American patriot, son of Josiah Quincy (1709–1784); born in Boston on the 23rd of February 1744. He was a descendant of Edmund Quincy, who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1633, and received in 1636 a grant of land at Mount Wollaston, or Merry Mount, afterwards a part of Braintree and now Quincy. He graduated at Harvard in 1763, and studied law in the office of Oxenbridge Thacher (d. 1765), to whose large practice he succeeded. In 1767 Quincy contributed to the Boston Gazette two bold papers, signed “Hyperion,” declaiming against British oppression; they were followed by a third in September 1768; and on the 12th of February 1770 he published in the Gazette a call to his countrymen to break off all social intercourse “with those whose commerce contaminates, whose luxuries poison, whose avarice is insatiable, and whose unnatural oppressions are not to be borne.” After the “Boston massacre” (March 5, 1770) he and John Adams defended Captain Preston and the accused soldiers and secured their acquittal. 1 He used the signatures “Mentor,” “Callisthenes,” “Marchmont Needham,” “Edward Sexby,” &c., in later letters to the Boston Gazette. He travelled for his health in the South in 1773, and left in his journal an interesting account of his travels and of society in South Carolina; this journey was important in that it brought Southern patriots into closer relations with the popular leaders in Massachusetts. In May 1774 he published Observations on the Act of Parliament, commonly called “The Boston Port Bill,” with Thoughts on Civil Society and Standing Armies, in which he urged “patriots and heroes” to “form a compact for opposition—a band for vengeance.” In September 1774 he left for England, where he consulted with leading Whigs as to the political situation in America; on the 16th of March 1775 he started back, but he died on the 26th of April in sight of land.
See the Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Jun., of Massachusetts (Boston, 1825; 2nd ed., 1874), by his son, which contains his more important papers.
