“Pray the God of Armies to restrain Man”

John Hancock wasn’t the only person Edmund Quincy wrote to on 22 Apr 1775, just after the start of the Revolutionary War, as quoted yesterday.

Justice Quincy couldn’t very well write to Hancock and ignore the man’s fiancée, Dorothy Quincy, could he? After all, she was his daughter.

Thus, we have this second, shorter letter written inside “Boston (a Garison’d town)”:

Dear Dolly—

I’ve an opporty (unexpected) by Doctr. [Benjamin] Church, Just to tell you, that I’m kept from my intended Journey to L[exing]ton & [Lene’y?] by restraint of Princes—endeavors are using to obtain an opening but how soon, none know!

It’s ye. will of Heaven, that it should be thus—!—To His Will, let us learn Submission, thro’ all the Changing Scenes of a Short uncertain Life—I pray God we may all learn this profitable Lesson, that we may be reaping the advantage at all times, especially in a time of Sharp trials, to wch. we are in every State more or less liable

We are generally in good health—but as generally under great sorrow, for the loss of so many humane lives, Wednesday last: pray the God of Armies to restrain Man, from further Attempts of a Similar kind—

Your Bror. & family propose removal—to Providence—if the Gates are opened to us—your Trunk is here—if mine go, yours will also—

I condole with Madm. [Lydia] Hancock, & you, under present & late Circumstances of things—I hope to see you soon, if it please God

Interim recommending you to his protection, with. all your near-Connexions in this devoted Town—I am with my Sincere regards to Madm. H. Mr. [Jonas] Clark & Lady—, Dear Child, Your Affectionate Father & Friend
Edm: Quincy

[Postscript:] Your S[iste]r. [Esther] Sewall distress’d, with ye View she has of things

[Postscript vertical along left margin:] I hope Mr. H. is well on is Journey—you are happy in yo. being out of this town—tho’ ye. Govr. Speaks Fair He is much troubled himself

Esther Sewall was another of Edmund Quincy’s daughters, married to royal attorney general Jonathan Sewall. She evidently had a close-up “View” of the administration of Gen. Thomas Gage and was “distress’d” at what lay ahead.

TOMORROW: The letter carrier.

Esther Sewall and “the female Connections”

In the fall of 1774 and winter of 1775, Massachusetts attorney general Jonathan Sewall appears to have worked as an advisor to the royal governor, Thomas Gage.

With the courts closed by crowds and Gage’s authority confined to Boston, there wasn’t much else for Sewall to do.

There’s a renewed debate about whether Sewall wrote the “Massachusettensis” essays published in those months. Patriots of the time believed he did, but his former law trainee Ward Chipman described copying them out for another Loyalist lawyer, Daniel Leonard. In 2018 a team led by Colin Nicolson reported in the New England Quarterly that their linguistic analysis pointed the finger back at Sewall.

In early April 1775, a dispatch from Lord Dartmouth brought instructions to arrest the leaders of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Gen. Gage might well have discussed the legalities of such arrests with his attorney general.

The president of that congress was John Hancock. His fiancée, Dorothy Quincy, was the sister of Esther Sewall, the attorney general’s wife. On 7 April, James Warren wrote to his own wife:

The Inhabitants of Boston are on the move. H[ancock] and A[dams] go no more into that Garrison, the female Connections of the first come out early this morning and measures are taken relative to those of the last.

Dorothy Quincy was soon staying with Hancock and Samuel Adams at the parsonage in Lexington.

As discussed yesterday, though Esther Sewall was married to a leading Massachusetts Loyalist, she was still emotionally attached to her family, friends, and neighbors on the Patriot side. She might have heard her husband talk of Hancock and Adams being arrested. Any military operation to do that could put her sister in danger.

Esther Sewall therefore had a motive and possible means to be the “daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics,” who sent a warning that British soldiers might arrest Hancock and Adams, as the Rev. William Gordon later wrote. When I first discussed that question, I didn’t see how Esther would have had access to inside information. Jonathan’s work with Gov. Gage offers a possible answer. (And, we must remember, this “daughter of liberty” did not have information on Concord as Gage’s real target.)

