Q: Quincy through Quinn

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


QUINCY, Edmund, 1808-1877, author, anti-slavery writer.  Stirred by the murder of the abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy [q.v.], by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, he became an active Garrisonian abolitionist. In 1837 he became a member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was corresponding secretary from 1844 to 1853; and in 1838 he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was vice-president in 1853 and 1856-59.

(Mabee, 1970, pp. 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 80, 200, 224, 248, 250, 255, 256, 257, 260, 262, 297, 313; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, p. 153; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 306). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 306:

QUINCY, EDMUND (February 1, 1808-May 17, 1877), reformer and author, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the second son of Josiah Quincy, 1772- 1864 [q.v.], member of Congress, mayor of Boston (1823-28), and president of Harvard, and of Eliza Susan (Morton) Quincy. After preparation for college at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, 1817-23, he entered Harvard College, graduating with high honors in 1827 and receiving a master's degree in 1830. On October 14, 1833, he married Lucilla P. Parker.

Stirred by the murder of the abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy [q.v.], by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, Quincy shocked the aristocratic, lettered class to which he belonged by becoming an active Garrisonian abolitionist. In 1837 he became a member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was corresponding secretary from 1844 to 1853; and in 1838 he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was vice-president in 1853 and 185&- 59. A prominent member of the Non-Resistance Society, formed in 1839, he abjured all recourse to force in resisting evil, renounced all allegiance to human government, and, in the interests of abolition, agitated disunion between the North and the South. He was associated with William Lloyd Garrison and Maria Wes ton Chapman [qq.v.] in conducting the Non-Resistant, a paper which gave expression to these doctrines from 1839 to 1842. In 1839 he also became an editor of the Abolitionist, an organ of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and from 1839 to 1856 was a chief contributor to the Liberty Bell, edited by Mrs.. Chapman for the annual Boston anti-slavery fairs. In 1844 he became an editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard, the journal of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He also frequently conducted the Liberator, as in 1843, 1846, and 1847, when its editor, Garrison, was absent. In addition to his work for these journals he contributed to the New York Tribune, the Albany Transcript, the Independent, and others, and his trenchant writings on slavery, called by Lowell "gems of Flemish art" (J. P. Quincy, post, p. 414), if collected, would make many volumes and furnish a valuable contribution to the history of the anti-slavery struggle. Apart from his activities as an abolitionist, Quincy was also well known among literary people as a writer of fiction and biography. His Wensley, a Story without a Moral (1854; reprinted in Wensley and Other Stories, 1885), a sympathetic study of early American society, reveals a cultivated mind, a genial humor, and a graceful style, and was called by Whittier "the most readable book of the kind since Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance" (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1 series XV, 283). In The Haunted Adjutant and Other Stories (1885) are collected some of his best short stories. With the help of his sister, Eliza Susan Quincy, he wrote an excellent biography of his father, Life of Josiah Quincy (1867), and edited Speeches Delivered in the Congress of the United States: by Josiah Quincy (1874). He was also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recording secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard College. In spite of the strenuous participation in active life which his devotion to the abolitionist cause entailed, he remained to the end the old-fashioned scholar and gentleman, his exalted and uncompromising idealism being tempered by wit and humor, friendliness and simplicity, cultivation and refinement.

[Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (3 volumes, 1872-77); J.P. Quincy, "Edmund Quincy," Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 2 series XVIII (1905); W. P. and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison (4 volumes, 1885-89); Later Years of the Saturday Club (1927), ed. by M.A. DeWolfe Howe; J. L. Chamberlain, Universities and Their Sons: Harvard University (1900); Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 1 ser. XV (1878); New-England Historical and Genealogical Register, January 1857; Nation (New York), May 24, 31, 1877; E. E. Salisbury, Family Memorials (1885), volume I; Boston Transcript, May 18, 1877.]

A. R. B.


QUINCY, Josiah, 1772-1864, statesman.  U.S. Congressman from Massachusetts.  Opposed slavery as Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 151-152; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 308; Bruns, 1977, pp. 222-223; Locke, 1901, pp. 93, 132, 152; Mabee, 1970, p. 75; Mason, 2006, pp. 46, 53, 64, 66-70, 73, 85, 146, 190, 216-217, 256n65, 257n82; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 37)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 308:

QUINCY, JOSIAH (February 4, 1772-July 1, 1864), politician, municipal reformer, and college president, was the only son of the young patriot leader known as Josiah Quincy, Jr., 1744-1775 [q.v.], and his wife Abigail Phillips, sister of Lieut-Governor William Phillips [q.v.]. The Quincy family (pronounced Quinzy), 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. When six years old, he was sent to Phillips Academy, Andover, the boarding school founded by his mother's cousin, Samuel Phillips [q.v.]. There he spent eight years under a severe classical discipline. Entering Harvard, he graduated first in the class of 1790. After three years' study in a h-.w office, Quincy was admitted to the Boston bar; but having a sufficient fortune, he never practised, law seriously. He was tall and hand, some, sociable and convivial; albeit an abstainer for medical reasons. The first of the many impetuous actions that marked his life was proposing to Eliza Susan Morton, a famous young beauty of New York, a week after he first met her, in 1794. They were married, on June 6, 1797, by the lady's tutor; President Samuel Smith of Princeton, who had conferred a master's degree on Quincy in 1796. Two sons, Josiah and Edmund [q.v.], and five daughters were born to them. 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.

