American Rebels

by Nina Sankovitch

  But talented or not, it was only through the patronage of Hutchinson that Sewall had well-heeled clients knocking on his door—and Sewall knew it. Both his reputation and his client list grew, and for this he owed Hutchinson both deference and loyalty. It was all that Hutchinson had hoped for. Both men were happy: Sewall was earning a good income and could now marry Esther, and Hutchinson gained a strong legal mind in his corner to defend his actions as chief justice of Massachusetts.

  In 1764, Jonathan Sewall and Esther Quincy were married. Edmund and his wife, Elizabeth, presided over a splendid party, largely paid for by their new son-in-law; all of Braintree society, and much of Boston’s, came out to celebrate the nuptials. The couple moved into a fine house in Charlestown, and three years later, through the machinations of Hutchinson, Jonathan Sewall was named attorney general for the colony.

  The writs of assistance case set the path that Jonathan Sewall would follow in the years to come, during which he supported all acts and measures taken by the British government in governing the colonies. But it also laid the paths of his friends, who would come to oppose the British government while fighting to uphold the rights of colonists.

  John Adams had followed the writs case closely and went with Sam Quincy to watch as Otis made his arguments before the court. Both men heard the prophetic words spoken when Otis warned that arbitrary use of governmental power “in former periods of history cost one king of England his head and another his throne.”29

  It was only years later that John Adams understood the significance of the case decided that day in 1761: “Then and there the Child of Independence was born.”30 Lines were being drawn throughout the colony of Massachusetts and also among his friends.

  The lines could be understood as questions: What did liberty mean? What did loyalty mean? On the one side, liberty was the right of the colonists to govern themselves, and duty lay only to the colony. On the other side, liberty meant living under the British constitution, and loyalty meant fealty to Parliament and the king. Jonathan Sewall was the first to take a side; the others would soon follow.

  6

  Colonial Enthusiasms

  If this be enthusiasm, we live and die enthusiasts.

  —JOSIAH QUINCY JR.

  Josiah Quincy Jr. was the youngest man ever invited to become a member of the Long Room Club. Although the exact date of his first attendance at the secret meetings is unknown, he most likely started coming after he graduated from Harvard in the summer of 1763. He was nineteen years old and had just begun his legal apprenticeship with the esteemed Boston lawyer Oxenbridge Thacher, who had participated with James Otis Jr. on the writs of assistance case. The speech Josiah Quincy Jr. gave at his commencement, titled “Liberty,” must have convinced Sam Adams to introduce the young man to Adams’ conclave of political zealots.

  Josiah was the youngest son of Josiah Quincy Sr. and his first wife, Hannah Sturgis. As a boy, Josiah had been frail and spent much of his youth tucked away to convalesce with a stack of books. While his body rested, his mind raced. He read every kind of book offered by his father’s and uncle’s extensive libraries, and then branched out when he entered college, going through Harvard’s library like a hawk through a row of pigeons. Whereas his older brother Samuel, along with Sam’s friend John Hancock, had been punished in college for excessive drinking and partying, the only discipline Josiah might have incurred would have been excessive library fines.

  During the years that the Quincy brothers, John Adams, and John Hancock were at Harvard, “two-fisted tippling was at its peak … at no other period in the history of the Cambridge institution has so much liquor been consumed per capita.”1 Even John Adams, ambitious and studious, drank a tankard of hard cider every morning at breakfast. But for the youngest Quincy, it was books and not booze that consumed his hours while at school.

  In his senior year, the year when students were permitted to take books out of the Harvard library, Josiah Jr. checked out a wide array of publications: the essays of the sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne; the seventeenth-century political histories of Clarendon; the works of the English poet Cowley; Daniel Turner’s Syphilis: A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease; the aphorisms of the seventeenth-century Venetian physician Sanctorius; the verses of Stephen Duck, a contemporary self-taught English poet; the works of Aristotle; and the essays of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Ralph Cudworth (A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality), the Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon (Antiquity Explained, and Represented in Sculptures), and the physician John Pechey (General Treatise of the Causes and Signs of All Diseases).2

  Josiah read all the plays of Shakespeare and copied out entire passages into small pamphlets called “quartos,” filling seventy pamphlets in all. He titled his pamphlets Beauties of Shakespeare and memorized dozens of lines from every play.3 But his favorite books, and the ones from which he again copied line after line after line, were the books that explored the history of law and legal systems dating back to the Greeks and Romans and its present manifestations in English common law.

  There was no question that Josiah Jr. would become a lawyer. After college, he began the study of law under the careful watch of Oxenbridge Thacher, who, like his young student, was broadly educated and well-read. To aid in his studies, Josiah created his first Law Commonplace book. On the cover of the book, he copied a quote from David Hume: “From law arises security; from security curiosity; and from curiosity knowledge.”4

  This first book was where Josiah kept notes that guided him in the years to come, including a record of his favorite legal maxims from Justinian, the sixth-century Roman emperor who compiled and unified Roman law; Sir Edward Coke, seventeenth-century champion of common law and liberty; and Sir Edmund Plowden, lawyer to Queen Elizabeth and brilliant legal theorist. Josiah also kept centuries-old maxims reflecting common sense and natural law, such as “To each, one’s own house is the safest refuge” and “That which is useful is not spoiled by that which is useless.”5

  In Law Commonplace, Josiah copied out detailed notes about court cases that he observed during his apprenticeship with Thacher as well as ones that he read about in other people’s accounts. In the margins of his notes on the cases, he scribbled his own legal analyses, especially of the interesting cases, along with explanations of different methods used for arriving at legal decisions.

