Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Jun., of Massachusetts
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A Municipal History of the Town and City of Boston During Two Centuries
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The History of the Boston Athenaeum, with Biographical Notices of Its Deceased Founders
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The History of the United States of North America: From the Plantation of the British Colonies Till Their Assumption of National Independence; Volume 3
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Speech ... Before the Board of Overseers ... Harvard ... Feb. 25, 1845 on the Minority Report of the Committee of Visitation, Presented ..
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Josiah Quincy was an American politician and municipal reformer.
Background
Josiah Quincy was born on February 4, 1772 in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States. He was the only son of the young patriot leader known as Josiah Quincy, Jr. , 1744-1775, and his wife Abigail Phillips, sister of Lieutenant-Governor William Phillips. The Quincy family, after whom that part of Braintree where he was born was named (1792), had been merchants, councillors, and judges since the seventeenth century. His father died on the eve of the Revolution, leaving him, with property of more substantial nature, a set of Sidney and Locke, by whose precepts he was brought up, even to winter plunges in cold water at the age of three. At the age of six, he was sent to Phillips Academy, Andover, the boarding school founded by his mother's cousin, Samuel Phillips. There he spent eight years under a severe classical discipline.
Education
Entering Harvard, Josiah graduated first in the class of 1790. After three years' study in a law office, Quincy was admitted to the Boston bar, but having a sufficient fortune, he never practised law seriously.
Career
An oration at Boston, July 4, 1798, gave notice of political ambition, and in 1800 Josiah Quincy ran for Congress unsuccessfully. Shortly afterward he began contributing political satire, over the signature "Climenole, " to Dennie's Port Folio, and to the Monthly Anthology. He was reelected for three successive terms, he became the minority leader in Congress, opposing the Embargo and non-intercourse system as cowardly, futile, and unconstitutional. On January 14, 1811, he startled the country by a speech on the bill to admit Orleans Territory to the Union as the state of Louisiana. Two years later, in the Massachusetts legislature, he got this doctrine adopted in a set of resolutions. In the war Congress that convened in November 1811, Quincy made a grave tactical error. Assuming that the "war hawks" were insincere, that Madison was a pacifist, and that Congress "could not be kicked" into hostilities, he outdid the westerners in shouting for preparedness. Undoubtedly he was one of the Federalists who advised the British minister that his government maintain the anti-neutral system, in order to force war on the United States, when Republican incompetency would return the Federalists to power.
Early in 1812, seeing the true drift, he changed face completely, voting against the declaration of war, opposing war legislation, and advising "the monied interest" to lend no money to the government. This ended his usefulness in Congress and after denouncing the invasion of Canada as "cruel, wanton, senseless, and wicked, " and describing military glory as "the glory of the tiger, which lifts his jaws, all foul and bloody, from the bowels of his victim, and roars for his companions of the wood to come and witness his prowess and his spoils", he resigned, and returned happily home. As a "solid man of Boston" Quincy now engaged busily in the affairs of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Phillips Academy, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Attempting to make his Quincy estate a model farm, he set out hedges of imported English hawthorn, through which the hardy New England cows cheerfully ate their way; but his published lecture to New England farmers on the sins of wasting manure and subdividing land, was much needed.
In 1813 Quincy was elected to the state Senate, where he continued his campaign against the war, slave representation, and Southern dominance. When the General Court voted to thank Captain Lawrence for his naval victory, he proposed and carried a resolution that such a war, "waged without justifiable cause, and prosecuted in a manner indicating that conquest and ambition" were its purpose, should not be supported by "a moral and religious people". Quincy was always stronger with the people than with Federalist leaders. They found him too undisciplined and indiscreet. That is why he never received the nomination for governor, and was not sent to the Hartford Convention.
After the war was over, Quincy continued in the state Senate until 1820, when he was dropped from the Federalist slate for insurgency, but got elected to the lower house. When speaker in 1821, he resigned in order to accept a place on the Boston municipal bench. There he addressed the Suffolk grand jury on the condition of Massachusetts jails, where little children were confined with hardened criminals. That year Boston adopted the city form of government. Quincy, after losing the Federalist nomination for mayor, "bolted" and lost again, but his popular strength was great, and in 1823 he won.
He found his city being run like a colonial New England town, and vigorously applied the besom of reform. He gave Boston its first thorough street cleaning in two centuries.
First steps were taken to introduce municipal water and sewer systems, and to forbid burials in crowded districts. It was the Mayor's boast that during his administration the death rate fell from one in forty-two to one in sixty-three.
He segregated paupers from criminals, built a House of Reformation for Juvenile Offenders that won the admiration of Tocqueville, and attacked breeding-places of crime by revoking liquor licenses and vigorously enforcing the laws against gambling and prostitution. When a mob swept the feeble police force from the streets, Quincy summoned the draymen, and, putting himself at their head, dispersed the rioters by muscular force. He tore down a nest of tenements on the water front, put through six wide streets, filled pestilential tidal flats, and built the Quincy or New Faneuil Hall Market, the last providing substantial income to the city to this day. The volunteer fire companies were reorganized as a fire department, hose was substituted for buckets, and insurance rates were reduced twenty per cent. Like a Harun al-Rashid on horseback, Quincy galloped around Boston at daybreak to see for himself how his subjects did, and on one of these jaunts was arrested for riding so as to endanger the public.
