When forth the tremulous question came
That cost the maiden her Norman name
Should I be I, or would it be
One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?”
Dorothy Q the Second was a dear child, carrying at fifteen the cares of the household, and apparently pointed down the path of a winsome spinsterhood. But within a few weeks, in the summer of 1737, her grandmother, her mother, and then her father died, and she married Edward Jackson and went to live in Boston, where her husband was a ship-owner in partnership with her brother Josiah.
One of their vessels, the Bethell, with thirty-seven men and fourteen guns, fell in with the Jesus Maria and Joseph, a Spaniard with 110 men and twenty-six guns. The Bethell’s skipper gambled on the gathering twilight, set up six wooden dummy guns, hung sailors’ caps and hats in the rigging to suggest a numerous crew, and then demanded the Spaniard’s surrender. Down came her ensign! The Spanish crew was set ashore at Fayal, and the Bethell brought back to Josiah and Dorothy one-hundred-and-sixty-one chests of silver, and two of Spanish gold.
With the prize money safely banked, Josiah was able to retire from business at the age of forty. He moved to Braintree, taking up his residence in the Hancock parsonage, across the way from the Homestead. Brother Edmund, the lantern-jawed parson, who had been living in Boston and spending his summers in Braintree, moved to the Homestead in his turn, lost most of his share of the prize money in artless speculation, and turned to farming.
Life in the two families presented diversion aplenty—most of the eligible young men of Boston and Braintree were courting Edmund’s five daughters. A sober young man named John Adams was running perilously close to the charms of Hannah, Josiah’s daughter. He was a marked man when her cousins, Esther and Susan, suddenly “broke in upon Hannah and me and interrupted a conversation that would have terminated in a courtship that would have terminated in a marriage which might have depressed me to absolute poverty and obscurity to the end of my life.” He veered, took a deep breath, went away from there, and two years later was married to Abigail Smith, who alone of American women was the wife and the mother of an American president. Important guests occasionally penetrated the swarm of suitors—such men as Admiral Warren and Sir William Pepperrell, the heroes of Louisburg; or Benjamin Franklin, who sent Squire Quincy cuttings of Rhenish grapevines and a new stove which he had invented; or Sir Harry Frankland, who gave the Squire a fine pear-sapling—the same Sir Harry who married Agnes Surriage, whom he had first seen barefoot, scrubbing floors in a tavern in Marblehead.
And the youngest of all was Dorothy Q the Third, with four big brothers and three boy cousins to pay her court, and four elder sisters to study. Through all the bitter period that followed the Boston Massacre, when her cousin Josiah Junior and John Adams were defending the British captain, and her cousin Samuel was appearing for the Crown, Dorothy Q was on the fringe of the excitement, coquetting with all of the earnest youths who were polishing their arms, but engaging in entangling alliance with none. Not until she was twenty-seven did she make her choice, and then it was John Hancock, the chief figure of pre-revolutionary days in Boston, a vigorous patriot who defied the Crown and became a member of the Committee of Safety. Most of the winter of 1774–75 she spent with his aunt in the Hancock mansion, where came Revere, and Warren, and Samuel and John Adams. By March of ’75 she was back in Quincy, gathering her trousseau, and superintending the application of a new French wall-paper to the walls of the north parlor, where a company of conventional blue Venuses and Cupids, garlanded with delicate flowers, was to preside over the wedding ceremony. The untroubled Homestead presented a strong contrast to the one she had left in Boston: a loyalist rabble stormed the Hancock house, tore down the fence, broke the windows and wrecked the coach-house, and the prospective bridegroom, threatened with arrest, was obliged to escape with little dignity and all possible speed.
He turned up at Concord for the meeting of the Provincial Congress on April 15, and after its adjournment he was joined by Dorothy, Madame Hancock and Samuel Adams at the Rev. Jonas Clark’s house in Lexington. Quietly, in the evening of the eighteenth, British troops assembled in Boston for a march to destroy the stores at Concord. As quietly, Paul Revere rowed across the mouth of the river to Charlestown, slipped by the guard, and rode hell-bent into the sleeping country. He pulled up at the Clark parsonage and called for Adams and Hancock. “Don’t make so much noise,” said a minute-man on guard. “Noise!” shouted Revere, “You’ll have noise enough before long—the regulars are coming!”—and he delivered Joseph Warren’s warning to Adams and Hancock to get out of the neighborhood at once. Against their will they fled to Woburn, while Dorothy slept no more that night. At dawn she saw Pitcairn and his scarlet column tramp to the Lexington common and set fire to the Revolution. Then she joined her lover in Woburn, and when he tried to forbid her to go back to Boston, the strain of a sleepless night and the horrors of the day broke the bridle on her tongue and she tossed her head and retorted: “Recollect, Mr. Hancock, I am not under your control yet. I shall go to my father tomorrow!”