In a speech delivered by his son Joseph Howe, in Boston July 4, 1858, he spoke of his father as follows: "The loyalists who left these States were not, it must be confessed, as good republicans as you are, but they loved liberty under their old forms, and their descendants love it too. My father, though a true Briton to the day of his death, loved New England, and old Boston especially, with filial regard. He never lost an opportunity of serving a Boston man, if in his power. At the close of your railway banquet, one gentleman told me that my father had, during the last war, taken his father from the military prison at Melville Island, and sent him back to Boston. Another, on the same evening, showed me a gold watch, sent by an uncle, who died in the West Indies, to his family. It was pawned by a sailor in Halifax, but redeemed by my father, and sent to the dead man's relatives. And so it was all his life. He loved his sovereign, but he loved Boston too, and whenever he got sick in his latter days, we used to send him up here to recruit. A sight of the old scenes and a walk on Boston Common were sure to do him good, and he generally came back uncommonly well." Elsewhere the same son remarked: "For thirty years he was my instructor, my playfellow, almost my daily companion. To him I owe my fondness for reading, my familiarity with the Bible, my knowledge of old colonial and American incidents and characteristics. He left me nothing but his example, and the memory of his many virtues, for all that he ever earned was given to the poor. He was too good for this world. But the remembrance of his high principle, his cheerfulness, his childlike simplicity, and truly Christian character, is never absent from my mind."
Mrs. Martha Howe died Nov. 25, 1790, aged 30 years, and was buried in St. Paul's churchyard, Halifax.
A few years after the death of his first wife, Mr. Howe married Mrs. Austin, a widow with several children, wife of Captain Austin. By her he had two children, Sarah and Joseph. Mrs. Howe died in 1837. He had eight children, and at the present time there are eighty-five of his descendants, out of all these the survivors who bear the name of Howe only number sixteen. Many of his descendants were men of great prominence. His son William Howe, Assistant Commissary-General, who died at Halifax, January, 1843, aged fifty-seven. John Howe, Queen's Printer, and Deputy Postmaster-General, who died at the same place the same year, and David Howe, who published a paper at St. Andrew, N. B., Joseph, born December 13, 1804, became Hon. Joseph Howe, Governor of Nova Scotia in May, 1873.
SAMUEL QUINCY.
Solicitor-General.
Edmund Quincy, the first of the name in New England, landed at Boston on the 4th of September, 1633. He came from Achurch in Northamptonshire, where he owned some landed estate. That he was a man of substance may be inferred from his bringing six servants with him, and that he was a man of weight among the founders of the new commonwealth appears from his election as a representative of the town of Boston in the first General Court ever held in Massachusetts Bay. He was also the first named on the committee appointed by the town to assess and raise the sum necessary to extinguish the title of Mr. Blackstone to the peninsula on which the city stands. He bought of Chickatabut, Sachem of the Massachusetts tribe of Indians, a tract of land at Mount Wollaston, confirmed to him by the Town of Boston, 1636, a portion of which is yet in the family.
Edmund Quincy died the year after making this purchase, in 1637, at the age of 33. He left a son Edmund and a daughter Judith. The son lived, in the main, a private life on the estate in Braintree. He was a magistrate and a representative of his town in the General Court, and Lieutenant-Colonel of the Suffolk Regiment.
Point Judith was named after his daughter. She married John Hull, who, when Massachusetts Bay assumed the prerogative of coining money, was her mint-master, and made a large fortune in the office, before Charles II. put a stop to that infringement of the charter. There is a tradition that, when he married his daughter to Samuel Sewall, afterwards Chief Justice, he gave her for her dowry, her weight in pine-tree shillings. From this marriage has sprung the eminent family of the Sewalls, which has given three Chief Justices to Massachusetts and one to Canada, and has been distinguished in every generation by the talents and virtues of its members.
Lieutenant-Colonel Quincy, who was a child when brought to New England, died in 1698, aged seventy years, having had two sons, Daniel and Edmund.