  In his notebook, he referenced all the cases he studied according to what type of law or legal question they dealt with, from domestic law to contract law to criminal proceedings. In many ways, his Law Commonplace books (more were to come) were the first textbooks for what would become Harvard Law School’s famous Socratic method of teaching law: questioning and analyzing every legal decision made to understand how the correct—or incorrect—decision was reached.

  Although most of the other members of the Long Room Club were more interested in politics than law, Josiah Jr. fit right in. His mentor Thacher, and Thacher’s partner on many cases, James Otis Jr., engaged young Quincy in debates concerning the rights of the colonists against an overreaching government—and that topic was fascinating to the older members.

  Seated around the low room of the club, above the print shop of Edes and Gill, publishers of the Boston Gazette, the other men listened while the lawyers, and Sam Adams too, made their arguments back and forth, laying out the rights and privileges of the American colonists: to be free from search and seizure, to be represented in Parliament, to be taxed fairly, to be heard in a court of law that was impartial.

  Josiah insisted that the best protection for the colonists of Massachusetts came from the rule of law, which applied to citizens as well as to the Crown and Parliament. No government stood above the law, no political party or judge or monarch was exempt, argued Quincy. Laws protecting individual freedoms were inviolate, and indeed, following such laws endowed the government with the ability to operate harmoniously and productively. It was good for everyone, Josiah insisted.


  Josiah traced his ideals for what the law could and should do back to ancient Rome, then followed them straight through to “the best asylum, that Glorious Medium, the British Constitution!”6 The British Constitution was composed of all accepted law in England, including the Magna Carta, the 1689 Bill of Rights, Acts of Parliament, court cases, and legal conventions. Josiah was certain that there was no system for promoting private and public rights, and guaranteeing freedom for all.

  When politicians failed to live up to their duties under the British Constitution, Josiah argued, it was the right—no, the duty!—of citizens to protest, and demand that the politicians reform their ways: “In defence of our civil and religious rights, we dare oppose the world.”7

  It soon became apparent to everyone attending the Long Room Club meetings that Josiah Quincy Jr. would be the successor in every way to Thacher, whose health was in serious decline following a smallpox inoculation received a few years earlier. In his conversations and writings, Josiah was out-Whigging the older man, previously the most Whiggish of colonial lawyers. Human reason, individual liberty, universal rights: these were the hallmarks of Whig thought and the backbone of both Josiah’s and Thacher’s legal and political convictions.

  * * *

  In 1764, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, billed as a bolster to the Molasses Act of 1733 (which had been largely evaded by the colonies through widespread smuggling). The Sugar Act was just one of many designed by Parliament to refill the coffers of the British treasury following the huge expenses exacted by the Seven Years’ War, which finally ended in 1763. England gained new territories in the war (including New France in Canada, Spanish Florida, and numerous islands in the Caribbean), but the war had incurred high debts and there were rising costs associated with running the newly expanded empire. Citizens in England couldn’t be taxed nearly enough to cover all the debts and costs. Taxing the colonies was the answer.

  Thacher and Josiah Jr. were at the forefront of protests against what they called Parliament’s illegal “taxation without representation.” Article Twelve of the Magna Carta, they argued, provided that “no scutage or aid is to be levied in our realm except by common counsel of our realm.”8 If England sought aid through taxes, then the colonists demanded their right to common counsel, that is, representation of their rights in Parliament.

  “We cannot conceive that [we] have forfeited [our rights] by … emigrating a thousand leagues, subduing immense forests,… protecting … British subjects … & thereby enlarging the British empire & commerce,” Thacher wrote in a widely distributed pamphlet. He concluded with the essential point: “Now we have ever supposed this to be one essential right of British subjects, that they shall not be subjected to taxes which, in person or by representative, they have no voice in laying.”9 Josiah Jr. spread the pamphlet far and wide, advising the citizens of Massachusetts to take notice: their rights as citizens of Britain were being threatened.

  When Thacher died early in 1765, Josiah inherited his legal practice. He hung a prominent but simple sign outside the door of his new law offices, becoming the first lawyer in Boston to proclaim his profession in that way. He continued to serve Thacher’s old clients but also brought in new clients of his own—all the while continuing to write about and fight for the rights of colonists under British law.

  As Josiah worked to build up his practice, his health once again faltered, as it had so often when he was a boy. He consulted a doctor, who gave him the terrible diagnosis of consumption (tuberculosis); his brother Ned had been afflicted by the same disease for the past few years. The illness caused Josiah to grow evermore pale and gaunt: he looked years older than he was, and he became prone to fainting spells along with fits of coughing.

