“Swelled to three times his size, black as bacon”

Here’s another account of anti-epidemic measures from the Adams family papers, this one a 17 Apr 1764 letter from John Adams to his fiancée, Abigail Smith.

John had gone into Boston to be inoculated with smallpox under the care of Dr. Nathaniel Perkins, and he reported:

Messrs. Quincy’s Samuel and Josiah, have the Distemper very lightly. I asked Dr. Perkins how they had it. The Dr. answerd in the style of the Faculty “Oh Lord sir; infinitely light!” It is extreamly pleasing, says he, wherever we go We see every Body passing thro this tremendous Distemper, in the lightest, easiest manner, conceivable.

The Dr. meaned, those who have the Distemper by Inoculation in the new Method, for those who have it in the natural Way, are Objects of as much Horror, as ever.

There is a poor Man, in this Neighbourhood, one Bass, now labouring with it, in the natural Way. He is in a good Way of Recovery, but is the most shocking sight, that can be seen. They say he is no more like a Man than he is like an Hog or an Horse—swelled to three times his size, black as bacon, blind as a stone. I had when I was first inoculated a great Curiosity to go and see him; but the Dr. said I had better not go out, and my Friends thought it would give me a disagreable Turn.

My Unkle [Dr. Zabdiel Boylston?] brought up one [John] Vinal who has just recoverd of it in the natural Way to see Us, and show Us. His face is torn all to Pieces, and is as rugged as Braintree Commons.

This Contrast is forever before the Eyes of the whole Town, Yet it is said there are 500 Persons, who continue to stand it out, in spight of Experience, the Expostulations of the Clergy, both in private and from the Desk, the unwearied Persuasions of the select Men, and the perpetual Clamour and astonishment of the People, and to expose themselves to this Distemper in the natural Way!—

Is Man a rational Creature think You?—Conscience, forsooth and scruples are the Cause.—I should think my self, a deliberate self Murderer, I mean that I incurred all the Guilt of deliberate self Murther, if I should only stay in this Town and run the Chance of having it in the natural Way.

Smallpox continued to spread well into the age of photography, so there’s graphic documentation of how victims look when the blisters break out. I don’t recommend it.

“No Carriage from L. & if there was—no permiso. to pass”

On 22 Apr 1775, three days after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Boston merchant and magistrate Edmund Quincy sat down to write a letter to John Hancock.

Quincy wasn’t just a colleague of Hancock in the Boston Patriot movement. He was also the father of Dorothy Quincy, Hancock’s fiancée (shown here).

Earlier that month, Dorothy had taken the family carriage out to Lexington and then used it to flee with Lydia Hancock from the regulars on 19 April. That left her father stuck inside Boston as the siege began.

Justice Quincy wrote to Hancock:

Dear Sir,

Referring you to a Ltr. wrote the 8th. currt: [i.e., of this month] I’m now to enclose you one I had this day out of [ship captain John] Callihan’s bag:—32 days fro. Lond: into Salem pr young Doct. [John] Sprague—who tells me [captain Nathaniel Byfield] Lyde sail’d 14 days before them wth. Jo. Quincy Esq & other passengers—that some of ye Men of War & transports sail’d also before Callihan. As to ye times [?] at home—ye Doctr. is little able to inform us—youl probably have Some papers via Salem.—————

As to my Scituation here ye unexpected extraordy. event of ye 19th: of wch. Ive wrote my thots—) now & for days past impedes my leaving town[.] No Carriage from L[exington]. & if there was—no permiso. to pass ye lines—The people will be distress’d for fresh provisions—in a Short time—

The Govr: & Genl.—is very much concern’d about ye Provl. troops without—wch. probably will be very numerous ’ere long if desired—Dorchester hill—I’m just now told, is possess’d by our provls—& I hope its true, for Ive reason to believe, ye Genl. had ye same thing in Contemplation——

Here they say & swear to it all round, in excuse of ye Regulars, proceeding at Lexinton—that they were attack’d first & I doubt not many oaths of Officers & men are taken before J. G—ley [Justice Benjamin Gridley], to confirm it—but among others who contradict ’em—Lt. [Thomas] Hawkshaw yesterday near expiring thro. his bad wounds——Call’d Several Credible persons to him & told ’em as a dying man—that he was obliged in Conscience to confess—that the first Action of ye Whole at L. was done by the Kings troops—wr. they killd & wounded eight men—but doubtless you have sufficient proof of ye Fact & every Circumstance attending near at hand—

my advice is that the Whole Matter—be forwarded at ye province expence or otherwise wth. the Greatest dispatch—that so your Advices may be in London as early as GG’s——

If the people of G:B: are not under a political Lethargy—The Account of ye late Memorable Event, will excite them to consider of their own Close Connexion wth. America; and to Suppose at length, that ye Americans especially N. Englanders will act as they’ve wrote, & engag’d—A Blessed Mistake our prudent G[ag]e has indeed made, & ye Sensible part of his Officers & Soldiers own it—& are vastly uneasie—

I had been at L— days to pay my real regards to yr. good Aunt & Dolly—but wn. we shall have ye passage clear I dont [know] we are in hopes of effecting soon. But ye Gl. is really intimidated & no wonder wn. he hears of 50.000 men &c.—Much is Confess’d of ye intripedity of ye provinls. Im much Surpriz’d to hear that the Regulars abt. 1700—were drove off & defeated by near an Equal Corps only.—

Capt. [John] Erving, at his house yesterday Gave me ye Account of Hawkshaws Confesso.-proved to him at ye No: End yesterday to be real, he also says that from all he can gather from ye Circumstances of the people of Gt. Bn. they are by this day in a State of fermentation—if we could be so happy, as to get speedily home, the necessary advices—I doubt not a Flame would soon appear—& ere its quench’d, may it burn up ye heads of the Accursed Faction fro. whence ye present British Evils spring

Genl. Gage is thrown himself into great perplexity—Ld. Percy is a thorn in his side & its said has menaced him Several times, for his late imprudence—a Good Omen

I cant nor ought I to add, but my best regards—& Love respectively & that I am
Dr. Sir Your most affecto: Friend
& H. Servt.
Ed. Quincy

youl excuse erro. for Ive not time to correct em

There are a lot of interesting bits of intelligence in this letter—Gen. Thomas Gage hoping to seize the heights of Dorchester, Col. Percy criticizing his Concord mission, Lt. Hawkshaw saying the British soldiers had fired first. Quincy urged Hancock and his colleagues to send the Patriot side of events to London as quickly as possible.

How did John Hancock respond to seeing this letter? In fact, he never saw it.

TOMORROW: Diverted mail.

“So they painted the little maid”

The Discover Quincy website now says in its description of the Dorothy Quincy Homestead in Quincy:

The childhood home of Dorothy Quincy, who became Mrs. John Hancock; the second President of the Continental Congress, first signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first Governor of Massachusetts.

There’s no mention of any other Dorothy Quincy.

But there was (at least) one, and records are clear that that house was named after an earlier woman named Dorothy Quincy (1709–1762, shown here courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society). She was an aunt of the woman who married Hancock.

The earlier Dorothy Quincy married the merchant and mill-owner Edward Jackson. One of their children was the merchant and politician Jonathan Jackson. The other child, a daughter named Mary Jackson, married the Boston merchant and politician Oliver Wendell.

