Portrait of a Patriot V. 2

Providing readers with the unusual opportunity to enter into the extraordinary mind of a patriot immediately before the Revolution, the ""Portrait of a Patriot"" series presents the major papers of the Boston lawyer and patriot penman Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744-1775). In volume 2 of the series, we are introduced to Quincy's ""Legal Commonplace Book""; the companion of his ""Political Commonplace Book"" from volume 1, the Legal Commonplace Book illustrates the systematic program of reading through which aspiring young lawyers learned their trade in colonial New England. In the accompanying introduction, coeditor Daniel R. Coquillette explains how the system of legal apprenticeship worked in Boston and contends that the level of legal argument practiced in Massachusetts prior to the Revolution was much less provincial than previously assumed. Volume 2 also includes a new transcription of the journal Quincy kept on a 1773 trip to the southern colonies undertaken on behalf of the Boston Committee of Correspondence to assess the depth of commitment to the patriot cause there, in which Quincy comments tartly on Southern manners, womenfolk, and the institution of slavery.