American Rebels

by Nina Sankovitch

  Abigail Quincy attended the day’s sermons with her father-in-law, having come out to Braintree with her children for a long visit. News had finally arrived of her husband’s safe arrival in Falmouth, from a captain who had been there to see it. But still no word from Josiah himself. Until she heard from him, she could not be sure of his safety; until then, Abigail would continue to write to Josiah, the letters sent care of a trading agent in London, an old colleague of John Hancock.

  The letters were never easy to begin. What to write? Abigail couldn’t help but fear that her words would never be read by their intended recipient. But fear was no excuse, and she knew what she had to do.

  Dearest Friend, she began. And from there, the words flowed.

  * * *

  At the end of the year, Edmund Quincy wrote to his daughter Katy, who was on a brief visit to Lancaster. John Hancock had been to the house on Kingston Street and “spent a Sociable evening of 2 hours … I should be glad to see him often.” Dolly and Hancock were still “entwined,” and yet no date had been set for the wedding, with “how things are here.” The scourge of the British was haunting all aspects of colonial life, and now a perhaps even greater threat had appeared in Boston: “the most threatening evil among us … small pox.” Edmund urged Katy to get herself inoculated, along with her sister and nieces and nephews. Quoting scripture, he advised her to take care of her “Vineyard … and [follow] the Truth of Righteousness.”3

  Smallpox had indeed come to Boston, infiltrating the British troops first and then spreading to the civilian population. The selectmen of Boston, still working despite the prohibition against town meetings, moved quickly to contain the illness. Stricken parents and children, along with British soldiers, were sent to a special smallpox hospital to recuperate or die. For those who refused to move from their homes, a fence was erected in the street around their dwelling and “Flags hung out to give notice of the Distemper.”4

  Despite the efforts at containment, concerns multiplied that by spring, Boston “will be filled with Pestilence and a consequent degree of Famine.”5

  But by early February 1775, William Cooper, town clerk and avowed patriot, announced that “after Strict Enquiry no person is found to have small pox in this town.”6 As welcome as the news was, townspeople only shifted their vigilance elsewhere, their fear of contagion quickly replaced by other, equally frightening worries.

  * * *

  Finally, in January 1775, Abigail Quincy received word from Josiah. The letter had been written in early November from aboard the ship on his way to England and was just now delivered back to America. “Dear Partner of my Life,” Abigail read, “when removed from you I most sensibly feel how dear you are to me.… I look toward you as my most valuable treasure.”7

  She read through quickly, looking for the news she sought most desperately, and she found it: “no one on board feels freer [than me] from disorder and none most certainly in better spirits.”8 Josiah was well. He was healthy. Abigail felt herself breathe again.

  A flow of letters began to arrive, letters for Abigail and Josiah Sr., as well as letters to be forwarded on to Joseph Warren, John Dickinson, James Lovell (an old friend from school, whose father was a Tory but who himself was a devoted patriot), and others. Details of the last few months of Josiah’s life were filled in, the voyage, the landing at Falmouth, and the journey on land to London.

  Josiah had taken his time traveling up-country; this was his first time in England and he wanted to take in all the sights. He was awed by the farms—“the cultivation of the land can scarcely be realized by a mere American…’tis an amazing perfection”—as he traveled up to the port of Plymouth. There the great number of docks, busy and bustling, so impressed him that he wrote in his journal, “My ideas of the riches and powers of this great nation are increased.”9 He also noticed the many gunships docked there, with firepower enough to wipe out Boston, if they so desired to try it.

  He traveled to Exeter, where he toured the cathedral (“Amazing work of superstition!”), and then continued on toward London, stopping for a day in Stonehenge—“a wonderful piece of workmanship and antiquity.”10 He finally arrived in London on November 17. He moved into a house on Arundel Street, near Fanton Square and Haymarket. That very afternoon he had tea with Ben Franklin.

  Josiah had long suspected Franklin of playing both sides of the controversy between England and the colonists. But it took only that one meeting on the first day to convince Josiah that he had been wrong. Franklin quickly became one of Josiah’s most visited and relied-upon friends in London: “Dr. Franklin is an American in heart and soul.”11 Franklin lived just a short stroll away from Josiah’s London home, and the two would spend many hours together over the weeks to come.

  Within just a few days of his arrival in London, Josiah met with the British prime minister, Lord North. North was a “heavy booby-looking sort” but his “blubbery” looks belied his sharp-edged tenacity.12 Josiah saw only warmth in North’s greeting of him, and was heartened by their meeting, in which he told North that the cause of “our political evils” was “gross misrepresentation and falsehood” concerning events in Massachusetts and the alleged motives of the colonists.

  He spoke with Lord North about the Boston Port Act, and “upon this subject I received much pleasure,” Josiah wrote in his journal, adding, “His Lordship several times smiled and seemed touched.” At the same time, Lord North stressed to Josiah the superior powers of Great Britain and “the determination … to effect the submission of the colonies.”13

  Thomas Hutchinson, living now in London, renewed himself as Josiah’s nemesis within his first days in London. Reports reached Josiah, via a number of different people, that Hutchinson continued to insist 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 … soon.”14 Infuriated, Josiah Quincy Jr. sought to persuade the influential Englishmen he met that the colonies were united, resolute, and stubborn.