A few months into the siege of Boston, Jonathan and Esther Sewall sailed for London. They remained yoked together for the rest of his life. But neither of them was happy. For most of those years Jonathan was seriously depressed, often confined to his bedroom. Esther was terribly homesick. Jonathan blamed Esther for his difficulties. Yet she stayed with him.

Esther Sewall made two trips back to Massachusetts, first in 1789 and then in 1797, the year after she became a widow. Her grown sons Jonathan and Stephen became important lawyers in Canada, and she settled in Montreal.

In 1809, Esther sued in Massachusetts court for her dower property, confiscated thirty years before as part of Jonathan’s assets. Though she didn’t live to hear about it, the state’s highest judges decided in her favor. Then the Massachusetts General Court passed a special law to compensate the man who’d bought that property for what he had to pay her estate. So the Massachusetts government ended up paying Esther Sewall money.

“Putting all matters of politicks out of view”?

Esther Quincy married Jonathan Sewall in January 1764, after a courtship of more than four years.

She was the daughter of the Boston merchant and magistrate Edmund Quincy, who had come back from bankruptcy a couple of years before.

He was a young lawyer of sharp wit and moderate means trying to establish himself, building up from the position of justice of the peace.

Jonathan Sewall didn’t enter the political debate over the Stamp Act, but in December 1766 he came out swinging on behalf of Gov. Francis Bernard and royal policy in newspaper essays signed “Philantrop.”

The governor rewarded Sewall with appointments as the province’s solicitor general and then attorney general. He later got to be a judge in the Vice Admiralty Court as well.

Esther’s father was on the other side of the political divide. He was one of the justices the Boston Whigs called on when they had a complaint about a royal official or soldier. He joined other magistrates in resisting Gov. Bernard’s call for barracks in 1768. He took the (conflicting) testimony of Charles Bourgate after the Boston Massacre. He issued the warrant to arrest John Malcolm for assault.

Most of Esther Sewall’s other male relatives were also Whigs. Uncle Josiah Quincy, Sr., in Braintree was on the Council, one of several thorns in the royal governors’ sides. Cousin Josiah, Jr., practiced law in Boston, wrote newspaper essays, counseled local activists, and traveled to meet fellow Whigs in the southern colonies and London. The major exception within the Quincy family was cousin Samuel Quincy, who followed in Jonathan’s wake as the province’s solicitor general.

Many of Jonathan’s old friends were Whigs, including John Adams, and that produced some awkward social moments. Jonathan prosecuted John Hancock on smuggling charges (eventually dropping the case for lack of solid evidence). But in 1772 the merchant wrote to him expressing

my inclination and wish (putting all matters of politicks out of view) that a perfect harmony and friendship may be kept up between us, and wish rather more familiarity than the common shew of friendship expresses, considering the connection I have formed with the sister of your Lady.

That was Esther’s sister Dorothy. She became Hancock’s fiancée, their engagement almost as long as the Sewalls’ had been.

By 1774 the Sewalls were living in Cambridge in a country mansion bought from Richard Lechmere. Their household included three small children, three young men studying the law, and at least one enslaved young man.

Early on 1 September, Gen. Thomas Gage’s soldiers seized militia gunpowder in Charlestown and cannon in Cambridge. Around noon, Jonathan Sewall suddenly left home and headed to Boston. The governor might have sent for him, or he might have feared how the neighbors would react to the army operation. Or he might have had a whim.

After dark, those neighbors came to the Sewalls’ house. They refused to take Esther’s word that Jonathan was out. Some men pushed into the house, and the young men inside beat them back. One of those boarders, Ward Chipman, fired a pistol inside the house—some sources say accidentally, some not. Either way, that noise got everyone’s attention. The two groups of men agreed not to do further violence as long as they could enjoy some of the Sewalls’ wine.

Soon afterward, Esther took the children into Boston to be with Jonathan. That might have been as early as 2 September when the “Powder Alarm” brought thousands of militiamen into the street outside.

Unlike some people threatened by crowd violence, Esther Sewall never renounced Massachusetts. Her family ties were too strong. In 1778 she wrote to her father: “I had not forgot my own Country, and Friends no, my D[ea]r Father, I should as soon forget myself.” But as of September 1774 she was stuck inside Boston with her unpopular husband.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

The Flight of the Cambridge Loyalists, part 1

The Cambridge neighborhood later dubbed “Tory Row” became a lot less populous after the “Powder Alarm” of 1774—which was only natural since all of those estates’ owners were either targets of the crowds or related to targets.