A portrait of young Dorothy (Quincy) Jackson descended in the Wendell family to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who became a very popular author. He wrote about the painting and its subject in “Dorothy Q.: A Family Portrait” in 1871. That poem begins:

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.

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 with 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. . . .

This was one of several poems Holmes wrote about the memory of the Revolution and its shadow on his time, such as “The Last Leaf” and “Under the Washington Elm.” He was so good at creating images and phrases that people overlook how he often simultaneously raised questions about those icons.

But Holmes wasn’t correct on the painting’s subject, either. His footnote for this poem said:

Dorothy was the daughter of Judge Edmund Quincy, and the niece of Josiah Quincy, junior, the young patriot and orator who died just before the American Revolution, of which he was one of the most eloquent and effective promoters. . . . The canvas of the painting was so much decayed that it had to be replaced by a new one, in doing which the rapier thrust was of course filled up.

Dorothy (Quincy) Jackson’s father was an Edmund Quincy, but a later Edmund Quincy was the father of the later Dorothy Quincy. That Dorothy Quincy did have an uncle named Josiah Quincy, but a later Josiah Quincy was the Patriot who died in 1775. So the confusion is understandable.

Nonetheless, it’s worth maintaining the knowledge of how the Dorothy Quincy Homestead got its name. It represents a confluence of the Colonial Revival and the Fireside Poets, and it stood for decades of family history. Discover Quincy’s current write-up is all about big names from the Revolutionary years only.

“The house of Francis Shaw was assigned for quarters”?

Yesterday I quoted the story of Samuel Shaw’s interaction with British marine officers staying in his father’s house in late 1774 or early 1775.

People sometimes point to the Shaw family as an example of colonists forced to host the king’s soldiers in their home under the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774.

Author Josiah Quincy’s language, especially the use of the passive voice, pushed that reading:

…the officers of the army were billeted on the inhabitants. The house of Francis Shaw was assigned for quarters to Major [John] Pitcairn and Lieutenant [John] Wragg.

But that’s not the way Britain’s Quartering Acts worked. Those laws required communities to provide barracks and firewood for regiments stationed in their cities and towns. They empowered the army to use uninhabited buildings if necessary, eventually with the help of royally appointed magistrates. Military commanders didn’t actually want to disperse their soldiers into different households; that was a recipe for desertion.

Furthermore, the Shaw family hosted officers, and officers didn’t live in barracks. As gentlemen, they made individual arrangements with homeowners to rent rooms. And as gentlemen, paying in hard currency, they were desirable tenants, especially when the local economy had been stifled by the Boston Port Bill.

Quincy’s word “assigned” suggests there was some formal process for matching officers with homes. Any bureaucracy produces paperwork, but there’s no evidence of such assignments. Nor were there complaints in the newspapers, and Boston’s newspapers ran lots of complaints. Instead, military officers asked around about rooming possibilities and reached deals with willing homeowners.

But didn’t Bostonians have political objections to hosting army and marine officers? Some surely did. We have no anecdotes about Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other activists agreeing to rent rooms to military men—nor of them being forced to do so.

(After the war began, many of those politicians had moved out of Boston and more troops arrived. During the siege, officers did move into empty private homes. But neither the Quartering Act nor the Third Amendment apply in wartime.)

TOMORROW: Shaw family politics.

“Thus ended the Superior Court”

As I described yesterday, when the Massachusetts Superior Court tried to open a new session in Boston on Tuesday, 30 Aug 1774, all the men chosen for juries refused to serve under Chief Justice Peter Oliver.

John Adams was away at the First Continental Congress, so his former clerk William Tudor described the judges’ response for him: “The Court told them they should consider of their Refusal, and then adjourn’d to next Day.”

The jurors didn’t change their minds. On the morning of 31 August the court sat again. Oliver and associate justices Foster Hutchinson and William Browne were at the Province House, meeting with Gen. Thomas Gage as part of his appointed Council. That body advised the governor to keep his redcoats in Boston and not “send any Troops into the interior parts of the Province.”

Tudor wrote that the justices who remained on the bench

…continued all the continued Actions till next Term. They agreed to let us file Complaints and to enter up Judgement on them; which we had imagined they would not consent to, as some of the Judges the first Day had said that if the County would rise and prevent them doing Business generally, they should decline finishing it partially, and the County must thank themselves for the Inconveniences of their own Madness.

The next day:

One small Point was argued by Mr. J[osiah]. Q[uincy]. and [Samuel] Fitch, a few Complaints read, and after Mr. Fitch, in Complyance with a previous Vote of the Bar, had reccommended four of Us to be admitted to the Atty.’s Oath, the Court adjourn’d to next Day.

Tudor was among the young men hoping to be admitted to the Boston bar at this session.

On the morning of Friday, 2 September, “there were a Number of printed Bills stuck up at the Court house and other Parts of the Town, threatening certain Death to any and all the Bar who should presume to attend the Superior Court then sitting.” Someone with access to a print shop had produced those death threats, making them all the more ominous.

The justices postponed “All the new enter’d Actions” as well as the old ones. Then the jurists noticed that people were taking advantage of the lack of juries to enter appeals, thus postponing judgments against them. Tudor wrote to Adams at length on whether this tactic was valid. “You had but one [case] in this Predicament,” he added.

The court swore in one new attorney: Nathaniel Coffin, Jr., a professed Loyalist. The other three young men hung back. Finally, the justices adjourned. “Thus ended the Superior Court and is the last common Law Court that will be allowed to sit in this or any other County of the Province,” Tudor wrote.

That same day, thousands of rural militiamen gathered in Cambridge in what was later dubbed the “Powder Alarm.” People inside Boston worried about an armed invasion. By evening, it was clear that the rest of the province was no longer going to cooperate with the royal authorities at all.

William Molineux’s refusal to serve as a juror under Chief Justice Oliver in the summer of 1773 had grown into the legislature’s march to impeaching Oliver, crowds closing the courthouses in rural counties, Suffolk County citizens boycotting juries, and finally a halt to all Superior Court business. Colonial Massachusetts’s judicial system was frozen, and in some areas would stay jammed up until past the Shays Rebellion in the late 1780s.

2023 Revolutionary War Conference in the Mohawk Valley, 9–11 June

On the weekend of 9–11 June, the Fort Plain Museum will host its annual Revolutionary War Conference in the Mohawk Valley.

This year’s session is called “Conference 250,” with several presentations looking back at events in 1773 and others looking forward to the Sestercentennial.