  During those early weeks he spent in London, Josiah’s hopes for a peaceful resolution of the conflict between England and America grew: “I find every day more reason to think that multitude of fervent friends to America reside on this Island.” And to Abigail, he wrote of finding “people … who revere, love, and heartily wish well to us … it is the interest, the highest private interest of this whole nation to be our fast friends.”15

  He was confident that he himself was serving to ignite even further love and support for the Americans: “I feel the ardour of an American; I have lighted up the countenances of many.… I am infected with an enthusiasm I know to be contagious.”16

  With great optimism, he sallied forth, scheduling meetings with William Pitt (Earl of Chatham, member of the House of Lords) and Sir George Savile (baronet and member of the House of Commons). The two men could not have been more different. Pitt, a former prime minister, was elegant and outspoken, while Savile was self-effacing and quiet; yet both were firm friends to the colonies, and both had opposed Lord North’s punitive acts against Massachusetts.

  Josiah also met with Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the colonies, who complimented Josiah on his pamphlet attacking the Boston Port Act but promised nothing; and Corbyn Morris, a member of the ministry, who advised him, “your Countrymen must fail in a contest with this great and powerfull people … you ought to write to your friends this intelligence and endeavor to influence them to their duty.”17

  Josiah recorded Morris’ advice in his journal, followed by exclamation marks; but he did not intend to share this unwanted counsel with his compatriots in America. Instead, he would focus on Morris’ request for a list of starting points from which a reconciliation between the colonies and England could begin.

  As long as his health held up, he would not stop striving, in meeting after meeting, to rally enough support for the colonists so that Lord North and his ministry would be forced to ch
ange course. Josiah prayed for a rescission of the Port Act and all the other Intolerable Acts, and a suspension of the tax on tea. Most of all, he hoped for a smooth return to those times when, before the Stamp Act, the American colonies and England existed in a happy equilibrium of mutual support and benefit.

  What Josiah did not know was that Thomas Hutchinson had poisoned the way for him, setting both Lord North and Lord Dartmouth against him even before they met. Lord Dartmouth had initially believed Josiah was a man who could bring about reconciliation between the colonies and England, but then Hutchinson gave him a copy of Josiah’s pamphlet on the Port Bill18—the very pamphlet Dartmouth later duplicitously complimented Josiah on—and after reading it, Dartmouth doubted anything could be accomplished via negotiations with such a man.

  After meeting with Josiah, Lord North reported back to Hutchinson that Quincy was “a bad, insidious man” who had pretended to come to England for his health but now spent all his time in pursuit of political advantages.19 And Corbyn Morris never intended to take Josiah’s list for opening negotiations seriously; instead, he tried to convince Josiah of England’s great poverty and its great need of the tax revenues from the colonies.

  In early December, Quincy’s tiring schedule in London resulted in a relapse of his consumption. “Incessant application, incessant talking … has brought me a little fever and a raising of blood.”20 In the evenings, he left his windows open while he slept in a vain effort to catch what fresh air he could in a London swathed in fog, and he suffered daily chills and fever. With the decline in his health came a decline in his outlook: not only had he begun to see how difficult it was to negotiate with people who refused to speak the truth with him or take his positions seriously, but disturbing rumors had begun to arrive in England of mayhem and destruction in Boston. His worries for America manifested themselves physically: coughing, chills, blood on his pillow.

  On December 7, he wrote to Abigail that he had heard “BOSTON WAS NOW IN ASHES.” Was it true? He was frustrated by the lack of solid news, having received no letters from anyone in Boston, Braintree, or Philadelphia. Instead, he told her, he was taunted in a coffeehouse that any day now, the news would be “that you are all subdued and in deep humiliation.”21

  He refused to believe the coffeehouse predictions—and yet he feared what lay ahead for America. Rumors had been circulating of parliamentary plots to divide the colonies, to bribe delegates to the Continental Congress, to grant concessions to the southern colonies so they might turn away from New England. He warned that above all else the colonies must stay united: “Prepare, prepare, I say, for the worst.” As John Adams had counseled his Abigail, now Josiah counseled: “Weigh, commune, consider, and act.”

  To show unity was paramount: “when once there is a conviction that the Americans are in earnest, that they are resolved to endure all hazards with a spirit worthy of the prize for which they content … [then] you will have many firm, active, persevering, and powerful friends, in both Houses of Parliament.”22 It was more important now than ever, for the colonies to present a unified and strong front to Lord North if they hoped to achieve a successful reconciliation with the mother country.

