This collection contains 8 personal letters that Edmund Quincy wrote in the mid- to late 18th century. The first item is Quincy's letter to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Weymouth, Massachusetts, about personal affairs. Quincy wrote 7 letters to his son Henry from Lancaster, Massachusetts, from May 1755-January 18, 1777. He commented at length about many aspects of the American Revolution, such as deteriorating relations between Great Britain and its North American colonies and his sympathy with the patriotic cause. Quincy sometimes mentioned military affairs, including early actions of George Washington, the number of missing persons after the Battle of Concord, privateers in the Caribbean, and recent battles. Some of Quincy's observations have religious overtones.
Edmund Quincy was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, on June 13, 1703, the son of Edmund Quincy and Dorothy Flynt. After graduating from Harvard College in 1722, he lived in Boston, where he and his brother Josiah started a merchant firm. When the firm broke up in 1750, Edmund Quincy joined two of his sons in a new merchant partnership, which went bankrupt in 1757. Quincy left Boston for Lancaster in 1775, and he later lived in Medfield and Newton, where he died on July 4, 1788. Edmund Quincy and his first wife, Elizabeth Wendell, married on April 15, 1725. Their children included Henry (d. 1780), Dorothy ("Dolly"), Esther, Elizabeth, Edmund, Abraham, and Jacob. After Wendell's 1769 death, Edmund Quincy married Anna Gerrish (d. 1787) on January 13, 1785. Dorothy Quincy married prominent Massachusetts statesman John Hancock (1737-1793).
