American lawyer and author, son of Josiah Quincy, Jr. (1744–1775); born in Boston on the 4th of February 1772. He studied at Phillips Academy, Andover, graduated at Harvard in 1790, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1793, but was never a prominent advocate. He became a leader of the Federalist party in Massachusetts; was an unsuccessful candidate for the national House of Representatives in 1800; served in the Massachusetts Senate in 1804–5; and was a member in 1805–13 of the national House of Representatives, where he was one of the small Federalist minority. He attempted to secure the exemption of fishing vessels from the Embargo Act, urged the strengthening of the American navy, and vigorously opposed the erection of Orleans Territory (LA) into a state in 1811, and stated as his “deliberate opinion, that if this bill passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that the States that compose it are free from their moral obligations to maintain it; 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.” This is probably “the first assertion of the right of secession on the floor of Congress.” Quincy left Congress because he saw that the Federalist opposition was useless, and thereafter was a member of the Massachusetts Senate until 1820; in 1821–22 he was a member and speaker of the state House of Representatives, from which he resigned to become judge of the municipal court of Boston. In 1823–28 he was mayor of Boston, and in his term Faneuil Hall Market House was built, the fire and police departments were reorganized, and the city’s care of the poor was systematized. In 1829–1845 he was president of Harvard College, of which he had been an overseer since 1810, when the board was reorganized; he has been called “the great organizer of the university”: he gave an elective (or “voluntary”) system an elaborate trial; introduced a system of marking (on the scale of 8) on which college rank and honours, formerly rather carelessly assigned, were based; first used courts of law to punish students who destroyed or injured college property; and helped to reform the finances of the university. During his term Dane Hall (for law) was dedicated, Gore Hall was built, and the Astronomical Observatory was equipped. His last years were spent principally on his farm in Quincy, where he died on the 1st of July 1864.
He wrote a Memoir of his father (1825); a History of Harvard University (2 vols., 1840), marred by a tendency to belittle the clerical régime; The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw (1847); The History of the Boston Athenæum (1851); The Municipal History of the Town and City of Boston (1852); a Memoir of the Life of J. Q. Adams (1858); and Essays on the Soiling of Cattle (1859), only one of his many practical contributions to agriculture. See Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy (Boston, 1867). See also “The Struggle for Patronage,” “Southern Rule in the North,” “The Witchcraft Excitement and the Mathers”; Literary Criticism.