The lineup of speakers includes:

• James Kirby Martin in conversation with Mark Edward Lender, professor and former student discussing the Revolutionary War and its 250th anniversary
• Friederike Baer, “Hessians: The German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War”
• John “Jack” Buchanan, “The Battle of Musgrove’s Mill, 1780”
• Benjamin L. Carp, “The Boston Tea Party at 250: Reflections on the Radicalism of the Revolutionary Movement”
• Vivian E. Davis, ”Over 250 Years Ago!: The Battle of Golden Hill, January 19, 1770”
• Holly A. Mayer, “Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union”
• Steven Park, “250 Years of Remembering: The Changing Landscape of Gaspee History”
• Nina Sankovitch, “The Abiding Quest of a Forgotten Hero: How Josiah Quincy Battled Overwhelming Odds to Bring Together the Northern and Southern Colonies in 1773”
• Eric H. Schnitzer, “Picturing History: The Images of the American War for Independence”
• Sergio Villavicencio, “St. Eustatius and the American Revolution”
• Kelly Yacobucci Farquhar, “Jellas Fonda, a Letter, and the Boston Tea Party: A Look Back 250 Years Later”
• Terry McMaster, “A Revolutionary Couple on the Old New York Frontier: Col. Samuel Clyde & Catharine Wasson of Cherry Valley”
• “New York State and the 250th: Where Things Stand” presented by Devin R. Lander, New York State Historian; Phil Giltner, Director of Special Projects, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; and Lauren Roberts, Saratoga County Historian
• Norman J. Bollen, Fort Plain Museum board chairman, “The Fort Plain Museum & Historical Park’s Grand Enhancement Plan: Rebuilding the Blockhouse for the 250th”

Before the conference and under a separate registration, there will be a bus tour of “Forts and Fortified Homes of the Mohawk Valley” led by Bruce Venter, Wayne Lenig, and Norm Bollen. This is a new, in-depth tour of the historic forts, fortified homes, and other sites that formed the defensive perimeter around Fort Rensselaer (Fort Plain). Lunch will be included.

The conference will take place in the theater of Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, New York. Based on past events, I expect an excellent selection of Revolutionary history books to be on sale.

For the full schedule as currently planned, additional information, and registration forms, visit this website.

The Mystery of “Mr. Inspector Williams”

I’ve been laying out a new interpretation of these entries from Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s journal of his trip to London in 1774:

November 17. Proceeded to London, where I arrived about 11 oClock a.m. . . . Was waited upon by Messrs. Thomas Bromfield, and Edward Dilly, and Mr. Jonathan Williams—from all of whom I received many civilities. . . .

November 18. This morning Jonathan Williams Esqr., Inspector of the Customs in the Massachusetts Bay[,] waited upon me and we had more than an hour [of] private conversation together.

The only Jonathan Williams from Massachusetts in London in late 1774 was the one born in 1750, a young merchant using his status as the famous Benjamin Franklin’s great-nephew to amass contacts.

But based on the second journal entry, the editors of the Quincy diary concluded that he had secured a no-show job as “a customs inspector in Massachusetts.” When I read that, my first thought was that a twentysomething would have to be very lucky to snag a government appointment at that level. Maybe nepotism helped—he was Franklin’s protégé, after all, plus a nephew of John Williams, documented elsewhere as Inspector-General of Customs in North America. But I couldn’t find anything more about a Jonathan Williams being in the Customs service. And if he had that job, why had he been sailing back and forth to Boston with goods to sell? 

After several days I had a breakthrough. We have to read Quincy’s diary carefully—and to recognize his own confusion about Williamses.

Look at how Quincy wrote about his visitors on those two successive days: “Mr. Jonathan Williams” on 17 November and “Jonathan Williams Esqr., Inspector of the Customs” on 18 November. Under eighteenth-century etiquette, a plain ‘Mr. Williams’ ranked below a ‘Williams, Esq.’ In his journal Quincy was indicating two different men. One was a young merchant, the other a middle-aged government official. When in his diary Quincy went to the trouble of referring to “Jonathan Williams Esqr.” and “Mr. Inspector Williams” at the start of an entry, he was referring to the second man.

Furthermore, I think Quincy misstated the first name and title of the Customs official who visited on 18 November. That was actually John Williams, who had been Inspector-General of His Majesty’s Customs in North America since 1767. Knowing so many men from Boston named Jonathan Williams, Quincy slipped and created one more.

In writing “Inspector of the Customs in the Massachusetts Bay,” Quincy referred to how John Williams was normally based in Boston, but the man’s job wasn’t limited to one colony. As Inspector-General, Williams didn’t inspect ships like lower Customs officers. Instead, he was tasked with visiting the Customs offices in all North American ports to make sure they were efficient and uncorrupted. Since he worked for a bureaucracy, Williams’s professional activity is well documented; here’s a whole William & Mary Quarterly paper based on his reports about the Chesapeake region.

Boston’s waterfront crowd attacked John Williams’s house during the Liberty riot of 1768, as reported by a colleague. He then got into a dispute with the Customs Commissioners over compensation. John Adams recorded Williams speaking snarkily about his bosses in late 1769. Soon he headed off to London to complain that he deserved more money. John Williams wasn’t a close relative of Franklin, being a half-sister’s daughter’s husband’s brother, but he did try to borrow funds in the summer of 1773.

Thus, in late 1774 Inspector-General John Williams was in London with, at least nominally, an important role in imperial government. He was somewhat alienated from the North American Customs department. He was also linked to the Boston Whig business community through his brother, Jonathan Williams, Sr. That position between the two hostile camps goes a long way to explaining why Inspector Williams tried to set himself up as an intermediary between Quincy and the government ministers in London.

My annotations for the diary passage above would be:

• “Mr. Jonathan Williams: Benjamin Franklin’s grandnephew (1750–1815). His father Jonathan, Sr., a wealthy Boston merchant and prominent Whig, had married Franklin’s niece, Grace Harris. In the early 1770s the younger Williams was establishing himself as a transatlantic merchant, using contacts gained during visits to his great-uncle. On January 16, 1775, he would deliver a letter from Dr. Joseph Warren to Quincy.”
• “Jonathan Williams Esqr., Inspector of the Customs in the Massachusetts Bay: Quincy misstated the given name of John Williams, Esq., Inspector-General of Customs in North America (d. 1791). Inspector Williams was an uncle of the Jonathan Williams who had visited Quincy the day before. Quincy took care to use ‘Inspector’ or ‘Esq.’ when referring to the older man. At odds with his supervisors in Boston, Inspector Williams spent most of the 1770s in London lobbying unsuccessfully for better compensation. He would engineer Quincy’s meetings with Lord North, the Earl of Dartmouth, and Customs Commissioner Corbyn Morris.”

Again, blame for the confusion starts with Quincy not getting the Inspector-General’s given name right. But in Quincy’s defense, colonial Boston was just running over with men named Jonathan Williams.

Three Cousins Named Jonathan

As I wrote yesterday, Jonathan Williams, Esq., merchant and town official in Boston, married Benjamin Franklin’s niece Grace Harris in 1746. They had a son named Jonathan in 1750.

Jonathan, Jr., went into business, starting with a trip to London to make contacts. While there he lived with his great-uncle Franklin and helped to keep the man’s accounts.

Boston newspaper advertisements say Jonathan, Jr., arrived back in Boston in September 1771 with “English Goods” and “Bohea Tea” to sell.

In April 1773 the young merchant wrote to Franklin from Boston, angling for part of the East India Company tea franchise for himself and his father. That was before the Tea Act became controversial. By the end of the year, Jonathan, Sr., had taken a prominent role in how Boston organized to stop any tea from being landed.

Jonathan, Jr., set out from Boston again in May 1774, allowing him to be in London late that year. His correspondence with his great-uncle Franklin shows he traveled around the British Isles through October, making contacts among rich businessmen and noble families.

