not Grant himself, did us better or more trying service than he in his forlorn outpost of London." Best of all, he did it in the high, manly way organic in his ancestors. He, too, was nobly Puritan, — that is, he earnestly strove to shape his Kfe by the most elevated moral ideals, and to labor as ever in his great Taskmaster's eye. Not alone by ^^ r^. t XoA/i/rltJ ^WlKUy ^4Jal4^. C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 123 his rare tact and judgment did he win battles, but by his directness, his grand simplicity of character, his clear reliance upon the highest conceptions of justice and truth. In its cumula- tive power what an inspiration to the Kepublic is the constancy of these Adamses, through three or more generations of resolute obedience to the moral ideal ! Does it not illuminate the saving element of our nation, now desperately, as in a death struggle, arrayed against the black smother of commercialism in trade and politics ? Does it not call upon all the true-hearted in this pre- sent time to abate not a jot " of what makes manhood dear " and the State beneficent ? Charles Francis Adams was born, not in Quincy, but in Boston, where his father was temporarily practising law, representing his State in the na- tional Senate, and incidentally serving as Boyl- ston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Har- vard. The date of his birth is August 18, 1807, his two brothers, George Washington and John, preceding him, though he long outlived them. Scarce was he two years old when he was swept into that world-wide errantry of his father, goino- with him on his mission to Kussia. His edu- cation there, as might be expected, fell into the hands of his parents. The father spent many hours a day at it, and read books of science just to qualify himself to improve his child's under- standing. " To be profitable to my children," 124 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN he humbly wrote, " seems to me to be within the compass of my powers. To that let me bound my wishes and my prayers." The mother ably assisted him in all this. After they had left Rus- sia, after Mrs. Adams with her son had followed her husband to Paris, entering the city two days behind Napoleon swiftly speeding from Elba, after two years spent in England, where Charles at a boarding-school learns Latin and the Eng- lish character, after their return to America, we read this entry in John Quincy Adams's diary : " June 11, 1819. My wife has made a transla- tion of the first and second Alcibiades," from the French. " She made it for the benefit of her sons ; and I this morning finished the revisal of it, in which I have made very little altera- tion. . . . The indissoluble union of moral beauty and goodness, the indispensable duty of seeking self-knowledge and self-improvement, and the exalted doctrine which considers the body as merely the mortal instrument of the soul, and the soul alone as man, made a deep impression on me. . . . The lessons of Soc- rates were lost upon Alcibiades ; they were not entirely so upon me. . . . My conduct in life has been occasionally marked by the passions of my nature, by the frailty of my constitution, by the weakness of my head and of my heart. But it has always been my will, and generally my endeavor, to discharge all my duties in life to ABIGAIL BROOKS ADAMS C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 125 God, to my fellow creatures, and to my own soul. I wish my sons to read and to be pene- trated as deeply as I have been with the lessons of the first Alcibiades." Thus was the founda- tion of the character of Charles Francis Adams laid deep in the eternal elements. That training made a diplomat who could not " lie abroad for the good of his country." Inestimable, also, was the influence exerted upon him by his grand- mother, Abigail Adams. Immediately upon his return to America in 1817 he was taken to Quincy and remained for a time in her keeping. An impressive experience was this, which never faded from his memory. After graduating from Harvard he spent a short time at the White House with his parents, and then went back to Boston to study law under the majestic and deep-browed Webster. He matured early ; and fitted, now, to enter upon his career, he fortunately found a most excellent wife. On September 5, 1829, he was married in Medford, at the family residence, to Abigail B. Brooks, the youngest child of Peter Chardon Brooks, a noted Boston merchant. In clear energy of soul she was, indeed, a second Abigail Adams. Queenly above most who adorn thrones, vivacious, strongly individual in charac- ter, sympathetic, and of quick discernment, she augmented every noble quality of her husband, and was a wise and devoted mother to her chil- 126 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN dren. Again the Adams race is indebted to the spindle side, in no small measure, for the steady continuance and possible expansion of its physical and mental vigor. Overshadowed deeply was Charles F. Adams at first by that astounding career of his father in the national House of Representatives. And behind '^ the old man eloquent " was the tower- ing presence of the supreme advocate of Inde- pendence. Surely it was no easy task for the young man to live up to his name, made famous by two such master spirits ! Furthermore, he was modest and sensitive in a marked degree ; so, to emerge from the shadow and develop from his own main roots such surpassing flower and fruitage is convincing evidence of his genu- ine abilities and force of character. What was in him of worth gradually began to show itself through virile articles in the magazines, through fearless editorials in a pure-politics newspaper he edited, and through five faithful years in the State legislature. Independent as either of his predecessors, he was, for an Adams, wonderfully reposeful in his sustained strength. Indeed, he was the first of his line to dispense with invec- tive, and to debate great matters in calm speech ; nevertheless in the deep elements of his char- acter there is plainly discernible the familiar ethical passion. It is visible in his contempt for shams, in his reverence for justice, in his reli- C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 127 ance upon " the laws of sublimer range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone." Naturally he is with the " conscience " Whigs when the Anti-slavery agitation begins to stir the North, and is numbered with the few choice spirits, Charles Sumner and the rest, who were the nucleus of the Eepublican party of Massachusetts and perhaps of the country. Nomi- nated Vice-President by the Free-Soil party in 1848, his is the strength of its slogan, " Adams and Liberty." Thus through the sifting for the inevitable conflict he finds his way as if by di- vine appointment to the firing line at the open- ing of the mighty battle for the Union. Fortunately for the nation he is there in Con- gress in the anxious days of 1860, aiding by his constitutional lore and by his astuteness to hold the government together in the perilous inter- regnum between Lincoln's election and inaugu- ration, when all things were out of joint and falling apart. Doubly fortunate is it that he was there, conspicuously at the fore, when the fittest man was urgently called for to fight the battle of diplomacy at the Court of St. James. As we now clearly see, he was the one man adapted by temperament and training to be our minister to England in that fearful crisis. He knew England, — he got part of his education there, — and from father and grandfather he had early imbibed all the inside facts of America's 128 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN relations with that nation. Then, also, as C. F. Adams, the younger, points out, he was in his solid quahties Anglo-Saxon himself, and by these, — self-control, high courage, frankness and fair- ness, — he won the esteem of Lord Russell, with whom he had chiefly to do. An auspicious equipment was this for a position most peril- ously abounding in points of friction, and in which it must be his one aim to prevent con- flict. At the outset the Confederate States had for chief hope the practical aid and possible inter- vention of foreign powers, and their plan was to " stand off " the Northern States just long enough to enable Europe to render the decisive verdict in their favor. As fate would have it they had fallen upon the opportune moment. Napoleon III. was then cherishing his exploita- tion of Mexico, and he welcomed, as an ally from heaven, the threatened dissolution of the Union. Hardly could he restrain himself from hastening the process, but it seemed to him so inevitable that he concluded to wait upon the slower methods of England. And England in her ruling classes was against us. For two gen- erations officialdom and aristocracy, at every mention of the United States, had been prophets of evil. The event was justifying their vatici- nations, as they were glad to believe, — " the great republican bubble in America had burst." C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 129 Thus, all of Europe that dreaded democracy, or was jealous of our growing commerce, or coveted our lands, sympathized with the South, and that sympathy was concentrated in London. It was the storm centre. How appalling was the situa- tion Mr. Adams was called upon to face ! Plain enough was this made known to him upon the very day he landed in England. With unfriendly haste — as he was persuaded — the Palmerston- Russell administration, through a royal procla- mation, had accorded belligerent rights to the Confederacy. "The intention of the govern- ment," says his son, Mr. Charles F. Adams, " undoubtedly was that the question should be disposed of — be an accomplished fact — in ad- vance of any protests." But he does not agree with his father and Secretary Seward that the step was taken in an unfriendly spirit or that it worked any real prejudice to the Union cause. However intended, it was accepted by the Amer- ican minister as a portent of the stern character of the struggle upon which he was entering. To the same effect was the obtrusively cordial recep- tion extended to the agents of the Confederacy. He found them established as favorites in the most fashionable circles, and indulged in familiar intercourse by those in power. Now began one of the most remarkable diplo- matic combats in history. It was Mr. Adams against all England in her ruling classes, with a 130 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN few notable exceptions; against France in the ambitions of her emperor ; against whoever and whatever in Europe ahgned itself in opposition to the experiment of a people's government in this western world. These various powers were flushed with the hope of victory. Gladstone spoke for them when he said, " We may antici- pate with certainty the success of the Southern States." Undaunted, Mr. Adams brought into play his great knowledge of international laws, and insisted upon the observance of sti-ict neu- trality ; he met the intrigues of the Confederate agents with direct and open protestation ; he overcame any prejudice which may have been in the mind of Lord Russell by his manliness and evident sincerity. At once his power began to be felt. Mrs. Jefferson Davis has recorded that " the astute and watchful ambassador from the United States had thus far forestalled every effort, and our commissioners were refused inter- views with her Majesty's ministers." This was only a beginning. The strife over the iron-clads was to come. Meanwhile, in a social way, Mr. Adams was holding his own. He was treated with scant courtesy by the aristocracy, but as his son Charles says, " when the Englishman was cold and reserved Mr. Adams was a little colder and a little more reserved than the Englishman." His wife marveled at his forbearance and pa- tience ) nevertheless she was his chief support C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 131 throughout his arduous mission. " To her/' writes Dr. WilHam Everett, a nephew, who knew intimately her home life in those days, " to her not less than to him are the thanks of all her countrymen due for maintaining her country's honor in the most trying circumstances of Eng- lish social life, where the aristocratic sentiment was notoriously hostile, with a combination of generosity, playfulness, frankness, constancy, culture, and dignity, w4iich none but herself, per- haps, could have so thoroughly exhibited, to the admiration of her new friends in England and the profound satisfaction of all Americans." That home life and the high character and tact of Mr. and Mrs. Adams cemented the loyalty to the Union of such men as Cobden, Bright, and Forster, and thus was effective in no slight meas- ure in averting in 1862 the recognition of the Independence of the Confederacy. Failing to " rush " the English government, the subjects of " King Cotton " now bent all their energies to create surreptitiously in England a navy to harass the North. It was their last chance ; the South pawned the family jewels to raise the needed millions, and Mason, Slidell & Co. toiled terribly through every subterranean channel. Wherever their doings showed on the surface they veiled them with the letter of the law. The ablest solicitors aided them, and the great resources of the shops and the shipyards 132 WHEKE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN of the Lairds of Liverpool were at their disposaL To defeat this enterprise Mr. Adams was per- sistent and unremitting in his efforts. In spite of all his protestations the Florida and the Ala- bama stole to sea under a cloud of legal techni- calities, Lord Russell too late admitting that it was a " scandal and reproach." " England must eventually pay for this," was the warning of Mr. Adams, and as ship after ship was destroyed by the privateers, he set down the bill of her in- debtedness. How Englishmen laughed in deri- sion ! But soberly enough they bowed to his superior wisdom ten years later at Geneva, and paid it to the last dollar. Succeeding in this first venture, the Confeder- ate agents were stimulated to carry out the more darmg one of the iron-clads. Orders were placed for the two double-turreted rams, which were designed to break the blockade of the Southern ports, and to terrorize the cities of the Northern seaboard. Should this scheme prove triumphant it would be a terrible menace to the Union. " It is a matter of life and death to defeat it," wrote the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. " Of all the insurgent menaces which lowered upon us so thickly in September and October," wrote Seward, in November of 1862, " there is only one that now gives us anxiety ; and that is the invasion by iron-clad vessels, which are being built for the insurgents by their sympathizers in C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 133 Enofland." And Jefferson Davis from an inside view declared they " would have swept from the ocean the commerce of the United States, and would have raised the blockade of at least some of our ports." Mr. Adams early discerned what was going forward, — our consul at Liverpool was alert, — and began anew his protests. Grimly Captain Bulloch, one of the Confederate agents, survey- ing his great war-ships, comments that " the passionate appeals and strong asseverations of Mr. Adams are not surprising." His situation was indeed trying. Neutrality laws, it is notori- ous, had been interpreted hitherto by the master- ful and vigorous English most liberally in their own interests. They had invented laws to justify such a course, when even the '' ancient and pre- scriptive usages of Great Britain," as Canning phrased it, in the days of the Chesapeake affair, did not go far enough. Now it was maintained, among other things, that the " lucrative char- acter" of British ship-building was so encour- aging " that closer supervision of that industry and the exercise of ' due diligence ' in restraint of the construction of commerce-destroyers would impose on neutrals a ' most burdensome, and, indeed, most dangerous ' liability." In putting forth such arguments the British government felt safe ; no fear of the future was entertained, for it cherished a perfect confidence in the 134 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN eventual triumph of the South. Recklessly the Confederacy was given the advantage of every doubt. Minister Adams had to make a thorough study of every aspect of the laws bearing upon the case, gather evidence of their infraction from our consuls, from spies, from informers, sift it carefully, and, repressing the outraged feelings of a patriot, present his remonstrances in courte- ous, judicious, and convincing form. Yet after all this ceaseless and intense labor, no more would be effected than to draw from Lord Russell a note, saying there was not sufficient evidence that the iron-clads were being built for the Con- federacy. Agent Bidloch, sheltered behind the letter of the law, feels that his enterprise is se- cure, and that the law will have to be strained to stop the war-vessels. But Mr. Adams is de- termined that if need be the laws shall be strained. The spirit of them, at the least, is with him. Justice shall be done by their exact observance. Gradually his indomitable activity and fearless protestations press with such force upon the government that they are compelled to do some- thino". " We beo^in to feel the effects of Mr. Adams's representations to Earl Russell," writes Bulloch. Yes, and still more was he to feel them ! So potent did they grow that a mock sale is made of the iron-clads to a mythical agent of the Egyptian Khedive. Desperately the South C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 135 hopes under these colors to get the ships on the blue seas. And, in fact, there is some likelihood that one of them, nearly fitted out, will escape as did the Alabama, on a "trial trip." Once again, Mr. Adams firmly calls the attention of Lord Russell to the notorious state of things, and once again receives for answer the weary array of reasons for letting the ships alone. What now is to be done? On the level of adroit diplomatic notes and solicitors' formalities absolutely nothing ! Higher ground than this he had always taken, and now, with character- istic directness and daring, he briefly expresses his regret at the conclusions of her Majesty's government, declares it opens " to the insurgents free Kberty in this kingdom to execute a pol- icy " of what they themselves described as the widest pillage, and then penned the sentence which since has become so famous, " It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lord- ship that this is war." Deliberately the words are written, but they seem to lift on " the dis- tant ground-swell of repressed passion." It was enough. This bold and direct appeal to real things was sufficient. There was activity now on the part of the British government. War vessels were placed between the iron-clads and the open sea, and they never left their berths till they were added, by purchase, to the British navy. Thereafter, to the end of the war, there 136 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN was no strain in the relations of the two coun- tries ; they were even cordial. Mr. Adams was the Grant of diplomacy, and this was his Appomattox. In the simplicity of his methods and his character he won the day for us. He did not palter in double speech, — an official and a private. His art was grand in its sincerity. '' Give me/' his father had written, reflectively viewing the duplicity of a certain diplomatist, — " give me, in every station of life and every crisis of affairs, an open and a candid mind." It was his son's prayer, too, and golden rule of intercourse. Indeed, may it not be said that the Adamses, in the three notable periods in which they so illustriously served the nation at the highest European courts, laid the foundation of what is now recog-nized in its directness as dis- tinctly American diplomacy ? Talleyrand, in his dealings with John Adams, sought to veil his mendacity, after his kind, in diplomatic phrases, insisting " on the form of civility and decorum, from which in their relations with each other governments should never depart." For such forms and evasions bluff John Adams had an utter abhorrence, and when he saw in Talleyrand not only falsehood and bribery, but an enemy of the United States, he struck him a blow so direct and vital that he carried the pain of it to his dying day. Bismarck has a name for candor. He could be frank, brutally frank, when it served C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 137 Ills turn ; but the Adamses were daringly and unswervingly veracious. When they spoke, they spoke as honest men, sound to the core. They could be silent, but never sinuous. Their direct- ness was like a law of nature. And this candor of the Puritan, so congruous with the new, simple life of this nation of the common people, has become organic. No heritage have we in the artful circumlocutions of the Old World, and we may fail at times in formal courtesy, but at least we are understood. In the simplicity and truth- fulness of his diplomacy, may it not be said that Secretary Hay in his dealings with China and " the powers " continued, in a distinguished man- ner, the " grand style " of the " open and candid mind " ? Mr. Adams was not permitted to retire from his post tiU May, 1868. Then England and America united to extol his wisdom, judgment, and character. It is all summed up in the verdict rendered by J. W. Foster in his " Century of American Diplomacy : " " No other minister of the United States has ever passed through so long a period of intense excitement and critical responsibility. He displayed diplomatic skill of the highest order, and a patriotic spirit unsur- passed by his fathers." He returned to Quincy for well earned repose, both Mrs. Adams and himself minghng unostentatiously in the life of the townspeople. From the enjoyment of this 138 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDEXCE BEGAN relaxation he was summoned, in 1871, to under- take the erownino^ achievement of his laborious days. As arbitrator on the part of the United States in the Geneva tribunal, for the adjustment of the Alabama Claims, his discretion and deep sense of justice, it is not too much to say, were paramount in harmonizing discordant elements, and in securing the highly satisfactory indemnity. As was then said of him, " he performed the difficult duty with the impartiality of a jurist, and the delicate honor of a gentleman." Back once more in Quincy, the leisure at last was his to expatiate on its serene delights. Through roads and lanes he took his customary walks and drives, respectfully greeted by neigh- bors, and reviving the memories of kindred and friends, so richly associated with almost every spot in the ancient town. At church of a Sun- day he was regularly seen, "through sunshine and through cloudy weather," a reverent worshiper in a liberal faith, as all his fathers were. He interested himself in the more important events of the town ; gave sound advice to the graduates of Adams Academy ; served as a director of the Mount Wollaston Bank. For serious occupation he could be satisfied with nothing less than the editing of the twelve volumes of his father's stupendous diary. In this ideal repose, accord- ing to the Puritan standard, Mrs. Adams par- ticipated. She, too, was always in her pew of a C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 139 Sunday, and graced the part of " Lady Bounti- ful " of the town with rare sympathy and dis- cretion. For the distressed no appeal to her was made in vain. She plied her needle at the " Fragment Society " as industriously as Aunt Abby Whitney, its president ; and her words of kindness and wisest counsel measurably strength- ened the moral and intellectual life of the com- munity. So they passed the remainder of their days, — in Quincy in summer, in Boston in win- ter, — always surrounded by friends, always in- terested in the living present, always uplifted by the love of their numerous children and grand- children. Their golden wedding, celebrated at this time, seemed but the accentuation of a har- vest season of life, glowing with a mild radiance, rich in the returns of honorable service. Together for so many years, they were not long parted by death. Mr. Adams was gathered to his fathers November 21, 1886, and Mrs. Adams followed him June 6, 1889. Rufus Choate, in the fierce political contest of 1848, when Charles F. Adams was put forward by the conscience of the country as the Free-Soil candidate for Vice-President, drew a laugh from the groundlings by declaring that John Quincy Adams was " the last of the Adamses." How absolutely time and the event have confuted the sneer of the brilliant partisan ! There was another Adams. As destiny would have it, 140 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Charles Francis Adams was the last of his gener- ation, but the last of his race, even at this late day, who can foresee or wish to presage ? Up to this moment it has surpassed, in the continuous fame of its successive generations, that of any other line or related statesmen in America. For a parallel to it we must go to the older civilization of England. Illustrious were the Pitts for two generations ; eminent the Grenvilles, with whom they intermarried, for one generation more. These are among the most celebrated instances of " hereditary genius," but they do not go be- yond what is exhibited by the Adamses. Fa- mous have they been for three generations in a direct Hue, and still are they vigorous and poten- tial in the familiar ethical and intellectual way. The late John Quincy Adams, eldest son to Charles Francis Adams, was acknowledged by all who knew him, to rank high among the ablest men of the country. Vigorous, clear-minded, ruggedly direct, a leader of men in the force- ful elements of his character, he could have dis- tinguished himself in any great administrative position ; had the task been his, might, indeed, have piloted his State or the nation through stormiest waters. A man of action, his destiny seemed thwarted by a too delicate regard for the public initiative, and an independence unyielding to the seduction of political managers. What- ever the cause, the feeling was widespread that f l^\ W»' ^m*'' JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, 1833-94 C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 141 here was a man, richly endowed by nature, excel- ling in the practical wisdom of statecraft, whose sagacity and character were urgently needed in public affairs, but who was left undisturbed al- most to prosecute his private concerns. To be sure he represented Quincy in the State legisla- ture three years, was thrice nominated for gov- ernor, and once for Congress. Perversely it hap- pened that his views and principles, tenaciously held, did not coincide with those of the major- ity of the voters. Late in life he was invited by President Cleveland to serve as Secretary of the Navy. This, one cannot help thinking, would have proved congenial work, — fit, too, for a descendant of that President who founded the American navy. But his health and absorbing private engagements would not permit. The rule of his family, never to seek nor to refuse public trust, was fated to be broken in this instance. Seven sons and daughters were born