Attorney general Jonathan Sewall was the first to depart. He arrived in Boston “between 12 & one” on 1 September, having been “advised to leave his house,” according to a letter from his father-in-law, Edmund Quincy. (That letter is in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts collection.) 

William Brattle also left Cambridge on 1 September after learning that his letter to Gov. Thomas Gage, quoted here, had become public in Boston that afternoon. And that evening, a local crowd came looking for Brattle and Sewall.

Late the next afternoon, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver faced off against what he counted as 4,000 men demanding his resignation from the Council. After signing their document under protest, he also hightailed it to Boston.

If Elizabeth Oliver and her children didn’t accompany Thomas to Boston then, they followed within days. So did Esther Sewall and her children.

William Brattle’s daughter, the widow Katherine Wendell, remained in the family’s Cambridge home—not only for the next several months but through the siege of Boston. She thus kept ownership of the house for the family while several nearby properties were confiscated by the state during the war.

Thomas Oliver’s wife Elizabeth was a Vassall by birth, and thus related to several other families in the area. One of her maternal uncles was David Phips, the royal sheriff of Middlesex County. Notes taken by the Loyalists Commission say:

He apprehended that his Life was in danger after he had removed the Gunpowder to Boston. . . . In Consequence of this treatment he removed himself to Boston & his family soon followed him.

Elizabeth Vassall’s paternal aunt Anna had married her stepbrother John Borland when she was thirteen and he twenty. In 1774 they lived in a Cambridge mansion originally commissioned by the Rev. East Apthorp, not counted as part of “Tory Row” since it wasn’t on the road to Watertown but near Harvard College. (In fact, today that house, shown above, is in the middle of the university’s Adams House.)

The Borlands also felt the “Powder Alarm” was too close for their comfort and moved into Boston. The 8 June 1775 New-England Chronicle reported:

DIED ] At Boston, on the 5th Instant [i.e., of this month], John Borland, Esq; aged 47 [actually 46]. His Death was occasioned by the sudden breaking of a Ladder, on which he stood, leading from the Garret Floor to the Top of his House.

According to none other than Jonathan Sewall, Borland “lost his life by a fall in attempting to get upon the top of his house to see an expedition to Hog Island.”

TOMORROW: More departures.

A Guide to the “Powder Alarm” and More

The sestercentennial of the “Powder Alarm” is coming up on 2 September, and American Heritage revisits the event with “The Revolution Could Have Started Here,” an excerpt from Bob Thompson’s book Revolutionary Roads.

Here’s a taste:

Today, 42 Brattle houses the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. In 1774, as tensions between Great Britain and New England neared an all-time high, it was home to William Brattle, a 68-year-old gentleman farmer and Massachusetts militia general who had kicked off the September craziness by writing the governor a letter. Composed in late August, it informed [Thomas] Gage, who was his boss, that gunpowder was starting to disappear from the Powder House. Gage took the hint. Before dawn on September 1, longboats ferried some 250 Boston-based British soldiers three miles up the Mystic River, where they got out and marched another mile to their destination. Removing hobnailed boots, lest a spark blow them to kingdom come, they collected the remaining powder in the tower; a few went to Cambridge to confiscate a couple of artillery pieces, as well. All were safely back in Boston by noon, and the governor was a happy man.

Not for long, though.

Later that day, Gage’s enemies somehow got their hands on Brattle’s letter. A crowd of local protesters showed up outside his house, but, by then, the owner was gone. “He went into Boston,” Bell said, “and never saw Cambridge again.” Unsatisfied, the crowd reassembled half a mile up the street, at the home of a colonial official named Jonathan Sewall, whose wife said he wasn’t home. The protesters didn’t believe her and tried to break in. Someone inside fired a pistol—accidentally, it was claimed—which sobered everybody up, and the crowd dispersed.

You may have noticed the name “Bell” in there. I was Thompson’s tour guide along Brattle Street nearly a decade ago. This article also profiles me, in case you were curious.

