John Adams said of him that he was a “flame of fire.” The Boston colonists’ nemesis, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, said that he “set the Province in a flame.” Yet, few Americans today know his name. James Otis Jr. was at one time the leader of the rebel cause, years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775. But when we speak of the Founding Fathers, we don’t think of him. How can that possibly be?
Born in 1725, James Otis was in his 50’s when the Revolution began. He was a decade old than John Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Patrick Henry and other leaders of the rebellion. He was 16 years old than Dr. Joseph Warren, and 18 years older than Thomas Jefferson. They all looked up to him. Otis had graduated from Harvard at age 18, and became a successful lawyer in Boston. He gained a modicum of fame when he served as counsel to a group of colonists challenging the legality of the so-called “Writs of Assistance,” which authorized the English government to enter people’s homes with no notice or probable cause. Many years later, John Adams paid tribute to Otis’ role in that case, calling it “the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain.”
By 1764, Otis was a vocal opponent of Parliament, and he was the first of the rebel leaders to articulate the view that Parliament’s actions in taxing Americans were unconstitutional—perhaps the first expression of the argument that has gone down in American history: “no taxation without representation.” Yet Otis was not a grenade thrower, and he abhorred the violent confrontations that men like Samuel Adams were provoking in the streets of Boston. Instead, Otis used his pen to frame the debate over which the Revolution ultimately would be fought. In the mid-1760’s he produced a number of important pamphlets that circulated in Massachusetts and other colonies, all of which heavily influenced the thinking of American political leaders.
By the end of the 1760’s, Otis’ mental health began to deteriorate badly, and he was sidelined by the time of the Boston Tea Party, the “Intolerable Acts,” and the “Shot Heard Round the World.” In 1771, John Adams went so far as to say that Otis was “raving mad.” While Otis lived another dozen years, and was still alive when the War effectively ended with the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, he was a mere shell of his former self. Before he died, Otis destroyed all of his papers, an act that has deprived historians of what could have been one of the most important first-person accounts of the events leading up to the Revolution. We are left to rely on the memoirs of others who knew him, most prominently John Adams, who bestowed the highest praise on Otis for his honesty, integrity and commitment to the Cause.
As for Otis’ personal life, he married Ruth Cunningham in 1755, and together they had three children. Otis’ sister Mercy, who married James Warren, became one of the most important female figures of the Revolutionary War era. But Otis’ own family was split—his wife was a Loyalist, as was his daughter, Elizabeth—shades of Benjamin Franklin, whose son William was a rabid Loyalist throughout the War. James and Ruth were married for 28 years. James died at age 58 when he was struck by lightning while watching a thunderstorm. Ruth outlived James by six years, dying in 1789.
So today we honor the memory of James Otis, Jr., one of the most important leaders of the American Revolution, on the 242nd anniversary of his death on May 23, 1783.
