Josiah Quincy II

Josiah Quincy, Jr.
Painted posthumously by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1825
Born	Boston, Massachusetts
Residence	Washington Street, Boston
Education	Harvard College
Occupation	Lawyer
Home town	Boston, Massachusetts
Spouse(s)	Abigail Phillips

Josiah Quincy, Jr., (/ˈkwɪnzi/; February 23, 1744 – April 26, 1775) was an American lawyer and patriot. He was a principal spokesman for the Sons of Liberty in Boston prior to the Revolution and was John Adams' co-counsel during the trials of Captain Thomas Preston and the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.

Quincy was the son of Col. Josiah Quincy I and the father of the Harvard president and Boston mayor Josiah Quincy III. He was a descendant of Edmund Quincy, who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1633. His first cousin once removed was Dorothy Quincy, wife of Governor John Hancock. He was also a distant relative of John Quincy Adams through the sixth President's mother, Abigail Smith Adams.

Quincy was born in Boston in 1744, to Col. Josiah Quincy and Hannah Sturgis Quincy. In 1756, shortly after the death of his mother, he moved with his father and other siblings to their ancestral homestead in Braintree. In 1763, he graduated Harvard, and began studying law in the office of Oxenbridge Thacher (died 1765), a top Boston attorney, whose practice he would take over in 1765. A gifted orator, in 1766 he delivered an impassioned address in English "on liberty," or as others would recall it, on the meaning of being "a patriot," at Harvard's commencement upon receiving his Masters. The speech caught the attention of Boston's patriot leadership, and by 1767, he was contributing regularly to Samuel Adams' Boston Gazette.