Continuation of the History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from the Year 1748: With an Introductory Sketch of Events from Its Original Settlement; Volume 1
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The history of the insurrections in Massachusetts. In the year seventeen hundred and eighty six. And the rebellion consequent thereon
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George Richards Minot was an American jurist and historian.
Background
George Richards Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the youngest of the ten children of Stephen Minot, a Boston merchant, A. B. Harvard, 1730, and Sarah Clark, daughter of Jonas Clark, of Boston. The Minots were early associated with Dorchester, George Minot, son to Thomas Minot of Saffron Walden, in Essex, England, having emigrated to Massachusetts and been admitted freeman of the town in 1634. According to the Rev. James Freeman, who wrote a memoir of the historian, Minot's father was "educated" and his mother "affectionate, " and the "intermediate ancestors were gentlemen of respectable characters. " The chief influence on his youth seems to have been the good example of his brother, Francis, who died in 1774, at the age of twenty-eight.
Education
In 1767, Minot entered the South Latin School in Boston, where his diligence, discretion, and decorum soon made him the favorite pupil of his teacher, John Lovell. In July 1774, he matriculated at Harvard and attracted the attention of his tutor, John Wadsworth, by his amiable manners and his love of books.
Career
When Wadsworth died in 1777 at the early age of thirty-seven, Minot established a reputation as a public speaker with the funeral oration he was selected to deliver. As a consequence, he was chosen to pronounce the valedictory address at the time he took his "second-degree" (A. M. ) in July 1781. Years later, Minot noted in his Journal for January 1800, on the occasion of his speech on the death of Washington. On receiving his degree of A. B. in July 1778, Minot entered the law office of William Tudor, through whose influence he was appointed in 1781 clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the first Great and General Court which met after the adoption of the new constitution in 1780. From January 9 to February 7, 1788, he served as secretary of the convention called to consider the ratification of the Federal Constitution. As a result of his conspicuous success in both these offices, he was appointed a judge of probate for the County of Suffolk in January 1792. He had already made his mark as the historian of Shays's Rebellion. The History of the Insurrection in Massachusetts in the Year Seventeen Hundred and Eighty-Six and the Rebellion Consequent Thereon was first published in Worcester in 1788. A second edition was brought out in Boston in 1810. The reception of this volume encouraged Minot to begin a continuation of the history of Massachusetts from the point at which Thomas Hutchinson had left off. The first volume of his Continuation of the History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from the Year 1748 was published at Boston in February 1798 four introductory chapters containing a survey of the period from 1630 to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. A second volume, carrying events through 1765, was published posthumously in June 1803. John Adams, who was "not satisfied with Hutchinson, though his work is valuable", praised Minot's performance in a letter written from Philadelphia, February 28, 1798. Just as he was completing his second volume, Minot died suddenly in Boston. Besides being a member of the Amicable Fire Society and president of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society, Minot was one of the original ten members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, founded in 1791, and served the organization as a librarian, 1793-95, and treasurer, 1796-99. Although his politics took color from his associates and circumstances, his history of Shays's Rebellion is by no means unreasonably hostile. His style was modeled on what already in college had become his favorite reading: Robertson, and Burke's contributions to the Annual Register. New methods of scholarship were to supplant his Continuation by the middle of the nineteenth century, and he did not live to cover that portion of the history of Massachusetts which he could have narrated at first hand.
Achievements
Minot is known as a distinguished jurist and historical writer, and one of the founders of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
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Personality
The reproduction of his portrait shows Minot to have been a man of distinguished, if not handsome, appearance, the only fault of whose character, according to a friend, was "a temper by nature irascible". The eulogy John Quincy Adams delivered before the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society, May 28, 1802, was long and enthusiastic. For ten years (1789 - 99), he was in almost constant correspondence with Fisher Ames.
Connections
Minot married Mary Speakman, by whom he had one son, George Richards Minot, and a daughter.
