The character and life-work of few men belonging to the pre-Revolutionary era are better worth studying than are those of James Otis, the patriot-orator of Massachusetts, who took so prominent a part in opposing England's obnoxious Stamp Act and in arousing the American Colonies to a sense of the outrage done them by the issue of the arbitrary Writs of Assistance. Though the records of his personal life are somewhat meagre, sufficient is known of Otis's public career to interest students of his country's history and entitle him to the admiration of all, as one of the most earnest and eloquent advocates of Liberty in the Nation's youth-time, and a sturdy and noble defender of its cause at the critical era of England's injustice and oppression. No man of the period, it may be hazarded, did more yeoman service than Otis did in the cause of American Freedom, or was more sensible of the rights of the Colonists and of the injustice done them by the Motherland in her assaults on their civil and political status in the years preceding the Revolution. Not only was he one of the most fearless asserters of the great principles for which our forefathers fought and bled, but few men better than he saw more clearly the malign character of the arbitrary acts imposed upon the Colonies that brought about separation and laid the foundation of American independence. In resisting the enforcement of these Acts, Otis was actuated not only by disinterested and patriotic motives, but by a statesmanlike discernment of their unconstitutional character and the wrong they would inflict, in being inconsistent with the foundation charter of the Massachusetts Colony. Like many of the Revolutionary fathers, Otis was not at heart a rebel, or from the outset disloyal to the Crown in its administration of the affairs of the Colonies. His occupancy of the Crown post of Advocate-General and his own well-known integrity and conscientiousness forbid that idea, not to speak of his pride in the fact that his ancestors were English and for generations had held high judicial offices and militia appointments in the gift of the King and the ministry of the period. But though by tradition and training, at the outset of his career, a subject of monarchy and a true man in his official relations with England, Otis was at the same time ardent in his interests for the wellbeing of the Colonies and zealous for their rights and privileges. When these came into conflict, the stand he took was staunchly patriotic, even to the sacrifice of his office and its emoluments; while in espousing the popular cause against the King and the ministry he stood forth, as John Adams expressed it, as "a flame of fire," full of consuming zeal for his country and an ardent upholder of its rights and prerogatives. In assuming this attitude, that Otis's zeal and energy were at times unrestrained and his language occasionally unguarded and overvehement, is doubtless true; but this was certainly excusable in a man of his ardent temperament and strength of character; while the situation of affairs was such as to call not only for patriotic enthusiasm, but for righteous indignation and heated denunciation, in a cause that stirred to the depths the heart and brain of an impetuous and commanding orator. Nor do we well to forget what this consuming, patriotic passion and heated vindication of his country's rights cost Otis, in the responsibility he felt and the solicitation he manifested, especially in the middle and later stages of his strenuous career, for the cause he had so keenly at heart. Pathetic is the story of the ailment that clouded his closing years; and only exculpatory can be the judgment now passed upon the man and his work when we consider what the strain was that he had long and anxiously borne and that revealed its effects in periods of sad mental alienation and incipient madness. To speak and write strongly on taxation and its injustice, in the case of the Colonies, might well, however, disturb the mental equilibrium of even a strong man, and the more so when actively protesting, as Otis long continued to protest, against unlawful encroachments upon the liberties of the Colonies and the other arbitrary acts that then characterized the administration of the Crown. Whatever it cost Otis personally to engage in this defence, the result, as we all now know and admit, was only and wholly beneficent--in the defeat of an unrighteous autocracy, and the emancipation of a Continent from a fettering and baleful administration.
This herald of and actor in the great drama of his time was born at West Barnstable, formerly known as the Great Marshes, in Massachusetts, on the 5th of February, 1723. He was one of thirteen children, his father being Colonel James Otis (born in 1702), the son of Judge John Otis, whose immediate ancestor had emigrated from England in the preceding century and settled in New England at the town of Hingham, calling the region after the old home of the family in the Motherland. This John Otis, who was born in A.D. 1657, became a prominent man in the Settlement, was a member of the Council of the Colony, and ultimately became Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas and Probate Court. Otis's own father (Colonel James Otis) likewise became a lawyer and publicist, a colonel in the local militia, and rose to a high post in the judiciary and was a member of the Council of Massachusetts. He married Mary Alleyne and transmitted to the future patriot, the subject of this sketch, the talents and many of the characteristics of his progenitors. A brother of our hero, Samuel Alleyne Otis, rose to prominence in the politics of the State and as Secretary of the Senate administered to Washington the oath of office as President, holding the Bible on which he was sworn as honored chief of the future nation. A sister, Mercy, an ardent and loyal patriot, married the notable republican, James Warren of Plymouth, and lived herself to write a compend of the "History of the American Revolution," together with a collection of patriotic verse.
