Collected Political Writings of James Otis. Otis James

Colonists are entitled to as ample rights, liberties and priviledges as the subjects of the mother country are, and in some respects to more.” As in 1762, to discover the nature of colonial rights, he turned to John Locke. Otis did not fail to notice the broader implications of his argument. He made strong statements against slavery. “Does it follow that tis right to enslave a man because he is black?” he asks. “Will short curl’d hair like wool, instead of christian hair, as tis called . . . help the argument?”¹³

      The great question that puzzled Otis’s contemporaries and has puzzled scholars since is whether Otis was consistent over time. In his major writings of 1765, A Vindication of the British Colonies, Against the Aspersions of the Halifax Gentleman, in his Letter to a Rhode-Island Friend; Brief Remarks on the Defence of the Halifax Libel on the British-American-Colonies; and a series of essays printed in the Boston Gazette from late July to early September 1765, later printed anonymously in London under the title Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists. In a Letter to a Noble Lord, in addition to a series of essays that appeared in the Boston Gazette in late 1765 and early 1766 under the pen name “John Hampden,” Otis seemed to retreat from the bold proclamations

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      of colonial rights he made in 1764. After 1764, Otis seldom published such strong statements about the rights of men and almost never quoted Locke in print. He never again suggested that courts might void acts of Parliament. In some of these writings, he seemed to suggest that Parliament had a right to tax the colonists. In the spring of 1765 he called for a Stamp Act Congress, and when it convened in the fall of that year he was one of its leading lights. Yet he was reluctant to sign the proclamation of rights issued by that very congress. Readers will have to draw their own conclusions, but it might be helpful to keep a few things in mind. Otis never allowed that Parliament ought to tax the colonists unless and until they were represented in Parliament, and he never ceased to suggest that putting Americans in Parliament was the best solution to the problem. What changed was his discussion of Parliament’s rights in the matter. It might be that he simply changed his mind, or perhaps he simply changed his argument.¹⁴

      After the repeal of the Stamp Act in early 1766, Otis began to disappear from the stage. He published little in the newspapers, and he began to play a smaller role in colonial politics. Otis had befriended John Dickinson at the Stamp Act Congress, and in 1767 Dickinson sent Otis the manuscript of his “Farmer’s Letters.” Otis saw to their publication in Boston. In his biographical sketch of Otis, Shipton suggests that Otis seems to have understood that he was gradually losing his mental composure and tried to wrap up his affairs.¹⁵ Between 1766 and 1770, Otis periodically did rouse himself and his fellow colonists against encroachments upon their rights.¹⁶ The second-to-last essay in this collection, Otis’s essay of April 27, 1767, much of which was advice to voters in Massachusetts, sounds, in part, like a valedictory. From his perch in the House, Otis continued to oppose Hutchinson and his connections. In September 1769, Otis took umbrage against customs agents in Massachusetts who had called him a traitor. He and John Robinson, one of the agents, soon came to blows. The most contemporary accounts of the brawl suggest that Otis walked away relatively unscathed. But according to subsequent accounts, which have become part of the Otis legend, Otis suffered a great blow to the head, and that is what did him in.

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      Whatever the cause, by 1770 Otis was no longer the man he had been. His family and friends eventually saw to it that he was shipped out of Boston and cared for on a farm in the countryside. In his remaining years, he had occasional lucid intervals, and periodically returned to Boston and tried to restart his life, but he always relapsed. In these years, he also burned almost all of his personal papers, which is part of the reason his biography will always remain incomplete. Ultimately, he sided with his fellow Americans. When the revolution came, he disinherited his Tory daughter. The end for Otis came in 1783, as the Peace of Paris securing American independence from Britain was being finalized. On May 23 of that year, he stood in the doorway of the home at which he was staying and a bolt of lightning took him. Family and friends, shocked by the event, recalled that that was how he wished to go.

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A Note on the Texts

      The editor who seeks to publish Otis’s political writings faces a problem: Otis often wrote anonymously. I have done my best to track down as many of his political writings as possible, even though it is virtually impossible to produce a comprehensive edition. The only major published writing of Otis that is certainly from his pen and that does not appear in this edition is his work on Latin prosody.¹

      The five pamphlets Otis published in his lifetime are readily identifiable as his, as are certain newspaper essays that appeared under his own name. When we turn to Otis’s anonymous and pseudonymous writings in the newspapers, the task gets a bit more difficult. That Otis wrote the series of essays signed “John Hampden” in late 1765 and early 1766 is clear. It is also clear that he penned the essays signed “Freeborn American” or “F.A.” that constitute his 1765 pamphlet Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists. In a Letter to a Noble Lord. That being the case, we can conclude that when “Curious” published a query for the author of the Noble Lord essays in the August 19, 1765, edition of the Boston Gazette, it was Otis who penned the response that appeared in the August 26 issue of that year. For that reason, I have included both. Similarly, since the two essays signed “F.A.” that appeared in the Boston Gazette in March 1766 are responding to criticisms of Noble Lord, presumably they came from Otis’s pen.

      Beyond that, the identifications must be based on informed speculation unless and until more evidence appears. It is highly likely that Otis was the author of the essay on writs of assistance that appeared in the Boston Gazette in January 1762 that is reprinted here. This volume also includes the two-part essay signed “John Hampden” from the November 24 and December 1, 1766, issues of the Boston Gazette, on the assumption that someone else did not steal Otis’s pen name. As mentioned above, Otis signed the essays that

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      became his pamphlet Letter to a Noble Lord “F.A.,” and scholars have identified Otis as the author of the essays that seem to pick up that signature by “Freeborn American” and “Freeborn Armstrong” that appeared in the Boston Gazette not long after the Noble Lord essays were printed.² These essays are reprinted here as well. Helen Saltman identifies Otis as the author of two essays on the fight concerning Massachusetts’s agent in London,³ and they are included in this volume.

      The scholarly apparatus of this edition is minimal. I have sought to equip readers with the basic tools that they need to understand Otis’s writings in the general introduction and the section introductions. This approach will allow the reader to experience the texts as part of a live and ongoing debate about the nature and purpose of a free society. Notations that might lead readers to approach the text as an artifact of a strange and foreign time and place have therefore been minimized. Translations of Latin and French material are provided. The text retains Otis’s footnotes in their original format (usually marked by symbols, such as asterisks or daggers); all new editorial notes, including the translations, are indicated by arabic numerals. If a Latin translation is needed in an original footnote, the translation appears in brackets after the Latin in the note itself.

      As much as possible, the original spelling and punctuation have been retained. That has been easiest for the essays from the Boston Gazette. Because I turned to Charles Mullett’s fine edition of Otis’s pamphlets, I have allowed his editorial procedure to stand for those pamphlets, although I have silently corrected one or two typos that snuck into his edition. I have also followed Mullett’s practice of noting the original pagination of these pamphlets (in angle brackets inserted in the text). In a few instances, generally in the newspaper essays, when a word could not be determined due to the illegibility of the original source, I have put the assumed word in brackets