to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Francis Adams : Louisa Catherine, who married Charles Kuhn ; John Quincy, who married Fanny Cadwallader Crowninshield of Boston ; Charles Francis, who married Mary Ogden of New York ; Henry, who married Mi- riam Hooper ; Arthur, who died in childhood ; Mary, who married Dr. Henry P. Quincy ; and Brooks, who married Evelyn Davis, daughter of Admiral Charles Henry Davis. Charles Francis, the second son, has long been 142 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN held in high esteem for his vital interest in what- ever advances the community in which he lives, and exalts the true welfare of the nation ; for his outspoken and thoughtful judgments on great public questions, and for the veracious and schol- arly qualities of his historical and biographical writings. He served in the Civil War with dis- tinction, and was mustered out in 1865 with the brevet rank of Brigadier- General. There have been lieutenants in his family from the beginning, and an unfailing spirit of militant patriotism, but he " ranks " all his kindred. Nevertheless his civil achievements have been so marked, and his leaning to arbitration's huraaner methods so decided, to say nothing of his aver- sion to titles, that the term " General " has never cleaved to him. At a critical time in the history of the Union Pacific Railway, when trustworthy administra- tion of that great corporation was imperatively demanded, he was elected its president. Yet, no matter how absorbing his business engagements, appeals to his public spirit were seldom made in vain. He accepted election as a member of the Quincy School Committee, where his keen obser- vation soon brought him to the conclusion, some time before expressed by Dr. Edw^ard Everett Hale, that if it were n't for the schools a child would stand a chance of getting an education. He revolutionized the prevailing methods, reen- CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS (The Younger) % C. F. ADAMS AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 143 forcing Colonel Parker — the noted school su- perintendent, whom he discovered — in the work of establishing the far-famed " Quincy system." Liberal were his labors, also, for the Thomas Crane Memorial Library. His inteUigent and hearty cooperation with the heirs of that son of Quincy were chiefly instrumental in securing for the town one of architect Richardson's gems. In it is stored John Adams's library, and a large and choice collection of books made in these later years by public appropriations. And not unrecognized by the citizens was the assistance he lent to Dr. John A. Gordon, Theophilus King, Mrs. Annie E. Faxon, and others of the Village Improvement Society, in planting trees and erect- ing, in the Training Field Square, a magnificent granite fountain. He is the author of historical and biographical writings of first-class importance: the "Three Epi- sodes of Massachusetts History," a "Biography of Richard Henry Dana," a "History of Quincy," the "Life of Charles Francis Adams," his father, "Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers," and much besides. He is now chiefly engaged upon the diary and letters of his father. As a member for years of the Metropolitan Park Commission he devoted much time to its wise plans. Not least among the honors that have come to him, and one entirely congenial, is that he is president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 144 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Professor Henry Adams, now of Washington, is author of a " History of the United States " which is unsurpassed among the few really great works of a similar character written by Ameri- cans. Beo^innin 3 u iz; 5 S *w^ ^ fvl X W tJ 0) w jai kJ U1 THE COLONIAL COLONELS 163 " Colonel " Quincy, thus comfortably housed and delightfully wived, is in a condition to enjoy life and pursue his ambitions. The clouds of sorrow from the death of father and mother have gradually dispersed. Judge Sewall refers to all this in the jottings he makes of a jour- ney to Plymouth and back in March, 1711-12. " Rained very hard, that went into a Barn awhile. Baited at Bairsto's. Dined at Cush- ing's. Dried my coat and hat at both places. By the time got to Braintry, the day and I were in a manner spent, and I turned in to Cousin Quinsey, where I had the pleasure to see God in his Providence shining again upon the persons and affairs of the Family after long distressing sickness and Losses. Lodg'd in the chamber next the Brooke." Whoever has lodged in that chamber, the one in the northwest corner of the second story, will not be likely to forget the brook, especially after a very hard rain. How restful the soft flowing of it, how musical the song of its fall, now rising, now dying away, with the wafting of the wind, and through all its changes mingling with the daydreams that melt into dreams of the night, and then vanish- ing as deep sleep falls upon the tired frame ! The Judge could not fail to remember the brook. Later another chamber, still nearer the brook, was provided for the celebrated Tutor Flynt, in 164 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPEXDEXCE BEGAN the L Avliicli Colonel Quiney generously erected for that gentleman's accommodation. He was the only brother of Dame Dorothy, a predestmed bachelor, scholarly, original, and widely famed in the prosy New England of that day as a wit. For over half a century he was a tutor at Har- vard. This retreat was provided for him in Braintree, where he might rest from college du- ties and come under the thoughtful ministra- tions of his loving sister. She bought clothing for him, compounded for his illness a " sutle physick," and otherwise tried to mitigate the ineptitudes of "single blessedness." At times he fell into what he describes as " a hypocondial disorder ; " and on the floor of his study at the mansion, tradition points out a depression worn by him as he walked forward and back in black, restless mood. An event of the first importance soon conse- crated Cousin Quincy's new Lome. " Dorothy Q.," "my Dorothy," as Dr. Holmes calls her, was born into it January 4, 1709. She was the fourth child. Before her were born Edmund, who married Elizabeth Wendell, and Ehzabeth, who married John Wendell ; a curious intermix- ture of names, but a felicitous union of two noble households. So early were they married that Dorothy was left at fifteen the main reli- ance of her mother in the multifarious duties of an increasing domestic establishment. And very THE COLONIAL COLONELS 165 exemplary was she, in a day when children were expected to be ideally pious, obedient, and in- dustrious. "My child," wrote her father, "you are peculiarly favored among your friends in these parts in having a good word spoken of you, and good wishes made for you, by every- body." A hint of her domesticity comes down to us in the tradition that she used to dry her laces on the "formal box," — still flourishing, the wayward growths of two centuries, — which edged the trim flower garden. This ancient box- wood, and Dorothy's fondness for the garden It bordered, reminds one of another queen, hap- less Mary Stuart of Scotland, who, as Dr. Brown tells us, had at Holyrood her favorite "little walk and its rows of boxwood, left to themselves for three hundred years." Dorothy, as she appears in the portrait which Dr. Holmes has made famous, is the helpful and afPectionate girl of fifteen her father describes. Willing, thoughtful, sympathetic, her nature in- vites the perplexed and needy, and all the wealth of it is lavished upon them. Grandmother Flynt, growing old gracefully in this inclusive house- hold, would be a loved charge; her mother's cares she would divide, and nephews and nieces she would pet and spoil with all her heart. Thus engaged she was well on her way to become that tender, solicitous, supplemental providence, an old maid aunt, when, at the age of twenty-nine, 166 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN she herself was taken possession of and loved and protected by Edward Jackson, Esq., of Bos- ton. Their daughter Mary married Judge Oliver Wendell in 1762, and their daughter, in the next generation, married the Rev. Abiel Holmes, father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. " What if a hundred years ago Those close-shut lips had answered No, When forth the tremulous question came That cost the maiden her Norman name ? " It was a contingency not at all improbable, — just then. For it was not till a swift and tragic series of events had stricken from her hand its chief duties that she gave it to her lover. On the 26th of July, 1737, grandmother Flynt, at the good old age of ninety, passed away. Then, suddenly, on the 29th day of the next month, her mother expired. Her father, about this time, was deeply engaged in making prepara- tions for a voyage to England, to defend before the King the cause of Massachusetts in the boundary dispute between that colony and New Hampshire. This duty could not be deferred, '' being satisfied of the clearness of my call, I dare not refuse the same," and with the dolor of bitter affliction burdening his heart he departed for London, where he fell an easy victim to in- oculation for the small-pox. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, where reposes the dust of Bun- yan \ and the General Court of Massachusetts THE COLOMAL COLONELS 167 caused a monument to be erected to him as a last- ing memorial that " he departed the delight of his own people, but of none more than the Sen- ate, who, as a testimony of their love and grati- tude have ordered this epitaph to be inscribed." News traveled slowly in those days. Judge Quincy died in February, but it was not until about April that Boston and Braintree heard of the catastrophe. On the 23d of that month pubhc services were held in the new meeting- house on the training field. The SufPolk regi- ment was there, the judges, the Representatives, the governor, and other provincial dignitaries. From the mansion came the train of mourners, the first of kin leading, — Edmund, and Eliza- beth, and Dorothy, and Josiah. The Rev. John Hancock, father of the signer of the Declara- tion of Independence, is pastor, and preaches a sermon upon " The Instability of Human Great- ness." The heart of the good man is heavily oppressed with the weight of woe that has fallen upon dear friends and the community. Turning to the mourners, and speaking to them in the direct fashion peculiar to that age, he said, " I must confess, my dear afflicted Friends, that the Conduct of Divine Providence toward your Family in the Course of the last year hath been uncommon and unaccountable. The blessed God hath seen meet to break you with Breach upon Breach, first in the Death of your pious grandmother 168 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Flynt in a good old age, and then in the sudden Decease of your virtuous Mother. The Provi- dence of God hastened her reward of the pious care of her aged Parent. For as soon as she had committed her precious Remains to the Dust, and set her House in Order, she finished her Work, undresses and dies. All this seem'd to prepare the way for the Departure of your honoured Father into our Mother Country in the Public Service of this Province, when the time of his Departure to a better World was at Hand ; and there it seemed good in the sight of God to put a Period to his useful Life." Thus in a brief period an entire generation was swept away. So complete and unexpected was the calamity that the mansion, it would seem, was left for a time without a tenant. Dorothy, to be sure, remained its mistress till her marriage, about a year afterward. Who then, if any one, kept the hearth-fire ablaze, it is difficult to surmise. Edmund, the first-born, to whom it was bequeathed, was living in Bos- ton, deep in mercantile affairs. Josiah, the other son, had accompanied his father to England, and afterwards visited that country and the continent more than once. When he settled down he mar- ried Hannah Sturgis, in 1733, and then he took a house in Boston, on Washington Street, the garden of which adjoined his brother's house, which fronted on Summer Street. They and THE COLONIAL COLONELS 169 brother-in-law Edward Jackson were partners in commerce and ship-building. If much of their business was as prosperous and exciting as one adventure which history relates, it is not to be wondered at that Braintree was negflected. One of their ships, the Bethell, voyaging from the Mediterranean in 1748, at a time when Eng- land was at war with Spain, fell in at nightfall with a vessel of greatly superior force flying the Spanish colors. Escape was out of the ques- tion, and the captain, putting a bold face to a bad business, summoned the enemy to surrender. To enforce his demand with the best show, six Quaker guns, which formed part of her arma- ment, were placed to look as formidable as the fourteen good guns ; lanterns were hung in the rigging, together with all the hats and coats the sailors' chests afforded. " The Spanish captain," writes Edmund Quincy in the " Life of Josiah Quincy," " after some demur and parley, taking the Bethell for an English sloop of war, struck his colors, and gave up his ship without firing a gun. His rage and that of his crew on discover- ing the stratagem to which they had fallen vic- tims, was infinite, but unavailing. The gallant captain of the Bethell, Isaac Freeman, whose name certainly deserves to be preserved, says in his letter to his owners, ' At Daylight we had the last of the Prisoners secured, who were ready to hang themselves for submitting, when they 170 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN saw our Strength, having only fourteen Guns, besides six wooden ones ; and you may easily imagine we had Care and Trouble enough with them till they were landed at Fayal.' The Jesus Maria and Joseph was a ' register ship/ bound from Havana to Cadiz, with one hundred and ten men and twenty-six guns ; while the Bethell had but thirty-seven men and fourteen guns. Her cargo consisted of one hundred and sixty-one chests of silver, and two of gold, registered, be- sides cochineal and other valuable commodities. The prize was brought safely into Boston, duly condemned, and the proceeds distributed. My great-aunt, Mrs. Hannah Storer, Mr. Quincy's daughter, who died in 1826, at ninety, used to describe the sensation this event caused in Bos- ton ; and how the chests of doubloons and dollars were escorted through the streets, by sailors armed with pistols and cutlasses, to her father's house, at the corner of what is now Central Court and Washington Street, where they were deposited in the wine cellar, and guard mounted over them by day and night while they remained there." Braintree profited by this extraordinary piece of good fortune. Josiah, though but forty years old, retired from business, made his home in the Hancock parsonage, and, like his father, became colonel of the Suffolk regiment and active in public affairs. Naturally, also, his fellow towns- men, when in need of funds to meet the extraor- THE COLONIAL COLONELS 171 dinary expenditures incident to the Revolution, waited on " Colonel Quincy to know of him whether he will lend the Town a sum of hard money." Edmund, the elder brother, also retii-ed to Braintree, but not with flags flying. He was the parson of all the generations of the Quincys, gentle, reflective, benevolent, and — unpractical. His share of the prize money went into unfortu- nate business speculations, and he resorted to the ancestral acres to recover himself by farming. By this time nine children had been born to him, the last of them Dorothy, — Hancock's Dorothy, — who first saw the light in the Sum- mer Street home. May 10, 1747. It could not have been long after this event — long enough, however, to celebrate the marriage of his second son, Henry, "the handsomest man in Boston," to Mary Salter, in 1749 — that he removed with his family into the old mansion of his birth. In 1753 he is appointed on a committee to divide the Braintree lands ; later he serves as modera- tor of town meeting. He is called Squire, but never Colonel, — the one man of his race, al- most, who has failed to receive this title. All of the Quincy name, with the exception of Henry, are once more in Braintree, their ances- tral town ; and interest in the mansion, the home of their fathers, culminates. The Revolution dawns, stormily red, its heroes appear upon tlie 172 WHERE AJMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN scene, and the queenly Abigail Adams and the ro- mantic Dorothy are regnant in visions of light and loveliness. Thronged seems the mansion with its inmates and its guests, — young men and women, vivacious, aspiring, a trifle formal (as was then the vogue), but thoroughly human. Three sons are at home : Edmund, who married Ann Hurst ; Abraham, who was swept from the deck of a sloop by its boom and drowned off Germantown ; and Jacob, who married Elizabeth Williams. There are five daughters, all " remarkable for their beauty," who, when they first enter the mansion, are none of them engaged. Then across the way, in the Hancock parsonage, are the three sons of Josiah — Edmund, Samuel, and Josiah — and his one daughter, the adorable Hannah. Is it any wonder that the young men from the other parts of the town, and from Dorchester and Boston, find much to interest them at Squire Quincy's ? John Adams is a frequent visitor. He writes of an evening spent here " with Mr. Wibird (the minister) and cousin Zab (Rev. Zab- diel Adams), when Mr. Quincy told a remarkable instance of Mr. Benjamin Franklin's activity and resolution to improve the products of his ow^n country." Drinking tea at the mansion, on one occasion when he visited Braintree, Franklin commended the Rhenish grape, and offered to supply cuttings, which he did, at some trouble to himself, a few months later. But no one seri- EDMUND QUINCY, 1703-88 ELIZABETH (WENDELL) QUINCY THE COLONIAL COLONELS 173 ously thinks that the strenuous young lawyer, John Adams, was really attracted to the mansion by minister Wibird, that " inanimate old bach- elor," as Abigail Adams called him in stirring Revolutionary days, or by Squire Quincy and his talk upon farm products. As his diary reveals, he was drawn there by the " pert and sprightly Esther " and her sisters. But, however witching Esther may be, " she thinks and reads much less than Hannah Quincy" over in the parsonage; so to her he turns, and was in utmost peril of becom- ing engaged to her. The future President out of the way. Dr. Bela Lincoln, a younger brother of Major-General Benjamin Lincoln of Hingham, with more of heart, faces the peril, and is lost. Then Jonathan Sewall, the intimate friend of John Adams, " who called him his Jonathan, and wished his own name had been David," succumbs to the " pert " Esther. Gravely John Adams sets it down in his diary that SewalFs " court- ship of Esther Quincy brought him to Braintree commonly on Saturdays, where he remained till Monday." As Samuel Sewall, about the same time, was carrying on a courtship with Elizabeth, and William Greenleaf with Sarah, a profane curiosity is awakened as to the apportionment of the remaining days of the week. Merry must life have been in the old mansion at this time ! For every suitor who triumphed there were, most likely, two or three others who aspired. These, 174 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN with other young people from neighbor Vassall's and Brackett's and SaviFs, and many a house besides, must have flooded Squire Quincy's home with life and laughter. Then, too, at this period, and earlier, as tradition tells, there were joyous parties from Boston, " our metropolis," graced, some of them, with the knightly Sir Henry Frank- land and his lovely Agnes Surriage, " With far-off splendors of the Throne And glimmerings from the Crown." If '' Agnes and the Knight " were of a merry party trooping out from Boston in coaches and on horseback, it may have been in the summer of 1746, before she was made Lady Frankland, and on the occasion when the heroes of Louis- burg, Admiral Peter Warren and General Wil- liam Pepperell, w^re being feted. Squire Quincy was then in good circumstances, and using the mansion, it is surmised, for his summer home. Later, on November 30, 1756, he writes from Braintree to Sir Harry excusing himself for neglecting to congratulate him in person on his remarkable rescue by Agnes from the ruins of Lisbon at the time of the earthquake : " As ye unhap. situation of my affairs has dep'd me of ye satisfaction of long since waiting upon yourself and lady & personally congratulating your safe & happy return into this prov. after so remark- able a protection wh ye G't author & preserver of all things was pleas'd to afford you at Lisbon, THE COLONIAL COLONELS 175 on ye never to be forgotten lOtli of Nov. last, I hope yr goodness will excuse an epistolary ten- der of my sincerest compliments on ye pleasing occasion." With the note he sends, in " testi- mony of my respect & gratitude ... a trifling collection of some of ye fruits of ye season pro- duced on ye place of my birth." Were there among them pears "from the tree in the Back Garden " of which he writes in 1757, and which is still to be seen, so says tradition, in the hollow and almost branchless trunk at the rear of the mansion ? But whether or not Sir Harry and the skipper's fair daughter ever made Squire Quincy's routs more piquant by their presence, wit and beauty thronged there. *' And judges grave, and colonels grand, Fair dames and stately men. The mighty people of the land, The ' World ' of there and then." And Dorothy, the youngest of the children, saw them all, and was, while young, petted by them all, and in this stimulating atmosphere grew up to womanhood. No wonder there is discoverable in her temper a flavor of imperial- ism and a suspicion of the coquette. Judged by any standard, she was not the least beautiful of the five fair daughters of the mansion, and quite early enough had her share of admirers. When it was that she became the object of the serious regard of any of them we have no means of 176 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN knowing. John Hancock, born in the parsonage close by, some ten years before her, had been adopted by his wealthy uncle of Boston, and was an inmate of the Hancock mansion there. But he w^as on intimate terms with the Quincys, and no doubt visited them frequently. He could not fail to note the unfolding loveliness of the young- est of them, and, in his masterful fashion, early to pay her the devotion of the ascendant lover. Tradition says that the Eevolution was afar off and the mansion still her home when she and Hancock plighted troth. Indeed, it is averred that all plans were made to celebrate the wedding in the home of her fathers. The laro^e north parlor was adorned with a new wall paper express from Paris, and appropriately figured w^ith the forms of Venus and Cupid in blue, and pendant wreaths of fl owners in red. And there to this day hangs the paper on the walls, unfading in its antiquity ! But before the happy day arrived the Revolution broke out, families were dispersed, and in Boston and its neijyhborhood chaos reie^ned. The Quincy family, in a measure, was divided against itself. Squire Quincy was a fervent patriot, and his children were as devoted as himself to the cause of the colonies. Judge Jonathan Sew^all, his son-in-law, however, sided with the Crown, as did Samuel Quincy, the son of his brother Josiah. It was a sorrow w4iich the brothers carried to their graves. For our Edmund, the owner of COL. JOSIAH QUINCy, 1709-84 'TJ 00 Z " -r ^ <^ ." >< O* O « ^ ^ JT ;:ii (J W OJ ^ CAl THE COLONIAL COLONELS 177 the mansion, there was at this time a yet deeper sorrow in the death of his beloved wife, EUzabeth Wendell. Sadly broken up and dispersed now is the family which had filled the mansion with life and merriment. Dorothy and her father are in Boston during the memorable winter of 1774-5, Madam Lydia Hancock exercising a loving guard- ianship over her nephew's betrothed. And when Hancock — fearing arrest — finds refuge in the Lexington parsonage where his father was born, Madam Hancock, with Dorothy in charge, takes coach and joins him there on the 18th of April. Sam Adams is there also. At midnight they are aroused by the swift summons of Paul Re- vere. The red-coats are coming ! Hancock and Adams are induced to seek safety in Woburn ; Dorothy and Madam Hancock remain under the care of parson Clark. From the shelter of the parsonage they witness the swift gathering of the minute-men, the arrival of the regulars, their murderous volleying, and the dispersion of the colonists. Then, when the regulars resume their march for Concord, the ladies are hastily driven to Woburn, where they are reunited to the pa- triots. From here Hancock accompanies the ladies to Worcester ; thence continuing on, they find a resting place in the home of Thaddeus Burr in Fairfield, Connecticut. In this town, a few months later, on August 28, 1775, John 178 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN j Hancock and Dorothy Quincy are united in marriage. Upon the evacuation of Boston by the British, Edmund Quincy returned from Lancaster, where he had found safety with his son-in-law, General Greenleaf . Never again, however, did he make his home in Brain tree. His last days were spent with his granddaughter, Mrs. Mary Donnison, daughter of Henry Quincy, who Hved at the cor- ner of Washington and Winter streets in Boston. Josiah, the brother of Edmund, continued to live in Brain tree. In 1752 he entered into part- nership with General Palmer, and established the first glass works in America on a peninsula in Quincy, which, from a colony of Germans they employed as workmen, received the name of Ger- mantown. This enterprise, together with some spermaceti works, was terminated by the Revo- lutionary War. In 1755 he was appointed by Governor Shirley on a commission with Thomas Pownall to solicit the colony of Pennsylvania to unite with Massachusetts in sending an expedi- tion to erect a fortress near Ticonderos^a. While at Philadelphia he formed a lasting friendship with Benjamin Franklin, who, whenever he came to Boston, always visited Colonel Quincy at Brain tree. The Hancock parsonage, which Josiah occupied during bachelor Wibird's ministry, was destroyed by fire in 1759, and in 1770 he built him the SAMUEL QUINCY, THE TORY THE COLONIAL COLONELS 179 later Quincy mansion, about a mile north of the old mansion, on the three hundred acres left him by his father. Here he lived during the whole of the war, strong in his faith in his country, wise in his counsel to his fellow patriots and their leaders. Sturdily he stood by his home, " though the ladies of his family, at times of special danger, would take refuge with Mrs. (John) Adams in the modest farmhouse at the foot of Penn's Hill, where Mr. Adams was born." On October 17, 1775, he had the satisfaction of seeing from an upper window the British sail out of the harbor, " of which fact he made a record with his rino- on one of the panes of glass, yet extant." He died March 3, 1784, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, of a cold caught while sitting on a cake of ice in the bitter winter weather watching for wild ducks. He was the last of the " colonial Colonels." He had three sons, whose early promise of great abilities