Jonathan, Sr.’s sister Mary married Samuel Austin, another Boston merchant and official. They had a son in 1751 whom they named Jonathan Williams Austin. He went to Harvard College (shown above), graduating in 1769. While studying law under John Adams, he was a witness at the Boston Massacre trial, which these days would be flagged as a honking conflict of interest.

In April 1773 the Massachusetts Spy published a version of James Otis’s argument in the 1761 writs of assistance case. Adams later wrote that this text was based on his notes, which Austin “stole from my desk and printed in the Massachusetts Spy, with two or three bombastic expressions interpolated by himself.”

By that time, Jonathan Williams Austin had moved out to Chelmsford to establish his own practice. In late 1774 that town elected him as a delegate to the Middlesex County Convention and then to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

Jonathan, Sr., and Mary’s brother John Williams also had a son named Jonathan, born in 1753. He went to Harvard College, class of 1772. Then he followed his Austin cousin’s career path by becoming a clerk for John Adams. His correspondence with Adams shows he was in Massachusetts in the fall of 1774.

That gives us some of the data we need to interpret these entries from Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s journal of his trip to London in 1774:

November 17. Proceeded to London, where I arrived about 11 oClock a.m. . . . Was waited upon by Messrs. Thomas Bromfield, and Edward Dilly, and Mr. Jonathan Williams—from all of whom I received many civilities. . . .

November 18. This morning Jonathan Williams Esqr., Inspector of the Customs in the Massachusetts Bay[,] waited upon me and we had more than an hour [of] private conversation together.

In the Colonial Society of Massachusetts multivolume publication of Quincy’s writings, the note for this passage identifies Jonathan Williams as:

Benjamin Franklin’s grandnephew. His father John, a wealthy Boston merchant and Patriot leader, had married Franklin’s niece, Grace Harris. The younger Williams studied law under John Adams’s tutelage and was then living in London with his great-uncle, his post as a customs inspector in Massachusetts essentially a sinecure.

That note conflates the two cousins named Jonathan Williams. The one born in 1750 was Franklin’s grandnephew, but the one born in 1753 was Adams’s law student. Only the first could have been in London in late 1774. The note also misstates the name of that eldest cousin’s father, the “wealthy Boston merchant and Patriot leader”—that man was also named Jonathan. The youngest cousin’s father was named John.

But the biggest error came earlier. I puzzled over this passage and other documents for weeks, trying to reconcile odd details. And I finally decided that the most likely explanation is that Josiah Quincy met with two different men and wrote down the wrong name for one of them.

TOMORROW: Who was “Mr. Inspector Williams”?

Identifying Benjamin Franklin’s “Cousin Williams”

A couple of weeks back I dissected the records of Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s 1774–75 visit to Britain, and in those postings I now believe I misidentified a man.

I think I erred because of an error in the notes to Quincy’s London journal as edited by Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. And I think Coquillette and York erred because of an error by Josiah Quincy, Jr., himself.

So let’s go back to the start of the eighteenth century. When Benjamin Franklin was a boy, he was already an uncle. That was because little Ben was the youngest son of the second marriage of Josiah Franklin (1657–1745). That man had had seven children by his first wife, starting in 1678 before the family moved to Massachusetts.

Baby Ben was thus almost thirty years younger than his oldest half-sibling, and the earliest half-siblings married and had children as he was growing up. When Ben was six years old, his half-sister Anne (1687–1729) married William Harris, and when Ben was twelve that couple had a baby named Grace (1718–1790). Grace was thus a niece of young Benjamin Franklin.

In 1746 Grace Harris married a man named Jonathan Williams. At this point the situation becomes confusing because there were two prominent men named Jonathan Williams in mid-1700s Boston, and authors have amalgamated the records of their lives. As a result, at Founders Online the editors of the Franklin Papers and the Adams Papers disagreed on when the Jonathan Williams who married Grace Harris was born and died.

The Adams Papers at one point said that man “(d[ied]. 1788),” probably based on a report in the Massachusetts Centinel of 29 Mar 1788 that “Deacon Jonathan Williams” had just died at age 88. The records of the First Meetinghouse say “Jonathan Williams (Son of the late Deacon Williams)” was himself chosen a deacon in 1737, and he appeared in those papers through 1776. However, that deacon’s widow was named Sarah, according to her own death notice in the 16 Sept 1789 Centinel.

On 14 Apr 1790 the Centinel reported the death of “Mrs. GRACE WILLIAMS, aged 71, the consort of Jonathan Williams, Esq. of this town, merchant.” That woman’s given name indicates she was Franklin’s niece. Her husband survived her for a few years, moving to his son’s home at Mount Pleasant near Philadelphia. Then the 1 Oct 1796 Columbian Centinel reported the death there of “Jonathan Williams, Sr., formerly a reputable merchant in this town [Boston].”

Therefore, after going back and forth on the question many times, I’ve decided that the Franklin Papers were correct in saying that the Jonathan Williams connected to the Franklin family lived “1719–1796.” (The Adams Family Correspondence volumes adopted these dates, too.) I can’t find confirmation for the birth year but can say that, contrary to many profiles of him, this man wasn’t the son of the Deacon Jonathan Williams who appeared in Samuel Sewall’s diary.

The Jonathan Williams who married Grace Harris was a successful merchant and Boston town official, thus earning the suffix “Esq.” As a Whig, he served on some town committees and in November 1773 moderated of one of the extra-legal tea meetings in Old South.

Franklin used this merchant Jonathan Williams as his business agent in Boston, referring to him as “Cousin Williams” and “Loving Cousin” since our language doesn’t have a specific term for a niece’s husband. However, when he was feeling conspiracy-minded, Thomas Hutchinson described that Williams as “a Nephew of Doctor F———ds,” making the relationship closer than it really was.

Now here’s where it gets more confusing. Jonathan Williams, Esq., had a brother named John (d. 1791). In 1767 Franklin told his son William that this man was “brother to our cousin Williams of Boston.” John Williams went to work for the Customs service in the late 1760s, though he ended up feuding with his superiors and spent most of the 1770s trying to go over their heads in London.

And here’s where it gets even more confusing. Both brothers, Jonathan Williams and John Williams, had sons in the 1750s whom they named Jonathan. So did their sister Mary, who married Samuel Austin. Two of those three first cousins named Jonathan studied law under John Adams. A different two spent years in France during the Revolutionary War. And two died during the war.

So who met with Josiah Quincy in London in 1774?

TOMORROW: Sorting through the Jonathan Williamses (and John).

“To support the Authority we have claimed over America”

Yesterday I wrote about how Josiah Quincy, Jr., was so rooted in his position in November 1774 that he couldn’t hear what some of the top ministers in the British government were telling him.

He wasn’t the only man in those meetings with that problem, though. Lord North, Lord Dartmouth, and other royal officials were equally committed to what they believed.

Former Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson kept track of Quincy’s activities in London. He wrote of the visiting attorney:

It seems his chief business was, to represent the Massachusets people to be engaged almost to a man, and so determined as that they would sooner die than submit, and particularly the two counties of Hampshire and Berkshire, which heretofore were the most loyal in the Province, to be now the most zealous and unanimous in opposition; and this, not from compulsion, but from conviction: and he added that the people were more enraged than otherwise they would have been, by the appointment of the most obnoxious persons for Members of the Council…

In other words, the constitutional changes of the Massachusetts Government Act had prompted an uprising in the province, pushed not by mercantile malcontents in Boston but by ordinary farmers in the western counties driven by “conviction.”

