American Rebels Read online

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  For Natasha,

  guide, companion, sister, star

  The Families of Braintree

  The Quincy Family

  Edmund Quincy II (1628–1698) had thirteen children, including Daniel Quincy and Edmund Quincy III:

  Daniel Quincy (1651–1690) + Anne Shepherd (1633–1708) = Colonel John Quincy

  Colonel John Quincy (1689–1767) + Elizabeth Norton Quincy (1696–1769) = they had three children, including Norton and Elizabeth

  Norton Quincy (1716–1801) never married

  Elizabeth Quincy (1721–1775) + Rev. William Smith (1706–1783) = Elizabeth, Mary, Abigail, William

  Mary Smith (1741–1811) + Richard Cranch (1726–1811) = Elizabeth, William, Joseph, Lucy

  Abigail Smith (1744–1818) + John Adams (see below) = Abigail (Nabby), John Quincy, Susanna (Suky), Charles, Thomas

  Edmund Quincy III (1681–1737) + Dorothy Flynt Quincy (1678–1737) = they had four children, including Edmund Quincy IV and Josiah Quincy

  Edmund Quincy IV (1704–1769) + Elizabeth Wendell Quincy (1706–1746) = Edmund Quincy V, Henry, Abraham, Elizabeth, Katy, Esther, Sarah, Dorothy (Dolly)

  Sarah Quincy (1736–1790) + William Greenleaf (1738–1793) = John Hancock Greenleaf

  Elizabeth Quincy (1729–1770) + Rev. Samuel Sewall (1715–1771)

  Esther Quincy (1738–1810) + Jonathan Sewall (1729–1796) = Jonathan, Stephen

  Dolly Quincy (1747–1830) + John Hancock (see below) = Lydia, John George Washington

  Josiah Quincy (1710–1784) married three times:

  + Hannah Sturgis Quincy (1712–1755) = Edmund, Samuel, Hannah, Josiah Quincy Jr.

  + Elizabeth Waldron Quincy (1722–1759) = Elizabeth

  + Anne Marsh (1723–1805) = Nancy, Frances

  Edmund (Ned) Quincy (1733–1768) + Rebecca Lloyd: marriage planned, but Ned died

  Samuel Quincy (1735–1789) + Hannah Hill (1734–1782) = Hannah, Sam Jr., Thomas

  Hannah Quincy (1736–1826) + Bela Lincoln (1734–1773) = no children

  Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744–1775) + Abigail Phillips (1745–1798) = Josiah III, Abigail

  The Hancock Family

  Bishop John Hancock (of Lexington, 1671–1752) + Elizabeth Clark (1674–1760) = they had seven children, including the Reverend John Hancock and Thomas Hancock

  The Reverend John Hancock (1702–1744) + Mary Hawke (1711–1783) = John, Mary, Ebenezer

  Thomas Hancock (1703–1764) + Lydia Henchman (1714–1776) = adopted John Hancock following death of his father, Reverend Hancock, in 1744

  John Hancock (1737–1793) + Dolly Quincy (see above) = Lydia, John George Washington

  The Adams Family

  Joseph Adams (1654–1736) + Hannah Bass (1667–1705) = they had nine children, including John

  Deacon John Adams (1691–1761) + Susanna Boylston (1708–1797) = they had four children, including John

  John Adams (1735–1826) + Abigail Smith (see above) = Abigail (Nabby), John Quincy, Susanna (Suky), Charles, Thomas

  PART ONE

  Tinder

  1744–1764

  The most important part of everything is the beginning.

  —JOSIAH QUINCY JR.

  Prologue: A Village Mourns

  Every moment of our existence has some connection …

  to an eternal succession of future ages.…

  —EDMUND QUINCY IV

  In the spring of 1744, a congregation in the small village of Braintree, south of Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, gathered to mourn the death of their minister, the Reverend John Hancock. Outside the church, the heavens opened up. Rain streamed down, drenching the wild bluebells that grew in the high meadows of Penn’s Hill overlooking the sea, dripping from the apple trees planted in ordered lines behind the village’s low houses, and running in widening rivulets between freshly plowed spring fields. Inside the church, its stone walls were streaked with black lines of damp and the windows steamed in the warmth rising off the gathered mourners.

  Six years earlier, in 1738, Reverend Hancock gave the funeral sermon for Braintree villager Edmund Quincy III, who had died the year before while visiting England. There was no body to bury but much to mourn. In his sermon, Hancock lamented the many afflictions of the Quincy family, having endured a year of many family deaths, including the death of Edmund’s wife, Dorothy Flynt Quincy. But not only had the family suffered from their losses, Reverend Hancock preached: the community as a whole had been wounded, for the strength of the whole derived from the contributions of each individual inhabitant.

  What Reverend Hancock could not have known in 1738—and what no one in the church knew on the day of his funeral in 1744—was that from this village, Braintree, and this parish, the North Parish, would come the men and women who would shape the history of America. From the Quincy family, whose losses were so heavy in 1738; from the Adams family, whose patriarch served as deacon to the North Parish Church; and from Reverend Hancock’s own family would come the leaders of the next generation, the rebels who would foment a revolution.