warranted the anticipation that the Qumcy name would be more firmly established and still more highly exalted. But Edmund, a merchant, enterprising, ingenious, and manly, died at the age of thirty-five ; and Samuel, who rose to be solicitor-general of the province under the Crown, became a violent loyalist, and went to England at the evacuation of Boston. The third son, Josiah Quincy, Jr., thus became the hope of the family, the one upon whom the sorrowing old 180 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Colonel centred his affections. It should be noted, however, that Samuel did not pass into oblivion nor did his descendants lose their affec- tion for America. He lived and died as crown attorney for the island of Antigua, but his son Samuel graduated from Harvard and practiced law at Lenox until his death in 1816. His son, another Samuel, became a noted Bostonian. He married Mary Hatch, and, after she passed away, Abigail Adams Beale, neighbor to the Adamses in Quincy. Eight children were born to him : three by his second wife, — Abby, Josiah, and Elizabeth, who married E. H. Mills Huntington. Josiah Quincy, Jr., was born February 23, 1744. The rudiments of a classical education he obtained in Brain tree under the tuition of Joseph Marsh, son of the minister, who also had the honor of preparing John Adams for his college career. Intimately were Josiah and John and Samuel associated in their earHer days. Too^ether Samuel and John were admitted to the Boston bar, and most dramatically were all three connected in the trial of Captain Preston for the " Boston Massacre." Samuel opened the case for the crown ; Josiah and John fol- lowed, pleading for the British officer. Colonel Quincy, amazed, sternly rebuked Josiah for undertakino; the defense " of those criminals charged with the murder of their fellow citi- zens." Memorable is his reply : " To inquire JOSIAH QUINCY, JR. THE COLONIAL COLONELS 181 my duty and do it is my sole aim." This Boston Cicero, as John Adams called him, threw himself with all his pure ideals and fervent passions into the patriots' cause, and from the beginnino- of his career was freely admitted to the counsels of his elders. " He was one of the first that said, in plain terms, that an appeal to arms was inevi- table, and a separation from the mother country the only security for the future." When the relations between the colonies and the mother country became more strained, and it was felt to be important that some one should represent the patriot party in England, he was the one to vol- unteer his services. Too zealously he performed this duty, for he undermined a constitution not at all robust. He set sail on his return voyage in March, 1775, but, delayed by baffling winds, he did not have strength enough to survive it. He lay dying off Marblehead, praying, as he caught sight of land, for one hour with his fellow patriots, Sam Adams and Joseph Warren. Well has he been called " the Patriot," for he fell a martyr to American liberty as truly as did any wdio sur- rendered their lives at Lexington or Bunker Hill. " May the spirit of liberty rest upon him ! " are the words with which Josiah Quincy, Jr., ended a slight bequest of great books to his son. That son, another Josiah, destined to surpass all of his name in the length, and perhaps the mag- nitude, of his services to his country, was at the 182 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN time of his father's death Httle more than a child. He was born in Boston February 4, 1772. With his mother he fled from Boston about the hour when the battle of Lexington was raging, to take refuge, under the guidance of William Phillips, Mrs. Quincy's father, in the distant town of Nor- wich, Connecticut. It was here the mother heard of the expected arrival of her husband at Glou- cester. Leaving her son with her father's people, she hurried to meet him, and all her glad antici- pations were submerged in the waves of sorrow which met her. " She proceeded immediately to Braintree to share her grief with the sorrowing household there. On arriving she found the family scattered. An alarm of a boat attack had caused the ladies to take refuge with Mrs. Adams at the foot of Penn's Hill, whither Mrs. Quincy went without delay, and received all the consola- tion and support that sympathy, affection, and friendship could afford." The little Josiah — he was the third of the name — was sent to Phillips Academy and to Har- vard, where he did not fail to distinguish him- self. Then he filled the measure of his mother's happiness by settling down with her in Boston ; a happiness which overflowed when he brought home, in 1797, Eliza Susan Morton, his wife. Thenceforward his advancement was as continu- ous as a " man of destiny." Volumes have been written about the career and achievements of PRESIDENT JOSIAH QUINCY THE COLONIAL COLONELS 183 this statesman and orator, and volumes remain to be written. A State senator ; a member of Congress, attaining leadership of the Federal party ; mayor of Boston for six years, earning the title of " Great Mayor ; " president of Har- vard for sixteen years; meanwhile writing his history of Boston, of the Boston Athenaeum, of Harvard, and biographies of his father and of John Quiney Adams. Truly a busy life, yet a serene one, " compacted of Roman and Puritan virtues." His summers he spent in Quiney, and there, on the first day of July, 1864, " as quietly as an infant sinks to slumber he ceased to breathe." His long and honorable life, begin- ning before the Revolution, almost outlasted the war for the Union. In his latter days he visited annually the older Quiney mansion, the original home of his race, and delighted in all the great memories it called up. How full these Quiney homes are of patriotic recollections ! In the mansion in which he passed away, President Quiney entertained Lafayette and frequently welcomed both Adamses, Daniel Web- ster, and other celebrated Americans. In 1812 the watchers from its windows were thrown into a state of excitement bv the entrance into the har- bor of the old Constitution after her capture of the Guerriere. A few days later the heroes, Hull and Decatur, breakfasted at the mansion. Josiah, the fourth of the name, then a child, 184 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN sat on Decatur's knee, playing with liis dirk and looking up into his handsome face. In what pei'})lexing profusion the Josiahs and the Edmunds have been sprinkled by the Quincy family over the pages of history ! This fourth Josiah was one of the sons of President Quincy. He was an important man in his day, — a typi- cal Bostonian, without whom no public function was quite complete, thrice mayor, a railroad man with ideas of expansion in advance of his time, and founder of the cooperative banks so help- ful to the workmen of Massachusetts. In his later years he lived altogether in Quincy, a mem- ber of that delightful household which included his three unmarried sisters, Eliza Susan, Abby Phillips, and Sophia M. How pleasant are the reminiscences of the gracious hospitalities of that home, with its old-time atmosphere, its anecdotes of the great men of the past, and its commendation of Jane Austen's " Emma " and similar books ! Another son of the president was Edmund, who lived in Dedham. He was a strong^ anti- slavery man, effectively assisting the cause by his fearless and frequent editorials. Many writ- ings besides flowed from his ready pen : " The Haunted Adjutant, and other Stories," " Wens- ley, and other Stories," etc. His son. Dr. Henry Quincy of Dedham, recently passed away. The married daughters of President Quincy are Mrs. Robert Waterston and Mrs. B. D. Greene. THE COLOXIAL COLONELS 185 In the next ofeneration the children of the fourth Josiah are Josiah Phillips, Samuel M., and Mrs. Benjamin Apthorp Gould. In Samuel was revived once more the military traditions of his race and the title of " Colonel." With distinc- tion he served as colonel of the Second Massa- chusetts Regiment, suffered in the prisons of the Confederacy, and when exchanged went once more to the front at the head of a colored regi- ment. His brother, Josiah P., devoted to the more peaceful ways of literature, but in it war- ring for truth, sociological and spiritual, is the one of his family through whom the honored name Josiah is passed on to still another gen- eration. His son Josiah, in these recent years mayor of Boston, is the sixth of the name. Even before his advent some one wittily said of the Quincys that, while with other families the de- scent was from sire to son, in their case it was from 'Siah to 'Siah. The obvious pun on the sur- name has also been perpetrated with a tiu-n so apposite as to lift it out of the commonplace. The Rev. Mather Byles, long celebrated in Bos- ton as a wit, in his younger days, it is said, made advances to a lady who refused his suit. After- wards she married a Quincy, and Dr. Byles meet- ing her remarked, " So, madam, it appears that you prefer Quincy to Byles." "Yes," she rephed, " for if there had been anything worse than biles, God would have afflicted Job with them." 186 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Now that this slight history of the Quincy family has been brought down through its lead- ing members to the present time, it would be well to return to the history of the old mansion in which the race began its career in America, and note briefly its occupants and owners since it passed out of the hands of the Quincys. The old house was ahenated in the days of Squire Edmund. In 1755 he mortgaged it or sold it to his brother-in-law, Edward Jackson, styhng the home my " mansion house," and estimating his land at about two hundred and fifty acres. The transaction is effected for " £675 lawful money of Great Britain." After this, for several years, as has been related, he lived in the mansion. Upon the death of Ed- ward Jackson, in 1763, his executors definitively parted with the property, selling it for £2400, " lawful money of the Province." The title is now held for a short time by Mary AUeyne of Milton, and by Benjamin Beale of Braintree, and finally passes, February 19, 1788, into the hands of Moses Black of Boston. It is then that Oliver Wendell and Mary (Jackson) Wen- dell, his wife, the heirs of Edward Jackson, " release, remise and quitclaim," whatever in- terest in the estate remains to them. Moses Black and his family were the first to occupy the mansion permanently after it had passed out of the possession of the Quincys. JOSIAH QUINCY, MAYOR OF BOSTON, 1846-4 THE COLONIAL COLONELS 187 Once more the brook, or creek, has its name changed, and thenceforward is known as "Black's Creek." Mr. Black was a Protestant Irishman, in his origins probably a Scotsman, and con- nected with that band of Scotch-Irish immi- grants who founded the Federal Street Church in Boston (now Arlington Street Church), made famous subsequently by its greatest preacher. Dr. Channing. His father, it is surmised, was the " Capt. Samuel Black of Ireland," buried in Bos- ton's Old Granary Burying-Ground about 1749. He had a brother named Andrew, a prosperous shipping merchant of Boston, and father of Anna, or Roxanna, Black, a celebrated beauty in her day. An article in the Boston " Daily Globe," by Alexander Corbett, Jr., states she was married on January 6, 1793, to Joseph Blake, Jr., a son of the former partner of her father. It is likely she was a frequent visitor to Brain- tree (or that part of it incorporated as Quincy in 1792), where her Uncle Moses was becoming an honored citizen. He is appointed on im- portant committees, is chosen moderator of town meetings, and is elected to the General Court. On September 30, 1799, it was " voted that the thanks of the town be returned President Adams and Mr. Moses Black for the present to the town of a clock in the meetino^-house." He died in 1810, bequeathing $1000 each to Anna Black Lamb and Mrs. Roxanna Blake, widow of Joseph 188 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Blake, Jr., and all his real estate in Quincy to his wife, " provided that if my said wife marry again, then I give and devise one-half of said Quincy real estate to Anna Hall." Thus provoked to continue in her widowhood, she highly resolved to receive into her home during the summer months " the gentility of Boston." Her ghost now walks the halls and grounds of the old man- sion. Why hers above all who ever lived there, is beyond guessing, unless it be in anxious pur- suit of what " Boston gentility," through those long summer days, thought its due. In 1825 Mrs. Black sold the entire place for $12,400 to EHzabeth Greenleaf, wife of Daniel Greenleaf. Notable people were the Greenleafs in the Quincy of that day. There was Daniel, who occupied the mansion, and his sister Pris- cilla, the widow of John Appleton ; there was John, the brother of Daniel, whose wife Lucy was the daughter of Judge Richard Cranch, and who occupied the ancient Cranch house on School Street ; and there was Thomas, a cousin of Daniel and John, who for fifty years lived in a beautiful home on Adams Street. Highly esteemed were they in all the families of them : related backward to Sheriff Greenleaf of Boston, and the Cranches and Abigail Adams ; and for- ward to the Greenleafs, merchants of Boston, to the Appletons, to true-hearted Harrison J. Dawes, and others of that name. JOSIAH QUINCY, MAYOR OF BOSTON, 1896-99 % THE COLONIAL COLONELS 189 From the Greenleafs the mansion now passed into the hands of Dr. Ebenezer Woodward, whose wife was the youngest daughter of Thomas Greenleaf . The old doctor, strong in his Hkes and dishkes, thrifty and yet generous, individual, indeed, as were most of the men of his day and profession, cherished for chief purpose the re- dressing of the balance of educational opportu- nities in the town of Quincy. John Adams had founded an academy for boys ; he would estab- lish one for girls. So in his will he bequeathed his estate to this end, suggesting that the Insti- tute be built on a portion of his land opposite the Hancock lot, on which the Adams Academy stands. Some sixty thousand dollars or more fell to the Woodward Institute, and there it stands to-day, facing the older school and emu- lating its beneficent work. It was during the thirty years or more the town authorities held the estate in trust that it was occupied by the Hon. Peter Butler. At first a refuge in summer from the city's heat and noise, it soon was made his permanent resi- dence. He loved the place for its idyllic beauty and for its charming history. He saturated him- self with its traditions. All its antiquities he searched out and cherished, and every noble or humorous story he enjoyed and related with keen relish. Again, as in the old days, life brimmed and flooded the mansion, the farm was 190 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN kept up, and the great barn stocked with a large herd of fine cattle. Natural it seemed for Mr. Butler, when released from affairs in the city and public duties, to enter into the restful life " of a sound and honest rustic Squire." When the older part of the mansion was built by William Coddington, his minister was the Rev. John Wilson, pastor of Boston church, and spiritual guide of all who were taking up farms in the region now included in the towns of Quincy and Braintree. Two hundred and fifty years afterward the minister of the church which in 1639 succeeded Coddington's and Wheel- wright's Chapel of Ease, was also named Wilson. It is a coincidence which was glanced at when the First Church of Christ in Quincy celebrated its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. There is no kinship between the ministers, but it seemed pleasant to look upon the fact as a finishing touch to the cycle then completed. This latter- day parson became occupant and owner of the mansion, and, like all who have lived in it before him, came to delight in its pictiu-esqueness and the wealth of its noble traditions. If, in this story he has attempted to tell, he shall awaken in others similar deHght in the great " Figures of the Past," he will feel himself doubly favored in the fortunate chance which brought him under this famous roof-tree. IX DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS What a charm, what a flavor of old romance, what a gleam of high-hearted ways and swift conquests, there is for us in the name Dorothy ! Always cherished by Americans from the early days of the first " Dorothy Q.," it has now be- come more than ever a choice title to bestow upon those possibilities of all perfection, " trail- ing clouds of glory " as they come, who are to unfold into the splendor of womanhood for which our race is famed. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes certainly stimulated the love for the name by his tuneful praise of the Dorothy who brought him — " Mother and sister and child and wife, And joy and sorrow and death and life." The revival, also, of interest in ancient days and colonial dames, as certainly has deepened the affection. But back of the name and the plea- sant sound of it, back of all that poets have sung and historians have said of it, there must be an entrancing ideal, a vision of worth and loveliness, a haunting radiance, which dawns upon the consciousness whenever the word Doro- 192 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN thy breaks upon eye or ear. Few may clearly re- alize what afPects them in the name, but were we to make captive our fleeting impressions, should we not discern a luminous presence, the compo- site of all the Dorothys we have seen in picture or read of in story? Is not this airy nothing our dream of the fair American dame of other days? Is it not woven of our conceptions of the simple, modest graces of the Puritan maiden and the stately presence, pompadour crowned, which moved through Washington's court and Hancock's levee, conquering and to conquer? Now the one and now the other conception pre- dominates, and again they mingle, if that be possible ; but through every winning transfor- mation one thing persists, an ideal of divinely sweet and true womanhood, — Dorothea, gift of God. The name appears early in our history. It was brought by the first settlers from the yeo- man soil of England, with the daisy and the apple blossom. In it there was enough of noble association and musical sound to strengthen it against the deluge of Hebrew names which swept in with the Puritan reformation. Side by side with Priscilla and Abigail and Martha, it held its own and swayed the hearts and homes of our forefathers. Old Braintree, Massachu- setts, in that portion now called Quincy, is the scene where the name rooted itself in vital bloom DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 193 and perennial vigor. There " Dorothy Q," of Holmes's poem was born, there " Hancock's Dorothy" grew to womanhood. Before these, however, were others of their race, gracious and wise women, who honored this font name. The great mother of all the famous New Eng- land Dorothys is Dorothy Flynt, daughter of the Rev. Henry Flynt and his wife Margery (Hoar) Flynt. Progenitors are these of some of the most distin squished families of America. The Holmeses, the Wendells, the Lowells, the Jack- sons, the Quincys, the Adamses, the Salsburys, and other historic persons make illustrious their descent from the excellent stock represented in the worthy pastor and his wife. Henry Flynt was a young man of unusual abilities when he was settled as teacher over the First Church in Braintree, now Quincy. Mar- gery, ^' his beloved consort, . . . was a gentle- woman of piety, prudence, and peculiarly ac- complished for instructing young gentlewomen ; many being sent to her from other towns, espe- cially from Boston. They descended from an- cient and good families in England." Indeed, the mother of Margery was that Joanna Hoar, widow of the sheriff of Gloucester, herself a gentle- woman of strong character, who was connected, through the marriage of her son Leonard to Bridget Lisle, with the fated Lady Alicia Lisle. The line of our Senator George F. Hoar proudly 194 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDEXCE BEGAN" looks to her for its origin ; and it " may fairly be questioned," writes Mr. C. F. Adams in his " Three Episodes of Massachusetts History," " whether in the whole wide field of American genealogy there is any strain of blood more fruit- ful of distino-uished men than that which issued from the widow of the seventeenth-century sher- iff." " Distinguished men ! " Are they alone to be remembered ! " They reckon ill who leave me out," might Abigail Adams say, and many another wise and loving lady of that celebrated strain of blood. From the widow Joanna, down through every generation since, they are to be recognized, not only in the happiness of their husbands and the nobleness of their children, but in their own force of character and high and faithful service. Into this noble kinship and illustrious line of men and women Dorothy I. was born August 21, 1642. We know little more about this earli- est Dorothy except that she was married to the worthy Samuel Shepperd, minister of Rowley, Mass., on the 30th of April, 1666. There is, however, testimony of some value to the affection in which she was held by her brother Josiah, in the fact of his naming after her his one daughter who lived to maturity. This Dorothy II. was born in Dorchester, Mass., May 11, 1678. Her father, Josiah Flynt, son of Henry Flynt, was minister of First Church DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 195 in that town, and in the very year of his settle- ment, 1671, married, at Swansey, Esther, the daughter of Captain Thomas Willet, the first mayor of New York. It was in Braintree, how- ever, that Dorothy was brought up, for her father died when she was scarcely two years old, and her mother, it seems, with her little brood, removed at once to the place of her husband's nativity. There among his kindred she was sure of a warm welcome. Perhaps she was asked to keep house for Edmund Quincy in the old Quincy mansion. His wife, Joanna (Hoar) Quincy, who was sister to Margery (Hoar) Flynt, her hus- band's mother, had passed away the previous May. Margery herself was still living, a gran- dame of " faculty " for all her years ; and there were uncles and aunts " too numerous to men- tion." Hearts and homes were invitingly open to her, and here in old Braintree she lived and died, attaining the full age of eighty-nine years. Not large was her family, only Henry and Doro- thy surviving of the four children born to her, and there would be little difficulty in bringing them up in the midst of such hospitable sur- roundings. Dorothy would have for playmates, as she blossomed into girlhood, the children of all the families of the better sort in the North Pre- cinct. Among them were the numerous offspring of the Adamses, Basses, Savils, to say nothing of the Quincys, now increased by the speedy second 196 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN marriage of Edmund to the Widow Gookin, seven months after the death of his first wife. The lit- tle Edmund Quincy, born in 1681, was her junior by three years. Their pleasant neighborhood in- timacies ripened rapidly into affectionate relations, and but a month beyond his twentieth year, on November 20, 1701, they were united in mar- riage. Viewed from either side the match was a felicitous one. The strain of the virile Hoar family already had been united with the steadily climbing virtues of the Quincy family, and now the keen intellectual qualities of the Flynts were to be intermingled through the beautiful Doro- thy. This first " Dorothy Q." is not born, but made, — changed by marriage from Dorothy F. to Dorothy Q. But no gift of seer is required to discern in her, as source and origin of Doro- thys yet to be, illustrious prefigurement of the " miracle of noble womanhood " which so richly adorns her line. Lovelier than her name, as Ten- nyson says of flowers, we may deem her ; wise and good most surely. And do not these qualities of themselves, " an inner lamping light," im- part to the face of her who is simply one of the fair sex a beauty quite beyond that of classical outline and clearness of complexion ? She was fitting helpmeet to a husband commanding in presence and ability. The first citizen of Brain- tree he, she the first lady. And when he, youth- DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 197 ful still, had won by merit a distinguished place in the colony, she shared and graced the distinc- tion. Her sisterly affection also is apparent in the addition made to the Quincy mansion for the convenience of her only brother, the facetious Henry Flynt, tutor at Harvard for fifty-five years. In a two-story L, study and chamber were provided for him, where he might rest from college labors and come under her immediate care. Her mother, too, found a home with her, ending her days under that hospitable roof in July, 1737. A few weeks later, just as her husband was about to start for England to defend the rights of Massachusetts in the boundary dispute be- tween that colony and New Hampshire, Dorothy herself suddenly passed away. " He intermarried with Dorothy Flynt," runs the quaint obituary in the " Weekly Journal " of that day, " whom he buried the 29th of August last. God blessed them with ten children, four of whom survive in great sorrow." These words are really from the notice of his own death, so soon did he join her in the silent land. He took with him to England the ache in his heart for the death of his be- loved Dorothy, " sweet and gracious woman " that she was, and succumbed all the more easily to inoculation for the smallpox, to which, as a precautionary measure, he submitted. He was 198 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN buried in Bunhill Fields, where reposes the dust of Bunyan, in February of that grievous year 1737-8, and on April 23, 1738, his pastor, John Hancock, preached the funeral sermon. The children were in front of him, seated in their pew, or on the fore-seats in the old meeting- house; and looking sorrowfully upon them he addressed them in words which, though spoken more than one hundred and fifty years ago, still quiver with the agony of their burden. " The blessed God hath seen meet to break you with Breach upon Breach ; first in the death of your pious Grandmother Flynt, in a good old age, and then in the sudden death of your virtuous mother." Dorothy III., the " Dorothy Q." of Dr. Holmes's poem, was one of the children over whom rolled these sorrowful words. She was now some twen- ty-nine years old, having been born January 4, 1709. Here is the ancient form in which the birth was set down in the town records : " Dora- thy, ye Daughter of Edmund Quinsey, Esq'', & M^ Dorathy, his wife, was born ye 4th January, 1709." This entry was included in a note sent to Dr. Holmes in 1889. In his reply he wrote, '^ I was pleased to learn from your note that 'Dorothy Q.' — my Dorothy, not Governor Han- cock's, who was her niece — was born in 1709, just a hundred years before I came into atmos- pheric existence." The large south chamber, it DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 199 is conjectured, was the scene of this advent ; a room with a sunny exposure, and since called the " Dorothy." Uncongenial was the season chosen to usher into the world the little maid, and, though the logs blazed high in the open fire- place night and day, the sun