  But Josiah had begun to wonder if reconciliation was possible or even desirable. The vast space between America and England, not only politically but also physically and atmospherically, had awoken doubts about whether the American colonies were still British at all. England was a strange place in so many ways, with such disparities of opulence and poverty, so much frivolity and entertainments on offer, and everywhere he looked, “extended miseries of enormous wealth and power,” including immorality and corruption.23

  London was very different from Boston and another universe entirely from Braintree. Josiah went one evening to the playhouse at Covent Garden, which only confirmed his opinion that “the stage is the nursery of vice, and disseminates the seeds of it far and wide, with an amazing and baneful success.”24

  Even the English that was spoken in London was different from the language he was used to. In the mid-eighteenth century, the upper classes in England began to speak in a new way, broadening out their a’s, slurring their s’s and changing both idiom and intonation, in a conscious effort to sound distinctly elegant and refined.25 The change in speech may have been due in part to the influence of the actor David Garrick, whom Josiah had seen perform at Drury Lane (and whom he called “a most surprising fellow”).26 Garrick’s elocution was widely admired in London—and imitated everywhere.

  To Josiah’s ears, the language seemed both “contrived and pretentious,”27 yet another example of “that pageantry I see … [which] makes me every day more attached to the simplicity of my native soil.”28

  Perhaps his native soil should separate from England and declare its independence from the British Empire. Josiah wasn’t quite ready to accept such a conclusion—but he had begun to think about it.

  Josiah continued to write to friends and family in America, hopeful that his letters were traveling safely by transatlantic packets and eager to finally receive return letters from home. Most of his letters were to Abigail, and he instructed her to share the news carefully with his “political friends … they must consider my letters to you as intended for them.”29

  But there were also words in those letters that were meant only for her: “My whole heart is with you; my whole time is employed in endeavoring to serve my country.… My heart feels for you all very exquisitely when I think of you, which is eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. Adieu, my best friend.”30

  As winter, damp and cold, settled on London, Josiah’s energy lagged. He felt disillusioned by the hypocrisy of those British representatives who spoke of a reconciliation between the colonies and England, while at the same time Lord North and his ministry pursued an ever harder line against America. But what depressed Josiah most of all was his growing awareness that King George shared Lord North’s punishing view of the colonies.

  For so long, Josiah and other New Englanders had believed that their sovereign would listen to them, that he would be eager to know the truth of what was going on in America, and that he would support them in their petitions for fair treatment. Instead Josiah found King George to be as prejudiced against the colonists of Massachusetts as his prime minister, Lord North.

  The king had opened Parliament in late November with a speech in which he asserted the power of Parliament to rule over all “the Dominions of my crown, the maintenance of which I consider as essential to the dignity, the safety, and the welfare of the British Empire.”

  The colony of Massachusetts, he declared, was home of the “most daring spirit of resistance and disobedience to the law,” with ever more “fresh violences of a very criminal nature.” He promised to punish all who “attempt to weaken or impair the supreme Authority of this Legislature over all the Dominions of My Crown” and directed Parliament to do what was necessary to demonstrate to the colonies “due Reverence for the Laws, and a just Sense of the Blessings of our excellent Constitution.”31

  The irony was not lost on Josiah. His own deep reverence for the “excellent Constitution” led him to the opposite conclusion of the king’s; and for the king he held no “due Reverence” at all: “in his robes and diadem … surrounded with his nobles and great officers. I was not awe-struck with the pomp.”32 For so long he had such high hopes for his monarch, but now he had almost none.

  All around him, men kept blaming Thomas Hutchinson for all the troubles of Massachusetts—Josiah recorded more than six instances of being told of Hutchinson’s treachery in one month—but Josiah began to think that the problem ran much deeper than one man’s misrepresentations of a colony; the distrust and scathing disregard for the colonies started at the top with the king, and then spread wide and ran deep.

  As Josiah’s hopes for a peaceful resolution faded, he saw a new purpose in the unification of the colonies; unity would be the sword necessary to cut, once and for all, the cords binding America to the Old Wor
ld. He wrote to Abigail in mid-December of his conviction that his “countrymen must seal their cause with their blood.… I see every day more and more reason to confirm my opinion.” He urged Abigail to tell the colonists of America, “acknowledge your ability to save your country if you have but union, courage, and perseverance.”33 Union to achieve more than just a boycott and to make more than just resolutions: union to make war.

  Three days later he wrote to Joseph Reed, a fellow lawyer and patriot he had met while in Philadelphia. His missive to Reed held the same message that he had sent to his wife: “my countrymen … must yet seal their faith and constancy to their liberties with blood.” He felt war was a curse but at times a necessity: “[War] is distressing … indeed! But hath not this ever been the lot of humanity?”34

  * * *

  In mid-December, rumors began to fly around London. News had arrived from America concerning the Continental Congress held in Philadelphia in the fall. Josiah rushed to Franklin’s home to learn what the older statesman knew. Franklin told Josiah that the Continental Congress had enacted a boycott of all British goods, proclaimed a Bill of Rights for the colonists, and rejected Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. Committees to enforce the boycott had been formed in all the colonies and militias would be trained. A petition to the king had been written and signed by representatives from twelve of the thirteen colonies, all those present at the Continental Congress. Ben Franklin was instructed by the delegates to make sure the petition was delivered to the king himself.