James Otis, whom we know as one of the most eloquent orators of the Revolutionary era and an ardent promoter of American independence, was educated for his career at Harvard, which institution he entered as a freshman in 1739, having previously been prepared for college by the Rev. Jonathan Russell. His university course, so far as can be gathered from any account of it that has come down to us, was not a notable one, though he had a fair scholastic career and graduated at the age of nineteen in 1743. While popular after a fashion at college, he was a bit of a recluse and a diligent student of literature, with a predilection, it is said, for music, playing well on the violin. After graduating, he wisely spent two years in general reading before entering upon the study of the law, which he did in 1745 under James Gridley, a prominent jurist of Massachusetts and sometime Crown Attorney-General. Three years later, he was admitted to the bar, and in 1748 began to practice his profession at Plymouth, Mass. In 1750, he removed to Boston, and there became known as an advocate of note and high promise, actuated by nice professional instincts, with a fine sense of honor, and keenly appreciating, it is recorded, his responsibilities in his relations with his clients, which led him to accept only such cases as he could conscientiously defend and take retainers from.
This characteristic scruple in the lawyer gave him a high standing in his profession, and naturally led to success at the bar, besides winning for him the respect and admiration of troops of warm and attached friends.
About this time he appears to have developed uncommon gifts as an orator, and his rather irascible nature gave scope to his keen wit and powers of sarcasm. His extensive reading and ultimate study of good literary models naturally bore fruit in the practice of the forensic art and gave him prestige at the bar, as well as, later on, in taking to public life and to the advocacy of the rights of the Colonists in the controversy with the Crown.
In 1755, when he had attained his thirtieth year, Otis married Ruth Cunningham, the daughter of an influential Boston merchant. The lady, from all accounts, was undemonstrative and devoid of her husband's patriotic ardor, traits that did not tend to domestic felicity or lead, on the wife's part, to a commanding influence over her vehement and somewhat eccentric husband. The fruit of the union was one son and two daughters. The son entered the navy, but unhappily died in his eighteenth year. One of the daughters, the elder of the two, probably under the mother's influence, angered her father by espousing the English cause and marrying a Captain Brown, a British officer on duty at Boston. The marriage was a source of irritation and unhappiness to Otis, who, after his son-in-law had fought and been wounded at Bunker Hill, withdrew with his wife to England, and was there disowned and cut off by the irate patriot, whose affection was also dried up for the erring daughter. The younger daughter, on the other hand, was a devoted and patriotic woman, who shared her father's enthusiasm for the popular cause. She married Benjamin Lincoln of Boston, but early became a widow.
By this time, Otis had become not only a man eminent in his profession in Boston, but a powerful factor in the public life of the city. The New England commonwealth was then beginning to be greatly exercised over the aggressions of the Motherland, and this was keenly watched by Otis, who took a lively and patriotic interest in Colonial affairs. Beyond his profession, which had closely engrossed him, he had heretofore taken little part in public life; his leisure, indeed, he had employed more as a student of rather than of national affairs, as his work on the "Rudiments of Latin Prosody," published in 1760, bears witness. As the era of a conflict with England neared, he however altered in this respect, and became a zealous advocate of non-interference on the part of the Crown in the affairs of the Colonies and an ardent protester against English oppression and injustice. Soon grievances arose in the relations between the Colonies and England which gave Otis the right to denounce the Motherland and excite dissaffection among the people of the New World. These grievances arose out of the strained commercial relations between the two countries and the attempt of England to devise and enforce irritating schemes of Colonial control. Of these causes of outcry in the New World the two chief were the revival and rigid execution of the English Navigation Acts, designed to limit the freedom of the American Colonies in trading with West Indian ports in American built vessels, and the insistence, on the part of the Crown and the British government, that the Colonies should be taxed for the partial support of English garrisons in the country. In the development of trade in the New World, the Colonies reasonably felt that they should not be harassed by the mother country, and so they permitted commerce to expand as it would; and when this was enjoined by England they naturally resented interference by her and began to evade the laws which she imposed upon the young country and bid defiance to the Crown customs officers in the measures resorted to in the way of restriction and imposed penalty. This attitude of the Colonists in ignoring or defying English laws was soon now specially emphasized when the Crown resorted to more stringent measures to curb Colonial trade and impose heavy customs duties on articles entering New World ports. Flagrant acts of evasion followed, and defiant smuggling at length brought its legal consequences--in the issue by the English Court of Exchequer of search warrants, or Writs of Assistance, as they were called, by which it was sought to put a stop to smuggling, by resorting to humiliating arbitrary measures sure to be resented by the Colonies. These Writs of Assistance empowered the King's officers, or others delegated by them, to board vessels in port and enter and search warehouses, and even the private homes of the Colonists, for contraband goods and all importations that had not paid toll to His Majesty's customs. This attempted rigid execution of the Acts of Trade, together with other arbitrary measures on the part of the Crown which followed, such as the imposition of the Stamp Act, and the coercive levy of taxes to pay part of the cost of maintaining English troops in the Colonies, was soon to cost England dear and end in the loss of her possessions in America and the rise of the New World Republic.