Israel Putnam and ”an express from Boston”

On 1 Sept 1774, British soldiers acting on orders of Gen. Thomas Gage took control of province-owned gunpowder stored in Charlestown (now Somerville) and two cannon used by a Cambridge militia company.

As governor and thus captain-general of the Massachusetts militia, Gage had the authority to issue that order. But coming on top of the Massachusetts Government Act the previous month, the move looked to local white men like another step toward depriving them of their traditional rights.

That evening there were some disturbances in Cambridge outside the house of William Brattle, the militia general who had prompted Gage’s move, and Jonathan Sewall, the royal attorney general. But eventually everyone went home, especially after Esther Sewall treated the crowd around her home to a round of drinks.

News of the event still spread, and the farther it got from Cambridge, the more dire it became. People were hearing there had been a second Massacre, or worse. The outer towns in Middlesex County were alarmed enough to send thousands of militiamen streaming into Cambridge the next day—a confrontation that historians later dubbed the “Powder Alarm.” (The first two chapters of The Road to Concord describe those two days in September 1774, which I argue is when Massachusetts’s resistance turned into revolution.)

Though there was still no violence in Cambridge, the rumors from 1 September continued to spread faster than that corrective good news. The alarm reached Israel Putnam (shown above) in Pomfret, Connecticut, in the late morning of Saturday, 3 September.

Putnam had extensive military experience in the Seven Years’ War, both with Rogers’ Rangers in the west and on the 1762 expedition to Cuba. He ranked as a colonel in the Connecticut militia. And on 3 September he saw his job as mobilizing that militia to help Massachusetts.

Putnam sent letters to men in other part of Connecticut, and he dashed off a special note to his neighbor Godfrey Malbone. We met Malbone last year in connection with the Anglican church he built in his largely Congregationalist corner of Connecticut.

Malbone had also reached the rank of colonel in the militia, mostly on the basis of his wealth. But he didn’t come from an old New England family, he’d spent some years at the University of Oxford, and he didn’t much care for his Yankee neighbors.

According to the Connecticut Historical Society, Putnam wrote to Malbone:

Saturday, 12 p.m.

Dear Sir. I have this minute had an express from Boston that the fight between Boston and Regulars [began] last night at sunset, the cannon began to and continued playing all night, and they beg for help,—and don’t you think it is time to go?

I am, Sir, your most obedient servant,
Israel Putnam

Malbone’s reply was short:

Go to the devil

TOMORROW: Connecticut on the march.

Bachelors in Braintree

When Anthony Wibird came to Braintree to be the minister of the north parish in 1755, the congregation offered him £80 a year and £120 as a lump sum in “settlement money” when he married.

Wibird held out instead for £100 a year with no extra help in setting up a household.

We can do the calculation and see that after six years as a bachelor Parson Wibird would be ahead.

Which is not to say the minister didn’t talk about marriage. In fact, that seems to have been a major topic in his conversations when the young lawyer John Adams slept over one Tuesday in January 1759. Adams wrote in his diary:

Met Mr. Wibirt at the Coll’s door, went with him to his Lodgings, slept with him and spent all the next day with him, reading the Reflections on Courtship and Marriage, . . .

In P[arson] Wib[ird] s Company, Something is to be learned, of human Nature, human Life, Love, Court Ship, Marriage. He has spent much of his Life, from his Youth, in Conversation with young and old Persons of both sexes, maried and unmaried, and therefore has his Mind stuffed with Remarks and stories of human Virtues, and Vices, Wisdom and folly, &c. But his Opinion, out of Poetry, Love, Court ship, Mariage, Politicks, War, Beauty, Grace, Decency &c. is not very valuable. His Soul is lost, in a dronish effeminacy. Ide rather be lost in a Whirlwind of Activity, Study, Business, great and good Designs of promoting the Honour, Grandeur, Wealth, Happiness of Mankind.

He says he has not Resolution enough to court a Woman. He wants to find one that will charm, conquer him and rouse his spirit. He is like a Turkey, retiring to Roost. . . .

Wib[ir]t exposes very freely to me his Disposition, the past and present state of his mind, his susceptibility of Impressions from Beauty &c., his Being amourous, and inclined to love, his Want of Resolution to Court, his Regard, fondness, for O., his Intimacy and dalliance with her &c. He has if I mistake not a good many half born Thoughts, of courting O.

