Josiah Quincy

• Born: February 4, 1772
• Birthplace: Braintree, Massachusetts
• Died: July 1, 1864
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Federalist politician, municipal reformer, and college president, Josiah Quincy was born in Braintree (later Quincy), Massachusetts, the only son of the prominent pre-revolutionary patriot Josiah Quincy Jr. Members of the Quincy family had been merchants, councillors, and judges in Massachusetts since the seventeenth century. His mother, Abigail (Phillips) Quincy, was the daughter of one of Boston’s leading merchants, William Phillips.

Quincy began his formal education at age six, when, despite his mother’s objections, his grandfather sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a school that had been established by his mother’s cousin, Samuel Phillips Jr., with the financial backing of the Phillips family. Staunch Presbyterians, the Phillips clan hoped to maintain at Andover a more proper Calvinist atmosphere than could be maintained in Boston. There, young Quincy received stern, well-disciplined Calvinist training and a strong classical education. Reacting against the school’s religious orthodoxy, he found Unitarian views more appealing in his later life.

After eight years in Andover, Quincy entered Harvard, graduating first in the class of 1790 and developing the speaking ability that marked him as one of Boston’s greatest orators. He studied law for three years in a Boston law office and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, but he never seriously practiced. Instead, he devoted himself to various intellectual pursuits as a founder of the Society for the Study of Natural Philosophy and a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In New York City in June 1797 Quincy married Eliza Susan Morton, eldest daughter of New York merchant John Morton. The couple, whose marriage endured for fifty-three years, had seven children, two sons and five daughters. After placing the family finances on a solid footing by developing the ancestral farm at Braintree and investing in successful real-estate and transportation ventures, Quincy entered politics as a Federalist. Elected to Congress in 1804 after brief service in the state senate, he played the role of opposition politician in Congress from 1805 to 1813. Unlike most Federalists, he saw politics as a profession rather than a duty or hobby, and sought to counter the Democratic party organization by improving Federalist organization and offering more effective competition for popular favor. Nevertheless, he remained fundamentally hostile to the democratic tendencies of his age.

Staunchly partisan, though often defiant of party discipline, Quincy continued to identify himself as a Federalist as late as 1861, long after the party had ceased to exist. In Congress he was antiexpansionist and antislavery. He attacked the Louisiana Purchase as a danger to the Union and began his lifelong opposition to the “slave power” and southern dominance of Congress. He condemned as unconstitutional President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo and nonintercourse policies against the British. In 1811, as relations with Britain and France degenerated, he sought to counter the Federalists’ image as British lackeys and to call the bluff of the James Madison administration by joining the public clamor for military preparedness. In so doing, he may well have contributed to the outbreak of war.

However, early in 1812, Quincy realized his mistake and reversed his attitude, assuming a strong antiwar position. He voted against the declaration of war on Great Britain, opposed all war legislation, and advised the “monied interest” to lend no money to the government. The outbreak of the War of 1812 ended his congressional career. He refused to stand for reelection and returned to Massachusetts, where he continued to campaign against the war. Issues of peace and war were to recur often during his long life. In 1820 he delivered a magnificent speech before the Massachusetts Peace Society attacking war and promoting peaceful settlement of international disputes; it so impressed Charles Sumner as a boy that he credited it with influencing his own later antiwar views. Nevertheless, Quincy’s opposition to war was primarily political, and at the end of his life he supported the Civil War.

Neither Quincy’s service in the Massachusetts Senate from 1813 to 1820 nor his business and intellectual pursuits sufficiently occupied his time, and he decided to turn his Braintree estate into a model farm. Seeking to buttress New England agriculture and stem the turn toward industrialization, he published numerous articles on scientific agriculture. His efforts were undercut by the fact that his own farm was proving so unprofitable as to jeopardize temporarily his own financial position.

Demotion to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1820 after being dropped for reelection to the Senate by the Federalists for insurgency opened entirely new fields of interest to Quincy. During the 1820 session the Massachusetts legislature began grappling for the first time with the social implications of industrialization and urbanization. The session opened with a speech by Governor John Brooks emphasizing the mounting problem of crime and pauperism and the rising cost of public relief. Quincy’s bill for creating a legislative committee to survey the condition of the poor and determine how the various Massachusetts towns handled their relief was promptly approved, and Quincy was appointed chairman. This gave him a new lease on public life and shaped his subsequent career.

In 1821 Quincy filed his Report of the Committee for Consideration of Pauper Laws in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the first comprehensive survey of the methods of state poor relief. The report urged the end of public outdoor (community-based) relief, insisting that the poor be rehabilitated in institutions in which temptations to vice could be eliminated and behavior could be controlled by appropriate rewards and punishments. Community-based relief was depicted as robbing the poor of initiative and promoting idleness and dependence. Along with the similar Yates report undertaken in New York in 1824, the Quincy report contributed to the development of the almshouse as the prevailing mode of assistance to the poor in the Jacksonian era. Quincy’s report also led to his being asked to head a Boston committee on the feasibility of a “house of industry” in which able-bodied paupers would be put to work. After he filed a series of reports recommending such a project, Quincy was appointed by the city of Boston to oversee construction of the building. These activities, together with the publication in 1822 of his Remarks… Affecting Poverty, Vice, and Crime, marked his emergence as one of the most knowledgeable experts of the day on the social problems of the Industrial Revolution.

Although he was now easily reelected as speaker of the Massachusetts House, Quincy’s involvement with the House of Industry project had turned his attention to another social problem, the administration of criminal justice; he resigned from the legislature to assume the less prestigious position of judge of the Municipal Court of Boston in 1822. However, when the newly created office of mayor of Boston opened up that year, he determined to run. Although unsuccessful in 1822, he easily won the post in 1823.

