100 Objects #7: The Otis Pamphlet

Jack is 27 at the time, recently out of grad school and obsessed with American history.

“I'm a constitution nerd, and my girlfriend and I've decided to write a book about marginalized figures in American history.”

Romance right there. So on this particularly romantic day, Jack was on his way to do some research on the revolutionary war in the stacks of Butler Library.

Butler Library is one of these libraries when you walk in the front door. It looks like it has about like four or five stories, but it's actually like twelve stories on the front door too. Right. So I'm down like in the ninth floor, and you know that setting, right. It's just books, wall to wall, books, and there's nobody down there. It says wonderful feeling of come off the elevator or walk down the stairs you're in this like it's just dark envelope of books. And each aisle is only illuminated by the 15 minute timer that you turn when you walk down it.

And so I'm heading down towards the American Revolution section on his mind is one particular figure from the American Revolution. Someone Jack thought history had almost entirely overlooked. We'd come across this guy named James Otis who had written this sort of inflammatory

pamphlet really early on in the early 1760s, you know, 10 or 15 years before the Declaration of Independence.

Some people say, you know, this is the document. This sort of got the ball rolling. Jack was fired up about this pamphlet. And if you're thinking this is kind of like a brochure that you get at a doctor's office, you know, the diagram of the food pyramid, think again, pamphlets were how big ideas were spread at the time. They could be printed quickly and disseminated widely. And it was also the place where you might have a hot take, right.

So think of the famous pamphlets that we all learned later in American history, Thomas Payne's Common Sensor, letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania by John Dickinson.

“They're the ones that, you know, that lasted and were famous. And that's why my girlfriend at the time,”

and I wanted to write this book, as Otis is pamphlet deserves to be that famous. Right. But what made the story kind of great for us is that things go sideways for Otis. Actually, horribly tragic. That's like Shakespeare. A man, you know, sorting into greatness crashing into unbelievable humiliation and then madness. And, you know, of course, I romance the idea that, you know, these dangerous ideas that he was entertaining so early on,

you know, taking him over the edge. So without the internet to rely on, Jack is looking for a book that might tell him more about this tragic proto-founding father and his inflammatory pamphlet. And I'm poking through the books looking for which ones I should check out. And I look behind one of the books, and I see that there's something back there, a thin volume, hand-sewn binding, and like what? Pull out some books, pull this thing out.

And this is the pamphlet that James Otis wrote. Wow. And this is an original copy. It's a 1764 edition of the pamphlet that made him famous.

My first thought, of course, is I should steal this.

And I'm thinking that in the most virtuous way. They don't know what they have. They don't appreciate it. It's rotting into dust back there behind these books. I know what it is. It's the magnitude of America. I know what I'm holding in my hand.

“Wouldn't it just sit back there and turn into dust over the next 100 years? If I don't save it?”

It's the only moral option is to take it, right? And then the light timer cut off and I was plunged into darkness, matching the darkness of your soul. Exactly. So of course, I grabbed walked out of there. The elevator to the ground floor and up to the sixth floor into the bright light of the rare books deficient and handed it to the curator. And I told her this jewel of the American

Revolution has been rotting away in the stacks. And I hope that they will take it and preserve it. And that's where it is today. Wow. But James Otis is still sort of in that hidden place in American history. To tell the story of James Otis and his seminal pamphlet is to tell the story of a bolt from the blue, a spark that would electrify the American Revolution. Before the declaration of

independence was even a twinkle and the founding father's eyes, there was James Otis. And you could argue that the story of this pamphlet is the story of the founding document of the United States of America. From 99% invisible and BBC studios, this is a history of the United States in a hundred

forgotten magna carda and the life of the tragic hero who wrote it. The story of this pamphlet

begins around 15 years before the Revolutionary War in 1761 in the tiny hamlet of Boston, Massachusetts.

You know, at the time, Boston is this tiny little port town population 16,000. Yeah. So it's like a large university. You all practically know everybody on campus. Right. And certainly the people in power all new each other. The city is so small. You could walk from one side of it to the other and under an hour. During which time you might hear boats from Boston Harbor creaking and knocking into the docks,

you might encounter pigs loose in the street. And if you weren't like in a church,

“you were probably in a tavern. And just remember, you know, we're talking about a time when”

no one is thinking of rebellion, no one's thinking of independence. These are British citizens in Boston, 1761, a full 15 years before the Declaration of Independence. And at the time, you know, they're mostly merchants trying to make a living and make something of their new life in America.

But the living the merchants were making wasn't always strictly legal.

This is a good bit of smuggling. And everybody kind of knows it. Yeah. And a lot of it was about getting cheap French molasses out of the Caribbean and into the rum cakes. One of the big trades in the New England colonies was making rum. But the cheapest molasses was from the French Caribbean. So to get around heavy tariffs, merchants smuggled it in, and London was tired of it. They wanted those tax dollars. Or I suppose those tax shillings.