Although he was five times reelected mayor (1823 - 1827), his reforms accumulated such opposition that in December 1828 he was defeated; but "his administration has formed a standard to which the efforts of his successors are continually referred". Largely on the strength of his name, his son Josiah and great-grandson Josiah were elected mayors of Boston. Now that the popular but unbusinesslike president of Harvard, John T. Kirkland had resigned, the Corporation seized the opportunity to obtain a president of proved practical ability.
Elected on January 29, 1829, Quincy was the first layman to occupy the office since John Leverett. This, coupled with the fact that he was a Unitarian, infuriated the Trinitarian Congregationalists, who redoubled their efforts to prove that the University was a centre of atheism, aristocracy, and dissipation. Quincy struck back vigorously in The History of Harvard University (1840), belaboring the Mathers and emphasizing the liberal traditions of the University. In spite of the haste with which it was composed, and the few printed sources then available, this work has lasted almost a century as the standard history of Harvard. After studying conditions and asking advice, Quincy inaugurated changes calculated to reform the spirit of disorder then prevalent among Harvard students. He improved the food and service in commons, trusting that if the students were served like gentlemen, they would behave as such; he broke an ancient tradition by addressing them as "Mr. ", also instituted a system of mathematical grading; and retained in his own hands all petty details of parietal administration, hoping to remove every source of misunderstanding and discontent.
But he did not go to the root of the trouble by providing athletic and other outlets for ebullient youthful spirits. Student riots continued, and Quincy destroyed what spirit of confidence he had established when, unable to get to the bottom of one outbreak, he violated a college tradition older than Harvard in announcing his intention of turning over to the grand jury, like common criminals, those suspected of destroying college property. On this occasion the students burned the President in effigy in the college yard, and in 1841 there was a terrific explosion in the chapel, where, after the smoke cleared away, "A bone for old Quin to pick" was found written on the wall.
His successor, Edward Everett, thought that Quincy had been too lenient. In his inaugural address, Quincy had urged the necessity of adjusting education to the age, but he seems to have had no clear ideas on undergraduate studies; he was not an educator, but an administrator, with a flair for choosing the right man. Among his appointees were Jared Sparks, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Benjamin Peirce. It was the faculty rather than the President that initiated an extension of the voluntary or elective system; but Quincy was warmly interested in the Law School, then functioning most feebly.
He became an ardent advocate of academic law teaching over the prevailing Anglo-American practice of apprenticeship; and with the bequest of Nathan Dane and the appointment of Justice Joseph Story, as Dane Professor in 1829, made that department into an academic professional school. After vain efforts to obtain a state appropriation for a new library building, on the ground that the college library of some 40, 000 volumes, "unrivalled in this country, " was in constant danger from fire, Quincy turned the Christopher Gore bequest to that purpose, and in 1841 Gore Hall, the most sumptuous American college library yet built, was opened. He launched the public subscription which provided the Astronomical Observatory.
During his sixteen years as president, the faculty, the endowment and the student body of the University greatly increased. Advancing age and the opportunity to secure Edward Everett as a successor led Quincy to resign on August 27, 1845. He resumed residence in Boston, humorously complaining that the unearthly quiet of city streets, in contrast to the turbulent college yard, kept him awake o' nights. Literary labors engrossed much of his time. Works such as Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Jun. , of Massachusetts (1825), The Journals of Mayor Samuel Shaw, With a Life of the Author (1847), The History of the Boston Athenæum (1851), A Municipal History of the Town and City of Boston (1852), a Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams (1858); and as a result of experiments at his Quincy estate, an Essay on the Soiling of Cattle (1852).
For twenty-three years Quincy had said nothing on politics in public, and to his dying day he refused to call himself anything but a Federalist. Whig protective tariffs revolted him. As the century entered its second half, he felt more and more that his early stand against the "slave power" had been correct. At the age of eighty-two, political pamphlets began to flow once more from his pen, denouncing the Fugitive-slave Law and Daniel Webster, supporting Frémont, but opposing the abolitionists as disunionists.
Unlike many Boston conservatives, he heartily supported Lincoln and the war, notably in his last public address, to the members of the Union Club, delivered in his ninety-second year. He died in Boston on July 1, 1864, happily confident that the Union which he had once so vigorously attacked, would be preserved.
Josiah Quincy was a member of Federalist Party. He had a distaste for the new West, for nationalism and for democracy.
Views
Quincy believed that it was far more important not to hamper Great Britain in her struggle against Napoleon, than to defend American rights on the high seas. He stood against the "slave power".
Personality
Josiah Quincy was tall and handsome, sociable and convivial, albeit an abstainer for medical reasons. He was a fine example of a cultured and aristocratic public servant, with the faults and virtues of his class, and a pungency and impetuosity all his own.
Interests
Josiah Quincy loved good conversations, good books, classical letters, and English culture.
Connections
Josiah Quincy proposed to Eliza Susan Morton, New York's famous young beauty, a week after her first meeting in 1794. They married on June 6, 1797, as a mentor to the lady, President of Princeton University Samuel Smith. They had two sons, Josiah and Edmund, and five daughters. With the ancestral fortune he was able to support the family estate at Quincy, and a mansion in Pearl St. , Boston, while still a young man.