Preaching had been in vain, and prayers for the conversion of the wretches remained unanswered.  So the neighbors held a convention, and decided to send Captain Miles Standish with a posse to teach the merry men manners.

Standish appeared among the bacchanalians one morning, perfectly sober, and they were not.  He arrested the captain, and bade the others begone.  The leader was shipped back to England, with compliments and regrets, and the thirty scattered.  This was the first move in that quarter in favor of local option.

Six years later, the land thereabouts was granted and apportioned out to the Reverend John Wilson, William Coddington, Edward Quinsey, James Penniman, Moses Payne and Francis Eliot.

And these men and their families built houses and founded “the North Precinct of the Town of Braintree.”

Between the North Precinct and the South Precinct there was continual rivalry.  Boys who were caught over the dead-line, which was marked by Deacon Penniman’s house, had to fight.  Thus things continued until Seventeen Hundred Ninety-two, when one John Adams was Vice-President of the United States.  Now this John Adams, lawyer, was the son of John Adams, honest farmer and cordwainer, who had bought the Penniman homestead, and whose progenitor, Henry Adams, had moved there in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-six.  John Adams, Vice-President, afterwards President, was born there in the Penniman house, and was regarded as a neutral, although he had been thrashed by boys both from the North and from the South Precinct.  But at the last, there is no such thing as neutrality.

John Adams sided with the boys from the North Precinct, and now that he was in power it occurred to him, having had a little experience in the revolutionary line, that for the North Precinct to secede from the great town of Braintree would be but proper and right.

The North Precinct had six stores that sold W.I. goods, and a tavern that sold W.E.T. goods, and it should have a post-office of its own.

So John Adams suggested the matter to Richard Cranch, who was his brother-in-law and near neighbor.  Cranch agitated the matter, and the new town, which was the old, was incorporated.  They called it Quincy, probably because Abigail, John’s wife, insisted upon it.  She had named her eldest boy Quincy, in honor of her grandfather, whose father’s name was Quinsey, and who had relatives who spelled it De Quincey, one of which tribe was an opium-eater.

Now, when Abigail made a suggestion, John usually heeded it.  For Abigail was as wise as she was good, and John well knew that his success in life had come largely from the help, counsel and inspiration vouchsafed to him by this splendid woman.  And the man who will not let a woman have her way in all such small matters as naming of babies or towns is not much of a man.

So the town was named Quincy, and brother-in-law Cranch was appointed its first postmaster.  Shortly after, the Boston “Centinel” contained a sarcastic article over the signature, “Old Subscriber,” concerning the distribution of official patronage among kinsmen, and the Eliots and the Everetts gossiped over their back fences.