That development had come as a pleasant surprise to the Boston Whigs. For once they weren’t trying to drag along the rest of the colony. Though the news Quincy brought gratified his political outlook, it was also accurate.

Indeed, Gen. Thomas Gage reported much the same situation to London after the first week of September. He warned of new appointees driven out of communities they had long dominated, of preparations for a military uprising, of virtually all of New England slipping out of Crown control.

And Lord North, Lord Dartmouth, and their colleagues didn’t believe it. They were certain their government had the legal and military resources to quell any problems. Dartmouth talked to Hutchinson about “an Act of Parlt. to suspend all the Militia laws of Mass. Bay.” By that time, Massachusetts towns had already started to reorganize their militia companies independent of royal authority. (And of course to collect cannon.) No “suspension” would have had any worthwhile effect.

In his polite, self-deprecating style, Lord North warned Quincy that his government was not going to back down:

His Lordship more than thrice spoke of the powers of Great Britain, of the determination to exert to the utmost in order to effect the submission of the Colonies. He said repeatedly We must try what we can do to support the Authority we have claimed over America, if we are defective in power we must set down contented and make the best terms we can, and nobody then can blame us after we have done our utmost; but till we have tryed what we can do we can never be justified in acceding; and we ought and shall be very carefull, not to judge a thing impossible, because it may be difficult, nay we ought to try what we can affect, before we determine upon its impracticability.

Quincy had sailed to Britain hoping to effect a political reconciliation. All his mission accomplished was to show how the two sides were on a collision course. 

“Your Countrymen must fail in a contest with this great and powerfull people”

Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s mission to London in 1774 was a failure after its first week, and he didn’t know it.

Quincy met with the prime minister on 19 November. Four days later the secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, told Thomas Hutchinson that Lord North had concluded Josiah Quincy, Jr., was “a bad, insidious man, designing to be artful without abilities to conceal his design.”

Hutchinson wrote back to Robert Auchmuty in Massachusetts, “If the remarks which Ld. North made upon the first visit are truly reported, there will probably be no second visit to cause a dispute.” You think?

Dartmouth went into his own meeting with Quincy the next day. It didn’t go any better. The earl had also heard “Quincy intended to go to Holland,” seeking military supplies or other support from one of Britain’s rivals, which provided another reason to mistrust the young attorney from Massachusetts.

In that same week John Williams set up one other meeting for Quincy with a royal official: Corbyn Morris, a long-time Commissioner of His Majesty’s Customs. On 22 November, Quincy recorded in his journal:

Dined with Corbin Morris Esqr., one of the Commissioners of the Customs, (supposed framer of the annual ministerial budget, being a choice friend of the Ministry) in company with one of the officers of the Treasury and Jonathan [sic] Williams Esqr. Mr. Morris was sensible, intelligent and very conversible. The who[le] conversation was on American affairs. He enter[ed] largely into the claims, the rights and the duty of Parliament. He spoke as might be expected. I observed a remarkable conformity of sentiments between him and Lord North, and an equally observable similarity of language. Mr. Morris expatiated largely upon the infinite resources of Commerce[,] wealth and power of the English nation. I heard him.

The following address to me was a little singular, not to say laughable—but I never smiled. “Mr. Quincy you are a man &c. (flummery). You have seen some of the ministry and have heard more of the disposition of [the] administration. You find that they have no inclination to injure, much less to oppress the Colonies. They have no wish, but that of seeing the Americans free and happy. You must be sensible of the right of Parliament to legislate for the Colonies, and of the power of the nation to enforce their laws. No power in Europe ever provoke[d] the resentment or bid defiance to the Powers of this Island, but they were made to repent of it. You must know your Countrymen must fail in a contest with this great and powerfull people. Now as you find how inclined Administration are to lenity and mildness, you should, you ought to write to your friends this intelligence, and endeavour to influence them to their duty. I don’t doubt your influence would be very great with them, and you would by this means be doing a lasting service to the Country.” ! ! !

Morris was apparently trying to give Quincy straight talk: the Crown government was constitutionally sound, beneficent, powerful, determined, and—for a limited time—willing to be lenient. But Quincy found the warning “laughable.” He even appears to have been suspicious that Lord North had said much the same thing.

Quincy might also have felt that Morris’s suggestion he use his “influence” to win over other Massachusetts Whigs might be followed by a financial reward for his “lasting service.” Quincy was already “upon my guard against the temptations and bribery of Administration.” One man in Massachusetts even told his sister that he ”loved money too much, to be trusted at a Court where every thing is bought and sold.” So he was determined not to bend his position.

Quincy remained in London, talking to local supporters of the American cause. But he had no more access to people who were actually in power. In early December Lord Chief Justice Mansfield told another official “Quincy had desired to see him, but he would not admit him.”

In early March 1775, Josiah Quincy, Jr., sailed home. By the time his ship arrived off the coast of Massachusetts, the province was at war and he was dying.

TOMORROW: More failure of communication.

“They understood he was not the person intended”

One of the minor but telling disagreements between Josiah Quincy, Jr., and the government ministers he met in London in November 1774 involved the new lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Oliver.

After meeting with Quincy, the secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, described their conversation to former governor Thomas Hutchinson.

Among other things Quincy warned that the people of Massachusetts were strongly opposed to the new Council, appointed by writs of mandamus from London rather than elected. Specifically, he said:

the new Counsellors were in general persons the most exceptionable to the Province, of any which could have been pitched upon, and only one whom the people were satisfied with, which was the Lt. Governor, and he by chance, for they understood he was not the person intended, but that the name of the Ch. Justice was mistaken.

That new appointee, Thomas Oliver, was only in his forties and had not been active in politics before. Massachusetts Whigs suspected that the government in London really meant to name Chief Justice Peter Oliver to succeed his late brother, Andrew Oliver (shown above). Or at least that bureaucrats believed Thomas Oliver was a member of the same family.

I thought the same thing, and said so, in presentations about the “Powder Alarm,” in which Thomas Oliver played a central role. There just didn’t seem to be any other explanation for how the man attracted any attention in London.

But then John W. Tyler, who’s busy editing the Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, alerted me to a 29 Mar 1774 letter, to be published in an upcoming volume. In that dispatch to Lord Dartmouth, Gov. Hutchinson discussed candidates to replace Andrew Oliver. William Browne of Salem preferred a seat on the bench. Hutchinson’s next choice was Customs Commissioner William Burch. The provincial secretary, Thomas Flucker, might be persuaded to exchange his hard job for an easier one with a slightly smaller compensation.

And then:

There is a gentleman of the same name with the late Lieut. Governor but of another family Thomas Oliver Esq. of Cambridge, now Judge of the Provincial Court of Admiralty which he must quit in case of his appointment. He has a handsome Estate, is a very sensible man & very generally esteemed. He is Cousin German to Mr. [Richard] Oliver the Alderman and City Member [of Parliament]. I know not how the Alderman stands affected to Government but this Gentleman has been steady in his opposition to all the late measures and I think the Administration in case of the absence of the Governor may be safely trusted with him.