would prove a most welcome aid to impart warmth and cheer. Baptism soon should have followed birth accord- ing to the custom of that day, but Mistress Quincy entertained the opinion, perhaps, that the daughter of a minister " hath a privilege," and so would not commit her " wee Dolly " to the rude blasts of winter and the deadly chill of the unheated church. But really there seems to have been in the parents a confirmed habit of procrastination with regard to this rite, for Doro- thy was not baptized till April 30, 1721, and then were " Colonel Quinsey's family all baptized." By this time she had expanded into promise of ideal Puritan maidenhood, — "modest and simple and sweet " as the Mayflower unfolds in the shade of the forest. How peaceful her en- vironment ! that household so wisely ordered and so industrious ! that companionship with the brook and the shore, the flowers and the trees, all so free, so natural ! Liberated from simple home duties, easy is it to imagine her walking the meadow paths, fed by her own pure fancies, up- lifted by thoughts selected among a thousand by her own temperament, cherishing the aspira- 200 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN tions native to her own soul, and so educated along individual lines into serious, self-reliant womanhood. Abigail Adams, and many another noble woman who might be named, grew up in this fashion, leading us to wonder if the very essence of education, of soul-forming, is not lost in modern schools and colleges, where so little space is left for one's own thoughts and the pro- cesses of individual expansion. Dorothy's existence was delightfully varied now and then by visits to relatives in " Boston, the metropolis of our country," as her father called it. In these early years she even went as far as Springfield ; and it is from letters written her while there by her father that we get the one authentic glimpse, which, with the famous portrait, makes her real to us. One of the let- ters, preserved by Miss Eliza Susan Quincy, and published in the " New England Historical and Genealogical Register," is as follows : — Bra-intbee, July 8, 1724. Mt dear Daughter, — This is to bring you the good news of my safe return home commencement day in the evening, and finding your mother in good health. With this you will have from your sister Betsey the things you wrote for by me, and from your brother Ed- mund a small present. My child, you are peculiarly fa- vored among your friends in these parts in having a good word spoken of you, and good wishes made for you by everybody ; let this hint be improved only to quicken and encourage you in virtue and a good life. DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 201 My love to all the family in which you are, with your mother's and Grandmother's also, to them and you. I am your dear and loving father, E. QuiNCY. Half a yard of muslin being too little for two head- dresses, your sister has sent you one yard wanting half a quarter, which cost ten and sixpence, — and the thread (lace) cost fourteen shillings ; so much I paid for, and 't is the best thread and muslin of the price. In another of these letters written November 9, 1724, he writes : — " Your sister Bettey will be married the 12th day of this month (that is next Thursday night) if health permit. " You may and ought to wish her joy and happiness in the new relation and condition she is entering into though you are at a great distance from her. We make no wed- ding for her but only a small entertainment on Friday, for a few friends that may happen to be present. You '11 hear the particulars perhaps from your brother Edmund or Josiah after 't is over. Your mother has sent you the muslin Pattern, Thread and needles, a Knott and girdle the Gown and quilted coat are not sent at present your mother thinks you may do without the gown and if you can possibly 't is best that you may not have too great a pack of things to bring back and besides we are apt to think 't is best you should keep in and not expose yourself this winter (though you be better) lest you fall back again by catching cold. Before Spring you may write further if need be for a sup- ply. The silk for Mrs. Hooker is also sent and the price is 1.3.10 being 7s. 4d. a yard you may acquaint her. " Pray give my kind salutation to her and Mr. Hooker with all the family and your mother also my regards to Dr. Porter and Mr. Whitman if you see him and he inquires after me." 202 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN One more letter remains, as interesting as the others in the light it throws upon Dorothy and her kindred of those days. No part of it can be omitted. Braintree, May 6tli, 1725. Dear Child, — Your mother and I were not so willing to have you leave us though for your own good, but now as desirous to see you here again were it for the best. Accept this expression as from the best of your earthly friends (your dear Parents) who think of you every day and hope to hear of you oftener than of late. The last of your letters I have yet received was dated March 6th. I have wrote since then once or twice but know not whether they have come to your hand. I expect a letter from you and Dr. Porter every day. Your brother Edmund you have heard I suppose is married and I hope very happily and that we shall have joy and comfort in this double relation to Mr. Wendells family. Brother Wendell and his wife from New York was at the wedding and have since been at our house a few days and are returning in a short time home by the way of Rhode Island as they came. The new married couple are yet at their uncles house but are to live with brother Wendell and his wife and Miss Molly Higginson is going from hence to-morrow to live with them, and your mother will be destitute of a companion and assistant again but I hope will be provided for. I am going on Monday next to Piscataqua to keep court at Ipswich and York to be absent about a fortnight. I am your loving father, Edmund Quincy. What a vivid and charming picture of life in the old homestead is outlined in these letters I DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 203 And Dorothy, demure Dorothy, who is well spoken of by every one, is so beloved by the Hookers of Springfield that they would like to keep her with them forever ! Is she herself al- most flattered by their affection into staying? However that may be, her parents long for her with a deeper longing, now that Edmund and Bettey are married and away, and she is lured back to her home. It is about this time that the celebrated portrait of her was painted, as we guess. The story of it as told by Dr. Holmes is as follows : — " The painting hung in the house of my grandfather Oliver Wendell, which was occupied by British officers before the evacuation of Bos- ton. One of these gentlemen amused himself by stabbing poor Dorothy (the pictured one) as near the right eye as his swordsmanship would serve him to do it. The canvas was so decayed that it became necessary to remount the painting, in the process of doing which the hole made by the rapier was lost sight of. I took some photo- graphs of the picture before it was transferred to the new canvas." " Grandmother's mother : her age, I guess, Thirteen summers, or something less ; Girlish bust, but womanly air ; Smooth, square forehead with uprolled hair ; Lips that lover has never kissed ; Taper fingers and slender wrist ; Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade ; So they painted the little maid. 204 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN " On her hand a parrot green Sits unmoving and broods serene. Hold up the canvas full in view, — Look ! there 's a rent the light shines through, Dark v^ith a century's fringe of dust, — That was a Red-Coat's rapier-thrust ! Such is the tale the lady old, Dorothy's daughter's daughter, told. " Who the painter was none may tell, — One whose best was not over well ; Hard and dry, it must be confessed, Flat as a rose that has long been pressed ; Yet in her cheek the hues are bright, Dainty colors of red and white, And in her slender shape are seen Hint and promise of stately mien. " Look not on her with eyes of scorn, — Dorothy Q. was a lady born ! Ay ! since the galloping Normans came, England's annals have known her name ; And still to the three-hilled rebel town Dear is that ancient name's renown, For many a civic wreath they won, The youthful sire and the gray-haired son." Soon after the publication of the poem Dr. Holmes wrote a note to Miss Eliza Susan Quincy, in response to an appreciative one written by her, in which he says, " I am very glad you were pleased with ' Dorothy Q.' I hope when her portrait comes back with its wound healed and its youth restored you will come and take a look at it. I would send you one of my photographs of the picture — if I could lay my hands on it — with this note, but I have so lately moved to a "DOROTHY Q." DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 205 new house that I cannot at once find many thino^s I want. I will remember to hunt one up for you, and if you do not get it within four weeks I beg you will remind me of my promise." Few are the events we now have to relate of the damsel Dorothy. On Sunday, May 28, 1727, she was received by her pastor, the Rev. John Hancock, into full communion. She was then eighteen years of age, a time when sincerity of soul and faithfulness to visions of the ideal awaken in the young all noble aspirations and moral audacities. The field for Dorothy's tri- umphs was not the wide world, nor " by the shores of old romance," but only a Puritan home with its plain duties. It was enough, however, for the display of her patience and the unbla- zoned heroisms of ordinary life. She was now the main reliance of her mother in the multifarious duties of an increasing domestic establishment. Her father was attaining to higher honors and a wider fame, and a generous hospitality kept pace with ampler means. Indeed, the Quincy mansion, at about this time the most pretentious and roomy house in the town, was roof -tree for reunions of the widely related family ; the shrine of domestic origins ; the central hearth, inviting frequent pilgrima- gings of the dispersed Quincy s and Flynts and Hoars and Sewalls and Wendells and numerous 206 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN others. Then there were parties of squires and dames on pleasure bent from Boston, and meet- ings of grave justices, and visits of dignified colonial officials, to say nothing of the solemn gatherings of parish committees to arrange the " prudentials " of the church. To these things, ordinary and extraordinary, Dorothy gave her life, which may account for her delay in giving her hand to Edward Jackson, Esq., of Boston. She was twenty-nine years of age when she was married to him on the 7th day of December, 1738. From the old home in Braintree she was removed to a home of wealth and culture in Boston. Here her daughter Mary was born, who married Judge Oliver Wendell in 1762, whose daughter Sarah married the Rev. Abiel Holmes, father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Along this line descended the portrait of Doro- thy, and the silver teapot of Tutor Flynt, and the poet. « O Damsel Dorothy ! Dorothy Q. ! Strange is the gift that I owe to you ; Such a gift as never a king Save to daughter or son might bring, — All my tenure of heart and hand, All my title to house and land ; Mother and sister and child and wife And joy and sorrow and death and life ! ** What if a hundred years ago Those close-shut lips had answered No, When forth the tremulous question came That cost the maiden her Norman name, DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 207 And under the folds that look so still The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill ? Should I be I, or would it be One tenth another, to nine tenths me ? " Soft is the breath of a maiden's Yes : Not the light gossamer stirs with less ; But never a cable that holds so fast Through all the battles of wave and blast, And never an echo of speech or song That lives in the babbling air so long ! There were tones in the voice that whispered then You may hear to-day in a hundred men. " O lady and lover, how faint and far Your images hover, — and here we are, Solid and stirring in flesh and bone, — Edward's and Dorothy's — all their own, — A goodly record for Time to show Of a syllable spoken so long ago ! — Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive For the tender whisper that bade me live ? " It shall be a blessing, my little maid ! I will heal the stab of the Red-Coat's blade, And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame. And gild with a rhyme your household name ; So you shall smile on us brave and bright As first you greeted the morning's light. And live untroubled by woes and fears Through a second youth of a hundred years." The rest of her days Dorothy spent in Boston, "our metropolis." There she is all but lost to view in the social whirl of a capital proud of its royal governor and his court, and boastful of its population numbering twelve thousand im- portant souls. Occasionally she emerges from this dazzUng sea of light and becomes visible as 208 WHERE AJMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN she visits her native Braintree ; but for the man- ner of her Hfe and the events of it we are left to the imagination. She passed away in her home in Boston in 1762. But of these dames who are more than queens we may proclaim, Dorothy is dead ! Long live Dorothy ! Dorothy IV. is already on the throne. " Han- cock's Dorothy " is she, — " King Hancock/' as the loyalists called him in derision, — made king now in reahty by his alliance to royalty. She should have elected to be born in Braintree, now Quincy, the home of her race, the place pre- appointed for the nativity of the great. It is an oversight, from the effects of which Quincy historians have never fully recovered. But her parents, Edmund Quincy and Elizabeth (Wen- dell) Quincy, because there was no room for them in the mansion, went immediately to Bos- ton upon their marriage, April 15, 1725. Here they spent their honeymoon and many a moon, no less romantic, besides; and so it perversely came about that destiny was defeated and their children first saw the light in the three-hilled town. It was their intention, as father Quincy wrote, "to live with brother Wendell and his wife " for a space, and this intention they very likely carried out. Later, they secured a home of their own on the south side of Summer Street. Writing of this residence Miss Eliza Susan Quincy says, " I know it was the residence of the elder DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 209 brother of my great-grandfather from about 1740 to 1752." Here it was, then, that Han- cock's Dorothy was born, May 10, 1747, and she was baptized May 17, " 1 w. old." Do not imagine, however, that the parents of Dorothy entirely deserted the old homestead in Braintree. They went back there for many de- lio-htful family gatherings and some sad ones. And when, in 1737-38, his parents suddenly passed away, Edmund Quincy, her brother, be- came heir to the mansion and the home farm surrounding it. Affectionately bound was he now^ to that home by a double bond, — that of birth and mastership. He was deeply engaged in mercantile enterprises in Boston, but he could not be held back from the rural delights and the uplifting associations of the ancient home of himself and his race. Through those earlier, prosperous years it was his summer home. It was the custom even then among the well-to-do to have their city and their country establish- ments. To Braintree he went for long, restful months amid the glorious scenes of one of the most beautiful towns on the shores of the bay. Thither flocked at his invitation merry parties from Boston, and we hear faint echoes of their laughter as they disported themselves al fresco about the well-kept grounds. Sir Henry Frank- land, the romantic and poetic personage of that day, was a friend of the family. He, with his 210 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN^ Agnes Surriagej that brilliant brunette, whose face and form captivated him when he first saw her, in rags and barefooted, scrubbing the floor of the old inn in Marblehead, joined in these excursions. What gleams of dainty gowns and rich vestments, what picturesque groupings, what drifting of silver-footed nymphs, as of breeze- blown petals, across the lawns ! From fi^ne feast- ing under the trees they turn with merry chal- lenges to the brook to supply Dame Quincy's larder with fish for yet another feast at set of sun. Some of this splendor Dorothy saw, and part of it she was. While still a child, not over five years old, the family removed to Braintree per- manently. From mercantile ventures, which lat- terly had proved unfortunate, Mr. Quincy turned to farming. It was " gentleman farming," fa- cilitated by a few excellent theories, a kind not unknown at this day ; and in the extravagance of it he was assisted by Sir Henry Frankland, who advises him to " propagate ye Warden pear from Cyons," and by Benjamin Franklin, who presents him " a small pack'g of cuttings of the small Rhenish grape." Tradition fastens upon an ancient pear-tree still flourishing, and upon a grapevine, improved away (all but a single sHp) about ten years ago, as growths of the identical plants referred to. The farming did not pay, could not be made to retrieve mercantile mis- DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 211 chances, and in 1756 the estate was mortgaged to brother-in-law Edward Jackson. But Doro- thy and her brothers and sisters (there were eight of them all told) flourished on the farm, if nothing else did. Soon it dawned upon the glad eyes of the young men of Braintree and Boston that Judge Quincy's five daughters were rarely beautiful. The fame of them spread through all the coun- try round, and the praise of Dorothy was not the least fervent. Like bees to flowers the beaux gathered from near and far. Among them we discern General William Greenleaf, John Adams, Bela Lincoln, Samuel Sewall, and Jonathan Sew- all. Sarah speedily brought General Greenleaf to her feet, and Samuel Sewall fell captive to Elizabeth. The future President confesses the power of Esther's " beauty, vivacity and spirit." He circles ever nearer to her, like moth to can- dle-light, but flutters away before he is scorched, leaving room for the advances of Jonathan Sew- all. Communing with the privacy of his diary, John Adams concludes that Esther is " pert, sprightly and gay, but thinks and reads much less than Hannah Quincy," her cousin. Towards Hannah his thoughts now turn, and he grows very neighborly with her father, Josiah Quincy, then living in the Hancock parsonage across the way. Beauty and bookishness ! — dainty teas and talks upon Homer, Milton, and Venice Pre- 212 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN served ! — the combination is irresistible. " She can practice the art of pleasing," he writes, " lets us see a face of ridicule and spying, sometimes inadvertently, though she looks familiarly and pleasantly for the most part. She is apparently frank but really reserved ; seemingly pleased and almost charmed when she is really laughing with contempt." Coquetting in this pretty way she asks him such near questions as, supposing he had a wife would he do thus and so ? " Should you like to spend your evenings at home read- ing and conversing with your wife, rather than spend them abroad in taverns or with other com- pany ? " His reply in its fine New England re- serve indicates the seriousness of the situation. " I should prefer the company of an agreeable wife to any other company, for the most part, not always ; I should not like to be imprisoned at home." More intimate they became when the pert Esther and her sister Susan from the mansion " broke in upon Hannah and me and interrupted a conversation that would have terminated in a courtship that would have terminated in a mar- riage which might have depressed me to absolute poverty and obscurity to the end of my life. . . . Now let me collect my thoughts," he heroically continues, " which have long been scattered among girls, matrimony, hustling, chat, provi- sions, clothing. . . . Let love and vanity be ex- tinguished and the great passion of ambition, B o* oi w Q O DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 213 patriotism, break out and burn." Alas for these heroics ! In less than two years he is looking with deep interest upon Abigail, the daughter of parson Smith of Weymouth, and is talking to her his Homer and Milton and Venice Pre- served. Dorothy, an opening bud in this blooming garden of girls, was now some thirteen summers old. Her large eyes, we may well believe, were keenly observant of all this sweet commerce, and her ears attentive to all the sprightly talk wafted around her on the melodious element of youth- ful laughter. When it was that she herself be- came the object of the serious regard of admirers we have no means of knowing. They were numerous enough before John Hancock finally swept them to a proper distance by his imperial claims, supported as they were by the vigilance of his aunt. Madam Lydia Hancock. He was her senior by ten years, — had graduated from Harvard and had been adopted into the family of his rich uncle, Thomas Hancock, in Boston, before she had outgrown her girlhood. How- ever, he would frequently return to Braintree, where he was born, and could not fail to note the unfolding loveliness of Dorothy. Did he avow his affection for her while yet the tumult of the Revolution was afar off and her home was in the old mansion ? Tradition says ^^ Yes," and further avers that not only was the troth 214 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN plighted there, but that all plans were made to celebrate the wedding in the home of her fathers. The large north parlor was adorned with a new wall paper express from Paris, and appropriately figured with the forms of Venus and Cupid in blue, and pendent wreaths of flowers in red. Does any one doubt the tradition ? There on the wall hangs the paper to this day, unfading in its antiquity and mutely confounding the in- credulous. But it was not destined to contribute its har- monious decorations to the joyous event. Before the happy day arrived the resistance of the high-spirited colonists to the oppressive measures of a willful king and " his friends " had burst forth in sulphurous flames. There was the swift, resolute muster of a new-born nation, and the scene of it was chaotic in the abrupt dispersion of long established domesticities. Not in Bos- ton, nor Braintree, nor Lexington, nor in the tier of towns behind them was to be found an abiding-place safe from the British ; and so while Judge Quincy sought sanctuary in Lancaster, in the home of his daughter Mrs. Greenleaf, Doro- thy, under the protection of Madam Hancock, fled to Fairfield, Connecticut. There the wed- ding was celebrated at last with due pomp and hilarity. It is in the lurid light of those heroic days that Dorothy first comes into clear view. All DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 215 throiig-h the memorable winter of 1774-75 we perceive she is in Boston, at the very heart of convergent patriotic fervor. A frequent guest in the stately Hancock mansion, she hears Earl Percy's voice as he drills the regulars on the common for the inevitable conflict, and in that home and in her own she is in daily communion with the valiant defenders of liberty, — Dr. War- ren, John Adams, Paul Revere, her cousin Josiah Quincy, Jr., that Boston Cicero, Sam Adams, and many another, to say nothing of patriotic dames as numerous and daring. In the wild tide of things heart answers to heart. They are not to be subdued by the aggressive presence and daily insolence of the thousands of British troops, nor turned back by the abyss yawning to engulf ancient loyalties, loved homes, and a long established peace. The mansion of " King Hancock," in the early days of March, is subjected to acts of vandalism by the soldiery ; its windows broken, its fences hewn, its coach house wrecked. The " King '' himself, threatened with arrest, escapes secretly into the country to be at the second meeting of the Provincial Congress at Concord. This assem- bly adjourns April 15th, and he finds what he conceives to be a safe retreat in the parsonage at Lexington, where his father had been born, and where he himself had spent many of the long bright days of youth. Here soon arrives 216 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Madam Lydia Hancock, anxious and harassed, drivins: out from the abandoned Boston mansion in a coach with that jealously guarded treasure, Dorothy Quincy. " Citizen " Adams is there also, a welcome guest under the hospitable roof of the Kev. Jonas Clark. At twelve o'clock on the night of the eighteenth, said Dorothy in later years, Paul Revere gallops up to the door with his startling cry of the approach of General Gage's troops. The village takes the alarm, the church bell clangs its wild tocsin, lights flash in house after house far away into the distant darkness, and swiftly the minute-men gather on the green. John Hancock, alert at the first summons, flames hot wdth the rage of fight. Hardly is he dissuaded from standing with the stout farmers and facing the battalions of the reofulars. Brouofht at last to realize that it is he himself and Sam Adams that the British would count no cost too great to capture, he allows himself to be hurried with his companion inland to the Woburn Precinct (now Burlington). The ladies remain under the protection of the parson. Within the shelter of his well built home they furtively watch, with no little peril to them- selves, the momentous clash of Old World veter- ans and homespun colonials. Then, when the volleying has died away and the regulars are on the march for Concord, Madam Hancock and Dorothy turn from the horrors of the battle- DOKOTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 217 field, take coach, and are reunited to tlie pa- triots in Woburn. Not entirely to Dorothy's mind, however, is this assumption of the exclusive custody of her- self by the astute Madam Hancock and her nephew. She has a natural longing, also, to be with her own people. Her mother was dead, but she had left her father in Boston ; and to him she declared she would return on the mor- row. " No, madam," said Hancock, " you shall not return as long as there is a British bayonet left in Boston." " Recollect, Mr. Hancock," re- torted Dorothy, " I am not under your control yet. I shall go fco my father to-morrow." And very glad she would have been, as she confessed late in hfe, to have got rid of him, then and there. The awakened waywardness of a maiden before whom the incense of fine compliments was continuously wafted by a host of admirers was with difficulty restrained by Madam Han- cock, and then they proceeded on their retreat to Fairfield. The course of this retreat, after leaving Woburn, is outlined in a letter written from Lancaster by Edmund Quincy, May 11, to his son Henry. " I was from noon Sat'y till Friday eve'g getting up hither with much diffi- culty by reason of scarcity of carriages. Cost me near 20 £s, besides quartering on some of my good friends who were very kind and gen- erous. Y'r sister Dolly with Mrs. Hancock 218 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN