By Jeremy Dibbell
Our fall exhibit, Josiah Quincy: A Lost Hero of the Revolution officially opens on Saturday, and we hope you’ll come by and see what we have on display. The show will be open to the public without charge, 1:00-4:00 p.m., Monday-Saturday, 23 October 2010 – 22 January 2011, except from 24 December 2010 – 1 January 2011, when the Historical Society is closed for a brief holiday season respite.k
Our October Object of the Month complements the exhibit: it’s a watercolor of Col. Samuel Miller Quincy (1833-1887) in his Civil War uniform. Col. Quincy was the great-grandson of Josiah Quincy, Jr. “The Patriot,” and edited his ancestor’s legal notes (while stationed at Port Hudson during the Civil War, as Peter Drummey notes in the Object essay). He later served as “acting mayor” of New Orleans.
The exhibit celebrates the publication by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts of the final two volumes of Portrait of a Patriot: The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior, edited by Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York, the first modern edition of the complete works of Josiah Quincy, Jr. (1744-1775). A brilliant young attorney – he was only twenty-six when, with John Adams, he defended the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials – Quincy was an ardent spokesman for the cause of liberty in Revolutionary Massachusetts, although his early death has made him less familiar today than many of his contemporaries.
The exhibition focuses on the Historical Society’s manuscript sources for the new Colonial Society volumes, including Quincy’s political and legal commonplace books, travel journals (he was a harshly critical observer of slavery in the American South), and the law reports that his great-grandson, Samuel Miller Quincy edited. In the exhibition, Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s personal papers will be shown in the context of the MHS’s enormous archive of Quincy family papers–letters, diaries, drawings, artifacts, and paintings that document eight generations of this extraordinary family–including the watercolor portrait of Samuel M. Quincy on display as our Object of the Month.