One of the most active men in the Colonies to oppose this Colonial policy of England was, as we know, the patriot James Otis, at the time Advocate-General of the Crown, who took strong ground against the Writs of Assistance, arguing that they were not only arbitrary and despotic in their operation, but unconstitutional in their imposition on the Colony, since they were irreconcilable with the Colonial charters and a violation of the rights and prerogatives of the people. Rather than uphold them as a Crown officer, Otis resigned his post of Advocate-General, and became a fervent pleader of the popular cause and denouncer of the legal processes by which the Crown sought to impose, with its authority, its obnoxious trammellings and restrictions without the consent of and in defiance of the inalienable rights of the American people. Otis not only resisted the enforcement by the King's officers of the odious warrants and denounced their arbitrary character, but inveighed hotly against English oppression and all attempts of the Crown and its deputy in the province, the Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, to restrict the liberties of the people and impose unconstitutional laws upon the Colony. The Writs of Assistance were, of course, defended by the representatives of the Crown in the Colony, and on the plea that without some such legal process the laws could not be executed, and that similar writs were in existence in England and made use of there on the authority of English statutes. The pleas against them advanced by Otis took cognizance of the fact that the Writs were irreconcilable with the charter of the Massachusetts Colony, that English precedent for their enforcement had no application in America, and that taxation by the Motherland and compulsory acts of the nature of the Writs did open violence to the rights and liberties of the people and were inherently arbitrary and despotic, being imposed without the consent of the Colonies and to their grave hurt and detriment. In pleading the Colonial cause against the Writs, Otis struck a chord in the heart of the people which tingled and vibrated, while stirring up such opposition to them that the authorities were fain to hold their hand and await instructions from the English ministry as to their withdrawal or enforcement. The response of the home government was that they should be enforced, but little advantage was taken of this mandate in the Colonies, since opposition to the Writs had, thanks to the patriot Otis's denunciation of them, became almost universal; while the people had been roused to a sharp sense of their situation, in view of the tyrannous attitude of England towards the Colonies, and the next step taken by the Crown, under Prime Minister Grenville, in threatening them with the no less hated Stamp Tax. This new fiscal infatuation on the part-of the English ministry strained the relations of the Colonies toward the Crown to almost the point of rupture. It was, moreover, an unwise exhibition of English stubbornness and impolicy, since it revealed the mistake which England fell into at the time of considering the Settlements of the New World as Colonial possessions to be held solely for the financial benefit of the mother country, rather than for their own advancement and material well-being. It is true, that the Seven Years' War, which had been waged chiefly for the protection of the American dependencies of the Crown, had left a heavy burden of debt upon England which she naturally looked to the Colonies in some measure to repay. But the Colonies had ready their argument-- they objected to being taxed without their consent, and without representation in the British Parliament, besides being, as they thought, sufficiently oppressed by the burden of customs' duties already imposed upon them. The spirit of resistance therefore grew, and was ere long to take a more determined and, to England, fatal form, for the Stamp Act, though later on repealed, was passed, in spite of the protests of the Colonial Assemblies and the increasing soreness of feeling in America against the mother country.
The like service James Otis did for the community of the New World in opposing the Writs of Assistance he also did in opposing the enforcement of the Stamp Act--remonstrances suggested by the patriot's love of independence, and which, besides numberless letters, speeches and addresses, drew from the pre-Revolutionist's trenchant pen several able pamphlets, one vindicating the action of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, of which Otis was now a member, in protesting against England's intolerance in laying grievous taxation on the Colonies, and the others upholding the rights of the Colonies in resisting the Crown's misgovernment, as well as its purpose to tax the Colonies to defray some of the cost England had incurred in prosecuting the French and Indian war. In these patriotic services and labors, Otis, as a public man, took an active and zealous part, besides conducting a large correspondence as chairman of the House Committee of the Legislature on subjects relating to the weal of the whole country. Nor were his duties confined to these matters alone, for we find him at this period engaged in controversies first with Governor Hutchinson, and then with his successor, Governor Bernard, both of whom deemed Otis an arch-rebel and incendiary--a man not only without the pale of considerate treatment by lawfully constituted authority in the Colonies, but the object of contumely and loathing by the obsequious loyalists of the Motherland and all who desired her continued dominance and supremacy in the country. History has happily long since done justice to James Otis and seen him in a fairer and far more worthy light--the light not only of a patriot lover of liberty, but an ardent and invincible defender of his country against autocratic encroachment, and a fearless asserter of the principles which have become the foundation stone of the American nation. In his masterful way, Otis was at times heedlessly bitter and inveterate in his prejudices against the mother country and the King's officers in the Colony; but we must remember the strength as well as the ardor of his affection for his native land and the righteousness of the cause he lovingly espoused and so nobly advocated. We must remember also the antagonisms he naturally aroused, and the hatreds of which he was the object, on the part of loyal authority in the Colony which feared while it traduced him. This is shown in the mishap that befell him in a British coffeehouse in Boston, where he was roughly assaulted by a man named Robinson, an ally of the revenue officers whom he had denounced in an article in the Boston Gazette, an attack that left its traces in the mental ailment which afterwards distressingly incapacitated him and shortened his bright public career. He nevertheless lived to see the fruition of his hopes, in the throwing off by the Colonies of all allegiance to Britain and take part himself in the battle of Bunker Hill. The harvest reaped by his country from the seeds of liberty he had planted in his day was such as might well cheer him in the period of mental darkness which fell upon him and regretfully clouded his closing years. Nor was he, in his own era, without regard and honor among those who delighted in his splendid patriotism, in the days of his manly strength, mental as well as physical, and who held him in high esteem as a patriot orator and the staunchly loyal tribune of the New World peoples. In these days of flaccid patriotism and moral declension in public life, his example may well stimulate and inspire. In his wholehearted devotion to the hopes as well as to the interests of the Colonies most notable was the polemical fervor with which he espoused their cause and noble the stand he took for liberty and independence.