Serving as mayor until 1827, he instituted a program of municipal improvement and reform that included Boston’s first thorough street cleaning in two centuries, introduction of a municipal water and sewerage system, and a ban on burial in crowded districts. Such measures led during his administration to a drop in the town’s death rate from 1 in 42 to 1 in 63. Quincy’s reorganization of the volunteer fire companies into a fire department and substitution of hoses for buckets caused fire insurance premiums to drop twenty percent. Attacking the breeding places of crime, Quincy also built a House of Reformation for Juvenile Offenders to prevent the incarceration of young people in the same prisons as older criminals; drastically reduced the number of liquor licenses; and vigorously enforced laws against gambling and prostitution. Quincy is best known today as the builder of the Quincy Market (New Faneuil Hall Market), Boston’s first publicly financed urban-renewal project, which not only ended congestion at the public market but also contributed substantial income to the city. Continuing his opposition to outdoor poor relief, Quincy promoted use of the newly built Boston House of Industry, or workhouse, instead.

After five successive victories, Quincy was defeated in the election of 1828. Opposition to his administrative centralization and autocratic ways had long been building, and the mayor’s decision to close the recently opened High School for Girls on financial grounds exposed the privately educated Quincy to charges of elitism. Such criticisms, together with the baiting of the aristocracy already occurring in the Boston press as part of the presidential campaign for Andrew Jackson, led to his electoral defeat.

Abandoning public office, in 1829 Quincy assumed the presidency of Harvard College, then suffering declining enrollments and diminishing financial support because it was widely perceived as a center of atheism, aristocracy, and dissipation. As president, he evinced many of the same centralizing and autocratic tendencies that he had displayed as mayor of Boston, but he inaugurated changes calculated to reform the prevailing spirit of disorder. Some changes, such as the improvement of food and service in the commons and the requirement that students be addressed as “Mr.,” were predicated on the assumption that if students were treated as gentlemen they would behave accordingly. Nevertheless, Quincy generally took a hard line on disciplinary matters and violated long-standing college tradition by announcing his intention to turn over to the grand jury as common criminals any student suspected of destroying college property. Although sometimes successful, such tactics made him unpopular with the students and contributed to the outbreak of a student rebellion in 1834.

Quincy also introduced at Harvard standardized numerical grading procedures; after initial reluctance, he backed proposals to introduce elective courses. He sought to attract able scholars to the college, turned Harvard Law School into an academic professional school, and established an astronomical observatory. In 1840 Quincy also produced a two-volume work entitled History of Harvard College, which was written in part to offset the efforts of orthodox Congregationalists to impose their views on the college, and which had as a central theme the gradual divestment of Harvard from its original sectarian purposes and the adoption of the ideal of disinterested scholarship.

Retiring in 1845 at the age of seventy-three, Quincy again turned to agricultural and literary endeavors. At eighty-two he reentered the public arena. Renewing his stand against the “slave power,” he sided with the Free Soil Movement, supported the 1856 presidential candidacy of John C. Fremont, and wrote pamphlets denouncing the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and the compromise measures of Daniel Webster. His last public address, given at the Union Club in 1863, supported President Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. Although his support for the Civil War was initially motivated more by a desire to defeat the “slave power” than to end slavery, by the end of his life Quincy had come to regard emancipation as the only goal that could possibly justify the human cost of the war. He died in Boston at ninety-two.

Quincy’s role as a reformer in many spheres was predominantly conservative in motivation and manifested an attempt to impose on the turbulent nineteenth century such eighteenth-century values as order, efficiency, cleanliness, respect for science and reason, and centralized authority. For this reason he is often referred to as the “last Federalist.”

The Quincy family remained prominent in the intellectual, political, and social circles of Massachusetts. Quincy’s son and great-grandson, both named Josiah Quincy, also served as mayors of Boston, and his son Edmund became a prominent abolitionist.

Quincy’s principal writings include Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Jun., of Massachusetts (1825); History of Harvard College (1840); History of the Boston Athenaeum (1851); A Municipal History of the Town and City of Boston (1852); Essay on the Soiling of Cattle (1852); and Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams (1858). About 50 of Quincy’s speeches were printed in pamphlet form, and many were published by his son Edmund as Speeches Delivered in the Congress of the U.S.: by Josiah Quincy… 1805-1813 (1874). For municipal affairs Quincy’s annual addresses as mayor to the Board of Aldermen are most useful. Recent writings on Josiah Quincy and his family include R. A. McCaughey. Josiah Quincy 1772-1864: The Last Federalist (1974) and M. M. Hilden, The Mayors Josiah Quincy of Boston (1970). Also important are treatments of Quincy by D. J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971) and D. H. Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in Jeffersonian Democracy (1965). Earlier sources include E. Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts (1867) and the Dictionary of American Biography (1935). The following obituaries and memorials appeared: New-York Daily Tribune, July 4, 1864; Boston Journal, July 4, 1864; Boston Daily Advertiser, July 20, 1864; Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, vol. 7 (1863-64) and vol. 9 (1867), and Proceedings of the City Council on the Occasion of the Death of Josiah Quincy (1864).

Bibliography

"Josiah Quincy's Argument for the Defense: 3 December 1770." Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/05-03-02-0001-0004-0015. Accessed 22 Nov. 2023.

Malcolm, Joyce Lee. The Times That Try Men's Souls: The Adams, the Quincys, and the Battle for Loyalty in the American Revolution.. New York: Pegasus Books, 2023.

"Quincy, Josiah, 1859-1919." City of Boston Archives, archives.boston.gov/agents/people/118. Accessed 22 Nov. 2023.