came from Shirley to y'r Bro. Grenleeaf's & dined & proceeded to Worcester, where Col'o H. & Mr. A(dams) were on their way. This was 10 days before I got hither, so that I missed seeing them. As I hear she proceeded with Mr. H. to Fayerfield, I don't expect to see her till peaceable times are restored." The home in Fairfield where the ladies now took up their abode was that of Thaddeus Burr, Esq., and it was not long after their arrival that there rode into town the fascinating Aaron Burr, his nephew, then a young man of twenty-nine, in the full pride of life. It is not to be won- dered at that Dorothy in her present mood, and too carefully protected by duenna Hancock, should gradually permit herself to become more warmly interested in the brave bearing and gal- lant attentions of the exquisite Aaron Burr than was entirely compatible with her relations to Hancock. A bit of local coloring is thrown upon this episode by a letter, written some time later, by the sprightly Dorothy Dudley, of Cambridge, to her friend Esther Livingston, in Philadelphia. Hancock, then united to his Dorothy, is in attend- ance upon the Continental Congress. " So you have seen Mrs. Hancock ! " she writes. " Is she not charming ! One cannot w^onder at Madam Lydia Hancock's fondness for her, and resolve to secure the treasure for her nephew. You have DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 219 heard how carefully she guarded her against the approach of any invader upon Mr. John Hancock's rights. I visited Lexington the other day and trod the ground so lately wet with the blood of our noble minute-men ; went into Mr. Clarke's house, where ' King' Hancock and ' Citizen ' Adams were lodged that memorable night before the battle, and walked under the tree which I am told shel- tered them during part of that time of terror. I saw the bullet in the wall of the attic chamber where the familv were hid at the time, and where Madam Hancock very narrowly escaped death, a ball grazing her cheek as it passed. After the battle Mr. Hancock, who had his coach and four at hand, left the town, accompanied by his Aunt Lydia and Miss Dorothy Quincy, and rode to one of the neighboring villages, and from there by slow stage to Fairfield, Connecticut. . . . Aaron Burr is a young man of fascinating manners and many accomplishments. He w^as much charmed with Miss Quincy, I have heard, and she in turn was not insensible to his attentions ; but Madam Hancock kept a jealous eye upon them both, and would not allow any advances upon the part of the young man toward the prize reserved for her nephew. When the knot was tied that made them one, she felt at liberty to breathe. Imme- diately after the wedding they set out for Phila- delphia, which has been their home ever since." The record of this notable event in the clerk's 220 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN book of the Fairfield church is as follows : " The Hon. John Hancock Esqr. and Miss Dorothy Quincy, both of Boston were married at Fair- field, Aug. 28th, 1775." For about four months previous to the marriage Dorothy was almost daily in the company of Beau Burr. There is httle doubt it was a perilous time for the peace of mind of John Hancock. That opulent but formal gentleman at a distance was scarce a match for the most dashing gallant of his age insistently present. " A handsome young man of very pretty fortune " is the way Dorothy spoke of him in later reminiscent mood. More lively is the description of him by Dorothy Dudley written in her diary when he had just arrived in Cambridge camp from his Fairfield campaign, Aug. 1, 1775 : " There is a young man in camp whom I have noticed again and again as he passes the house. He is striking in appearance, though quite small and boyish. His eyes are piercing in their brightness, and there is some- thing winning in his manner. His name is Aaron Burr, a son of Kev. Aaron Burr, formerly Presi- dent of Princeton College, N. J., and grandson of Rev. Jonathan Edwards." For a young woman of Dorothy's temperament here was a situation portentous of much, as Car- lyle would say. It may be written of her what Thomas Hardy writes of one of his characters : " She had a spirit with a natural love of liberty, DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 221 and required the next thing to liberty, spacious- ness." Was there promise of this in the manner she had been treated of late as a captured person, a possession ? A rumor has descended to these times that Madam Hancock feared an elopement. But what would you ? Was not independence in the air? And Dorothy, high-spirited, way- ward, and imperious, as the best of her sex, might easily persuade herself there really was a flavor of abduction in the swooping way duenna Hancock fled with her to Fairfield. Besides, the habit of conquest was so deeply confirmed in her by her invincible progress through the courtly society of New England's capital that only the utmost self-restraint could keep her from making a final and distinguished triumph. " Oh, saw ye bonie Lesley As she gaed o'er the border ? She 's gane like Alexander, To spread her conquests farther." It was a conspicuous flirtation, one to make golden the atmosphere of the prim homes and romantic scenes of the staid Connecticut village ; and it was fraught with the due measure of sur- prises. Like gallant ship " with all her bravery on and tackle trim,'' she gracefully sailed the uncertain seas, met the enemy, and — was she his ? Hancock, fretting his heart out at Philadel- phia, receives scant consideration in these critical 222 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN days. He writes to her frequently, but awakens no response. " My Dr. Dolly/' he protests in a letter dated June 10th, " I am almost prevailed on to think that my letters to my aunt & you are not read, for I cannot obtain a reply, I have ask'd million questions & not an answer to one, I beg'd you to let me know what things my Aunt wanted & you, and many other matters I wanted to know, but not one word in answer. I Really Take it extreme unkind, pray my Dr. use not so much Ceremony & Reservedness, why can't you use freedom in writing, be not afraid of me, I want long Letters ... & I Beg, my Dear Dolly, you will write me often & long Letters, I will forgive the past if you will mend in future. Do ask my Aunt to make up & send me a Watch String, & do you make up another & send me, I wear them out fast. I want some little thino" of your doing." ..." Adieu my Dr. Girl," he concludes, " and believe me to be with great Esteem & Affection. Yours without Reserve, John Hancock." It was a deplorable dissonance, virtuously we say it, the while a vagrant sentiment persuasively hints it was all so natural, so inevitable, so pretty, as to seem a subtly woven note in a preexistent harmony. Slide it might not, however, into a pitch so strident as to shake down with its vibra- tions a single pillar in the temple sacred to the af- fections of the troth-plighted couple. Capricious DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 223 Dorothy, the essential loyalties of her nature un- touched, turned with glad abandon to the altar where the steady flame of heart-felt and heaven- born love burned clear. The music and mirth of the marriage-day submerged and swept away all aben elements, and blithe was that midsummer progress through a sympathetic land to the tem- porary home in Philadelphia. What luminous glimpses we catch of their joy in one another, and of their happy, patriotic toil in those tumultuous days ! Fortunate were they to whom it was given to see the beautiful Dorothy presiding with inborn grace and dignity as the mistress of the estabHsh- ment of John Hancock, president of the Continen- tal Congress. Then, when they returned to the stately Hancock mansion in Boston, what gener- ous hospitality they dispensed ! For the honor of the town in its poverty they kept open house, feasting the officers of the French fleet forty at a time, welcoming them and their crews with un- failing cheer, when, in mischievous spirit, they mob in a multitude the mansion, and the " com- mon is bedizzened with lace." Washington, Lafayette, John Adams, Lords Stanley and Wort- ley, and other notables not a few, are received royally, and the finest part of their entertainment is ever the sight of the face and the form of their hostess. '* When in the chronicle of the wasted time I see description of the fairest wights 224 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN And beauty making beautiful old rhyme, In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights; Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have expressed Even such a beauty as you master now." For eighteen years they hved thus together. Two children were born to them, and, to their unspeakable grief, early passed away. On Octo- ber 8, 1793, John Hancock himself died. His widow remained single for three years, and then was married to James Scott, a trusty sea captain, who had long sailed the ships of Hancock. The romance of her life was ended, but in happiness and content she spent the rest of her days. " She outlived her second husband many years," writes A. E. Brown in "John Hancock, His Book," resided for a time at Portsmouth, N. H., and later in Federal Street, Boston. As Madam Scott she delighted the people by her unfailing memory of the heroic past and brilliant powers of conversation. Hospitality was a characteristic of hers at her Federal Street home. Her table was always laid with an extra plate for any one who might call, and fourscore years did not rob her of her native dignity. Says Mrs. William Wales : " I often ran into Aunt Dorothy's from school at noon intermission, when the extra plate was at my service, and the venerable woman ready to greet me with a smile." On the 3d day of February, 1830, the gift of God, Dorothea, was returned to Him. DOROTHY HANCOCK DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 225 The throne occupied in such queenly manner by Dorothy Hancock remained vacant after her death. There were other Dorothys, but none sufficiently eminent to be her successor and com- mand such universal homage. The Dorothy Q. who was born to Henry Quincy and Eunice Newell, his second wife, in 1775, was an excel- lent lady, and the ancestor of some of the most highly regarded famihes in New England. The record of her birth made by her father, who, in the first year of the Revolution fled from his home, corner of Winter and Washington streets, Boston, to Providence, R. I., is interesting. " Sept. /75, 28th. This day at two o'clock God in his Providence was pleased to Grant Deliver- ance to my wife of a Daughter which was Christ- ened at the Presbetery Meeting House in Provi- dence and Christened by the Rev. M. Lathrop by the name of Dorothy in memory of sister Dorothy Hancock." This Henry Quincy, who was some twenty years older than his sister Dorothy, was called the handsomest man in Boston when he married his first wife, Mary Salter. By her he had a daughter Mary, who married Dr. John Stedman in 1773, and after his death for second husband William Donnison. Descendants of their chil- dren are living and honored to-day. The Dorothy of Henry's second marriage also had a second husband, Jabez Bullard, the ancestor of the Bid- 226 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN lards and the Doggetts, and so a connection of the Rev. Dr. Caleb Davis Bradlee, whose long and useful career in Boston is fresh in the mem- ory of its citizens. Still another "Dorothy Q." remains to be men- tioned, for the very important reason that she elicited from Dr. Holmes a second " Dorothy Q." poem. The sister of the poet, Mrs. Upham of Salem, had a son who was named Oliver Wen- dell Holmes. He in turn became the father of a little ofirl whom he named after the heroine of the portrait. Dr. Holmes, when made aware of this, wrote the following verses : — " Dear little Dorothy, Dorothy Q., What can I find to write to you ? You have two U's in your name, it 's true, And mine is adorned with a double U. But there 's this difference in the U's, That one you will stand a chance to lose When a happy man of the bearded sex Shall make it Dorothy Q. -|- X. " May Heaven smile bright on the blissful day That teaches this lesson in Algebra ! When the orange blossoms crown your head, Then read what your old great-uncle said, And remember how in your baby-time He scribbled a scrap of idle rhyme — Idle it may be — but kindly too, For the little lady, — Dorothy Q. ! " And still the name is perpetuated, and still the Hue it adorns stretches out as if to make conquest of a dateless future. There is a " Dorothy Q." of "DOROTHY Q." OF TO-DAY DOROTHY Q. AND OTHER DOROTHYS 227 to-day. She inherits directly from the ancestors of all the Dorothys, and herself bears the name in its original simplicity. A daughter of the late Dr. Henry Parker Quincy of Dedham, her ascent is through Edmunds and Josiahs to the Judge Quincy who was the father of Dr. Holmes's " Dorothy Q./' and so back to the beginnings of her race in a mingling of worthy progenitors. Through her mother, also, Mary Adams Quincy, she is heiress to the sterling virtues of that kin- dred line. Thus the name fails not, nor can the qualities which have exalted the fame of it fail. In pre- sent power, as well as remembered puissance, " Dorothy Q." reigns. Long live Dorothy ! X TUTOR FLYNT, NEW ENGLAND S EARLIEST HUMORIST Facetious was rare old Tutor Flynt ; scholarly and shrewdly practical, too, but above all a wit, a humorist. So was he regarded by his contem- poraries, and so has he been esteemed by every generation since. He is, in fact, the first among grave New England men with enough genial humor in him to become famous. Others of his day, and earlier, gleamed now and then, as sheet lightning through sombre clouds, with a certain grim jocularity; and not a few, as Samuel Sewall, Captain Underbill, and Cotton Mather, were at times unconsciously and irresistibly funny. But the Tutor, in the humane fibre of him, was by happy foreordination and deliberate personal intention a humorist. He had in him enough natural vivacity, not infrequently explosive, to temper or astound the austerity and solemnity of a century of the primal Puritanism of Massachu- setts Bay Colony. Indeed, his repartees and hrusqiierie comprised about all of the salt current in the small talk of his time. Was it not the fame of the Tutor, as much as anything else, TUTOR FLYNT 229 which drew Harvard men with eager anticipation to Commencement and other college functions ? Certainly it is hard to see in the endless preaching of those occasions, to say nothing of " three-mile prayers an' half-mile graces/' sufficient to compete with Father Flynt's "• latest." And to-day among those conversant with New England traditions a smile is awakened whenever his name is men- tioned, and a pleasant reminiscence or two speeds to the tip of the tongue, craving to utter itself. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes had a deep appre- ciation of the Tutor, and was frequently referred to as the depositary of all that is worth telling about him. Some who should know think he wrote a poem in honor of the cheerful old gentle- man. If such be extant, the writer has failed to find it. Possibly it may be the one he wrote " in wondrous merry mood," which tickled its readers into such cachinnatory convulsions as induced the confession, — " And since, I never dare to write As funny as I can." Dr. Holmes and the Tutor were distantly con- nected, — " cousins in the fourth remove," as Bailie Nicol Jarvie said of his relationship to Rob Roy. How consonant with optimistic views of heredity it would be to think of our loved poet as in " the line of conveyance " from that old-time wit to the Professor at the Breakfast- 230 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Table ! How agreeable it would be to trace in his genial humor, in his swift, searchlight expo- sure of lurking incongruities, the exuberant wit of his Puritan predecessor in lambent refinement ! But we are not permitted to delight ourselves in so notable an example of the transmission and evolution of genius. Tutor Henry Flynt died a bachelor. What was directly and indubitably transmitted was of a less personal character. A silver teapot is the priceless heirloom which Dr. Holmes received from the hands of his distant connection. Perhaps he fell heir to other articles of value ; but this he regarded as of surpassing worth. He thus fondly refers to it when pre- sented with a loving cup by Harvard students in his later days : — "This gift of priceless value to me and to those who come after me will meet another and similar one of ancient date which has come down to me as an heirloom in the fifth generation from its original owner. The silver teapot which serves the temperate needs of my noontide refec- tion has engraved upon it, for armorial bearings, three nodules, supposed to represent the mineral suggesting the name of the recipient, the three words. Ex Bono Pupillorum, and the date, 1738. This piece of silver was given by his Harvard College pupils to the famous tutor, Henry Flynt, whose term of service, fifty-five years, is the longest on the college record. Tutor Flynt was a bache- TUTOR FLYNT TUTOR FLYNT 231 lor, and this memorial gift passed after his death to his niece, Dorothy Quincy, who did me the high honor of becoming my great-grandmother. Through her daughter and her daughter's daugh- ter it came down to me, and has always been held by me as the most loved and venerated relic which time has bequeathed me. It will never lose its hold on my affections, for it is a part of my ear- liest associations and dearest remembrances." It is to President John Adams, however, that we are chiefly indebted for the preservation of the most interesting foibles and witticisms of Henry Flynt. He, too, was taken with the surprising contrasts exhibited by this mellow phenomenon among the hard and grim "meeting- going animals " of the Puritan settlement. In a sense they were neighbors or fellow townsmen. John Adams was twenty-five years old when the Tutor died, and as a boy he must have heard him preach his occasional sermon in the old Braintree meeting-house, and, as a young man, have seen him in his study in the old Quincy mansion. No one, indeed, was more talked about in the quiet country village, then nourishing "the mighty heart " of the masterful advocate of independ- ence, than old Father Flynt. Many a dull hour between sermons of a Sunday, or of a week day at the tavern, or by the home hearthstone, was pleasantly whiled away by tales, more than twice told, of his quaint ways and words ; and when his 232 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN familiar figure was descried on horseback, or in the old calash, approaching along the country road on his journey from Cambridge, a ripple of interest ran through the town. How was it, may be the natural inquiry, that Tutor Flynt came to have a second home, or study, or retreat, so far away from the shades of Harvard ? His sister Dorothy was the wife of Judge Edmund Quincy, then owner and occu- pant of the Quincy mansion in Braintree. Be- sides, the north precinct of old Braintree (now Quincy) was the seat of his ancestors, almost from its first settlement, and away back he was related to the Quincys. The Tutor's grand- parents were Teacher Henry Flynt of the old Braintree (now Quincy) First Church and Mar- gery, his wife. This Margery was sister to Joanna Hoar, who married Colonel Edmund Quincy, son of the Edmund who, first of the Quincy name, came to these shores. So it will be seen he was among his own kith and kin. His father, Josiah Flynt, born in Braintree, was settled as minister over the First Church in Dorchester, December 27, 1671, and took to wife Esther, daughter of Cap- tain Thomas Willet, first mayor of the city of New York. Their first child was Henry, the subject of this sketch, who was born May 5, 1675. He graduated at Harvard in 1693, and in 1705 began his surpassing career as permanent tutor in the college. TUTOR FLYNT 233 Whatever attractions his birthplace, Dorchester, may have had for him, they were swept away by the current of memory and affections which drew him to old Braintree. Dorothy was his only living sister, and their relations appear to have been tender and mutually helpful. It was prob- ably not long after her marriage to Edmund Quincy, in 1701, that there was built for her brother a two-story lean-to on the north side of the mansion, containing a study and a chamber. Here he long continued to have occasional resi- dence, and found the only real home he ever knew in maturer years. The rooms overlook the brook, and into them steal the pleasant sounds of the falling waters, — a soothing melody to lull to sleep by night, a liquid monotone to deepen meditation by day. And the immemorial willows, ^' huge trees, a thousand rings of spring in every bole," line the farther banks, sifting the golden sunlight into luminous green shade. Ah, it is a retreat for the repose of the spirit ! And for this purpose was it used, says tradition, by the teacher and scholar, wearied w4th his unvarying tasks and rebelling against the baiting of the unlicked cubs of the college and the stupid con- troversies of that dull age. The study is on the ground floor, and has its own separate entrance, so that he might go in and out without disturb- ing the other inmates of the mansion. With its open fireplace, its undisturbed quiet, its book- 234 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN shelves within easy reach, it is a place to grow wise in. A steep flight of winding stairs leads to the chamber directly overhead. Indeed, it was just the retired and separate establishment to suit a whimsical and scholarly old bachelor. From these pleasant precincts he vanished more than a century and a half ago ; but visible traces of him are still there on the floor of the little study. A sHght depression from wall to wall was worn, it is said, by the ceaseless tread of his feet as he paced forward and back again in black, restless mood. As in many another humorist, a deep, irre- pressible element of melancholy mingled with the lighter vein. " I fell into a hypocondial disorder,'' he wrote in his diary. Dark weather and much company and talk often predisposed to this, as did more effectually threatened blindness. " God hath been pleased to deprive me of the sight of one of my eyes," he wrote in 1719 ; and later on he writes as if the disorder were confirmed and chronic. He is suspicious also that much smok- ing may induce his melancholy turns, and ground is not wanting for the suspicion. " I believe," he writes in 1714, " I have been of late hurt by much Smoaking Tobacco, two pipes in forenoon & 2 or 3 in afternoon & 4 or 5 at night. This w^ere surely noxious to melancholy and erring bodily. Moderation in this and moderate exer- cise are necessary for me. I shall not be suffi- ciently moderate in smoak unless I wholly omit > O H TUTOR FLYNT 235 it in forenoon.'' With such a habit, it is not to be wondered at that sister Qiiincy fell in with the idea of a separate establishment all to him- self. The only wonder is that she permitted the cutting of doorways from both chamber and study, giving entrance to the main house. But she had deep sisterly affection for her erratic brother, and abated nothing in her care of him. In his distressful times he drinks " a portion of a sutle Physick " of her compounding, and quaffs fre- quent libations of "good cider" from the presses of brother Edmund. His habiliments also have the benefit of her supervision. For a coat he " had 10 yds. of Camblet of Sister Quincy at 5 sh. per yard." It was no small contract to keep a confirmed bachelor and smoker up to the cler- ical standard, and so the daughter of " Bishop " Hancock of Lexington was invited to take a hand in fulfilling it whenever she could capture him at his college residence or in clerical meet- ings at her father's house. Perhaps a vague hope was entertained in the Quincy domicile and beneath the " Bishop's " roof that the helpless bachelor was fair game and might be led into perpetual captivity. Here is a sample of items scattered through his diary : " Paid Mr. Han- cock's Daughter 1 sh. for new ristbanding three shirts ; " " Paid Mr. Hancock's daughter 2 sh. 6 d. for making three neckcl. & necks ; 6 d. for the neckcloaths made out of old ones & 4 d. for 236 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN the necks." It was about this time that the brother of Miss Hancock became the pastor of the Braintree church, and a frequent visitor, of course, at the Quincy mansion. Before taking leave of their domestic economies, it is but fair to state that the Tutor was not ungrateful for benefits received. From his abundant means, thriftily hoarded, he now and then loaned brother Edmund good sums of money; and we come upon such records as this : " 1722 mem. I gave sister Quincey 10 sh. or 10 sh. 6 d. to buy Plates Tea dishes 6 Saucers. She bought only plates & Tea dishes, 7 sh. so that 3 sh. is now due to me. The saucers being returned I bought again." Was he deter- mined she should have all the dishes she wanted, even if she felt she could n't afford them ? When Henry Flynt began his career, he was counted one of the most promising scholars in the colony. He seems, however, to have held in slight regard the few black-coat prizes of his day. In 1718 he was invited " to become Rector of the newly named Yale College." He preferred his tutorship, and according to all accounts he most faithfully performed its duties. His teach- ing abilities were of a high order, and his sound judgment was much depended upon in the ad- ministration of the affairs of the college ; but he fairly wore out the patience of the authorities before he gave up, at the age of seventy-nine. Promptly upon his resignation, the governing TUTOR FLYNT 237 board voted " that no person chosen hencefor- ward into the office of tutor shall abide therein more than eight years." Why was it that what President Quincy called ^^ the inconvenient experiment of a tutor seventy- nine years of age " was tolerated so long ? It was because the Tutor had himself become an institution. For how many years had he been the marked man of the college, the embodiment of its use and wont, the one fixed element in the flow of generations, the genial source of original wit, the natural recipient of the exuberant greet- ings of returning alumni, not forgetful of his good-easy advocacy of their delinquencies as " wild colts that might make good horses ! " Who else among the tutors and professors was honored as he, not only with gift of silver teapot, but with other argent utensil borne in hilarious procession by the undergraduates on a memorable Commencement day ! Yet wdthal he was full of learning, diligent in business, and a moving preacher, " with a most becoming seriousness and gravity peculiar to him." In a story which he tells of himself, he reveals what manner of man he was and the secret of his hold upon his pupils. At the same time a glimpse is afforded of the way instruction was imparted in his day. " One morning my class were recit- ing, and stood quite around me, and one or two rather at my back, where was a table on which 238 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN lay a keg of wine I had the day before bought at Boston ; and one of the blades took up the keg and drank out of the bung. A