Thus, when the secretary of state appointed Thomas Oliver to be Massachusetts’s new lieutenant governor, he had heard about the man and knew he wasn’t part of the same family.

How did Lord Dartmouth respond to Josiah Quincy suggesting the new lieutenant governor was nothing but a big mistake? According to Hutchinson, “Ld. D. interrupted him here and said it was strange the people of N.E. should suppose the Ministry so inattentive as not to ascertain the names of the persons they appointed.”

Quincy doesn’t seem to have recognized that that was a polite aristocratic way of telling him he was talking through his hat.

As with so many of these conversations, Quincy’s outlook was so far away from how the ministers saw things, and all the men were so certain about their beliefs, that they were speaking past each other.

TOMORROW: A failure of communication.

“His Ldship. did not suppose he would say this was a misrepresentation”

I’ve quoted Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s descriptions of his meetings in November 1774 with Lord North, the prime minister, and the Earl of Dartmouth, the secretary of state for North America.

So far as I know, we don’t have accounts of those discussions directly from those ministers or their aides. But we do have what former governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote after hearing from Lord Dartmouth and others, and it presents a very different picture of the conversations.

Of course Hutchinson was an interested party, in that one of Quincy’s main talking-points in London was that the former governor had been lying about Massachusetts and Boston. So Hutchinson was probably pleased to hear that the ministers showed no sympathy for that complaint. On the other hand, he would have recorded any hint that the ministers were sympathetic, so I think we can take Hutchinson’s reports as accurate.

From the start, it appears, Lord North and Lord Dartmouth listened to things Quincy said and oh-so-politely tried to correct him. For example, Dartmouth gave Hutchinson this account of Quincy’s meeting with Lord North:

[Quincy said] the people of the Massachusetts must have been much wronged by the misrepresentations which had been made from time to time to the Ministry, and which had occasioned the late measures: that there was a general desire of reconciliation, and that he thought three or four persons on the part of the Kingdom, and as many on the part of the Colonies, might easily settle the matter.

Lord North said to him, he had been moved by no informations nor representations: it was their own Acts and Doings, (of which he had been furnished with attested authentic copies,) denying the authority of Parliament over them. His Ldship. did not suppose he would say this was a misrepresentation.

But of course that’s what Quincy was saying, and would say again.

Quincy wrote: “We spoke considerably upon the sentiments of Americans of the rights claimed by Parliament to tax.” Lord North’s position on that was, in modern terms, Parliament’s sovereignty under the British constitution doesn’t care about your sentiments.

(In this same week Lord North was reading Gov. Thomas Gage’s suggestion that the ministry suspend some of the Coercive Acts as a pragmatic measure. The prime minister told Hutchinson, “He did not know what General Gage meant by suspending the Acts: there was no suspending an Act of Parliament.”)

To Lord Dartmouth, Quincy suggested that the Lord Chief Justice (shown above, as painted by John Singleton Copley) could help to mediate the dispute; “he had the highest opinion of Lord Mansfield, and he did not doubt his Lordship was capable of projecting a way to reconcile the Kingdom and the Colonies.”

The secretary of state replied that “he believed Lord M. was fully of opinion that the proceedings in Massachusetts Bay were treasonable.” There had been serious discussions about that in the wake of the Boston Tea Party. 

Rather than take the hint that a legal authority he’d just praised didn’t approve of his party’s actions, Quincy responded that “he knew the people in N.E. had no idea that they were guilty of Treason.”

Once again, the government minister might have replied that what the people in New England thought they were doing did not carry the legal weight of what the Lord Chief Justice thought.

TOMORROW: Invoking the lieutenant governor’s name.

“I wished his Lordship to urge him to go into particulars”

On the evening of 23 Nov 1774, Josiah Quincy, Jr., recorded in his London diary, “Mr. Inspector [John] Williams waited on me with the Compliments of Lord Dartmouth and requested my visting on tomorrow 10 oClock.”

The Earl of Dartmouth was the British government’s secretary of state for North America from 1772 to 1775. He was thus the supervisor of all the royally appointed governors and the chief architect of the London government’s imperial policies.

In his diary Quincy added, “Mr. Williams gave me a curious account of a Conversation with his Lordship relative to my Observations.”

That referred to Quincy’s longest political work, published in Boston in May: Observations on the Act of Parliament, Commonly Called “The Boston Port Bill,” with Thoughts on Civil Society and Standing Armies. You can read the published text here, and a transcription of Quincy’s manuscript here. While he was in London, the Dilly brothers printed their own edition.

Unfortunately, we don’t know what “curious” things Lord Dartmouth had said to Williams about Quincy’s little book. Earlier that same day Lord Dartmouth consulted with former governor Thomas Hutchinson, who wrote:

Lord Dartmouth…had just received Quincy's book, and another pamphlet, which somebody, he said, had just sent him in. He asked me the character of the book, and of the man, which, when I had given, he said he had seen letters from persons in Boston to persons of respectable characters here, recommending him as a person well disposed to bring about a reconciliation between the Kingdom and the Colonies.

The earl had also consulted with the prime minister, Lord North, about his own meeting with Quincy a couple of days before. Dartmouth told Hutchinson:

Lord North looked upon his [Quincy’s] design to be to represent the Colonies in the most formidable view; and at the same time supposed the measures taken in England to be caused by misrepresentation.

Hutchinson replied, “I wished his Lordship to urge him to go into particulars.” In other words, if he’s blaming me, he should come out and say it.

On 24 November, the young Massachusetts lawyer arrived for his meeting with the secretary of state. Quincy recorded in his diary:

Waited upon Lord Dartmouth and had about an hour and a half’s conversation with him. I was convinced, that the American and British controversy would be much sooner and much more equitable settled, if it was not for the malevolent influence of a certain Northern personage now in Great Britain.

Still not naming names, but Hutchinson was behind all the trouble.

Quincy didn’t record how the earl responded to that hint, but he did record this exchange:

Lord Dartmouth being called out for a few minutes to attend the physicians of his Lady, made his apology, and taking up a pamphlet that lay on his table, said “I would entertain you with a pamphlet during my absence, but I fancy you have seen this—I think you know the author of it—Do’n’t you?” His Lordship bowed with a smile, which I returned, and he retired for a few minutes.

Once again, Quincy was flattered by the amount of time a government minister devoted to talking with him and the politeness of those British aristocrats.

But he wasn’t hearing what Lord North and Lord Dartmouth were really saying.

TOMORROW: How the ministers thought of Quincy.

“We spoke considerably upon the sentiments of Americans”

On 19 Nov 1774, Josiah Quincy, Jr., the young Whig lawyer from Massachusetts, sat down with Lord North, the prime minister, to discuss the crisis in America.

Quincy left a detailed account of the meeting in his diary of his London trip:

Early this morning Jonathan [sic] Williams Esqr. waited upon me with the Compliments of Lord North, and his request to see me this morning. I went about half past 9 oClock . . . . After a short time his Lordship sent for Mr. Williams and myself into his Apartment. His reception was polite and with a chearfull affability.