  The rebels were still children—or not yet even born—and their time to lead was still decades away. But their story—the shared story of John Hancock, Dolly Quincy, John Adams, Abigail Smith, and Josiah Quincy Jr.—began on that day in May 1744, when a community gathered to mourn their spiritual leader.

  Reverend Hancock’s son John was seven years old when his father died. On the day of the funeral, he sat in the same pew he had sat in every Sunday listening to his father preach. Beside him sat his mother, Mary Hawke Hancock, his sister, Mary, and his brother, Ebenezer.

  “Braintree may this day be called Bochim, a place of Weepers,” began the Reverend Ebenezer Gay.1 Gay was minister of the Old Ship Church in Hingham but had come to Braintree to preach the funeral sermon of his good friend, John Hancock. Reverend Gay looked out over the crowded church, every pew taken up and more people standing with their heads bowed. All the community had come together to mourn the too-short life of a very good man.

  Reverend Hancock had loved his North Parish ministry, a small but solid community of Congregationalists settled by the bay. He’d been raised inland, in the town of Lexington, the oldest son of the man he’d been named for, and in whose footsteps he had at first followed. His father was a minister so powerful that he was called the Bishop of Lexington, a minister so persuasive that a brand-new meetinghouse had been built for him when he commanded it, its spire visible from the countryside all around.2 And yet when the younger Reverend Hancock was ready to preach, he left Lexington and came to Braintree, eager for the sea and for a different style of preaching.

  Like the lighthouse that stood on Brewster Island in the bay, John Hancock saw his calling as that of a beacon of light through the dark. While his fearsome father had given fire-and-brimstone sermons filled with prohibitions and punishments, he built his ministry based on hope and comfort. His sermons offere
d the promise of eternal salvation through faith, and happiness on earth through hard work and the building of community. In his daily life, he showed gratitude for what God had given him and kindness toward the villagers who had come to rely on him.

  The North Parish congregation was reminded now by Reverend Gay of just how caring their minister had been: “How Sweet to us hath been his Conversation! How sound his Advice! How kind his Assistance! How tender his Sympathy with us in our Troubles!”3

  Reverend Gay asked the parishioners, “Is the Untimely Death of a Man of God to be Deeply Lamented?” After all, John Hancock had been only forty-one years old when he died from his short illness. “Who can forbear to mourn the untimely Death of the Man of God, whose funeral we are now attending? Is there a Person that does not from the bottom of his Heart sigh out the Lamentation over him, Alas my Brother? Or O my Father, my Father!”4

  Young John Hancock had passed the grave dug for his father that morning. Walking with his mother and siblings to the meetinghouse from the parsonage where they lived, he had seen the open rectangle of black, framed by neat mounds of wet grass and brown earth. There was no shelter from rain in this graveyard, nor from the hard winds that came off the coast less than a mile away. By the time the funeral service ended, the graveside piles of earth and grass would be diminished, pummeled down by the elements. But the hole would remain, waiting to be filled.

  Although there is no complete record of who attended the funeral, it is likely that Reverend Hancock’s North Parish congregation turned out in full, despite the rain. Hancock knew them all personally, had baptized them, guided them, married them, and buried them for almost two decades. The minister recorded the dates of the ceremonies himself, as when he baptized his own son: “John Hancock, my son, January 16th, 1737.”5

  Certainly, Deacon John Adams would have attended the funeral of his minister, along with his two older sons, John and Peter. His wife, Susanna, however, might have stayed home with little Elihu, not even three years old. Deacon Adams’ son John was a friend of young Hancock; he would later write that he had known John Hancock “from the cradle.… We were at the same school together, as soon as we were out of petticoats.”6

  Together with the other boys of the village, young Adams and young Hancock often escaped into the hills surrounding the village; they would find a flat slab of granite where they sat watching the ships passing in and out of Boston to the north and pitched rocks and acorns down the hill, aiming for but never hitting the glittering waters of the bay.

  Members of the extended Quincy family would also have attended the funeral, filling out entire rows of pews. Edmund Quincy IV (the oldest son of Edmund Quincy III, who had been eulogized by Reverend Hancock in 1738), along with his wife, Elizabeth Wendell Quincy, would have attended, although how many of their eight children would have come along is unknown. Josiah Quincy, brother of Edmund Quincy IV, working now in Boston much of the time, would have tried to attend; he considered Reverend Hancock a friend, and his two sons, Edmund and Samuel, were playmates of young John Hancock. Josiah’s wife, Hannah Sturgis Quincy, would not have been in church but was most likely home with their youngest, a baby boy named Josiah after his father.

  Norton Quincy, a cousin to brothers Edmund and Josiah, wrote in a letter about being in church that day. He would have come to the funeral with his parents, with whom he lived, John Quincy and Elizabeth Norton Quincy. Norton’s sister Elizabeth was there with her husband, the Reverend William Smith. Elizabeth and William Smith lived in Weymouth, the next town over, where Reverend Smith served as pastor of the First Church.

