Josiah Quincy II

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Josiah Quincy II (February 23, 1744 – April 26, 1775) was a famous American lawyer. He was father of Josiah Quincy III, and son of the first Josiah Quincy I (1709-1784). He was born in Boston on February 23, 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 February 12, 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. 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 and for vengeance. In September 1774 he secretly left for England, where he argued the American cause to British politicians who were sympathetic to the colonies; on March 16, 1775 he started back, but he died of tuberculosis on April 26, 1775, within sight of land.