Like most members of his class in eastern Massachusetts, Quincy accepted the Federalist party without question. An oration at Boston, July 4, 1798, gave notice of political ambition, and in 1800 he 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. Elected to the state Senate in 1804, he supported the "Ely Amendment" to abolish slave representation as provided for in the federal Constitution, striking the sectional keynote that his party followed during the next ten years; and that fall he was elected to Congress from the Boston di strict. At Washington he found a congenial friend in John Randolph of Roanoke [q.v.]. The two understood each other perfectly. They had in common a distaste for the new West, for nationalism, and for democracy; a love of good conversation, good books, classical letters, and English culture. Each was passionately devoted to his native soil, and a liberal in religion; a colonial whig, born too late.

Quincy believed that it was far more important not to hamper Great Britain in her struggle against Na pol eon, than to defend American rights on the high seas. 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, 18n, he startled the country by a speech on the bill to admit Orleans Territory to the Union as the state of Louisiana. If a territory from outside the original Union is admitted by majority vote, without the consent of the original partners, "I am compelled," he said, " to declare it as my deliberate opinion that, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some to prepare definitely for a separation-amicably, if they can; violently, if they must" (Edmund Quincy, Speeches, post, p. 196) . Two years later; in the Massachusetts legislature, he got this doctrine adopted in a set of resolutions (H. V. Ames, State Documents on Federal Relations, 1900, pp. 65-68).

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 th e 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 (S. E. Morison, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, 1913, II, pp. 33- 35). 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 (Washburn MSS., post, XVIII, 11). 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" (January 5, 1813, Edmund Quincy, Speeches, pp. 366, 372), 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 (An Address Delivered before the Massachusetts Agricultural Society, October 12, 1819, 1819). 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" (Edmund Quincy, Life, p. 324). 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 (Remarks on Some of the Provisions of the Laws of Massachusetts, Affecting Poverty, Vice, and Crime, 1822).

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 (An Address to the Board of Aldermen, January 1, 1828, 1828). He segregated paupers from criminals, built a House of Reformation for Juvenile Offenders that won the admiration of Tocqueville (Life, p. 395), 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 (1823-27), 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" (Winsor, post, III, 226). 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 [q.v.] 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 [q.v.]. 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 (2 volumes, 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."; 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 (M. T. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1914, p. 30). His successor, Edward Everett, thought that Quincy had been too lenient.

In his inaugural address (MS., University Archives), 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 [qq.v.]. 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 [q.v.] and the appointment of Justice Joseph Story [q.v.], as Dane Profess or 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 (Seventh Annual Report of the President of Harvard University, 1833, pp. 4-6), 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 [q. v.] 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 The Journals of Mayor Samuel Shaw, ... With a Life of the Author (1847), The History of the Boston Athenaeum (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). Earlier he had published a Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Jun., of Massachusetts (1825).

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; and 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 Fremont, 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 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. These individual qualities unsuited him for party politics; but in a position of responsibility and quasi-autocratic power, like the Boston mayoralty and the Harvard presidency, he was really great.,

[A portrait of Quincy as mayor, by Gilbert Stuart, is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Quincy family papers have disappeared (except for a few MSS. in the possession of M. A. DeWolfe Howe, and one volume of letters, the Washburn MSS., volume XVIII, at the Massachusetts Historical Society) since they were used in the filial biography, Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy (1867, and later editions). There are shorter memoirs by C. M. Fuess, in Men of Andover (1928); by James Walker, "Memoir of Josiah Quincy," in Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, IX (1867), pp. 83-156, and separately printed (1867). About fifty of Quincy's speeches were printed in pamphlet form, and his son Edmund published Speeches Delivered in the Congress of the U.S. by Josiah Quincy ... 1805-1813 (1874). His annual addresses to the Board of Aldermen throw much light upon municipal affairs, but his annual reports as president of Harvard are disappointing; perhaps the best comment on college studies during his administration is found in Annual Report of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, 1883-84 (1885). But there is much pamphlet and archival material on his Harvard career. For portraits and statues, see Justin Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston, III (1881), p. 227 n. A drawing by his daughter Eliza Susan of his house at Wollaston in Quincy is reproduced in his son Josiah Quincy's Figures of the Past, ed. by M.A. De W. Howe (1926), p. 134.]

S. E.M.


QUINN, William Paul, 1788-1873, African American, leader of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, clergyman.  Actively supported abolition and anti-slavery movements. Also associated with Black emigrationist movements. (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 9, p. 302)



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.