It is perhaps impolite to compare a Massachusetts family tree to a banyan instead of the conventional elm, but no prowler among her old houses can come away without a feeling that almost everything in New England is related to almost everything else. Chicago glances over Boston’s shoulder and finds her reading the Monday Transcript’s genealogy page; Chicago howls with laughter and turns to Vanity Fair to see what is going on in New York. Boston is momentarily interrupted, doesn’t know quite what Chicago is laughing at, returns a well-bred smile of complete detachment, and plunges back into the genealogy page.
This business of keeping track of marriages and deaths, cousinships and children-by-the-second-wife is serious, though bred of no spirit of arrogance, no desire to find a coat of arms for the door of the new town-car. There is brisk mental exercise in chasing an obscure ancestor to his lair and finding that he was what you thought he was when you started out, and not his own grand-nephew-twice-removed. Further, reasons Boston, unless you know to whom a person is related, how can you know to whom that person is related? By this sound process of logic a personal news item in a Boston newspaper worth six agate lines of white paper is so interestingly overgrown with eighteen or twenty lines of genealogical wistaria that the outsider has some trouble peering through the vines to the item itself. He will never understand the irrelevant matter until he understands that it is not irrelevant, that the ever-present landmarks of tradition are bristling with precedents, and that the respect for those precedents is so congenital that they guide the footsteps of New Englanders more than even New Englanders suspect.A
If the foreigner from beyond the Hudson or the Delaware or the Mississippi will do himself the favor of visiting the Quincy house, he will sense the point, and be paid in full measure by the contemplation of a house with a varied and engaging story.
It began life as a Puritan farmstead, by a brookside in the town of Braintree. Sixteen years after the first settlement at Plymouth, and therefore nearly three centuries ago, William Coddington built three rooms on a kitchen. Bigoted public opinion soon broke up the trio of liberals who used to sit and talk free worship before the great fireplace in that kitchen—Coddington fled, Sir Harry Vane went other ways, and Anne Hutchinson was banished from the colony. Edmund Quincy, the new owner, came out from Boston, with a retinue of six servants. Such a staff was a rare luxury in those ascetic days. It is partially explained by the fact that in an age of large families Edmund Quincy’s was no exception, and four children wanted a lot of looking after. He enlarged the house to accommodate his growing tribe, and about 1685 gave up the Coddington structure to his slaves, while he built a new house a few rods away. (It was this Edmund’s sister who married the master of the Mint, John Hull; he named Point Judith after her, and their daughter Hannah was the maiden who was given in marriage with a dowry of her weight in pine-tree shillings—one hundred and twenty-five pounds avoirdupois and five hundred sterling.)
Another Edmund, the third of the American line and the second in possession of the estate on Quincy Brook, fell heir to it when his father died in 1698. Through his grandmother Edmund was already related to the line which was presently to bring forth John Adams. His thirteen brothers and sisters and numerous cousins connected him by marriage with nearly all the families of the settlement, and out of one of those ceremonies is left to us a glimpse of tragedy: Judge Sewall records in his diary that just after “Cousin Daniel” was being married to Mrs. Shepard, when the guests were singing in the hall, one of them dropped dead. Her body was carried to the room which was to have been the bride’s, “the Bridegroom and Bride ... going away like Persons put to flight in Battel” to spend their honeymoon at a neighbor’s house.
Edmund the Third was a man not only of fortune but of discrimination, which he showed by marrying Dorothy Flynt—the first “Dorothy Q.” In 1706 he invited the whole countryside to the estate by the brook, and around and above the old Coddington house the whole corps of neighbors, abetted by hard cider, raised the huge timbers of a new mansion, the one which stands there today restored to its full dignity. It was a suitable dwelling for a man of eminence in the colony, a man big enough to quarrel with Benning Wentworth over the boundary of New Hampshire. On the rear of the new home he built an extension containing a bedroom and a study, where “Tutor” Flynt, Mrs. Quincy’s brother, could find rest from his duties in Harvard College, and there Tutor Flynt spent most of a crusty, tobacco-perfumed bachelor life as a sort of paying guest, driving down to Braintree from Cambridge in a calèche for week-ends and the longer holidays. (Tutor Flynt, by the way, is the earliest recorded user of the “If-you-are-going-to-Heaven-I-don’t-want-to-go-there” joke, though genuine research would doubtless reveal that Shem made the same remark to Japheth one afternoon when the Ark lay becalmed.)
The light of the household was Dorothy Q, and the source of her radiance was her family of growing children. Three of them claim our attention: Edmund (the Fourth), who inherited the Homestead; Josiah (the first of a series of notable Josiahs); and a second Dorothy, whom her grandson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, described in this way:
“O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q!
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring,—
All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
Mother and sister and child and wife
And joy and sorrow and death and life!
“What if a hundred years ago
Those close-shut lips had answered No,
When forth the tremulous question came
That cost the maiden her Norman name
Should I be I, or would it be
One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?”