“O.” was Adams’s code for the young lady he called “Orlinda”: Hannah Quincy (1736-1826), eldest daughter of Col. Josiah Quincy. [The house the colonel built in 1770 appears above as a stand-in for the family’s previous house.]

Adams himself was beguiled by Hannah Quincy, filling his diary with their dialogues and analyzing how she treated young gentlemen.

She lets us see a face of Ridicule, and Spying, sometimes, inadvertently, tho 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. Her face and Hart have no Correspondence.

Hannah checks Parson Wibirt with Irony.—It was very sawcy to disturb you, very sawcy Im sure &c.

I am very thankful for these Checks. Good Treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved, and [my] own Vanity will be indulged in me. So I dismiss my Gard and grow weak, silly, vain, conceited, ostentatious. But a Check, a frown, a sneer, a Sarcasm rouses my Spirits, makes me more careful and considerate. . . .

Mr. Wibirt has not an unsuspicious openness of face. You may see in his face, a silly Pain when he hears the Girls, a whispering, and snickering.

For his part, in the summer the parson declared, “Out of H[annah] and E[sther Quincy, her cousin] might be made a very personable Woman but not a great soul.”

Adams likewise began to resent Hannah Quincy’s behavior:

Should have said, H. you was dissatisfied with your situation and desirous of a Husband. In order to get one, you Wheedled Wibirt; you wheedled Lincoln. You gave each of them hints and Encouragement to Court you. But especially you wheedled me. For 6 months past you and I have never been alone together but you have given me broad Hints, that you desired I should court you, &c. &c.

Adams once came close to proposing to “Orlinda,” but he never did. The rival he called “Lincoln”—Dr. Bela Lincoln (1734–1773) of Hingham, brother of Benjamin Lincoln—proposed first. He and Hannah Quincy wed on 1 May 1760.

In his diary Adams assured himself that he’d made a narrow escape, that he didn’t really want to marry “Orlinda” anyhow:

[Jonathan] Sewal and Esther [Quincy] broke in upon H. and me and interrupted a Conversation that would have terminated in a Courtship, which would in spight of the Dr. have terminated in a Marriage, which Marriage might have depressed me to absolute Poverty and obscurity, to the End of my Life. But the Accident seperated us, and gave room for Lincolns addresses, which have delivered me from very dangerous shackles, and left me at Liberty, if I will but mind my studies, of making a Character and a fortune.

A couple of years later, Adams met young Abigail Smith of Weymouth, and they married in 1764. That same year, Adams’s friend Jonathan Sewall married Esther Quincy after a long engagement. Another of their circle, Robert Treat Paine, finally married Sally Cobb in 1770, two months before their first child was born.

TOMORROW: And Parson Wibird?

On the Night Before the Powder Alarm

Yesterday we left Esther Sewall in her house in rural Cambridge on the night of 1 Sept 1774.

Sewall had two young sons. Her husband, attorney general Jonathan Sewall, had gone into Boston that morning. The household also included a couple of law students about twenty years old and at least one enslaved man.

Outside, there were upwards of forty local men and boys demanding that her husband come out and answer for the royal governor’s actions. Not only was Gen. Thomas Gage implementing the Massachusetts Government Act, but he had just taken gunpowder and cannon away from the local militia.

Yesterday I started quoting an account of that confrontation from a third, unnamed young man inside the house. It continued:

…those without played their artillery of stones & brickbats against the windows.

The door being shut, & they being enraged by the explosion of a gun in the entry near the front window tho’ without the least design of hurting & at a different side of the house from where we supposed the mob were, they went into the front yard & broke those windows.

We then went out to them & declared that the gun went off accidentally, that we were very sorry for it as it was agreed upon since we had got them out of the house not to fire but on the last extremity; yet that we were determined to defend ourselves at the risque of our lives & they might depend upon resistance at all events if they offered to reenter. We begged them to consider the distress this might occasion to Mrs Sewall & family & to disperse

They appeared to be satisfied about the gun at last, told us we had fought like brave fellows & if we would give them something to drink they would not go to Judge [Joseph] Lee’s as they intended but would disperse

which they did after drinking a few glasses of wine & cordially bid each other Good-Night.