looking glass was right before me, so that I could plainly see what was doing behind me. I thought I would not disturb him while drinking; but as soon as he had done I turned round and told him he ought to have had the manners to have drunk to somebody.'' His mild and practical temperament influenced his theology, an effect more apparent it may be in his familiar talk than in his public preaching. In his printed sermons (sold by S. Kneeland and T. Green in Queen Street, Boston, 1739), one may perchance find an entirely modern sentence like this : " God having made man a rational Creature, he treats him as such ; He requires nothing of him but what is agreeable to his nature, and conducive to his happiness." But for the most part he proses monotonously on with the droning clericals of that day, who never dreamed of imitating their Maker and treating man as a rational creature. It was the ice age in New England's religious history, as Charles F. Adams, the younger, so emphatically reiterates ; an edelweiss at the foot of the retreating glacier is the blossom or two we discover in the writings of the Tutor. Hardly anywhere else is there visible new thought vital enough to force its way through the frozen crust. His was a soul pro- TUTOR FLYNT 239 phetic o£ the age to come, — his tolerant temper perhaps, even more than his ideas, in advance of his time. In this regard he was alone, alone ! His resort was to practical topics and to silence. Sometimes it appears as if his brusque wit were flung out as a Kne of defense to mask opinions which would imperil him. Heresy ran in his blood. He came of heterodox stock. His grand- father, settled with Pastor Thompson over the old Braintree church, was for a period under condemnation for his support of the Antinomian heresy ; and his father was charged with " utter- ing divers dangerous heterodoxies, delivered, and that without caution, in his public preaching." The family trait persisted in the Tutor ; but he had learned to envelop in it that element of caution which his father lacked, restrained him- self to be silent, and lived much within him- self. Still he did not escape. His very aloof- ness was suspicious. When in his earlier days a parish was minded to call him, objection was made that he was not sound. All the reply he vouchsafed was, " I thank God they know no- thing about it." What other resort than to remain silent had a rational creature in those days, when stupidity was cultivated by artificial selection ! It was a mark of his sanity and genuine soundness. The arch-stupid, as Carlyle often vociferated, is after all your true arch-enemy of human weal and pro- 240 WHERE MIERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN gress. Argument has no effect upon him, facts lose their potency in his presence. Kidicule and wit alone penetrate this primordial pachyderm, and then only to irritate and arouse to bestial rage. Confronted by it, here is the attitude adopted by the Tutor, as described in his own handwriting : " In this controversy keep Charity & Justice. Keep silence, even when you shall beforehand conclude yourself called to speak." What con- troversy was in his mind we have no means of knowing. The people of that day, after the de- feat of Sir Harry Vane and the cruel banishment of other high-thinking " Antinomians," were sub- merged in a sea of theological futilities. Judge Sewall, one of the ablest and most liberal-minded persons then in the colony, lets us into a know- ledge of them in taking our Tutor to task for saying " Saint Luke and Saint James, etc." when reading or quoting Scripture. " I have heard it from several," declares the judge, " but to hear it from the Senior Fellow of Harvard College is more surprising, lest by his example he should seem to countenance and authorize Inconvenient Immoralities." That last phrase is good : " In- convenient Immoralities" does so magnify the trifle in debate ! Not content with writing him, the judge lies in wait for the Tutor and captures him in Boston after the Thursday lec- ture. Home he must go to the judge's dinner, and there they have it out. This is the record >- ►J o H D H TUTOR FLYNT 241 left by the judge : " He argued that saying Saint Luke was an indifferent thing ; and 't was com- monly used ; and therefore he might use it. Mr. Brattle used it. I argued that 't was not Scrip- tural ; that 't was absurd and partial to Saint Matthew, &C.5 and not to Saiiit Moses, Saint Samuel, &c. And if we said Saint we must go through and keep the Holy days appointed for them, and turned to the order in the Common Prayer Book." Wise Mr. Flynt, not to care for any of these things ! " Religion in the substance of it," declared a contemporary. Dr. Appleton, of the First Church, Cambridge, " seemed always to be near his heart ; and whilst he had a very catholic spirit, not laying that stress upon dis- tinguishing forms and modes of worship, . . . he laid great stress upon the substantial parts of religion, the weightier matters of the law and gospel, such as judgment, mercy, faith, and the love of God." Exquisite for point and for rebuke of intolerance was his prompt repartee in a com- pany of gentlemen where Whitefield, the revival- ist, was leading the conversation. " It is my opinion," said Whitefield, " that Dr. Tillotson is now in hell for his heresy." ^' It is my opinion," retorted Tutor Flynt, " that you w411 not meet him there." His humor seems to have been of the explosive sort described by Dr. Johnson, " something which comes upon a man by fits, which he can neither 242 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN command nor restrain, and which is not perfectly- consistent with true politeness." But it had point, and that saved him from suppression when impo- lite, as in his retort upon Whitefield, and from oppression when indifferent to accepted creeds. The streaming character of his wit, to use a phrase of Emerson's, also floated him, kept him " in the swim," when by a highly proper and discriminat- ing social instinct he was doomed to stranding and entire isolation for eccentric persistence in the state of " single blessedness." The measure of this handicap, which his ruling genius had to overcome, may be gathered from the careful state- ment in the funeral oration of Dr. Appleton, from which we have already quoted. " To say that he was without his foibles and failings would be to say more of him than can be said of the best of men. But any of them that were observ- able I doubt not were owing in a great measure to that single state in which he lived all his days ; which naturally begets in men a contractedness with respect to their own private and personal con- cerns." As he uttered these words, how could even a Puritan preacher refrain from regarding the women of his congregation with one auspi- cious, and the men with one drooping eye ? However, we have kept the reader too long from that most graphic description of the Tutor contained in the account of his journey to Ports- mouth, N. H. This was written down at the TUTOR FLYNT 243 request of John Adams by his classmate, David Sewall, who accompanied the old bachelor on his trip. The affair was transacted in June, 1754, Mr. Flynt being then eighty years of age and Sewall nineteen. " He sent for me to his chamber in the old Harvard Hall, on Saturday afternoon," wrote Sewall ; " being informed that I was an excellent driver of a chair, he wished to know if I would wait upon him. ... I replied the proposition was to me new and unexpected and I wished for a little time to consider of it. He replied, ' Aye, prithee, there is no time for consideration ; I am going next Monday morning.' " At Lynn, their first stopping place, " Mr. Flynt had a milk punch," for it was a warm forenoon. By night- fall they reached Rowley, where they were enter- tained by Rev. Jedediah Jewett, who put them both in one bed, which was all he had unoccupied. The next day, Tuesday, at old Hampton, they fell in with parson Cotton walking on foot with his wife. Mr. Flynt informed him " that he intended to have called and taken dinner with him, but as he found he was going from home he would pass on and dine at the pubhc house. Upon which says Mr. Cotton, ' We are going to dine upon an invitation with Dr. Weeks, one of my parishioners ; and (Rev.) Mr. Gookin and his wife of North Hill are likewise invited to dine there ; and I have no doubt you will be 244 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN as welcome as any o£ us.' The invitation was accepted. " After dinner, while Mr. Flynt was enjoying his pipe^ the wife of Dr. Weeks introduced her young child, about a month old, and the twins of Parson Gooldn's wife, infants of about the same age, under some expectation of his blessing by bestowing something on the mother of the twins (as was supposed), although no mention of that expectation was made in my hearing ; but it pro- duced no effect of the kind. After dinner we passed through North Hampton to Greenland ; and after coming to a small rise in the road, hills on the north of Piscataqua River appearing in view, a conversation passed between us respect- ino- one of them which he said was Frost Hill. I said it was Agamenticus, a large hill in York. We differed in opinion and each adhered to his own ideas of the subject. During this conversa- tion, while we were descending gradually at a moderate pace, and at a small distance and in full view of Clark's Tavern, the ground being a little sandy, but free from stones or obstructions of any kind, the horse somehow stumbled in so sud- den a manner, the boot of the chair being loose on Mr. Flynt's side, threw Mr. Flynt headlong from the carriage into the road ; and the stoppage beino; so sudden, had not the boot been fastened on my side, I might probably have been thrown out likewise. The horse sprang up quick, and TUTOR FLYNT 245 With some difficulty I so guided the chair as to prevent the wheel passing over him ; when I halted and jumped out, being apprehensive from the manner in which the old crentleman was thrown out, that it must have broken his neck. Several persons at the tavern noticed the occurrence and immediately came to assist Mr. Flynt ; and after rising, found him able to walk to the house ; and, after washing his face and head with some water, found the skin rubbed off his forehead in two or three places, — to which a young lady, a sister of William Parker, Jr., who had come out from Portsmouth with him and with some others that afternoon, applied some pieces of court plaster. After which we had among us two or three single bowls of lemon punch, made pretty sweet, with which we refreshed ourselves, and became very cheerful. The gentlemen were John Wen- dell, William Parker, Jr., and Nathaniel Tread- well, a young gentleman who was paying suit to Miss Parker. Mr. Flynt observed he felt very well, notwithstanding his fall from the chair ; and if he had not disfigured himself, he did not value it. He wovild not say the fault was in the driver ; but he rather thought he was looking too onuch on those hills ^ The party went on its way towards Ports- mouth. " The punch we had partaken of was pretty well charged with good old spirit, and Father Flynt was very pleasant and sociable. 246 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN About a mile distant from the town there is a road that turns off at right angles (called the creek road) into town, into which Mr. Treadwell and Miss Parker (who afterwards married Captain Adams) entered with their chair. Upon which Mr. Fljnt turned his face to me and said, ^ Aye, prithee, I do not understand their motions ; but the Scripture says. The way of a man with a maid is very mysterious.' " On the return journey Mr. Flynt was destined to hear aofain of " Parson Gookin's wife's twins." Indeed, it would seem as if a conspiracy had been entered into by the ladies of Hampton to way- lay the old bachelor as he wended homeward and compel him to give that silver blessing. At Hampton Falls he planned to dine with the Rev. Josiali Whipple. " But it so happened the dinner was over, and Mr. Whipple had gone out to visit a parishioner, but Madam Whipple was at home, and very social and pleasant, and immediately had the table laid, and a loin of roasted veal, that was in a manner whole, placed on it, upon which we made an agreeable meal. After dinner Mr. Flynt was accommodated with a pipe ; and while enjoying it Mrs. Whipple accosted him thus : ^ Mr. Gookin, the worthy clergyman of North Hill, has but a small parish, and a small salary, but a consider- able family ; and his wife has lately had twins.' ' Aye, that is no fault of mine,' says Mr. Flynt. TUTOR FLYNT 247 ' Very true, sir, but so it is/ And as he was a bachelor, and a gentleman of handsome property, she desired he would sfive her somethinsf for Mr. Gookin ; and she would be the bearer of it, and faithfully deliver it to him. To which he replied : ^I don't know that we bachelors are under an obligation to maintain other folks' children.' To this she assented ; but it was an act of charity she now requested for a worthy person, and from him who was a gentleman of opulence ; and who, she hoped, would now not neglect bestowing it. ' Madam, I am from home on a journey, and it is an unreasonable time.' She was very sensible of this ; but a gentleman of his property did not usually travel without more money than was necessary to pay the immediate expenses of his journey, and she hoped he could spare something on this occasion. After some pause he took from his pocket a silver dollar and gave her, saying it was the only Whole Dollar he had about him. Upon which Mrs. Whipple thanked him and en- gaged she would faithfully soon deliver it to Mr. Gookin ; adding it was but a short time to Com- mencement . . . and she hoped this was but an earnest of a larger donation. . . . Father Flynt replied, ' Insatiable woman, I am almost sorry I have given you anything.' " However, he fully reimbursed himself at the expense of the next minister's wife he met. In the evening he stopped at the home of Kev. Nathaniel Rogers in 248 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Ipswich, who introduced him to his wife, where- upon Mr. Flynt exclaimed, " Madam, I must buss you ! " and gave her a hearty kiss. " In the morning we had toast and tea. He was interro- gated by Mrs. Rogers whether he would have the tea strong or weak, that she might accommodate it to his liking. He replied that he liked it strong of the tea, strong of the sugar, and strong of the cream ; and it was regulated accordingly." The same day the Tutor and his Bos well ar- rived in Cambridge, and the journey was ended. It was in this year of his journey that he resigned his tutorship. By this time death had so chano^ed affairs in the old home in Braintree that no harbor offered itself there in which to end his days. So, upon leaving his chambers in the old Harvard Hall, he went to reside near by at the Widow Sprague's. Not long after, he fell sick. His wonted humor, however, never deserted him. John Adams records in his diary (1759) that Mr. Marsh (of Braintree) says : " Father Flynt has been very gay and sprightly this sick- ness. Colonel Quincy went to see him a Fast Day, and was, or appeared to be, as he was about taking leave of the old gentleman, very much affected ; the tears flowed very fast. ' I hope,' says he in a voice of grief, ' you will excuse my passions.' ' Aye, prithee,' says the old man, ' I don't care much for you, nor your passions neither.' Morris said to him, ^ You are going, sir, TUTOR FLYNT 249 to Abraham's bosom ; but I don't know but I shall reach there first.' 'Ay, if you go there, I don't want to 2:0.' " In spite of these comforters, Tutor Flynt lin- gered on till the 13th of February, 1760, when he passed away, in the eighty-fifth year of his age. He had a peaceful ending and a notable funeral. On the day of interment a brief funeral oration was dehvered by James Lowell, in Hol- den Chapel, "On the Truly Venerable Henry Flynt; " and on the Sunday following a sermon was preached in his honor in the First Church, by Mr. Appleton, on "The Blessedness of a Fixed Heart." XI PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY QuiNCY is not wholly a town of the past in its more interesting aspects. It is also a city of the present, full of life, — simmering, indeed, with the incalculable and transforming energy of the times. The obliterating march of modern progress has not spared scenes and homes dear to the " oldest inhabitant," but many historic places remain untouched, and what is new is not by any means to be ignored. A perambulation of Quincy, revealing all this, will be its own reward. Does the antiquarian, well satisfied to remain with the picturesque generations among whom American Independence began, wish further warrant for such an undertaking ? He will find it in the example of Sir Walter Besant, who has " The Perambulation of the City and its Suburbs " in his " Survey of London." The London of the New World it was early predicted Quincy would be. No less a person than the explorer who first set his eyes upon this favored spot. Captain John Smith, wrote on his map of the coast the name of England's greatest city all over the region now within the bounds of Quincy. H W u > u 5 o PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 251 The anticipation has been fulfilled in one respect at least : since 1889 Quincy has been a city. The change from a town government was, however, a doubtful transaction, entered into under the compulsion of a large increase in pop- ulation ; and the returns from the " consensus of the competent " are not so overwhelming as to establish the wisdom of it. In the old New England town meeting every man is conscious of his sovereignty and counts for all he is worth, and all business and elections are done above- board and by unquestioned majorities. Simple, direct, and democratic, this form of govern- ment is the norm and ideal of free institutions. Nothing as good as itself can be devised to take its place. The town meeting in Quincy was always pre- served in its original strength and simplicity, but in the later years of its existence it came to its highest estate. It was held in the granite Town Hall, which, unchanged externally, still fronts the training field square, with its wide spaces and massive Stone Temple. To be a freeman in such an assembly, the equal of any, unfettered in speech or vote, an observer of the quick play of thought, the wise deliberation of important ques- tions, the surprises of individual characteristics, was an exhilaration. So citizens and statesmen were made ; and ladies were permitted to sit in the gallery and see the process. 252 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Then, too, — an important factor, — the mod- erator, unanimously chosen year after year, was John Quincy Adams. His vigorous guidance of business, his swift and wise decisions, his wit, his fairness toward all, his masterful retention of long strings of amendments, his discomfiture of the mere obstructionist, his patient indulgence of the inexperienced, was as fine a bit of pre- siding as one w^ould wish to see. Early in his twenty years' career as moderator he was instru- mental in bringing into the meetings a measure of dignity and order not known in their previous history. From time out of mind the sovereign citizens of Quincy had stood about wdth hats on, and when not especially interested in the item of business just then under consideration would talk of crops and candidates. Mr. Adams changed all this. Seats were brought in, hats were re- moved, and with George L. Gill, the perennial and faithful town clerk, at his right hand, and the chairman of the Committee of Fifteen at his left, all was done decently and in order. That Committee of Fifteen, appointed to ex- pedite business, was the nucleus of a characteristic group which came to be known as the " Wisdom Corner." Edwin W. Marsh, frequently chairman of the committee, went into that left-hand cor- ner, for the reason that it was easy there to catch the attention of the moderator, to face the meet- ing, and to watch the course of business. Charles PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 253 F. Adams, the younger, quickly discerned the convenience of the situation and followed; so did John Quincy Adams Field, William G. A. Pattee, George F. Pinkham, Horace B. Spear (town treasurer for seventeen years), Warren W. Adams, Rupert F. Claflin, Colonel Abner B.Pack- ard, Theophilus King, James H. Slade, and many others who, if not guilty of " indecent exposure of intellect," were admittedly quahfied to sit in the " corner." Its astuteness challeno-ed all measures in the interest of economy and con- servative government ; it was almost a higher chamber in the very heart of a lower one. " Though many people spoke lightly of the Wisdom Corner in those days," writes one, " I believe that now, after their experience with a city government, they would be very glad to have the Wisdom Corner take another turn at it." Another institution of the town meeting was Henry H. Faxon, temperance agitator, reformer of politicians, " millionaire pohceman," pubhc benefactor. Over forty times by actual count he is said to have spoken at a single session. He required no advantage of place or support of fol- lowers. "Single and alone" he was an irrepres- sible centre of explosive energy, now controvert- ing the " Wisdom Corner," and now castigating for its indifference the entire assembly. But his severest critics admit, however reluctantly, that this " intemperate advocate of temperance " has 254 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN been always on the side of decency and order, honesty and good government. Chiefly through his efforts Quincy, since 1881, has been a " no- hcense town," and it is altogether owing to his personal watchfulness and persistence in prose- cuting offenders that prohibition has not been a farce, but a fact. Fearlessly, in the capacity of volunteer constable without pay, he has ventured alone, in the night as well as the day, to ferret out " rum-sellers " in the lowest dens. Liberally he has given time and wealth for the furtherance of his principles, spending a fortune for " the cause." A characteristic form of his generosity is to contribute annually to all the Sunday schools in Quincy large amounts for the Christmas and other entertainments of the children. He is a genuine product of the rugged, independent old Quincy settlers (his ancestors were among the earliest English immigrants), peculiar in the pic- turesque Yankee way, restless under the ceaseless exactions of the New England conscience. He is a "character," who, besides his other achieve- ments, has certainly made the life of his ancient town more interesting. But the town meeting, in which Mr. Faxon was seen at his best, came to an end. The Town Hall could not hold the citizens for the multitude o£ them, and even the great barn of a skating- rink proved inadequate. A new form of govern- ment was imperative, but the change was made HENRY H. FAXON PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 255 with reluctance. All felt that it was a critical moment in the history of the old town. The assembly which met in the Town Hall to inaugurate the new government was not large, and lacked enthusiasm. Altogether it was a life- less affair, with little to indicate the importance of the occasion. Should it be permitted to end so ? The minister of First Church, immediately upon the close of the exercises, called out " Father Flint," the old white-haired sexton, and directed him to ring the bell in the grand historic edifice. But what should it be, — a peal of joy or toUing as for the departed ? " Father Flint " was of the past, and plainly depressed. Uncertain what to do, he rang once, and then paused to expostulate. Urged to go on, and assured that it was all right, he laboriously pulled the rope again. The bell was tolling, — there was no doubt of that, — toUing for the passing of the town of Quincy, for the close of an epoch in which it had been famous among the towns of the Commonwealth. A memory now was that town to be, — a memory of a life and a time never to be repeated. Gone were the simple ways and the strength of them, — gone the quiet, unhasting life, the unques- tioned faith, the sturdy devotion to duty; gone the plain honesty, the humble romance, the high- hearted patriotism, the rugged independence, the social equality, of the town of John Adams (the son of a cordwainer), and of " Colonel " Quincy, 256 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN and of the Basses and Baxters, the Savilles and Spears. And the white-haired sexton in his feebleness and uncertainty was tolling the bell. Plainly this would never do. A young man, Walter B. Holden, stepped forward to relieve " Father Flint." Youth and optimism now rang a vigorous peal for the new city of Quincy. The plangent sounds flooded the square (once the training field), stirring the hearts of the people pouring from the City Hall, as they had quickened the pulses of their forefathers in the victorious days when Independence was declared and the sons of Quincy triumphed on the field or in the senate. They were flung far and wide to the granite hills, to the shores of the sea, to the farms, to the shops, to the remote villages. They chanted to the future a defiant faith snatched from the struggling light of these unintelligible days. They drowned in their clamor the fears which will arise from a life transitional between two worlds, — one parochial in its secluded and changeless homogeneity, the other cosmopoli- tan, and swayed by the vast forces of inven- tive and competing globe exploiters. Not too desperate is the hope, they seemed to say, that Quincy the city may fulfill a destiny as sublime and beneficent as Quincy the town. The form of government of the city was ham- mered into ideal shape through long winter months, particular attention being given to the PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 257 features of " personal responsibility," " single chamber/' and other modern devices to circum- vent the self-seeking and the delinquent. Charles H. Porter had the honor to be elected the first mayor. He has been succeeded by Henry 0. Fairbanks, William A. Hodges, Charles F. Adams, 2d, Russell A. Sears, Harrison A. Keith, John 0. Hall, and Charles M. Bryant, now (1902) in office. The city is well launched on a sea not too turbulent, but just enough to put to the test the virtues of its citizens. In the perambulation of the city — too long delayed by unavailing regrets over the accept- ance of it — no better place to start from is afforded than the summit of Penn's Hill. Not only is it a commanding height on one of the sides of the city, but there the past and the present harmoniously meet. On this eminence, the 17th of June, 1896, the Adams Chapter of Quincy of the Daughters of the Revolution laid the corner-stone of a cairn to the memory of Abigail Adams. A beautiful day with clear- est atmosphere, the multitude which was gath- ered on the o^ranite ledgi'es of the hill could look over the town and across the bay to where in the haze of the metropolis Charlestown lay, and the tall shaft of Bunker Hill pierced the sky. From this view, much like that which fell upon the eyes of Abigail Adams so many years before, the assembly was called to give its attention to 258 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN the interesting exercises appointed for the day. They were conducted by Mrs. N. V. Titus, re- gent of the chapter, through whose efforts the enterprise had been assured and all arrange- ments for the ceremonial perfected. Addresses were delivered by Charles F. Adams, 2d, then mayor of Quincy, Edwin W. Marsh, Charles F. Adams, the younger, and Miss Elizabeth Porter Gould. The corner-stone, contributed by the Swithin Brothers, is a beautiful block of polished granite made from a sleeper of the oldest railway in the country, — that built in 1826 from the Quincy quarries to the Neponset River, for the conveyance of stone to be used in the construc- tion of Bunker Hill Monument. At the laying of it Abigail Adams, daughter of John Quincy Adams, presided with silver trowel ; and when she had accomplished her part, various patriotic societies and individuals contributed stones, prized for their associations, which were built into the cairn till it reached its monumental proportions. Colonel E. S. Barrett, President of the Sons of the American Revolution, brought a stone from the Concord battlefield, Mrs. Abbie B. Eastman brought one from Lexington battlefield, John H. Means, a connection of Samuel Adams, brought one from Dorchester Heights, Hon. James Hum- phrey brought one from the home of Abigail Adams in Weymouth, and so did Rev. Robert R. Kendall, the present successor of Rev. William ABIGAIL ADAMS CAIRN BIRTHPLACE OF PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 259 Smith, Abigail's father. Then there were con- tributions from the foot of the Washington Ehn by George Eastman of Cambridge, and from North Bridge, Salem, by Miss Helen Philbriek, and from historic Hull by Miss Floretta Vining, and thus one after another these memorial stones were wrought into a structure unique among the monuments of the country. A beautiful bronze tablet with the following inscription was given by Charles F. Adams, the younger : — " From this spot, with her son John Quincy Adams, then a boy of seven by her side, Abigail Adams watched the smoke of burninof Charles- town while listening to the guns of Bunker Hill, Saturday, June 17, 1775." Little more than a stone's throw eastward from the summit of Penn's Hill is one of the more picturesque quarries of Quincy, the large crater-like cavity of the pink granite quarry, memorable to the writer and many others as the scene of the labors of one of Quincy's former residents, George B. Wendell. He was of the famous Wendell stock, a sea captain and son of Portsmouth, N. H., who in his later years re- strained his adventurous spirits to forsake the free world of the great waters and the rule of the quarter-deck to " boss " a quarry gang in the bowels of the earth. As true a man as ever breathed, was the universal acclaim when he passed away, — one whose life deepened faith in humanity. 