Dorothy Q the Second was a dear child, carrying at fifteen the cares of the household, and apparently pointed down the path of a winsome spinsterhood. But within a few weeks, in the summer of 1737, her grandmother, her mother, and then her father died, and she married Edward Jackson and went to live in Boston, where her husband was a ship-owner in partnership with her brother Josiah.
One of their vessels, the Bethell, with thirty-seven men and fourteen guns, fell in with the Jesus Maria and Joseph, a Spaniard with 110 men and twenty-six guns. The Bethell’s skipper gambled on the gathering twilight, set up six wooden dummy guns, hung sailors’ caps and hats in the rigging to suggest a numerous crew, and then demanded the Spaniard’s surrender. Down came her ensign! The Spanish crew was set ashore at Fayal, and the Bethell brought back to Josiah and Dorothy one-hundred-and-sixty-one chests of silver, and two of Spanish gold.
With the prize money safely banked, Josiah was able to retire from business at the age of forty. He moved to Braintree, taking up his residence in the Hancock parsonage, across the way from the Homestead. Brother Edmund, the lantern-jawed parson, who had been living in Boston and spending his summers in Braintree, moved to the Homestead in his turn, lost most of his share of the prize money in artless speculation, and turned to farming.
Life in the two families presented diversion aplenty—most of the eligible young men of Boston and Braintree were courting Edmund’s five daughters. A sober young man named John Adams was running perilously close to the charms of Hannah, Josiah’s daughter. He was a marked man when her cousins, Esther and Susan, suddenly “broke in upon Hannah and me and interrupted a conversation that would have terminated in a courtship that would have terminated in a marriage which might have depressed me to absolute poverty and obscurity to the end of my life.” He veered, took a deep breath, went away from there, and two years later was married to Abigail Smith, who alone of American women was the wife and the mother of an American president. Important guests occasionally penetrated the swarm of suitors—such men as Admiral Warren and Sir William Pepperrell, the heroes of Louisburg; or Benjamin Franklin, who sent Squire Quincy cuttings of Rhenish grapevines and a new stove which he had invented; or Sir Harry Frankland, who gave the Squire a fine pear-sapling—the same Sir Harry who married Agnes Surriage, whom he had first seen barefoot, scrubbing floors in a tavern in Marblehead.
And the youngest of all was Dorothy Q the Third, with four big brothers and three boy cousins to pay her court, and four elder sisters to study. Through all the bitter period that followed the Boston Massacre, when her cousin Josiah Junior and John Adams were defending the British captain, and her cousin Samuel was appearing for the Crown, Dorothy Q was on the fringe of the excitement, coquetting with all of the earnest youths who were polishing their arms, but engaging in entangling alliance with none. Not until she was twenty-seven did she make her choice, and then it was John Hancock, the chief figure of pre-revolutionary days in Boston, a vigorous patriot who defied the Crown and became a member of the Committee of Safety. Most of the winter of 1774–75 she spent with his aunt in the Hancock mansion, where came Revere, and Warren, and Samuel and John Adams. By March of ’75 she was back in Quincy, gathering her trousseau, and superintending the application of a new French wall-paper to the walls of the north parlor, where a company of conventional blue Venuses and Cupids, garlanded with delicate flowers, was to preside over the wedding ceremony. The untroubled Homestead presented a strong contrast to the one she had left in Boston: a loyalist rabble stormed the Hancock house, tore down the fence, broke the windows and wrecked the coach-house, and the prospective bridegroom, threatened with arrest, was obliged to escape with little dignity and all possible speed.
He turned up at Concord for the meeting of the Provincial Congress on April 15, and after its adjournment he was joined by Dorothy, Madame Hancock and Samuel Adams at the Rev. Jonas Clark’s house in Lexington. Quietly, in the evening of the eighteenth, British troops assembled in Boston for a march to destroy the stores at Concord. As quietly, Paul Revere rowed across the mouth of the river to Charlestown, slipped by the guard, and rode hell-bent into the sleeping country. He pulled up at the Clark parsonage and called for Adams and Hancock. “Don’t make so much noise,” said a minute-man on guard. “Noise!” shouted Revere, “You’ll have noise enough before long—the regulars are coming!”—and he delivered Joseph Warren’s warning to Adams and Hancock to get out of the neighborhood at once. Against their will they fled to Woburn, while Dorothy slept no more that night. At dawn she saw Pitcairn and his scarlet column tramp to the Lexington common and set fire to the Revolution. Then she joined her lover in Woburn, and when he tried to forbid her to go back to Boston, the strain of a sleepless night and the horrors of the day broke the bridle on her tongue and she tossed her head and retorted: “Recollect, Mr. Hancock, I am not under your control yet. I shall go to my father tomorrow!”
Having spoken her mind, she exercised a woman’s privilege in changing it—and did almost as he had asked: set out at once for a safe refuge at Fairfield in Connecticut.