And so to catch these smugglers, London has issued these new kinds of search warrants, called Ritz of Assistance. And they're blanket warrants. I mean, you don't need any evidence. You can come aboard a ship day or night. You can go into a house or a warehouse any time during the day with the barest of suspicions. Huh. And the reason they're called Ritz of Assistance is the other aspect of them is that they, any agent who holds this piece of paper can kind of

dragoon anyone into accompanying them on one of these searches. That's the assistance part. You command it. I mean, if they stop you, one of these customs agents stops you. And says,

“you have to help me. You have to help them. And so you have this like little mob practically”

coming into people's places and searching and looking for smuggled goods and everything. And the kicker was that the customs agents also had a financial incentive. They got a cut of whatever they found. So you've got agents crawling around town more and more like thugs. And everyone is scared in on edge. And ostensibly the owner or the holder of this red of assistance is an agent of the British government in some way. Oh, yeah. These Ritz are executed,

you know, by authority from London, by the court in Massachusetts. Got it. So you really have this sort of, like, wonderful tempest in a teapot where you have, you know, the authorities are angry because duties are definitely being avoided. Taxes are not being collected. Yeah, money is not going into the king's coffers. So you have that. And then you have the merchants. And they're also furious about,

“you know, the abuse of these blank warrants. So, you know, everybody's like ready for a courtroom battle.”

And so the merchants bring a lawsuit and charges that, you know, these Ritz of assistance are illegal. Okay. Okay. So now, now it's February 1761. We're in the town hall. That's now called the the old state house in Boston. And there were five British judges sitting in wigs and red robes at the front. And so you can imagine the public is permitted to come. And so the place is packed.

First, the British government's lawyer gets up and makes the expected case in favor of the Ritz.

Parliament authorize these sorts of warrants. And Parliament's word is law. Standard, you know, defense of the Ritz, then it's the merchants turn to try to convince the judges that the Ritz are illegal. And the first lawyer for the merchants gets up. A guy with a fabulous Dickensian name, Oxen Bridge Thatcher. Oxen Bridge makes an equally predictable case on the opposite side. But he makes this very tidy argument about the Ritz, you know, citing precedent and so on.

Oxen Bridge sits down. So far, the packed audience doesn't seem moved. But the merchants have a second lawyer, too. A hotshot, hotheaded man who just joined their team. And this is James Otis. Now, I just got to try to describe James Otis to you. And he was sort of known as a really

guys that went rioting on Guyfox Day. He took their case, you know. And his friends had an

“nickname for him. He was called Furio. Oh, wow. You have to earn that one. And just to complicate”

things for Furio a little more, he had a personal history with the Chief Justice, a man named Thomas Hutchinson, who at the time had just been appointed by the governor. And the man he had passed over for this job that the governor had passed over and given to Hutchinson was James Otis's father. Oh, I'll see. Yeah. So it's no secret. These two don't like each other. But they also fundamentally disagree. Otis quit his job to take this case. Until days before the trial, he was working for

the government side, meaning he should have been arguing in favor of the Ritz. But he quit the job. And dramatically offered to represent the merchants for free. Wow. Now, you can say, you know, he did this for principal or he did this because he's still steamed about his old man. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. It's pretty exciting stuff. So Otis takes to the floor and he speaks for five hours. Wow. Now let me just say something about five hours. I think people forget that way before

television and radio, before telegraph, before even magazines or a Tory was a whole other kind of,

you know, public entertainment. Really. I always loved to remind people that, you know, we we

lawed the Stephen Douglas Abraham Lincoln debates. There were seven Lincoln Douglas debates. Each were three hours long. But people had all the time in the world. This was great. Yeah. So when I

“say he carried on for five hours, I mean, that was just like, this is a good show. That's what”

totally, they're they're their bench in a Netflix show. Right. This this is the Prano season one. You're just hitting next episode. Next episode. Next episode. Exactly. And we know that he's cereal. Right. He's a fonderest kind of fella. So, you know, he warns the audience. He says, I'm going to make this rather dangerous argument and even suggest one that may end up destroying me. And as we know them, these are the words he said right at the beginning of his talk. He says, let the consequences

be what they will. I am determined to proceed. The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice his state, ease, health and applause, and even life itself to the sacred call of his country. Otis is preparing his audience. Whatever he's about to say about these rits of assistance, these search warrants might be so crazy that it could threaten everything. And in fact, you know, he comes right in and lands it. He says this rit, he says,

appears to me the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law that ever was found in an English law book. Swingin. What he's saying is that it's inherently wrong for thugs to break into your home without due process. He says,

“now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house.”