  Reverends Gay, Hancock, and Smith had shared their pulpits with one another, preaching from town to town. Their purpose, as Reverend Hancock put it, was “to shine in these dark Places of the Earth … to sing of the Mercy, the distinguishing Mercy of the Lord, in planting, watering, increasing, and defending them.”7

  Reverend Smith might have wondered why he hadn’t been asked to give the funeral sermon, given his friendship with John Hancock and his wife’s connections to Braintree, but in the end, he’d taken it all in stride. Elizabeth was pregnant that spring, and their daughter Abigail would be born in the summer. As the granddaughter of a Quincy, she would have social status; even with all his spiritual fervor, Reverend Smith was glad for the potential benefits such status would confer.

  Braintree, like most villages settled by emigrants from England in the seventeenth century, was not separated, geographically or socially, along rigid class lines. All members of the community shared the village green and patronized the same shops and tradesmen; they bought their beer from the same brewery, and the younger boys all attended the same Dames School led by Mrs. Belcher; most of the older ones attended the local Latin grammar school. Three parish churches provided spiritual nourishment and everyone imbibed.

  And yet subtle divisions were acknowledged. The villagers considered the Quincy family to be their local gentry, with their vast landholdings, fine houses with imported furniture, large libraries, and cellars stocked with Madeira and other wines from Europe; their sons would not attend the local Latin school but instead were students at the more prestigious—and rigorous—Boston Latin School.

  The Hancock family was revered in the village for their association with the church and respected for their education: both Bishop Hancock and his son had attended Harvard.

  The Adams family and others like them were the solid yeomen of the village, craftsmen and farmers who worked with their hands, prayed dutifully, and drank hard cider but never wines from faraway lands.

  Despite these subtle class lines, the Hancock, Quincy, and Adams families all lived close by each other, with just a mile or two separating them. Edmund and Josiah Quincy lived in the houses that had been owned by their father, Edmund Quincy III. The oldest of the houses had been built in 1635, and Josiah lived there during the early years of his marriage to Hannah Sturgis; both Edmund and Samuel were born in the old house. Edmund Quincy IV lived in the newer house, built in 1685 and located close to a wide brook that teemed with eels. Surrounding the two brothers’ homes was a large estate of outbuildings, well-tended fields, ornamental gardens, and orchards with “fine fruit trees.”8

  From the Quincy estate, it was a short walk to the village green of North Braintree and the parsonage of Reverend Hancock. The Hancock home was a “Handsome Country seat … containing besides a very commodious well-finished house, a good Barn, Out-Houses, fine Gardens and the best of orchards.”9 It was also dark and cold (John Hancock never forgot the frigid conditions of his father’s parsonage during the long winter months) but its outlook was brightened in the spring by tall stands of lilac and clumps of yellow lilies.

  A farther walk past the green and down the old Plymouth Road led to the Adams family farmhouse: from “both sides stretched away the wide fields of the farm … sprinkled with orchard trees and occasional pines and elms. The majestic sweep of the forest-covered slopes of Penn’s Hill … and the more distant terraces of the Blue Hills bounded the vision.”10

  Up the hill that rose beyond the Adams property was the home of Norton Quincy and his parents, a tall and rambling house built high on Mount Wollaston, site of the original village settlement in 1625.

  Living in such a close community, and regardless of class or status, the young people of the North Parish of Braintree felt connected to one another. They had been baptized together, schooled in the early years together, and raised together on the promises of their minister, the Reverend Hancock.

  Now they, along with their parents and grandparents, mourned him. “It is the Death of a Prophet and of the Son of a Prophet, we are bewailing,” preached Reverend Gay. “An able Minister of the New Testament taken away from us in the midst of his Days.”11 The stone-walled church of North Braintree echoed with sorrow.

  Underneath the current of grief for the dead ran concern for the living. The parsonage would have to be vacated, another minister found, and a new place made for Mary Hancock a
nd her children. It was assumed—and rightly so—that the old Reverend Hancock would invite his son’s diminished family to live with him in Lexington. Work would be found for the wife and daughter, and the boys would be educated as best the local schools could do. Friends would be separated and new lives begun.

  But even as the fortunes of these children of Braintree diverged, their futures would bring them together again. A shared promise connected them, fostered by the history, the land, and the people of Braintree. It was instilled in their blood and bones; distilled from their parents’ lessons, the psalms they all knew by heart, and the books they read; nurtured by the fertile hills they roamed and the abundant wilderness that touched their tiny village; and strengthened by the cross-hatched, dependable order of the village itself, and the wide-open shoreline that could be seen from every promontory, with an expanse of blue leading all the way back to England.

  The promise had been articulated in 1739 by Reverend Hancock, in a sermon in which he told his congregation that their “great Errand into this wilderness”—their “solemn covenant … of Liberty”—was grounded in the “good and early Foundation” laid by their forbears who first came to America from England.12

  But it was not until his father’s death in 1744 that events were set in motion which would propel young John Hancock and his village companions to hold that promise as sacred and inviolate. The covenant of liberty that they shared would be sharpened by ambition and envy, polished through friendships and love, and fought for in a revolution fomented by these children of Braintree.

  These American rebels.

  1

  Founding a Village

  Not such Another Place, for benefit or rest,

  In all the universe can be possessed.

  —THOMAS MORTON