She was still somewhat piqued. She found at Fairfield, in the person of her host’s nephew, an eager listener to her narrative of the skirmish at Lexington—a Princeton graduate who was studying law. He probably gained her confidence at once by asking her just what she thought he ought to do, and by offering to join the colors for her sake. Aaron Burr was very accomplished at that sort of thing, and considered it good exercise, for he was carrying on two other affairs and an anonymous sentimental correspondence at the same time. To Hancock’s affectionate letter from Philadelphia Dorothy made no reply. For the peace offering of silk stockings he sent her she said not even “thank-you.” Then either Madame Hancock or Dorothy’s own conscience stepped in and settled the quarrel. Burr left for Cambridge to enlist, and Hancock came to Fairfield and married the lady.
They took up their home in Boston on the heels of the British evacuation, and until Hancock went back to Braintree to die in 1793 her life was a brilliant panorama of illustrious society. When Washington came to Boston in 1789, Hancock, who was governor of the Commonwealth, invited him to be a guest in the fine house on Beacon Street opposite the Common. Washington declined and the governor offered him an invitation to dinner. On the assumption that within his own state a governor’s position was sovereign to that of the President, he did not call upon Washington before dinner. The hour came, but no President, and Hancock sent a messenger to apologize to Washington for not having paid his respects, and to plead that sudden illness prevented. Washington guessed that the illness was sour-grape poisoning and ate his dinner at home. Later in the evening the lieutenant-governor and two councilmen appeared to repeat Hancock’s apology. “I informed them,” Washington writes in his diary, “that I should not see the governor except at my own lodgings.” The next day Hancock bent his stiff neck to the president, apologized, and the two became friends again.
The Squire had long since sold his rights in the old Homestead, though the family continued to occupy it until his death in 1788. It passed successively through the families of Black, Greenleaf, and Woodward, and then into the hands of the town of Quincy, which was now formally detached from Braintree. For thirty years it was held by the town as part of a trust fund Ebenezer Woodward left to found a girl’s academy to match the boy’s school started by John Adams.
Even before the Squire’s family had dispersed from the house, its earlier liveliness was somewhat dimmed by the crescent line of able Quincys in another Quincy house built by the first Josiah, and now known as the “later Quincy Mansion.” From its windows he recorded the sailing of the British from Boston in 1775; from those windows his children saw the Constitution sail in victorious over the Guerriere. There lived Josiah the Second, agent of the provincials at London, who died off Marblehead as the firing at Lexington began, while his wife and the third Josiah were fleeing from a threatened naval attack on Braintree. Josiah the Third grew up to be mayor of Boston and president of Harvard, and if no other distinction remained to him except this passage from his speech in Congress on the embargo in 1808, it would be a proud enough monument for any American:
“But I shall be told, ‘This may lead to war.’ I ask, ‘Are we now at peace?’ Certainly not, unless retiring from insult be peace—unless shrinking under the lash be peace. The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it. The idea that nothing on earth is so dreadful as war is inculcated too studiously among us. Disgrace is worse. Abandonment of essential rights is worse.”
Is it any wonder that Daniel Webster, Lafayette, and the Adamses, father and son, came often to the home of Josiah, or that, given his heredity and achievement, he had such sons as Josiah the Fourth, another mayor of Boston and an able economist, and Edmund, the stanch abolitionist?
The older house by the brook was leading a humble and retired old age when the Colonial Dames took over its custody. Their restoration not only has made the utmost of the material they found, but has brought to the house a collection of articles which are uniformly good and are in some instances rare and beautiful. The long hall has tall spotless wainscoting and hunting paper, a carven balustrade and newel post; in a low-studded dining-room a set of 1770 Dutch chairs surrounds an Empire table, in a corner stands a buffet whose builder died a century and a half ago; at the fireplace are Delft tiles nearly as aged as the fireplace itself, and there is an odd Chinese paper on the walls. In the parlor is the Venus-and-Cupid paper hung for Dorothy Q’s wedding, in the window frames is glass made by a Quincy in the first glassworks in America. You may read in one of those panes the initials “J H” as you may find the writer’s full name on the Declaration of Independence, and in the pane below, in the same hand, “You I love, and you alone.” You will be interested in Tutor Flynt’s bed, built in a recess of the brookside bedroom. You may be mildly thrilled by the Indian-proof shutters, mystified by the secret staircase which follows the course of the chimney, and delighted with the kitchen William Coddington built, with its eight-inch beams, Dutch oven, churn, spinning-wheel, and a musket over the mantel for inviting Indians to dinner.
There are ever so many things in the house today to call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath. Take away its Hoars, Lowells, Holmeses, Adamses, Wendells, Hancocks, Sewalls—to mention only a few of the Quincy connections—and you have left hardly enough to make a Monday Transcript.
And yet their generic importance was the least of their concerns. “Could I ever suppose,” wrote John Adams, “that family pride were in any way excusable, I should think a descent from a line of vigorous independent New England farmers for a hundred years was a better foundation for it than a descent through royal or noble scoundrels ever since the flood.”