260 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN From tlie side of the bill in the neio-hborhood of this quarry one can look down into Wey- mouth Fore E/iver, the salt-water inlet which separates Weymouth and Quincy. Here are sit- uated the extensive Fore River Ship and En- gine Company's Works, where battle-ships and torpedo-boats are built with all modern celer- ity and skill, and where was recently launched the seven-masted schooner Thomas W. Lawson. What astounding fulfillment is this of predic- tions made by John Adams and others that the Quincy seaboard, so convenient for ship-build- ing, would some day be the scene of a great development of this industry ! The first vessel built in Quincy was launched from ways on a creek now included within the Fore River Com- pany's plant, but the point near Germantown has been the location most prized. Here was Deacon Thomas's shipyard, where in the old day, a marvel for size, an 800-ton vessel was constructed. John Souther, too, had a ship- yard at what is now known as Johnson's wharf, on Town River ; and Dr. Woodward was so con- vinced that Black's Creek, drained at every ebb of tide, was a good haven for vessels and their making that in his will he invited especial atten- tion to the matter. But how far beyond all that was ever done or dreamed is the development at Fore River ! It is the largest element in the creation of the new Quincy, transforming the PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 261 pretty roads and shores of the Point into a bus- tling, " booming " industrial centre. Quincy is said to have a more sinuous and deeply indented shore than any other town or city in Massachusetts. Follow it round from Fore River to the Neponset, which divides Quincy from Boston, and what various scenes of quiet beauty meet the eye ! Points of quite human interest there are also : the magnificent electric light plant at Brackett's wharf, where Henry M. Faxon, the manager, produces more illuminating power than could be measured by all the spermaceti candles made by his Hardwick ancestors in the Germantown of the old day; the Sailors' Snug Harbor at Germantown, in which Captain C. P. Jayne, who has sailed the seven seas, cares for the other ancient mariners ; the summer settlement at Hough's (pronounced Hoff's) Neck, with its fleet of yachts and its plea- sant clubhouse ; Merry-Mount, the home of Mrs. John Quincy Adams, where hill and shore retain unchanged the natural beauty roistering Mor- ton looked upon ; the National Sailors' Home, refuge of infirm naval heroes, whose comfort is made sure by Lieutenant Downes. So we come to Squantum, romantic and historic, whose cliffs look upon old Dorchester Bay and Boston. Here Myles Standish and a party from Plymouth — piloted by Squanto, the faithful friend of the white man — landed, September 30, 1621. In 262 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN commemoration of this fact a cairn has been built on the highest part of the stone ridge, which on the east dips to the sea and on the west decHnes to " Massachusetts Hummock " and its meadows. On Monday, September 30, 1895, the corner-stone was laid and the services of dedication celebrated in the presence of a large assembly. Charles F. Adams, the younger, de- livered the address of the occasion, once more showing his interest in the historic places of Quincy. He described the voyaging of Myles Standish and his men from Plymouth, and did not fail to pay a fine tribute to Squanto, for whom Squantum is named. Mrs. William Lee, Regent of the Daughters of the Revolution of Massachusetts, also made an address, and she and Mr. Adams laid the corner-stone. The Quincy Historical Society and the Bostonia So- ciety participated in the exercises, and were represented by many members. The leading spirit of the occasion, however, was Mrs. N. V. Titus, who presided, gave the address of welcome, and entertained the guests at her home near by. Indeed, it was entirely owing to her interest in the historic places of her picturesque neighbor- hood that the enterprise was conceived and car- ried out. Standing by the cairn one may not only enjoy a good view of Boston harbor, gemmed with its islands, but looking inland he sees the rugged PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 263 hills which from any point along the shore form the background of Quincy. Observing these hills closely, he will discern what appears to be masts rising from their summits. They are the derricks of the granite quarries. Who has not heard of Quincy granite ? At one time thought to be the only stone Boston should use in the erection of its more dignified edifices, and now considered to be unsurpassed for polished work. As early as 1749 this granite was utiHzed, but at that date only surface boulders were broken up and wrought into shape. King's Chapel in Boston was built of this material between 1749 and 1752, and it was thought to be so limited in quantity that the town became alarmed, and by vote forbade its further removal until otherwise ordered. Later, however, enough was secured to construct the famous old Hancock mansion on Beacon Hill. " The difficulty seems to have been,'' writes Mr. Adams in his " Three Epi- sodes," " that, with the tools then in use, they were unable to work into the rock. The King's Chapel stone, it is said, was broken into a degree of shape by letting iron balls fall upon the heated blocks. At last, upon one memorable Sunday in 1803, there appeared at Newcomb's Tavern, in the centre of the North Precinct, three men, who called for a dinner with which to celebrate a feat they had just successfully performed. The fear of the tithingman not restraining them, they had 264 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN that day split a large stone by the use of wedges. Their names were Josiah Bemis, George Stearns, and Michael Wild. It was indeed a notable event, for the crust of the syenite hills was broken." Later Solomon Willard and Gridley Bryant, two remarkable men, greatly advanced the industry. Bunker Hill Monument was to be built, — an immense contract. They were stim- ulated to invent new methods. " While Willard laid open the quarry and devised the drills, the derricks, and the shops, Bryant was building a railway. This famous structure marked an epoch, not only in the history of Quincy, but in that of the United States ; and in every school history it is mentioned as the most noticeable event dur- ing the administration of the younger Adams." On this first railway of the United States, operated by horse power, the first cars were run October 7, 1826. From quarry to tide-water the stone was carried, not only for Bunker Hill Monument, but for Minot Ledge Lighthouse and many a nota- ble structure beside. The railway was demolished years ago, its roadbed bought and utilized by the Old Colony system ; but the quarry still produces abundance of granite, and the " Granite Railway Company " still conducts an increasing business, laying modern rails to yet other ledges. Luther S. Anderson, son of the schoolmaster so well known in Boston a decade ago, Luther W. An- derson, is its enterprising manager. o > > PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 265 Numberless are the other quarries which have been opened in these granite hills. Great eleva- tions are being leveled, and the very " roots of the mountains " are being torn out, but the sup- ply is inexhaustible. Stone sheds for the ham- mering and polishing of the obdurate material have multiplied, so that within the last twenty years these and the houses of the workmen have quite altered the face of the country. New vil- lages have sprung up in the meadows, and the rugged hillsides have been sprinkled over with habitations. Through industry and enterprise of a high order were the quarries developed and the shap- ing and handling of the stone brought to their present perfection. Little enough, it is some- times thought, has this advantaged Quincy. It has fatefully changed the character of the com- munity, making it more of an industrial centre. This may well disturb those who love the old scenes and the old ways, and who looked for a different development. All the cosmopolitan camaraderie he may assume is hardly sufficient to reconcile the ordinary native to the disappearance of " neighbors " in the " foreign invasion," the multiplication of unpronounceable names on the voting lists, and the consequent increase of taxa- tion for the additional number of schoolhouses needed to educate the abundant progeny of the unsophisticated or improvident proletariat from 266 WHEKE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN over the water. But this is the condition of things which most communities in this land of Hberty and of " unparalleled prosperity " have to face. It may be that if we are chary neither of our sympathy nor of our honesty, what is best in those escaping from the ancient wrongs of the Old World will rise up to meet us. Swedes and Norwegians are now swelHng the invasion. Who will deny that they possess sterHng virtues in large measure? And the thrifty Scot "from Aberdeen awa' " has already made his religious- ness and ethical persistence felt. Whatever the effect of the quarries upon Quincy's future, this at least is to be said : that we have in the men who have had most to do with the development of them persons who would add to the strength of any community. From the earliest times they had in a marked degree the intelligence needed to extend their business to about all the large cities and towns of the coun- try, and the virtues which go to the making of good citizens. There was Henry Barker, eager for all moral and educational reforms ; and Charles Henry Hardwick, a true lover of nature and syl- van sports ; and Patrick McGrath, the philoso- pher and friend of James Martineau, the great English thinker; and honest Amos Churchill and ex-Councilman George L. Miller ; and besides these many more, both of the past and the pre- sent, — the Wrights, the Mitchells, the Fields, PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 267 the Fallons, the Badgers, the McDonnells, and Messrs. Hitchcock, Wild, Craig, Kichards, Mc- Gillvray, Vogel, Jones, and. John Thompson and his more famous son James. Having fetched a compass round about the outer limits of the city and caught a glimpse of its far-extending and verdure-clad uplands, and its sinuous shores bathed by the shining sea, we should now be prepared to traverse the heart of it. Let it not be imagined, however, that we are to be led through a man-made wilderness of brick and mortar and granite pavement. Quincy fortunately retains still, even in its populous parts, the natural beauty of the New England town. Its thoroughfares are roads and lanes. The old Centre, with its " God's acre '' asleep in the greenwood shade, its stately granite temple of worship dominating the wide grass-sown spaces and broad highways which surround it, its city hall Roman in strength and severity of outline, and its fountain with the bubbling water brim- ming its ample rim, is to all appearances a village square. The old Hancock Tavern is there yet, — somewhat changed, to be sure (its yard filled up with a line of stores), but much the same as when Daniel Webster, journeying to Marshfield, used to descend from the mail coach to drink to the "inanes of the place and to the comfort of his own majestic frame. And just across the way is the simple homestead of Henry H.Faxon, who bought 268 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN the tavern as the only way to circumvent " mine host," who would persist in dispensing liquid refreshment. Mr. Faxon's house is on the corner of Coddington Street, and opposite it is an ancient landmark, — the little wooden cottage in which since time out of mind the Quincy Mutual Fire Insurance Company has had its offices. Cramped the officials find themselves in spite of frequent extensions ; but President Charles A. Howland seems to consider that what he has done in the way of monument-building to his Pilgrim an- cestors is in this hue quite enough. He does not feel called upon to inspire the erection of a monument to his business. On yet another side of " the Square " (it is a triangle) is the Adams Block, built by John Quincy Adams a few years ago. In it is the Mount Wollaston Bank, upon whose board of directors Charles F. Adams, the elder, served for a number of years. ' AU these buildings face the old training field, whose bounds (now obliterated) the late Edward H. Dewson patiently searched out and estabhshed. For over two hundred and fifty years this spot has been the very heart of the community, throb- bing with its life, the pulsations of which have been transmitted with renewing power to the re- motest homes. Originally, it is probable, it was part of the Coddington grant, and came by gift or confiscation into the possession of the town. Its level greensward early invited the militia for PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 269 the wonderful evolutions of training days, and from here the raw levies of hardy farmers went forth to fight the Indians, the French, the red- coats, and the Confederates. What would we not give to possess a " snap shot " of Colonel Quincy and Lieutenant John Adams at the head of their picturesque array ! Alas, the days of the camera came in as the men and the events worth photographing went out ! Added interest was imparted to the training field October 8, 1732, when a new meeting-house was built upon it by the old First Society. To be more correct, the town built it, for then the church and the town were one. This was the Hancock meeting-house, which lasted for almost a hundred years, when it was superseded by the present Stone Temple, w^hich was dedicated November 12, 1828. The historic character of this dignified edifice becomes with every passing year more exalted in the pub- lic mind. Already the number of visitors who wish to view the interior has increased to such an extent as to embarrass the sexton and the parish committee. The beautiful marble tablets in mem- ory of the Presidents and their wives, and the sarcophagi beneath the portico are certainly of interest to the multitudes who in these days are increasing their knowledge of America's heroic generations. And recently Mr. Edmund M. Wheelwright of Boston has placed one more ob- ject of interest in the church, — a fine bronze 270 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN tablet in memory of his sturdy old ancestor, the Rev. John Wheelwriofht. From the training field square roads branch off in all directions. Near by on Washington Street, which goes to " the Point," is to be seen the charming Crane Memorial Hall, which con- tains the Thomas Crane Public Library and the library bequeathed to the town by John Adams. Thomas Crane came of " pure old New England stock/' bearing the Quincy hall-mark. In his blood was the strength of the Savils and Baxters. His fathers for three generations back were born in Quincy, but he himself was born on George's Island, in the harbor, on the 18th of October, 1803. Not long after, his parents returned to the mainland, and in the primitive schools of Quincy he received all the pedagogic training destiny allotted him. At the age of twenty-six, as we read in Mr. Adams's admirable address at the dedication of the hall, Thomas Crane went to New York, a journeyman stonecutter, active, self-reliant, and ambitious. Here he soon became a master workman, and eventually one of the leading stone contractors of the city. " During nearly thirty years of as active construction as any great city ever saw, there were few buildings of- magnitude erected in New York, in which granite was used, to which Thomas Crane did not contribute, and which did not contribute to him." His wealth rapidly increased, and for his THOMAS CRANE CRANE MEMORIAL HALL PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 271 clear, shrewd common sense and sterling honesty positions of honor and trust were abundantly conferred upon him. Throughout his life he retained a deep affection for Quincy, and after his death Mrs. Crane and her two sons gave to the town the perfect bit of architecture named in memory of him. While she hved Mrs. Crane manifested great interest in the Hbrary, and at her death left $20,000 to be devoted to the care of the building and the grounds and to the purchase of works of art. Her son Benjamin Franklin Crane has also passed away, and in his memory a beautiful window has been placed in the hall. The other son, Albert Crane, is still living. His home is in Stamford, Conn. Opposite the Crane Memorial Hall is to be erected the new government building. It can- not fail to add greatly to the appearance of this locality and to awaken anticipations of the de- velopments yet to be made in the heart of the city. Along the line of the old Plymouth road, now called Hancock Street, the square seems to ex- tend itself, — so wide is the thoroudifare, — past the new colonial building of the Quincy Savings Bank to the imposing Bethany Congre- gational Church. Continuing in this direction one comes to the offices of the solid old "Quincy Patriot," a newspaper, not a person, with a lin- gering aroma of village days and colonial hero- 272 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN worship. Adjoining is the garden spot of the Centre, the greenhouses and shrubbery of Col- onel Abner B. Packard. Beyond is the " Hol- low/' where the town brook passes under the road, a place for tanneries in the old days, but greatly improved now by the fine business blocks of Durgin and Merrill and Henry L. Kincaide, and the lar^e brick Music Hall. And so we come to a place where four roads meet, and which might be called Liberty Tree Square ; for here, as John Adams tells us, a liberty tree was planted in the fervent first days of the Revolu- tion. Measures were taken to guard its growth, but if it survived till independence was won, no record of tliat fact remains. Perhaps it was planted in this spot because the Brackett Tavern, the house of fashionable resort in Revolutionary times, as W. S. Pattee tells us in his history, stood prominently on one of the corners. It is there now, altered into a commodious dwelling- house, long owned and occupied by John S. Wil- liams, and at present by Dr. John F. Welch. On the opposite corner is the pretty stone " Christ Church," the place of worship of one of the oldest Episcopal societies in New England. It may indeed be called the oldest, for King's Chapel, which preceded it by but a few years, has been a Unitarian church for over a century. As early as 1689 there were gatherings of Church of England people in Braintree North Precinct, PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 273 now Quincy, and organization was formally ef- fected in 1701. An exotic among New England Congregationalists, it had a hard struggle for ex- istence, in which it displayed a persistence equal to that which was manifested anywhere by its opponents. Not far from Christ Church, on that part of the winding Plymouth road which is now called School Street, is yet another church which commands attention. It is St. John's Catholic Church, the largest of that faith in Quincy ; the mother church it might be called, as its clergy have gone out into other parts of Quincy and established and maintained new houses of wor- ship as they were required. The oldest Catholic Church is, however, St. Mary's at West Quincy. Across the way from St. John's Church is the residence built by that rugged and honest " forty- niner " James Edwards, on the site of the Cranch house, where lived the companion of John Adams and where the first post-office was located. Later the Greenleafs, who intermarried with the Cranches, made this their home. From here one might continue his perambulation along the old Plymouth road past the place where Joseph Marsh had his school, to the birthplaces of the Presidents and the old-fashioned homestead of the Fields. The temptation is strong, however, to linger for a moment at the hospitable residence of James H. Stetson, so long the home of his father, Dr. James A. Stetson. w 274 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN Dr. Stetson, born in Braintree in 1806, was, when he died, in 1880, not only the oldest prac- titioner in Norfolk County, but the last of the physicians who, in the old-fashioned imperious way, attended to the ills of the entire town. One minister for the cure of souls and one doctor for the cure of bodies was the ancient order up to his day. He was the true successor of Drs. Wil- son and Savil and Phipps and Woodward, as Mrs. A. E. Faxon shows in " A Brief Record of the Physicians of Quincy," and wisely and kindly did he reign. Some time before his death the increase of popidation invited other physicians to share his labors, and in 1862 Dr. John S. Gilbert, so skillfid, sympathetic, and disinter- ested, began his long career. " The beloved phy- sician " he was to thousands, a description which may well be applied to about all of the medical gentlemen who have practiced their profession in Quincy. Affectionately one recalls Dr. Joseph Underwood, manly and unselfish, who settled here after his devoted services in the war for the Union, and scholarly Dr. James F. Harlow, and Dr. James Morison, great of stature but tender and gentle as any woman. Dr. John A. Gordon, still in active performance of his professional duties, came to Quincy from the Harvard Medi- cal School and the Boston Hospital in 1871. Of all the physicians of the city he has been here longest ; he is the " Dean of the Faculty." JOHN ALEXANDER GORDON, M. D. PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 275 Notwithstanding the exacting nature of a large practice, he has shown himself a model citizen by lending his aid to public improvements and heartily cooperating with Mr. William B. Rice in the planning and establishment of the City Hos- pital. He does not stand alone, however, in this regard among his fellow physicians. Dr. Joseph M. Sheehan, Braintree born, a Harvard graduate and student of Paris universities, has wisely served the town as chairman of the Board of Health and member of the School Committee. With these gentlemen we cannot fail to mention Dr. S. M. Donovan, the first city physician, cut down by death in the prime of his powers, Dr. John F. Welch, Dr. Frank S. Davis, Dr. W. H. Record, Dr. S. W. Garey, Dr. Henry C. Hallo- well, Dr. N. S. Hunting, and Dr. S. W. Ells- worth. Rising from the centre of the city, all its streets and homes and fields, away to the in- dented shore, spread out before it, is Presidents' Hill. A view unsurpassed by any to be obtained in other parts of the suburbs of Boston is to be enjoyed from its summit. Almost a dozen cities and towns are in sight, indicated by the steeples of their churches or their clustered houses, all set in an ideal New England landscape, — the rugged hills behind and the infinite expanse of the changeful sea before. This is the prospect the Presidents dehghted in, and from his home, 276 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN built upon the very crown of the gently sloping hill, Charles Francis Adams the younger daily rejoiced in it. To his sorrow he was forced to abandon the charms of the place, both those seen with the sight of the eyes and those suggested by the associations of centuries, " driven from a home of two hundred and fifty years by the steady, irresistible advance of what the world is pleased to call modern improvements." Like an exile, almost, he must feel in the town of Lincoln, to which he has removed. But his regret over the enforced change can hardly be keener than that of the older residents of Quincy, with whom he was so ready to labor for all real improve- ments. However, his broad acres have been carved into ample plots on curving roads, and fine homes of the newer Quincy are now adorning the hill- side. Across the way from Mr. Adams's old home, occupied by Mr. Herbert Lawton, is the spacious and artistic residence of Mr. William B. Bateman, and near by are the beautiful places of W. T. Babcock, Herbert F. McLitire, A. W. Par- ker, and W. E. Blanchard. Presidents' Lane, which is the way John Adams used to take morn- ing and evening to see the sun in its rising and setting, has long been one of the prettiest of country roads, and on it were built about all the houses which enjoyed the advantages of the hill. Parson Lunt's house, now occupied by Judge ADAMS ACADEMY PRESIDENTS' LANE PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 277 E. C. Bumpus, was built there, and near it for years has stood the pleasant homestead of Jo- seph C. Morse, a leading leather merchant of Boston, the comfortable early home of Charles F. Adams, the younger, now the residence of Edward H. Anger, the house of Professor Jef- frey R. Brackett, and that of Mrs. Lane and the late Charles Marsh. Now to these have been added the modern villas of Hon. John Shaw, Clarence Burgin, and A. F. Schenkelberger. By Dimmock Street one descends to Hancock Street, the part of the old Plymouth road on the Boston side of the square. Here is situated the Adams Academy, on the site of the Rev. John Hancock's parsonage. It was founded by John Adams, who in 1823 conveyed by deed of gift one hundred and sixty acres of land, from the income of which was to be built the Stone Temple, and afterwards a building for a school or acad- emy. " The deeds by which this property was con- veyed," writes Josiah Quincy in his Figures of the Past, " were executed at my father's house, and my name appears as a witness to the document." The academy was built in 1872. The first master was William Reynolds Dimmock, LL. D., Law- rence Professor of Greek in Williams College, a schoolmate and devoted friend of Bishop Phillips Brooks. Dr. Dimmock threw himself with the ut- most energy into the work of the school, and his name attracted pupils from all over the country. 