It was still possible for young men to stop their violence before anyone was hurt. As long as there was wine involved.

Years later, in speaking to the Loyalists Commission, one of the law students, Ward Chipman, declared that he had deliberately fired that pistol. He went on to be one of the most important builders of New Brunswick, Canada.

Massachusetts Patriots seized on Chipman’s gunshot and spun events to suggest that it provoked the crowd’s violence. For example, Dr. Joseph Warren wrote to Samuel Adams on 4 September: “some boys and negroes had called at Mr. Sewall’s house at Cambridge; and, by the imprudent discharge of a pistol by a person in the house, they were provoked to break the windows, but very soon left the house without doing further damage.”

Even Esther Sewall’s own father, Edmund Quincy, unhelpfully told her sister: “Im sorry to understand, that thro. great inadvertency, a Gun or pistol was dischd. from ye. house—ye sole Cause of ye Violence wch. ensued.”

By the end of 2 September, however, almost no one was talking about the assault on the attorney general’s house. Sparked by wildly exaggerated rumors of a British military attack, thousands of Massachusetts militiamen had marched into Cambridge and forced resignations from everyone from the county clerk to the lieutenant governor. That “Powder Alarm” signaled the end of royal rule in almost all of New England. The conflict in Massachusetts turned from political to military.

The Sewall house still stands on Brattle Street in Cambridge, though moved from its original site. It’s in private hands and unmarked.

As far as I can tell, the anonymous account of what happened there in September 1774 has been published only in Leslie F. S. Upton’s 1968 collection of readings, Revolutionary Versus Loyalist: The First American Civil War, 1774-1784.

Attack on Jonathan Sewall’s House

On 1 Sept 1774, Gen. Thomas Gage sent soldiers out to Charlestown to remove the provincial militia’s supply of gunpowder from the stone tower that still stands in what is now Somerville.

Some of Gage’s troops went on into Cambridge and wheeled away two small cannon that the Middlesex County militia trained with.

Locals treated those actions as a raid on their military resources, an attempt to curtail their self-defense. By the end of the afternoon, people learned that William Brattle of Cambridge had alerted the governor about that gunpowder. Men surrounded Brattle’s house, but he had already fled into the army camp in Boston.

Some of that crowd moved out the Watertown road to the house of Jonathan Sewall, attorney general and Vice Admiralty Court judge. He was a high-profile supporter of the royal government, having represented it in court (though he sat out the Boston Massacre case) and written newspaper essays.

Sewall lived in a country mansion with his wife Esther and two young sons, a few household servants, and at least two young men studying law, Ward Chipman (1754-1824) and Thomas Aston Cotton (1754-1810). Chipman also tutored the boys in Latin.

A third young man was also in the Sewall house that night and left an anonymous description of events now preserved in the Public Archives of Canada:

On Thursday evening September 1, 1774 there was a riotous assembling of about 40 or 50 men & boys in the town of Cambridge—I passed by them several times in the course of the evening carefully observing their number strength & movements—

About half past 11 or at 12 o’clock in the night, thinking that they had dispersed in a great measure & perceiving that they had been in indifferent spirits the whole evening, I went to Judge Sewall’s & informed Mrs Sewall that I believed there was no danger of a visit from them at that time of night; but if they came, they were so little used to acts of violence that I thought we might safely venture to resist them.

About 1/2 hour after being alarmed with the noise of their coming, & having secured the Windows & Doors as well as we could, we repaired to Mrs Sewall’s Chamber; they came shouting & blowing a horn & Mrs Sewall threw up the window when they had got to the house & asked them what they would have—

they replied Mr. Sewall,—

she told them he was not at home, but had gone to Boston in the morning & had not returned since;

on which they exclaimed she was a damned liar &c that he was in the house & they would search the house for him & have him;—

on which there was a tumultuous noise, but Mrs Sewall begged to be heard, & being a little more silent, she observed to them that being a woman she expected civil treatment from them as she had & would treat them;

they exclaimed that he was an enemy to his country & have him they would—

Mrs Sewall begged them not to disturb her—that being alone she hoped they would not treat her or her children ill, & if they would go away, they should have anything she could give them out of the house.