His Lordship soon enquired into the state in which I left American affairs. I gave him my sentiments upon them[,] together with what I took to be the cause of most of our political evils—gross misrepresentation and falsehood.

His Lordship replied he did not doubt there had been much, but added that very honest [men] frequently gave a wrong state of matters through mistake[,] prejudice, prepossessions and byasses of one kind or other.

I conceded the possibility of this, but further added, that it would be happy if none of those who had given accounts relative to America had varied from known truth from worse motives.

Quincy was voicing the Boston Whig position that Boston’s strict adherence to the British constitution had been grossly misrepresented by Gov. Francis Bernard, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, and others.

He didn’t know that Lord North consulted with Hutchinson regularly and obviously trusted his judgment. And he didn’t pick up on the prime minister’s nudge about “very honest [men]” being misunderstood, instead continuing to point to the possibility of “worse motives.”

The two men discussed the Boston Port Bill, the destruction of the tea, and the Gaspee investigation, but soon ascended into the political and constitutional principles behind those disputes. “We spoke considerably upon the sentiments of Americans of the rights claimed by Parliament to tax,” Quincy wrote.

Quincy noted that he “should have said more had not his Lordship’s propensity to converse, been incompatible with a full indulgence of my own loquacity.” The meeting lasted nearly two hours, “many Letters and messages” being brought to the prime minister all that time, while he insisted that Quincy didn’t have to leave.

Lord North appears to have been exceedingly polite—“His Lordship several times smiled and once seem[ed] touched,” Quincy wrote. At the end of their conversation Lord North told his visitor “He hoped the air of the Island would contribute to my health.”

TOMORROW: A meeting with the secretary of state.

Who Asked for the Meeting between Quincy and Lord North?

You may have noticed a conflict in the last two postings about Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s 1774 visit to London.

On 18 November, Quincy told Jonathan Williams John Williams, a Customs officer born in from Boston, that he was willing to meet with government ministers Lord North and Lord Dartmouth but only if they asked: “as it was not at their Lordships’ desire…, I declined going for the present.”

Yet in his diary former governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote that Lord North “let me know Quincy had desired to see him, and that he was determined to allow it.”

So did Quincy seek to converse with Lord North or not? And when on the morning of 19 November Williams, as Quincy wrote, “waited upon me with the Compliments of Lord North, and his request to see me this morning,” had the prime minister made that request? Which man had asked the other’s people for the meeting?

A couple of weeks later Hutchinson noted the contradiction: “Ld. North told me that Quincy desired to be admitted to speak with him. Quincy tells his friends that Ld. North desired to speak with him. It seems Mr. Williams, the Inspector, was the messenger between them.”

Without spelling it out, Hutchinson focused on Williams as the person who’d probably told each man that the other wanted to talk. Williams was part of the British Customs bureaucracy, to be sure; in particular, he appears to have worked closely with Commissioner Corbyn Morris. But Williams was also a great-nephew of Benjamin Franklin, and he felt loyalty to his home town of Boston. If he could facilitate a solution to the conflict between Massachusetts and the ministry in London, Williams was ready to bend some protocols.

It’s also possible that Lord North changed his mind about being ”determined” to meet Quincy after hearing what Hutchinson had to say about him and was ready to keep the visitor from Massachusetts waiting. In mid-December, Hutchinson heard this story from Israel Mauduit, an unofficial lobbyist for the province and the former governor:

Lord North…said he not send for him [Quincy]. Williams wrote him a letter that such a person was arrived from Boston, and if it would be agreeable, he would bring him to wait on his Lordship. The morning Wms. went himself to Lord North’s, who supposed to be come for an answer. Upon his being admitted, he brought Quincy in with him.

However it happened, the meeting was on.

(Another contradiction in the records: Both Hutchinson’s diary and Quincy’s diary recorded a long morning meeting between that man and the prime minister on 19 November. I suspect the date in the Hutchinson book was wrong, and he actually talked with Lord North the previous day. An alternate possibility is that Lord North went from his conversation with Quincy into a discussion between Hutchinson and John Pownall, asked Hutchinson about Quincy, and never let on that he had just met the man.)

TOMORROW: The prime minister and the attorney from Massachusetts.

(The picture above shows Wroxton Abbey in Oxfordshire, Lord North’s country seat. This was not where he met with Hutchinson or Quincy, but it shows the style to which he was accustomed.)

“I fancied his errand here was to inflame the people”

On 17 Nov 1774, the day that Josiah Quincy, Jr., arrived in London, nineteen-year-old Brinley Sylvester Oliver went to the London house of his uncle, Thomas Hutchinson, to say hello and deliver letters. Oliver had sailed from Salem on the Boston Packet, the same ship that carried Quincy.

The former governor wasn’t home, so Oliver left a note, name-dropping his fellow passengers, and came back the next morning.

Among the letters Sylvester Oliver had brought were some from Gen. Thomas Gage to the government, and Hutchinson sent those on immediately. (Part of running a worldwide empire was asking a teenager to hand-deliver official and sensitive documents to his retired uncle, who would then forward them on to the right government office.) Hutchinson quizzed his nephew about “Quincy’s business,” but the young man knew nothing.

Soon the under-secretary of state at the American department, John Pownall, sent for Hutchinson “upon an affair of very great importance.” The former governor called a cab and hurried to Whitehall. Pownall’s news was:

General Gage had wrote that there was a person unknown, supposed to be going over in Lyde [i.e., on the Boston Packet], upon a bad design, some said to Holland, and that young Mr. Oliver, who was a passenger in the same ship, would probably be able to give some account of him; and therefore Ld. North had desired Pownall to examine Mr. O.

Quincy had managed to hide from Gage’s administration that he was sailing to Britain, but the governor found out that someone from the Boston Whigs was taking a trip. And then Gage sent that news to London on the same ship that carried Quincy.

Hutchinson told Pownall that his nephew knew nothing of Quincy’s plans but invited the under-secretary to dinner to talk with the young man himself. Oliver’s intelligence must had been unimpressive because Pownall “was convinced at dinner that it was best to make no public or particular inquiry.”

On 19 November, Hutchinson sat down with Lord North to share his responses to the various news from New England. Among other things, the prime minister reported that “Quincy had desired to see him, and that he was determined to allow it; but he wished to know what he was.”

Hutchinson described his briefing for the prime minister this way in his diary:

I informed him he [Quincy] was a lawyer, as inflamatory in Town Meetings, &c., as almost any of the party: that I fancied his errand here was to inflame the people by his newspaper pieces, and in every other way possible; and to give information to those at Boston, of the same spirit and party, what was doing here, and whether they were in danger.

In a letter written that same day, Hutchinson said of Quincy:

I gave his Lordship his just character and acquainted him that he called upon Doctor F[ranklin]. the first day after he landed, and brought recomendatory letters to [John] Wilkes; and I had reason to believe republished a piece in the Public Ledger of to-day; so that his Lordship will be able to make a shrewd guess what will be his principal business

Quincy’s journal said nothing about the Public Ledger that week, and he surely would have recorded placing an essay or seeing his own words in that newspaper. But Hutchinson recalled Quincy’s 1760s newspaper essays as “Hyperion” and his “infamous” instructions on behalf of the Boston town meeting in 1770, writing then that Quincy wanted to be “a Successor to [James] Otis and it is much if he does not run mad also.”