278 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN For their accommodation the " Hancock House " was hired and opened as a boarding-house. Dr. Dimmock's exertions entirely overtaxed his strength, and he died at the early age of forty- three, March 29, 1878. His successor was Wil- liam Everett, Ph. D., formerly assistant profes- sor of Latin in Harvard College. Dr. Everett retained the position till 1893, when he resigned, to take his seat in Congress. He was succeeded by Mr. William Royall Tyler (A. B. Harvard College, 1874), who had been connected with the school for nineteen years. The boarding depart- ment was now discontinued. Mr. Tyler's ser- vice was short, and he died, greatly lamented, November 1, 1897, when Dr. William Everett was reappointed, who is the present master. In the porch memorial tablets are erected to Dr. Dimmock and Mr. Tyler. On the outside of the schoolhouse is a tablet commemorating the fact that on the same spot stood the dwelHng wherein was born John Hancock, w^io signed the Declaration of Independence as president of Congress. If one were to continue on the old Plymouth road, following in the footsteps of John Quincy Adams when as a boy he rode to Boston for letters, he would pass over one of the plea- santest thoroughfares in New England. Adams Street has lonjr been considered the most attrac- tive of the Quincy streets. Beginning at the p^ \ PERAMBULATION OF QUINCY 279 academy and the home of Ex-Mayor Porter across the way, it runs past the Adams mansion, the ample Beale homestead, the new residence of J. H. Emery and that of the late John C. Ran- dall, an influential Boston merchant and lover of letters. Beyond are the spacious houses of Thomas Whicher, William B. Kice, Mrs. E. H. Dewson, Mr. T. L. Sturtevant, Mr. H. L. Rice, Mr. Timothy Reed, Mr. Theophilus King, Mr. J. L. Faxon, Mr. Henry M. Faxon, the City Hospital high on a hill away from the road, and so on to the comfortable farmhouse of William H. Eaton and the Milton line. Pleasant, indeed, are these roads and homes of the Centre, but they hardly surpass those of WoUaston Heights. This region might with truth be called the chief residential part of Quincy. The houses are built on three command- ing hills, which afford not only fine outlooks but lend themselves to pleasantly curving roads. The first hill is supposed to be the site of Ann Hutchinson's farm, and a stone commemorating this fact is placed on the grounds of Mr. Wen- dell G. Corthell. Appropriate would it have been to have named this village Hutchinson Heights, as Mr. Adams suggests. " Wollaston Heights " is not supported by any associations of the place, and is too often confounded with the old Mount Wollaston, on the shore. However, the name has come to be recognized as that of 280 WHERE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE BEGAN a place pleasant to dwell in, and will probably abide. From the " Heights " one looks down upon the broad plain of the ancient Massachu- setts Fields, — historic ground, where the Rev. John Wilson, Boston's earliest minister, was granted a large allotment of land. He built him a house, the first to be erected in this neigh- borhood, which he never occupied. Was the liberal atmosphere of the place too bracing for the leader of the " leofalists " ? However this may be, his descendants lived in the house for a hundred years and more, and it stood there, on what is still known as the Taylor farm, as late as 1850. Within sight of it Colonel Quincy built, in 1770, the later Quincy mansion, and in recent years a companion home was erected for Mr. J. P. Quincy. A model school for young ladies has established itself in this delightful situation. Here, also, the old and the new are intermin- gling, a good place in which to end our peram- bulation of Quincy. To be sure the half has not been seen, — Norfolk Downs and West Quincy are quite left out, — but the end has been at- tained if a clear picture has been presented of a city of ancient fame inspiring modern possi- bilities. INDEX INDEX Adams, Abigail, home of, 68 ; edu- cation and marriage, 76 ; on Penn's Hill, 86 ; urges independence, 89 ; heroism of, 92 ; described by Pre- sident Quincy, 95 ; death, 102, 125, 171 ; cairn, 257. Adams, Abigail, of to-day, 145, 258. Adams, Abigail B. (Brooks), mar- riage, 125 ; services and character, 130, 138. Adams Academy, 103, 138. Adams, Brooks, 141, 145. Adams, Charles Francis (1807-86), public spirit, 75 ; on Monroe Doc- trine, 115 ; character, 122 ; mar- riage, 125 ; in Congress, 127 ; min- ister to England, 127-136 ; Ala- bama Claims, 138 ; death, 139 ; children of, 141 ; gift to First Church, 146. Adams, Charles Francis (the younger), cited, 12 ; describes Thomas Morton, 16 ; Sir Christo- pher Gardiner, 19 ; Antinomian controversy, 32 ; Wheelwright's meeting-house, 36 ; of the " tribe of Joanna," 47 ; on Judge E. R. Hoar and the " Widow Joanna Hoar" scholarship, 57; on com- pulsory municipal service, 74 ; Abigail Adams on Penn's Hill, 86 ; England and the Confederacy, 129 ; his public services, 141-143 ; children, 145 ; Abigail Adams cairn, 258 ; Myles Standish cairn, 262 ; granite industry, 263 ; Thomas Crane, 270 ; removes from Quincy, 276. Adams, Charles Francis, 2d, mayor of Quincy, 145, 257. Adams, Elizabeth C, 101. Adams, Hannah. 63. Adams, Henry (d. 1646), progenitor of John and Sam Adams, 12 ; settles in Braintree, 27 ; land grant confirmed, 43, 62 ; ancestry, 63, 65. Adams, Lieut. Henry, 44, 66. Adams, Prof. Henry, son of C. F. Adams, 141 ; his " History of the United States," 144, 145. Adams, Isaac Hull, 101. Adams, Deacon John (1691-1761), father of President John Adams, 67 ; death, 73. Adams, John (1735-1826), on inde- pendence, 2, 11, 39, 71 ; relation to Sam Adams, 12 ; ancestry, 63 ; a Puritan, 65 ; birthplace, 67 ; mar- riage, 76 ; on Writs of Assistance, 78 ; Stamp Act, 79 ; home life, 81 ; defends Capt. Preston, 83 ; ad- vanced views on independence, 84, 88; secures appointment of Gen. Geo. Washington, 87 ; trium- phant advocacy of independence, 89; minister to France, 93; fur- nishes model of constitution, 94; President, 96 ; fails of reelection, 97; last meeting with Lafayette, 100 ; death, 101 ; last message to his fellow-citizens, 104 ; character, 106, 136 ; in the household of Ed- mund Quincy 172, 211 ; on Tutor Flynt, 231, 243 ; founds Adams Academy, 103, 277. Adams, John Quincy (1767-1848), aids Harvard College, 60; de- scribes his grandfather, 67 ; birth- place, 68 ; baptized, 81 ; on Penn's Hill, 86, 107 ; character, 93, 106 ; marriage, 110 ; author of Monroe Doctrine, 115 ; President, 117 ; heroic career as Representative, 119 ; death, 120 ; how named, 158. Adams, John Quincy (1833-94), pub- lic services and character, 140, 141 ; moderator of town meeting, 252. Adams, Mrs. John Quincy, 42, 261. Adams, John T., author of " Knight of the Golden Melice," 25. Adams, Joseph, son of Henry the immigrant, 66; marries Abigail Baxter, 67. Adams, Joseph (2d), marries, 1688, Hannah Bass, 67. Adams, Louisa Catherine, 141. Adams, Mary, daughter of C. F. Adams, 141 ; marries Dr. Henry P. Quincy, 145, 227. Adams, Samuel, 12, 79, 82 ; radical 284 INDEX ideas on independence, 84, 94; at Lexington, 177. Adams Street, 27H. Adams, Judge Thomas Boylston, 101, 102. Adams, Warren W., 253. Adams, Rev. Zabdiel, 172. Agassiz, Mrs. Louis, 58. Alabama claims, 138. Alabama, Confederate cruiser, 132, 135. Alden, Ruth, 67. Alleyne, Mary, 186. American people, praised by Lafa- yette, 64. Andros, Governor, 6. Anderson, Luther S., 264. Anderson, Luther W., 264. Antinomian controversy, 32. Barker, Henry, 266. Barrett, Col. E. S., 258. Bass, Hannah, 67. Bass, Deacon Samuel, 34; his nu- merous offspring, 150. Beale, Abigail Adams, 180. Beale, Benjamin, 186. Belhgerent rights, 129. Bethany Congregational Church, 271. Besant, Sir Walter, 250. Black, Moses, 186. Black's Creek, 260. Boston Massacre, 82. Bowdoin, James, 94. Bradford, Gov., describes Thomas Morton, 16; capture of Sir C. Gardiner, 22. Bradlee, Rev. Caleb Davis, D. D., of Boston, 226. Braintree, cherishes independence, 11; liberal movement in, 37; in- corporated, 43; named, 66; town meeting on Stamp Act, 79. Briant, Rev. Lemuel, liberal theo- logian, 38. Bright, John, friendly to the Union, 131. Brooks, Abigail B., marries Charles F. Adams, 125. Brooks, Peter Chardon, 125. Brown, A. E., " John Hancock, His Book," 224. Bryant, Charles M., mayor of Quincy, 257. Bryant, Gridley, constructor of first railway, 264. Bulkeley, Rev. Peter, of Concord, 60. Bullard, Jabez, 225. Bullock, Capt., Confederate agent, 133. Bunker Hill, battle of, 86, 257 ; mon- ument, 258, 264. Burr, Aaron and Dorothy Quincy, 218. Burying-gronnd, 43 ; monument erected in, by Hon. G. F. Hoar, 57 ; deed of Joanna Hoar scholar- ship dated from, 58. Butler, Hon. Peter, occupies Quincy Mansion, 189. Byles, Rev. Mather, Boston wit, 185. Cairn, to Abigail Adams, 257; to Myles Standish, 262. Canada, J. Q. Adams insists upon its annexation, 114. Canning, George, 133. Catholic Church, St. John's, 273. Chamberlain, Mellen, on independ- ence, 2. Chapel of Ease gathered, 38. Charter of Massachusetts, 4-G. Chesapeake, fired upon by English gunboat, 114. Choate, Rufus, "the last of the Adamses," 139. Christ Church, Episcopal, early origin of, 272. Church gathered at " the Mount," 34; liberal, 38; cradle of inde- pendence, 39 ; gift of J. Adams to First Church, 103. Churcliill, Amos, 266. Civil service, upheld by J. Q. Adams, 117. Claflin, Rupert F., 253. Clay, Henry, 112. Cleveland, Pres., 141. Cobden, Richard, friendly to the Union, 131. Coddington, Wm., 27-30; church in his farmhouse, 36 ; estate sold, 45. Coddington's Brook, 43. Compulsory municipal service In Quincy, 73. Corbett, Alex., Jr., quoted on Moses Black, 187. Corthell, W. G., 279. Cotton, Mrs. Bridget, 56. Cranch, C. P., poem written for First Church anniversary, 40. Cranch, Judge, 188, 273. Cranch, Lucy, 188. Cranch, Richard, 40, 75, 158. Crane, Albert, 271. Crane, Benjamin F., 271. Crane Memorial Hall, 143, 270. Crane, Thomas, granite contractor and son of Quincy, 270. Crane, Mrs. Thomas, 271. Crowninshield, Fanny Cadwalla- der, 141. Dana, Richard Henry, biography of, 143. Daughters of the Revolution, Adams Chapter, 69, 257. INDEX 285 Davis, Admiral Charles Henry, 141. Davis, Evelyn, 141. Davis, Dr. F. S., 275. Davis, Jelterson, comment on iron- clads building for the Confeder- acy, 133. Davis, Mrs. Jefferson, admits alert- ness of minister Adams, 130. Dawes, Harrison J., 188. Decatur, Commodore, visits the Quincys, 183. Declaration of Independence, adopted, 91; foundation of Mon- roe Doctrine, 115. Dewson, Edward H., bounds the training field, 268. Dewson, Mrs. E. H., 279. Dimmock, Dr. W. K., 277. Diplomacy, American, 136. Donnison, Mrs. Mary, 178. Donnison, Wm., 225. Donovan, Dr. S. M. 275. Dorothy Q., of to-day, 145, 226; Holmes', 148, 164, 198-208 ; Han- cock's, 148, 171, 172, 175, 191, 208- 224; the first, 158; daughter of Henry Quincy, 225; daughter of Mr. Upham, 226, Downes, Lieut, of National Sailors' Home, 261. Dudley, Dorothy, writes about Dorothy Hancock, 218 ; describes Aaron Burr, 220. Dudley, Gov. Thomas, 22. Dudley, Madam, rides with Judge Sewall, 155. Eastman, Mrs. A. B., 258. Eastman, George, 259, Eaton, Wm. H., 279. Education, the "Quincy System," 143. Edwards, James, 273. Edwards, Eev. Jonathan, grand- father of Aaron Burr, 220. Ellsworth, Dr. S. W., 275. Emerson, R. W., quoted, 31, 116. Emery, J. H., 279. Endicott, Gov., hews the maypole at Merry-Mount, 15, 18. England, sympathy for the Confed- eracy, 128 ; neutrality laws, 133. Episcopal Church, planted early in Quincy, 272. Everett, Dr. Wm., tribute to Mrs. C. F. Adams, 131 ; master of Adams Academy, 278. Fairbanks, Rev. H. F., ancestry of Adams family, 63. Fairbanks, Henry O., mayor of Quincy, 257. Fairfield, Conn., place of Hancock's marriage, 177, 218. Farrar, Prof. John, 60. Faxon, Mrs. Annie E., 143, 274. Faxon, Henry H., gives a park to Quincy, 146 ; public services, 253, 254 ; home of, 267. Faxon, Henry M., 261. Faxon, J. L., 279. Federalists, 113, 114. Field, George H., 68, 273. Field, J. Q. A., 253. Fifteen, Committee of, 252. First Church, gifts to, 103, 146. Fiske, John, cited, 88, 89. Flint, Jacob, sexton of First Church, 255. Florida, annexation of, 115. Florida, Confederate cruiser, 132. Flynt, Dorothy, 158, 193, 232. Flynt, Rev. Henry, 48, 55, 60, 150, 159, 193. Flynt, Tutor Henry, in Quincy man- sion, 163, 197 ; life and character, 228-249. Flynt, Rev. Josiah, 158, 194, 232. Flynt, Margery (Hoar), 158; death, 166, 193. Fore River Ship and Engine Co., 260. Forrest, the " Irish Infant," 83. Forster, W. E., 131. Foster, J. W., " Century of Ameri- can Diplomacy," 137. Fourth of July, 91; celebration in Quincy in 1826, loi. Frankland, Sir Charles Henry, 148, 174,210. Franklin, Benjamin, Stamp Act, 8 Declaration of Independence, 91 visits Quincy mansion, 172, 178 gift of vines, 210. Freeman, Capt. Isaac, of the Bethel, 169. Free-Soil party, 127. Fruitful vine, 149. Gardiner, Sir Christopher, 14, 18-26. Garey, Dr. G. W., 275. Gerrard, Mr., on Sir Harry Vane. 35. Gerry, on Trumbull's picture of the signing of the Declaration, 92. Ghent, treaty of, 114. Ghosts, in Quincy mansion, 187. Gilbert, Dr. John H., 274. Gill, Geo. L., 252. Gladstone, Wm. E., prophesies suc- cess of Confederacy, 130. Gordon, Dr. John A., 274. Gorges, Sir Ferdinando, 24. Gould, Mrs. Benjamin Apthorp, 184. Gould, Elizabeth Porter, 258. Granite, Quincy, 263. Granite Railway Co., 204. Greene, Mrs. D. B., 184. 286 INDEX Greenleaf, Daniel, 188. Greenleaf, Elizabeth, 188. Greenleaf, Wm., 173, 273. Gienvilles, 1-10. Grove, Mary, companion of Sir C. Gardiner, 19, 21-26. Hale, Dr. E. E., on education, 142. Half-way Covenant, 53. Hall, John O., mayor of Quincy, 257. Hallowell, Dr. H. C, 275. Hancock, "Bishop," daughter of, 235. Hancock, Rev. John, 69 ; describes Judge Quincy, 159; sermon on Judge Quincy, 167. Hancock, John, birth, 69 ; baptized, 72; birthplace, 103, 172, 178, 278; courtship of Dorothy Quincy, 213- 223; death, 22-1. Hancock, Madam Lydia, 177, 213- 223. Hancock mansion, 215,262. Hancock parsonage, 172 ; destroyed by fire, 178 ; site of, 278. Hancock, Thomas, 70. Hardwick, Chas. H., 266. Hardy, Thomas, 220. Harlow, Dr. J. F., 275. Harod, Ann, 102. Harvard College, and Joanna Hoar, 59 ; Tutor Flynt in, 236, 240, 243, 248. Harvard, John, 59. Hatch, Mary, 180. Hawthorne, N., 15. Hay, Secretary of State, his diplo. macy, 137. Henry, Patrick, 79, 80, 91. Hoar, Bridget, marries Usher, 54. Hoar, Charles, husband of Joanna, 48, 59. Hoar, Judge E. R., interest in Jo- anna Hoar, 47; Joanna Hoar scholarship, 57. Hoar, Hon. Geo. F., ancestry, 48; visits their English homes, 51 ; erects monument in Quincy, 57, 193. Hoar, Joanna (d. 1661), " great mother," 47 ; descendants, 48, 194 ; death, 56; lives with Judith Quincy, 56 ; memorial to, 57. Hoar, Joanna (d. 1680), marries Edmund Quincy, 46 ; home of, 56, 147 ; death, 152. Hoar, John, 48, 56, 60. Hoar, Lavina, 61. Hoar, Leonard, 48; president of Harvard, 53 ; death, 54, 59, 193. Hoar, Margery, 48, 56, oO, 158, 193, 195. Hohart, Daniel, 152. Holden, Walter B., 256. Holmes, Rev. Abiel, 166, 206. Holmes, Dr. O. W., letter about Quincy mansion, 162 ; relation to " Dorothy Q.," 166, 191 ; letter about " Dorothy Q.," 198, 204 : poem, 206 ; to Dorothy Q. Upham, 226 ; on Tutor Flynt, 229. Hooker, Rev. Thos., company of, 27, 34, 65. Hooper, Miriam, marries Henry Ad- ams. 141. Hough's Neck, 261. Howe, D. W., quoted, 5. Rowland, Chas. A., 268. Hull, Hannah, marries Judge Sew- all, 44. Hull, Isaac, 183. Hull, John, marries Judith Quincy, 44. Hull, Judith, death, 46. Humphrey, Hon. James, 258. Hunt, John, 152. Hunt, Ruth, 152, 156. Hunting, Dr. N. S., 275. Huntington, E. H. Mills, 180. Hurst, Ann, 172. Hutchinson, Anne, 33, 37. Independence, American, 1-3 ; pow- er and meaning, 9; especially cherished in Quincy, 11; cradle of, 39, 68; advocated by .lohn Adams, 39; anticipated by Judge Quincy, 40 ; when born, 78 ; inevi- table, 84 ; Sam Adams on, 84 ; urged by Abigail Adams, 89 ; tri- umphant, 89 ; Declaration of, 91 ; John Adams's last message on, 104. Independence Day, 91 ; celebration in Quincy, 1826, 101. Industrial combinations and inde- dence, 10. Iron-clads built in England for the Confederacy, 130. Jackson, Edward, marries " Doro- thy Q., "106; partner of Josiah Quincy, 168, 185, 206. Jackson, Mary, 186. Jayne, Capt. C. P., 261. Jefferson, Tliomas, 3 ; no desire for independence, 88 ; on speech of John Adams, 90 ; reconciled to John Adams, 101. Jeffreys, Judge, condemns Lady Lisle, 50. " Joanna," tribe of, 158. Johnson, Joshua, 109. Johnson, Louisa Catherine, marries J. Q. Adams, 109. Keith, Harrison A., mayor of Quincy, 257. Kendall, Rev. R., 258. INDEX 287 Kincaide, Henry L., 272. King, Theophilus, 143, 253. King's Chapel, 263. Kuhn, Charles, 141. Lafayette, Marquis de, praises American people, 64 ; last meeting with Pres. John Adams, 100. Lawson, Thomas W., seven-masted schooner, 260. Lechford, Thomas, cited, 32. "Lee at Appomattox," by C. F. Adams, 143. Lee, Kichard Henry, 90. Lee, Mrs. Wm., 262. Lexington, battle of, 1, 216, 219. Leopard, English gunboat, fires on Chesapeake, 103. Library, Adams, 102, 143 ; Crane Me- morial, 143. Lincoln, Pres. Abraham, birthplace, 69, 127. Lincoln, Dr. Bela, 173. Lincoln, Gen. Benjamin, 173. Lisle, Lady Alicia, 49-52. Lisle, Bridget, marries Leonard Hoar, 49 ; H. Usher, 54 ; death, 55. Lisle, Lord John, 49. Livingston, Esther, 218. Longfellow, H, W., poem on Sir C. Gardiner, 19, 25. Lowell, James, on Tutor Flynt, 249. Lowell, James K., cited, 122, 149. Mclntire, H. F., 274. McGrath, Patrick, 266. Marsh, Charles, 276. Marsh, Edwin W., 252, 258. Marsh, Joseph, 180, 273. Massachusetts, defends her char- ter, 6 ; resists oppression, 8 ; origin of name, 28; missed a great de- stiny, 37 ; constitution of, 94. Massachusetts Fields, 28. Massachusetts Historical Society, 57, 143. Mather, Kev. Cotton, 54. Mather, Increase, 54. Mayors of Quincy, 257. Maypole erected at Merry-Mount, 16-18. Means, John H., 258. Meeting-house, earliest built at " the Mount," 36; Hancock's, 99 ; Stone Temple, 103, 151, 154, 269, Merry-Mount, revels, 15-18; be- queathed to John Quincy, 42, 261. Merry-Mount Park, gift of C. F. Adams, the younger, 146. Miller, Geo. L., 266. Miller, Dr. Ebenezer, 74. Monroe Doctrine, J. Q. Adams au- thor of, 115. Morison, Dr. James, 274. Morse, John T., Jr., cited, 110, 120. Morse, Joseph C, 277, Morton, Eliza Susan, 182. Morton, Thos,, of Merry-Mount, 15- 18 ; quoted, 29, Motley, J, L., 15, 25, Mount Wollaston, 14-19, 35. National Sailors' Home, 261. Navy, U. S., inception of by John Adams, 97, 141. Neutrality laws, England's inter- pretation of, 133, New England fai'mers, 64 ; J. Adams a typical man of, 65. Newell, Eunice, 225. No license in Quincy, 254. Nourse, H. S,, 51. Ogden, Mary, marries C. F, Adams, 141. Otis, James, quoted, 4, 78, 82. Packard, Colonel A, B., 253, 272, Paine, Elizabeth, marries H, Ad- ams, 44, 66. Paine, Moses, marries Judith Quincy, 43, 66. Paine, Thomas, "Common Sense," commended by Abigail Adams, 89, Palmer, General Joseph, 178. Parker, A. W., 276. Parker, F. W,, 143. Parker, Captain John, at Lexing- ton, 1, Parker, Rev. Theodore, on Pres. John Quincy Adams, 113, 121. " Patriot," the Quincy, 271. Pattee, William G, A,, 253. Pattee, W. S„ 272. Philbrick, Helen, 259. Phillips, Wendell, on Sir H. Vane, 34. Phillips, Wm,, 181, Pinkham, Geo. F,, 253. Point Judith, 45. Poison, Mrs. Wm. R„ 103. Porter, Chas. H., mayor of Quincy, 257. Portsmouth, N. H., Tutor Flynt's journey to, 242. Presidents' Hill, 99, 276. Purchase, Thos., marries Mary Grove, 25. Quarries. Quincy granite, 263, Quincy, cherishes independence, 12 ; meeting place of liberals, 37 ; named, 98, 158 ; given library by John Adams, 103 ; other gifts, 146 ; a city of the present, 250; town meetings, 251 ; a city, 251, 255. 288 INDEX Qiiincy, Abby Phillips, 184. Quincy, Daniel, marries Anna Shep- ard, 152 ; a goldsmith. 156. Quincy, Dorothy, Hancock's, 13, 171; of to-day, 145, 226. first, 158; Holmes's, 164 ; charm of the name, 191 ; account of all the Dorothys, 192-227; slster of Tutor Flyut, 232. Quincy, Edmund (the "immigrant," 1602-35), settles at "the Mount." 27; in Coddiugton's farmhouse, 32 ; death, 37. Quincy, Edmund (1627-98), marries Joanna Hoar, 46, 60 ; life of, 147- 155. Quincy, Judge Edmund (1681-1737), early ideas of independence, 40; life of, 153-160; builds extension to Quincy mansion, 160 ; death and funeral, 167 ; marries Dorotliy Flynt, 196; letters to daughter Dorothy, 200-202; builds L for Tutor Flynt, 232. Quincy,Squire Edmund (1703-88). oc- cupies Quincy mansion, 72 : birth, 164; Boston merchant, 168; in Quincy, 171; letter to Sir H. Frankland. 174; retreats to Lan- caster, 213 ; sells mansion, 186. Quincy, Edmund, marries Ann Hurst, 172. Quincy, Edmund, son of Col. Josiah, 172. 179. (Juiucy, Edmund, of T^edham, 184. Quincy, Elizabeth (Wendell), 164, 177. Quincy, Eli/a Susan, cited, 40, 46; letter to Dr. Holmes, 162 ; home of, 184; letter from Dr. Holmes, 204. Quincy, Esther, daughter of Ed- mund, 72 ; marries Jonathan Sew- all, 173. Quincy, Hannah (b. 1736), daughter of Josiali, 72. 172. Quincy, Henry (1726-80), marries Mary Salter, 171; daughter, 178; Dorotliy. 225. Quincy, Dr. Henry P., marries Mary Adams, 141, 145, 184,227. Quincy, Joanna (Hoar), marriage, 46. .55. Quincy, John (b. 1089), on church conmiittee. .39 ; Pres. J. Q. Adams named after, si ; (Quincy named after, 98 ; his public services, 157. Quincy. Col. Josiah (1709-84), 72 ; marries Hannah Sturgis, 168; en- riched by capture of Spanisli ship, 168 ; public services and death, 178. Quincy, Josiah, Jr. (1744-75), pa- triotic services, 82, 83, 172 ; death, 181. Quincy, Pres. Josiah (1772-1864), president of Harvard, 60; de- scribes Abigail Adams, 95; career, 181-183 ; cited, 237. Quincy, Josiah, mayor of Boston, 1896-99, 185. Quincy, Josiah, son of Pres., b. 1802, describes Hancock's church. 99; public services, 183 ; witnesses deed of Adams Academy, 277. Quincy, Josiah Phillips, son of pre- ceding, 184. 280. Quincy, Judith (d. 1654), life, 42-47 ; settles in Hraintree, 62. Quincy, Judith (1626-95), 42; mar- ries John Hull, 44; Point Judith named for, 45 ; obituary, 46. Quincy, Norton. 93. Quincy, Samuel, the Tory, 72, 172, 176. 179. Quincy, Samuel M., 184. (}uincy, Sophia M.. 184. Quincy system, 75, 143. Kadcliffe College, Joanna Hoar scliolarship, 58. KadclifTe, Lady, 59. Kailwav, oldest, 258. Randall, John C, 278. Reed, Timothy, 279. Religion, liberal, espoused by Vane, 35; defeated by "legalists,'' 36; toleration in. advocated by Col. John Quincy, 39; by Leonard Hoar. .53. Repubhcan party, origin, 127. Rice, Harry L., 279. Rice, Wm. P., gift of City Hospital, 146 ; residence. 279. Russell, Earl, 130, 134. Salter. Mary, marries H. Quincy, 171. 225. Salsbury. 193. Savage. Epbraim. 152. Savil, Dr. Elisha, 71, 74. Savil, WilUam. 152. Schenkelberger, A. F., 277. Scott, Captain James, marries Dorothy Hancock. 224. Sears. Russell A, mayor, 257. Sewall. David, companion of Tutor Flvnt, 243. Sewall, Jonathan, 72,173; a Tory, 176. Sewall. Judge Samuel, marries Hannah Hull, 44: account of fu- neral of Bridget (Hoar) Usher, 55 ; Daniel Quiney's marriage, 152 ; lodges in Quincy mansion, 163; disputes with Tutor Flynt, 240. INDEX 289 Sewall, Samuel, 173. Shaw, John, 277. Sheehan, Dr. J. M., 275. Shipyards, 260. Slade, James H., 253. Slavery, opposed by J. Q. Adams, 118. Slaves in Quincy, 154. Smith, Abigail, marries John Adams, 76, 158. Smith, H. W. 102. Smith, Captain John, 28, 250. Smith, Mary, marries Kichard Cranch, 75. Smith, Sarah, 102. Smith, Kev. William, 75, 76, 158. Souther, John, 260. Spanish treasure ship, captured, 169. Spear, Horace B., 253. Spoils system, opposed by J. Q. Adams, 117. Squanto, friendly Indian, 261. Squantum, cairn to Myles Stand- ish, 261. Standish, Myles, 15 ; at Merry- Mount, 17 ; memorial cairn, 261. Stedman, Dr. John, 225. Stetson, Dr. James A., 274. Stetson, James H., 273. Stockton, Kichard, 90. Stoddard, Simeon, 55. Storer, Hannah, 170. Stuart, Queen Mary, 165. Sturgis, Hannah, 168. Sturtevant, T. L., 279. Swithin Bros., 258. Talleyrand, Charles M. de, 136. Tavern, Hancock, 267; Brackett's, 272. Taxation without representation, 7. Teapot, of Tutor Flynt, 206, 230. Thomas, Deacon, 260. Tlionipson, lienjamin, 155. Thompson, James, 267. Titus, Mrs. N. V., 258, 262. Town meetings, 3 ; in Quincy, 251. Training Field, 251, 268. Trumbull's painting of the signing of the Declaration, 91. Tyler, Wm. Koyall, master of Adams Academy, 278. Tyng, Capt. John, buys Coddington estate, 42. Uphani, Dorothy Q., 226. Upham, O. W. H., 226. Usher, Bridget, 54, 55, 150. Vane, Sir Harry, the older, 35. Vane, Sir Harry, in Coddington's house, 32 ; liberal leader, 35 ; goes to England, 37. Yassall, Leonard, 98. Vining, Floretta, 259. Virginia, instructs representatives, 79, 89, 90. Wales, Mrs. Wm., quoted, 224. Warren, Dr. Joseph, 82, 87. Washington, Pres. George, birth- place, 69 ; appointment as general secured by J. Adams, 87 ; praises J. Q. Adams, 110. Waterston, Mrs. K., 184. Webster, Daniel, 125, 267. Weddings, golden, of John, John Quincy, and C. F. Adams, 99, 139. AVelch, Dr. John F., 272. Wendell, Elizabeth, 164, 177. Wendell, Geo. B., 259. Wendell, John, 40, 164. Wendell, Judge Oliver, 166, 186, 206. Wheelwright, Edmund M., 269. Wheelwright, Kev. John, in Cod- dington's farmhouse, 32 ; preaches at "the Mount," 35 ; builds meet- ing-house, 36 ; banished, 37 ; me- morial tablet, 267. Whicher, Thos., 279. Whitefield, Rev. Geo., 241. Whitney, Mrs. Abigail, 103, 139. Whitney, Capt. John, 104. Whittier, John G., 25, 221, Wibird, Rev. A., 71, 81, 158, 172. Willard, Solomon, 264. Willet, Esther, marries Josiah Flynt, 195, 232. Willet, Capt. Thomas, mayor of New York, 195, 232. Wilson, Rev. D. M., 190. Wilson, Rev. John, 33, 34; legalist leader, 36, 280. Winthrop, Gov., quoted, 3 ; on Mass. charter, 5 ; Sir Christopher Gardi- ner, 23, 44. " Wisdom Corner " In town meeting, 252. Woodward, Dr. E., 146, 188, 260. Woodward Institute, 189. Wollaston, Capt., 15. WoUaston Heights, 279. (jibe Uliter^ibe ^te0^ Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton <5^ Co. Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. 'ffli^^^BNilESS^ ■