They swore they would search the house & immediately burst open the door. Finding they had entered & hearing them below, Mr. Chipman, Mr. Coffin & myself, together with a servant [i.e., slave] of Judge Sewall’s, being all the males that were in the house ran downstairs, attacked them & by an active & vigorous application of the argumentum baculinum [argument by means of clubs] drove them out & Mr. Coffin declared he would blow the first man’s brains out, that offered to enter again.

Jonathan Sewall really had gone into Boston earlier that day. According to his father-in-law, Boston magistrate Edmund Quincy, he “came here between 12 & one yesterday, said he was advised to leave his house & come to town.” Gage might have anticipated trouble, or he might simply have wanted legal counsel.

Either way, that left Esther Sewall overseeing a besieged house of small children, servants, and three hotheaded young men.

TOMORROW: Beyond the argumentum baculinum.

Living History in Quincy, 18 Aug.

On Saturday, 18 August, the Dorothy Quincy Homestead in Quincy is hosting a living-history event highlighting the Quincy, Hancock, and Adams families. The title for this event is “Lydia, Liberty, and Loyality.”

Those three families had a lot to talk about 250 years ago. In June, as I related back here, in the spring the Customs service tried to get Massachusetts attorney general Jonathan Sewall to prosecute John Hancock for interfering with their personnel aboard his ship Lydia. Sewall refused, saying the law was on Hancock’s side.

In June top Customs officers, with the help of the Royal Navy, seized Hancock’s ship Liberty for smuggling. This time they got Sewall to prosecute the case. Hancock retained John Adams as his lawyer.

Hancock and Adams had known each other since they were boys; Adams was a Braintree selectman’s son, and Hancock’s father was a minister in that town before his early death. Adams was also good friends with his fellow lawyer Sewall, though they were drifting apart because of political differences.

Even more fraught with drama, Sewall’s wife was the former Esther Quincy, part of the family that had owned that mansion earlier in the 1760s. Hancock would eventually marry Esther’s younger sister Dolly. And John Adams’s wife Abigail was cousin to the Quincys.

Also present at this event will be John Singleton Copley, portrait painter for the wealthy. In the 1760s he painted John Hancock and yet another Quincy cousin, attorney Samuel, and his wife. Eventually Copley would paint John Adams, but only after almost two decades had swelled Adams from a country lawyer to the American minister to the Court of St. James. For the Adamses and Sewalls in 1768, Copley was too expensive.

The Dorothy Quincy Homestead is co-owned by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. That organization is co-sponsoring this event with Discover Quincy, Revolution250, and the Guild of Historic Interpreters South. Guides will also offer tours of the mansion.

This event is scheduled to run from 11:00 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. at the Dorothy Quincy Homestead, 34 Butler Road in Quincy. It is free to all, but donations will be gladly accepted.

Jonathan Sewall on John Adams

The new books about John Adams and his thoughts on aristocracy give me a chance to quote one of my favorite passages about him, from his old friend Jonathan Sewall.

Sewall became an attorney for the Crown, then a Loyalist, then a very depressed shut-in. He recovered and retired to Canada with his sons. In 1787 Sewall wrote to a friend in the energetic, expansive prose he produced when he was feeling well:

While I was in London, my quondam friend, John Adams, sent me a complimentary card, and afterwards made me a long friendly visit, as Mrs. [Abigail] Adams soon after did to Mrs. [Esther] Sewall. [The two women were cousins.] And they then earnestly pressed us to take a family dinner with them, in a way so evidently friendly and hearty, that I was sorry I could not comply. But having resolved to make no visits nor accept of any invitations, and having upon this ground previously declined invitations to dine with Sir William Pepperell, your friend Mr. [Richard?] Clark, and several other friends, I was obliged, to avoid giving offence, to decline this.

When Mr. Adams came in, he took my hand in both his, and, with a hearty squeeze, accosted me in these words: “How do you do, my dear old friend?” Our conversation was just such as might be expected at the meeting of two old sincere friends after a long separation.