TOMORROW: Who wanted the meeting most? 

“Great wonderment made at the New England Coffee house”

On 8 Nov 1774, Capt. Nathaniel Byfield Lyde of the Boston Packet left Josiah Quincy, Jr., “at Falmouth in the county of Cornwall” before sailing on to London.

Quincy made his way to the imperial capital over land, seeing the Plymouth Dockyard, Exeter, Salisbury, “the famous Roman or Druid Temple at Stonehenge,” and at least three peers’ lordly seats. He arrived in the imperial capital on the morning of 17 November.

Word of Quincy’s arrival got around quickly. He wrote in his journal that day that the Boston merchant Thomas Bromfield, a relative of his wife, reported “there was great wonderment made at the New England Coffee house about what brought me to London.” One man even said, “he has been blowing up the seeds of sedition in America and had now come to do the same here.”

Quincy told Bromfield to reply “that if I had done nothing but blow up seeds they would probably be very harmless, as they would never take root, but if I should have to sow any here and they should afterwards ripen, he or the ministry might blow them about at their leisure.”

Other visitors that first day were Edward Dilly, the London bookseller who published Catharine Macaulay, and Jonathan Williams (1750–1815, shown above), who had secured an easy job as “Inspector of the Customs in the Massachusetts Bay” but sided with the American Whigs. Later Quincy went to tea at the home of Williams’s great-uncle, Benjamin Franklin.

The next day Williams Williams’s uncle, Customs Inspector-General John Williams, visited Quincy again for a long private talk. He reported:

Governor [Thomas] Hutchinson had repeatedly assured the Ministry, that a union of the Colonies was utterly impracticable: that the people were greatly divided among themselves in every colony, and that there could be no doubt, that all America would submit, and that they must, and moreover would, soon. . . . Governor Hutchinson had more than once said the same to persons in the Ministry in his presence.

Inspector Williams wanted Quincy to meet with Lord North, the prime minister, and the Earl of Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for North America. Quincy signaled that he was ready if those officials wanted to meet with him.

That day Quincy dined at Franklin’s house with Jonathan Williams and Dr. Edward Bancroft. (During the war, Bancroft would serve the first U.S. diplomats in France as a secretary and, simultaneously, the Crown as a spy.) Franklin echoed what his great-nephew had said about Hutchinson.

In the evening, Quincy went to the Covent Garden Theater, a novel experience for a man raised in Massachusetts. He wrote:

the actresses in several striking elegances of Gesture, voice and action, convinced [me] that women equal men [in] the powers of Eloquence. I am still further satisfied in my opinion, that the Stage is the nursery of vice, and disseminates the seeds of vice far and wide—with an amazing and banefull success.

Meanwhile, royal officials were discussing this visitor from Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: Through Hutchinson’s eyes.

Josiah Quincy’s Fellow Travelers

Once his ship was safely clear of Salem harbor, Josiah Quincy, Jr., must have come up to enjoy the sea air. One of the benefits of his voyage to Britain was supposed to be relief from his tuberculosis.

I suspect his presence startled his fellow passengers aboard the Boston Packet. In his diary of the trip, Quincy listed those men this way:

With us went passengers Messrs. W. Hyslop and son; Dr. Paine and Rufus Chandler, Esq., of Worcester; Mr. Higginson, of Salem, and Mr. Sylvester Oliver, son of the late Lieutenant-Governor. Some of us might say, “Nos dulcia linquimus arva,” [We abandon our sweet fields] while others were obliged to mourn, “Nos patriam fugimus.” [We fly from our country]

Those Latin tags appear together in Virgil’s first Eclogue. Quincy evidently thought one applied to some of the men and one to the rest.

Who were those fellow travelers?

William Hyslop (1714–1796) was a merchant of Scottish descent, close to the Rev. Charles Chauncy and involved in missionizing charities. By 1774 he was “liveing out of town,” as Jane Mecom wrote, in a Brookline house he bought from Dr. Zabdiel Boylston. (Mecom had asked Hyslop to carry a letter to her brother in London, Benjamin Franklin, but he’d forgotten.) Hyslop’s son traveling with him was probably William Hyslop (1753–1792).

Hyslop appears to have been stranded in Britain by the outbreak of war. In May 1778 he wrote to John Adams from London to say he had “not heard from his Wife, Family, and other Friends at B—— since the 21st of September last” and was “impatiently waiting for a favourable opportunity to return to his Family and Friends from whom he has been so long involuntarily absent.” He probably didn’t want to be counted among the “absentees”; if so, the state might assume he was a Loyalist and confiscate his property.

Hyslop eventually did return to his family and property. He funded a school building for Brookline in 1793, and the town still has a road named for him.

Dr. William Paine (1750–1833, shown above) and Rufus Chandler (1747–1823) were both Harvard-educated young professionals, Paine a physician-apothecary and Chandler a lawyer. Their families were also related. They had been building genteel lives in Worcester until they sided with the Crown in the town’s increasingly Whiggish politics.

In August 1774, “near 3000 people” visited Paine’s father, Timothy Paine, to express their displeasure at him accepting a seat on the mandamus Council. The next month, over 4,500 Worcester County Patriots turned out to close the courts where Chandler worked. The two men decided they were better off visiting London.

Paine and Chandler returned to Massachusetts in the spring of 1775, landing in Salem in May only to find that there was a war under way and they were on the wrong side of the lines. They quickly moved into Boston and took stock of their situations.

Paine sailed back to Britain, where he bought and wheedled a medical degree and an appointment as apothecary for Gen. Sir William Howe’s army in 1776. During the early 1780s he held some offices in Nova Scotia. But in 1787, Paine came back to Massachusetts and rebuilt his upper-class life.

Chandler stayed in Boston through the siege, evacuated to Halifax with his wife, and then spent most of the war years in New York City. He tried to establish a lucrative legal practice in Halifax and Annapolis Royal, but eventually gave up and moved to London for his final decades.

Stephen Higginson (1743–1828) had become a merchant in Salem after spending a decade as a young ship’s captain. During this trip to London, the House of Commons invited him to testify about how the fishermen of Massachusetts would respond to a proposed new law. Higginson’s answers didn’t endear him to all his Essex County neighbors, and Salem’s committee of safety had to ask the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to vouch for him in June 1775.

Higginson repaired his reputation well enough, particularly by financing privateers, that toward the end of the war he became one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Continental Congress. During the Shays Rebellion, he helped to lead the militia that Gov. James Bowdoin sent to quell the unrest, and he was a strong Federalist in the early republic.

Finally, Brinley Sylvester Oliver (1755–1828) was indeed a son of Massachusetts’s late lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver. His mother died in March 1773, his father a year later, just before he graduated from Harvard College. Oliver started attending Anglican services, a sign of his alienation from the Massachusetts society of his ancestors.

Syvlester Oliver was also a nephew of former governor Thomas Hutchinson, who greeted him warmly in London and loaned him £150. Eventually he gained the rank of purser in the Royal Navy and a Loyalist pension. He saw naval action against the French, including at the Battle of Trafalgar. Oliver died in London, a fairly wealthy man.

TOMORROW: Arriving in London.