Like many men who have attained eminence in public life, James Otis was the victim in his day of detraction and envy. A specially malignant slander was current with reference to him and his father at the period of the patriot's resigning his Crown post of Advocate-General. The motive for throwing up his appointment and pleading the people's cause against the Writs of Assistance, it was at the time said, was the disappointment of the Otis family at the Chief-Justiceship, then vacant, going to Governor Hutchinson instead of to Colonel James Otis of Barnstable, father of our hero. This aspersion of the fair name of the Otises as patriots and high-minded gentlemen, and the lying assertion that it was this disappointment that led the Otises, father and son, to abandon the Crown's side for that of the people, was cruelly false, and especially so as Hutchinson, who got the post, repeats the falsehood in his "History of Massachusetts" in explanation of the Otises turning their coats and becoming partisans of the popular cause. Nothing could well be more unjust and untrue, for both men were of far too honorable a character and too ardently patriotic to justify the slander and give even the slightest color to the misrepresentation. Were it necessary more emphatically to characterize the slander as false, one might confidently point to the happy relations of the Otises with the other patriots of the time--to men of the stamp of the two Adams statesmen, to Hancock, Randolph, Warren, and other leaders of the Revolutionary era, as well as to the contemporary repute and influence of both men in the heroic annals of the Colonial period. The times were indeed trying and critical, and at the outset of the movement for independence and relief from the irritating aggressions of the Crown, the attitude, we may be sure, was closely watched and not over truthfully reported, of men of influence who took the patriot side and helped on the great cause which was afterwards to be gloriously and triumphantly crowned.
But we pass on to relate, in a few brief words, what remains yet to be told of James Otis's career, and of the pathetic declining days of the hero and his tragic end. While mind and body were intact and working perfectly in unison, Otis continued to give himself heart and soul to the cause he had so patriotically and zealously espoused. Even when his malady showed itself, there were brief returns of useful activity and old-time mental alertness, only, however, to be followed by sad relapses into the eclipse-period of his powers. At periods of respite from his ailment, Otis took part fitfully in his duties as member of the Massachusetts Legislature, of which body he had been Speaker, and did what he could to further the work of legislation. He also at this time appeared once or twice as an advocate in Court, and also continued his correspondence in Committee of the General Assembly with prominent men in the other Colonies, seeking successfully cooperation with them in the great drama of the time. But for the most part we now find him a considerately cared-for guest of his old-time friend, Colonel Samuel Osgood, at the latter's farmhouse at Andover. Here the distinguished pre-Revolutionist had phenomenal premonitions of the coming manner of his death, related to his sister, Mrs. Warren, to whom the patriot on more than one occasion said, that when God in his Providence should take him hence into the eternal world, he hoped it would be by a stroke of lightning! This tragic fate was ere long to be his, for on the afternoon of May 23rd, 1783, when Otis was standing amid a family group at the door of the Osgood homestead at Andover, a bolt from the blue flashed down from aloft and felled the hero to the ground. Death was instantaneous, and happily it left no mark or contortion on his body, while his features had the repose and placidity of seeming sleep. Thus passed the hero from the scenes of earth, and in a sense fitly, for the period was that which saw the close of the drama of the Revolution he had been instrumental in bringing about, and the departure from the soil of the new-born Republic of the last of the English soldiery.
[3]Historian, Biographer, Essayist, Author of a "Precis of English History," a "Continuation of Grecian History," etc., and for many years Editor of Self-Culture Magazine.--The Publishers.
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