Adams has a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible of its finest feelings. He is humane, generous, and open; warm in his friendly attachments, though, perhaps, rather implacable to those whom he thinks his enemies. And though, during the American contest, an unbounded ambition and an enthusiastic zeal for the imagined or real glory and welfare of his country, (the offspring, perhaps in part, though imperceptible to himself, of disappointed ambition,) may have suspended the operation of those social and friendly principles which, I am positive, are in him, innate and congenial, yet sure I am they could not be eradicated. They might sleep, inactive, like the body in the grave, during the storm raised by more violent and impetuous passions in his political career for the goal to which zeal and ambition, united, kept his eye immovably fixed; but a resuscitation must have been the immediate consequence of the peace.

Gratified in the two darling wishes of his soul, the independence of America acknowledged and established, and he himself placed on the very pinnacle of the temple of honor, why, the very devil himself must have felt loving and good-natured after so complete a victory; much more, a man in whose heart lay dormant every good and virtuous social and friendly principles. Nature must, and, I have no doubt, did break forth and assert her rights. Of this I am so well convinced, that if he could but play backgammon, I declare I would choose him, in preference to all the men in the world, for my fidus Achates, in my projected asylum.

And I believe he would soon find it the happiest state; for, if I am not mistaken, now he has reached the summit of his ambition, he finds himself quite out of his element, and looks back with regret to those happy days, when in a snug house, with a pretty farm about him at Braintree, he sat quiet, in the full possession of domestic happiness, with an amiable, sensible wife, and an annual increase of olive-plants round his table, for whose present and future support he was, by his own honest industry, for he was an honest lawyer as ever broke bread, rapidly making ample provision.

He is not qualified, by nature or education, to shine in courts. His abilities are, undoubtedly, quite equal to the mechanical parts of his business as ambassador; but this is not enough. He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and talk small talk and flirt with the ladies; in short, he has none of the essential arts or ornaments which constitute a courtier. There are thousands, who, with a tenth part of his understanding and without a spark of his honesty, would distance him infinitely in any court in Europe.

At this time Adams was the U.S. minister to London. Sewall thought he was ill suited to being a diplomat at a royal court. Of course, Sewall also thought that Adams had reached the “summit of his ambition,” with no idea of the positions of Vice President and President that the Constitutional Convention was about to create.

(This text of the letter appears in a footnote in the first edition of John Adams’s diary and memoir. It’s unclear how the editor of those books, Adams’s grandson, came by it.)

Meeting the Quincy Women, 12 Nov.

In January 1759, John Adams paid a call to Col. Josiah Quincy’s house in Braintree (shown here).

There the young lawyer found his host’s daughter Hannah (1736–1826) and her first cousin Esther Quincy (1738–1810).

Referring to Hannah Quincy as “O.” in his diary, Adams compared the two young ladies:

O. thinks more than most of her Sex. She is always thinking or Reading. She sitts and looks steadily, one way, very often, several minutes together in thought. E. looks pert, sprightly, gay, but thinks and reads much less than O. . . .

O. makes Observations on Actions, Characters, Events, in Popes Homer, Milton, Popes Poems, any Plays, Romances &c. that she reads and asks Questions about them in Company. What do you think of Helen? What do you think of Hector &c. What Character do you like best? Did you wish the Plot had not been discovered in Venice preserved? These are Questions that prove a thinking Mind. E. asks none such.

But really they were both flummoxing him: “I talk to Hannah and Easther about the folly of Love, about despizing it, about being above it, pretend to be insensible of tender Passions, which makes them laugh.”

Hannah Quincy married Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham the next year. Esther Quincy married Adams’s friend and fellow lawyer Jonathan Sewall in 1764. That same year, Adams married Abigail Smith, whose mother was a Quincy.

On Thursday, 12 November, Nancy Carlisle will speak at Old North Church in Boston on the topic “From the Revolution to the Close of the Nineteenth Century, the Remarkable Women of the Quincy Family.”

In a family where six successive generations of Quincy men held prominent public roles in the civic life of Boston and New England, the women in the family have long been overshadowed. But in reality it is because of them that we know as much as we do about their husbands, fathers, and brothers. When we shine a light on the lives of the Quincy wives and daughters we learn about the role that intelligent, articulate, and engaged women played in the political and cultural life of the region.

Carlisle is the Senior Curator of Collections for Historic New England. For the past three years she has focused on the Quincy House and its inhabitants as part of a major reinstallation.

This talk is scheduled to start at 6:30 P.M. It is free, but Old North asks people to reserve seats through this site. There will be a reception afterwards.