Having spoken her mind, she exercised a woman’s privilege in changing it—and did almost as he had asked: set out at once for a safe refuge at Fairfield in Connecticut.
She was still somewhat piqued. She found at Fairfield, in the person of her host’s nephew, an eager listener to her narrative of the skirmish at Lexington—a Princeton graduate who was studying law. He probably gained her confidence at once by asking her just what she thought he ought to do, and by offering to join the colors for her sake. Aaron Burr was very accomplished at that sort of thing, and considered it good exercise, for he was carrying on two other affairs and an anonymous sentimental correspondence at the same time. To Hancock’s affectionate letter from Philadelphia Dorothy made no reply. For the peace offering of silk stockings he sent her she said not even “thank-you.” Then either Madame Hancock or Dorothy’s own conscience stepped in and settled the quarrel. Burr left for Cambridge to enlist, and Hancock came to Fairfield and married the lady.
They took up their home in Boston on the heels of the British evacuation, and until Hancock went back to Braintree to die in 1793 her life was a brilliant panorama of illustrious society. When Washington came to Boston in 1789, Hancock, who was governor of the Commonwealth, invited him to be a guest in the fine house on Beacon Street opposite the Common. Washington declined and the governor offered him an invitation to dinner. On the assumption that within his own state a governor’s position was sovereign to that of the President, he did not call upon Washington before dinner. The hour came, but no President, and Hancock sent a messenger to apologize to Washington for not having paid his respects, and to plead that sudden illness prevented. Washington guessed that the illness was sour-grape poisoning and ate his dinner at home. Later in the evening the lieutenant-governor and two councilmen appeared to repeat Hancock’s apology. “I informed them,” Washington writes in his diary, “that I should not see the governor except at my own lodgings.” The next day Hancock bent his stiff neck to the president, apologized, and the two became friends again.
The Squire had long since sold his rights in the old Homestead, though the family continued to occupy it until his death in 1788. It passed successively through the families of Black, Greenleaf, and Woodward, and then into the hands of the town of Quincy, which was now formally detached from Braintree. For thirty years it was held by the town as part of a trust fund Ebenezer Woodward left to found a girl’s academy to match the boy’s school started by John Adams.
Even before the Squire’s family had dispersed from the house, its earlier liveliness was somewhat dimmed by the crescent line of able Quincys in another Quincy house built by the first Josiah, and now known as the “later Quincy Mansion.” From its windows he recorded the sailing of the British from Boston in 1775; from those windows his children saw the Constitution sail in victorious over the Guerriere. There lived Josiah the Second, agent of the provincials at London, who died off Marblehead as the firing at Lexington began, while his wife and the third Josiah were fleeing from a threatened naval attack on Braintree. Josiah the Third grew up to be mayor of Boston and president of Harvard, and if no other distinction remained to him except this passage from his speech in Congress on the embargo in 1808, it would be a proud enough monument for any American:
“But I shall be told, ‘This may lead to war.’ I ask, ‘Are we now at peace?’ Certainly not, unless retiring from insult be peace—unless shrinking under the lash be peace. The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it. The idea that nothing on earth is so dreadful as war is inculcated too studiously among us. Disgrace is worse. Abandonment of essential rights is worse.”
Is it any wonder that Daniel Webster, Lafayette, and the Adamses, father and son, came often to the home of Josiah, or that, given his heredity and achievement, he had such sons as Josiah the Fourth, another mayor of Boston and an able economist, and Edmund, the stanch abolitionist?
The older house by the brook was leading a humble and retired old age when the Colonial Dames took over its custody. Their restoration not only has made the utmost of the material they found, but has brought to the house a collection of articles which are uniformly good and are in some instances rare and beautiful. The long hall has tall spotless wainscoting and hunting paper, a carven balustrade and newel post; in a low-studded dining-room a set of 1770 Dutch chairs surrounds an Empire table, in a corner stands a buffet whose builder died a century and a half ago; at the fireplace are Delft tiles nearly as aged as the fireplace itself, and there is an odd Chinese paper on the walls. In the parlor is the Venus-and-Cupid paper hung for Dorothy Q’s wedding, in the window frames is glass made by a Quincy in the first glassworks in America. You may read in one of those panes the initials “J H” as you may find the writer’s full name on the Declaration of Independence, and in the pane below, in the same hand, “You I love, and you alone.” You will be interested in Tutor Flynt’s bed, built in a recess of the brookside bedroom. You may be mildly thrilled by the Indian-proof shutters, mystified by the secret staircase which follows the course of the chimney, and delighted with the kitchen William Coddington built, with its eight-inch beams, Dutch oven, churn, spinning-wheel, and a musket over the mantel for inviting Indians to dinner.
There are ever so many things in the house today to call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath. Take away its Hoars, Lowells, Holmeses, Adamses, Wendells, Hancocks, Sewalls—to mention only a few of the Quincy connections—and you have left hardly enough to make a Monday Transcript.
And yet their generic importance was the least of their concerns. “Could I ever suppose,” wrote John Adams, “that family pride were in any way excusable, I should think a descent from a line of vigorous independent New England farmers for a hundred years was a better foundation for it than a descent through royal or noble scoundrels ever since the flood.”