  Even in his consumptive state, Josiah exuded energy and confidence. When he entered a room, looking about with his crossed eyes and his wild curls flung back, people paid attention. And when he spoke, people listened. His reasoning was clear, and his voice “was like the music of the spheres; soft and melodious, yet powerful, clear, and distinct. He had a tenor voice … and could be heard to the farthest verge of the most crowded assembly.”10 Josiah began to collect admirers, and his reputation for speaking truth to power grew.

  Because of his political leanings, and because Thomas Hutchinson wanted to keep potential troublemakers out of political power in his colony, Quincy was never “admitted to the gown”; that is, he was never invited to wear the wig and robe of Crown-approved lawyers, as his brother Samuel had been. But Josiah didn’t care. Even as a young lawyer, he had all the clients he needed. As he wrote later, “I proceeded … to manage all my own business … though unsanctified and uninspired by the pomp and magic of the long Robe.”11

  * * *

  John Adams, who was less interested in politics than Josiah, concentrated on building his legal practice and courting Abigail. Despite his growing status in Braintree, Abigail’s parents still did not approve of the young lawyer as a match for their daughter. Thinking to bring her parents round, Abigail began taking John to the home of her grandparents, John and Elizabeth Quincy, and their son, Norton Quincy. Abigail knew that if she could persuade her grandparents of John Adams’ worth, her mother and father would be sure to follow.

  John found the Mount Wollaston estate to be the most peaceful and beautiful place he had ever seen. He had always loved the landscape of Braintree, but looking out over the sea from the Quincy mansion, he found true bliss: “Here is Solitude and Retirement. Still, calm, and serene, cool, tranquil, and peaceful.” He walked from room to room, waxing on and on about the gorgeous views: “Out at one Window, you see Mount Wollaston, the first Seat of our Ancestors, and beyond that Stony field Hill covered over with Corn and fruits. At the other Window, an Orchard and beyond that the large Marsh called the broad Meadows.”

  It was as if all of the world was at his feet: “From the East Window of the opposite Chamber you see a fine Plain, covered with Corn and beyond that the whole Harbour and all the Islands. From the End Window of the East Chamber, you may see with a prospective Glass, every Ship, Sloop, Schooner, and Brigantine, that comes in, or goes out.”12

  The older Quincys were flattered by John’s appreciation of their home and lands, and Norton Quincy enjoyed John’s company; they all gave Abigail their blessing to marry John. Her relatives, Josiah Quincy and his sons, just down the hill, also made clear their approval of John. It was only a matter of time, Abigail and John reasoned, before Abigail’s parents relented and the hoped-for marriage could finally come to pass.

  * * *

  On August 1, 1764, Thomas Hancock died. He’d suffered “a fit of apoplexy” (most likely a stroke) while walking into the council chamber of the Massachusetts Colony State House and died two hours later.13 In his will, he left most of his wealth to his nephew, John; this included the shipping and merchant business and all its holdings as well as properties in Boston, along with tens of thousands of acres of land throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts. He left the mansion on Beacon Hill to his wife, Lydia, but she almost immediately gave the house and all its goods and lands to John, asking only that she be allowed to continue living there.

  Without hesitation, John granted her request and promised to take the best care of her always. He loved his aunt as much as she loved him. John also vowed to his mother; sister, Mary; and brother, Ebenezer that their fortunes would be forever linked with his and they had little to worry about.

  While Lydia may have hoped that now John and Dolly Quincy would finally become engaged, no such announcement came from the couple. They continued to see each other often, and John wrote notes to Dolly, which were delivered by messenger at all hours of the day, but no wedding plans were made or ever mentioned by either of them. Lydia kept careful watch, biding her time to make her plan of linking the Hancocks with the Quincys a reality.

  * * *

  Abigail Smith’s parents finally gave her their approval of John Adams, and in October 1764, at her father’s parsonag
e in Weymouth, they were married. Guests included a large contingent from Braintree, including the Adams family and all the members of the various branches of the Quincy family. Reverend Smith performed the wedding service, as he had for Mary when she married Richard Cranch in 1762, and as he would for his daughter Elizabeth when she married John Shaw in 1777.

  For the wedding of his daughter Mary, Reverend Smith chose a reading from St. Luke, Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken from her. When his daughter Elizabeth married John Shaw in 1777, Reverend Smith would once again go with St. Luke, choosing There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

  But when Abigail married John Adams, Reverend Smith’s sermon was based on a reading from St. Matthew: John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say he hath a devil. Perhaps Abigail’s parents had not completely come to terms with the marriage of their beloved daughter to lawyer John Adams; perhaps John would never be Reverend Smith’s most favored son-in-law. But the Braintree Quincys liked the man and Abigail was happy with her choice.

  Three years earlier, Abigail had written to Hannah Quincy Lincoln about searching for the love of her life but fearing that a good man was as hard to find as “justice, honesty, prudence, and many other virtues.”14 Now she had found her man, and in her estimation, he was filled with the virtues she revered.