Part 3 (2/2)

The following year, when a meeting was held in Braintree to take action in consequence of the failure of Great Britain to heed the protest against the Stamp Act, he wrote:

”I prepared a draught of instruction at home, and carried them with me. The cause of the meeting was explained at some length, and the state and danger of the country pointed out.

A committee was appointed to prepare instructions, of which I was nominated as one. My draught was unanimously adopted without amendment, reported to the town, and accepted without a dissenting voice.... They rang through the state and were adopted in so many words ... by forty towns, as instructions to their representatives.”

Less than two years later, on July 11, 1767, in the town close by his own birthplace, to which John Adams had taken his bride, John Quincy Adams was born. The delights of the new home have been pictured in a pleasing manner by Daniel Munro Wilson:

”Elevated was life in this 'little hut,' but it was real, genuine, beautifully domestic. The scene of it, visible there now to any pious pilgrim, and reverently preserved in many of its antique appointments by the Quincy Historical Society, a.s.sists the imagination to realize its n.o.ble simplicity. The dining-room or general living room, with its wide open fireplace, is where the young couple would most often pa.s.s their evenings, and in winter would very likely occupy in measureless content a single settle, roasting on one side and freezing on the other. The kitchen, full of cheerful bustle, and fragrant as the spice isles, how it would draw the children as they grew up, the little John Quincy among them!

Here they could be near mother, and watch her with absorbing attention as she superintended the cooking, now hanging pots of savory meats on the crane, and now drawing from the cavernous depths of the brick oven the pies and baked beans and Indian puddings and other delicacies of those days. We can more easily imagine the home scene when we read these words written by Mrs. Adams to her husband: 'Our son is much better than when you left home, and our daughter rocks him to sleep with the song of ”Come papa, come home to brother Johnnie.”' 'Johnnie' is the dignified President and 'old man eloquent' that is to be.”

When it became evident that there must be Revolution, the patriot Adams was compelled to leave his family and go into the thick of the fight. He did not want to go. ”I should have thought myself the happiest man in the world if I could have returned to my little hut and forty acres, which my father left me in Braintree, and lived on potatoes and sea-weed the rest of my life. But I had taken a part, I had adopted a system, I had encouraged my fellow citizens, and I could not abandon them in conscience and in honor.”

From the old home Abigail Adams wrote him letters that moved him to renewed efforts for his struggling countrymen. In one of them she said, ”You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator; but if the sword be drawn, I bid adieu to all domestic felicity, and look forward to that country where there are neither wars nor rumors of war, in a firm belief, that through the mercy of its King we shall both rejoice there together.”

The wife rejoiced when her husband's ringing words helped to carry the Declaration of Independence; she urged him to make the trips to France which Congress asked him to undertake; she encouraged him when he was Vice-President and, later, President, and she made home more than ever an abode of peace when, in 1801, he returned to Braintree, to a house of Leonard Va.s.sall, built in 1731, which he bought in 1785.

In this house husband and wife celebrated their golden wedding, as John Quincy Adams was to celebrate his golden wedding many years later. Here, for many years, the son enjoyed being with the mother of whom he once wrote:

”My mother was an angel upon earth. She was a minister of blessings to all human beings within her sphere of action....

She has been to me more than a mother. She has been a spirit from above watching over me for good, and contributing by my mere consciousness of her existence to the comfort of my life.... There is not a virtue that can abide in the female heart but it was the ornament of hers.”

And in this house the mother died, on October 28, 1818. John Quincy Adams lived there until his death, on July 4, 1826.

VIII

THE QUINCY MANSION, QUINCY, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS

THE HOME OF THREE DOROTHY QUINCYS

Among the settlers to whom Boston granted large allotments of outlying lands were William Coddington and Edmund Quincy. In 1635 they went, in company with their a.s.sociate settlers, to ”the mount,” which became Braintree, now Quincy.

By the side of a pleasant brook, under the shade of spreading trees, Coddington built in 1636 his house of four rooms. Downstairs was the kitchen and the living room, while upstairs were two bedrooms. The upper story overhung the lower in the old manner, and a generous chimney, which afforded room for a large open fireplace, dominated the whole.

This house became the meeting place for a group of seekers after religious liberty who were looked upon with suspicion in Boston--Rev.

John Wheelwright, Sir Harry Vane, Atherton Hough, Ann Hutchinson, and others. In consequence of their views the company was soon broken up.

Ann Hutchinson and Wheelwright were banished, while Coddington would have been banished if he had not gone hastily to Rhode Island.

Edmund Quincy, who succeeded to Coddington's house, probably would have been banished if he had not died before the decree could be p.r.o.nounced. For a season his widow, Judith, lived in the house, which, from that time, became known as the Quincy Mansion. With her were the children, Edmund and Judith. Judith, who married at twenty, and became the mother of Hannah (Betsy) Hull, whose dowry, when she became the bride of Judge Samuel Sewell, was her weight in pine-tree s.h.i.+llings, the gift of her father, the master of the colony's mint. Florence Royce Davis has written of the wedding:

”Then the great scales were brought, amid laughter and jest, And Betsy was called to step in and be weighed; But a silence fell over each wondering guest When the mint-master opened a ponderous chest And a fortune of s.h.i.+llings displayed.

”By handfuls the silver was poured in one side Till it weighed from the floor blus.h.i.+ng Betsy, the bride; And the mint-master called: 'Prithee, Sewell, my son, The horses are saddled, the wedding is done; Behold the bride's portion; and know all your days Your wife is well worth every s.h.i.+lling she weighs.'”

Edmund Quincy married at twenty-one, and became the next occupant of the mansion. During his long life there were welcomed to the hospitable roof many of those whose words and deeds prepared the way for the liberty that was to come to the country within a century.

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