And then he brings out the sort of cherished old metaphor. He says, a man's house is his castle, and while he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This rit, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. And then he goes right there. He says, no acts of Parliament can establish such a rit, no matter how Parliament might word this rit, it would be void. Well, gulp. What is so radical about this is the fact that he's questioning

the very validity of Parliament that there might be some laws that are deeper, more fundamental than the laws of Parliament. Because what he's basically saying here is that the king's law doesn't stand up against natural law. That's right. He's saying Parliament's law. So, understand, at this time, you know, no one has really brought into an American courtroom this idea of natural rites. These notions that haven't even been written down yet. These five appointed judges,

they totally believed that Parliament was supreme. No exceptions. So remember, in the previous century, you know, a king had lost his head and another his throne in this like centuries long struggle that culminated in this idea that the law of Parliament is supreme. And that's the

word they always used. The law of Parliament is supreme. So here he is saying, like, this rite

to privacy and these British rites in general, predate Parliament or any government that's certainly older than any of Parliament's merely laws. And so how is this panel of judges who represent Parliament's merely laws? How are they reacting to this? Well, the judges must have been floored,

trying to wiggle out of some smuggling fees. But now, we're practically the Knights of the Round

“Table in the Court of King Arthur. The truth is we don't know exactly what James Otis said in that room.”

There isn't a transcript of his speech. There was no minutes taker for the court. In fact, we only have one set of notes from it. There was really only one young guy who frantically scribbled down everything that he could get down on paper. What was all over? 25-year-old freshly minted lawyer John Adams. Wow. Yes, in the room. That John Adams. For people who don't know.

I mean, I don't know. That John Adams, founding father, second president and kind of the scholar

of the group. He's not only the scholar and the intellectual, but Adams is he kept his diaries. He's kind of the minute staker of the entire revolution. We have his commentary on just about everything. In fact, here, he famously writes a little later. Otis was a flame of fire. Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against rits of assistance. To be clear, Adams isn't a merchant.

He has no money at stake here. He's just a young lawyer who has swept up in the brilliance and pressience of James Otis before him. Later, he swooned a little bit and he says, and this is this very famous line about this little moment, then in there, the child independence was born. Even the chief judge Hutchinson would later marvel at the magnitude of this moment. Later, Hutchinson writes his own little memoir and remembers that, you know,

basically all the troubles in the colonies stem back to this time and remembers that Otis

before this speech, Otis swore to him that he would quote, "set the province in flames." His five-hour operation may have radicalized the crowd of merchants and onlookers, but it failed to win the case. He lost the case, but he kind of won in the battle of ideas, at least in the crowd. Absolutely, and one in terms of his reputation. Otis becomes a politician. He's elected to the Massachusetts House and meanwhile, over the next few years,

he's taking this electrifying speech and refining his ideas, turning the argument into something he'll write down on paper in one of the most popular forms of political commentary of the day.

The pamphlet. You know, this is three years after the speech when this pamphlet comes out.

So he's taken this idea of like these natural rights, these British liberties, these inherent rights that predate government, and he's kind of pulling it all together. And in 1764, he publishes a little pamphlet with a big title. The rights of the British colonies asserted and proved. Otis writes this pamphlet and it does kind of go viral. In America, it goes through like three editions. It's published in London. So they're discussing it in Parliament.

So yeah, this is a serious piece of paper, right? And it made all the more serious by some of the

“crazy ideas that are being thrown out from this pamphlet. He says, and I think he believes in his”

heart that he's trying to describe a British government. He's describing what he thinks once existed in England. But in fact, he's kind of outlining what America is about to become. Otis goes much further in this pamphlet than he went in his courtroom speech. And he starts to outline a version of a country that was so foreign at the time, it would put his life in jeopardy, which is strange. Because to us today, these crazy ideas sound so familiar. They're

almost boring. For example, in the pamphlet, he lays out a structure for government. Instead of this supremacy of Parliament, he describes three branches working in tandem. Then he even uses the phrase checks and balances to describe how they work harmoniously. But of course, understand me. Parliament does not see it, though. He also takes issue with how the colonists are taxed even though they don't have a vote in elections. He says,

the very act of taxing exercise of a those who are not represented appears to me

“depriving them of one of their most essential rights as free men. And you know, this idea,”

this idea is what sort of boils down to the bumper sticker, taxation without representation is tyranny. One of the central sort of models of the revolution. That's in this pamphlet. And he evokes this idea in this dramatic moment that our rights aren't given to us by government. But by God, he says Parliament cannot make two and two five. And he says, you know, the only person that can make natural law, like two and two is four, is God. Yeah. You know, and every

rights granted by our maker. And of course, Jefferson famously says, you know, in a liable

rights endowed by our creator, but he's also imagining a version of America that is far more of a utopia than most of the founding fathers would conceive of. And he has this one passage, check this out. He says at one point, the colonists are by the law of nature, freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black. Whoa. Yeah, James Otis in this pamphlet goes there, because this is the absolute logic of all of these ideas. Absolutely. Absolutely. And he says slavery threatens to reduce

Europe and America to the ignorance and barbarity of the dark ages. Wow. I love that he sees it all, right? It's all there. And he just carries it forward, because he's hotheaded, you know, he's furious. Yeah. He's going to, he's going to take his argument to the end.

“Otis wasn't trying to start a revolution with this pamphlet. Remember, it's lovingly awkwardly”

called the rights of British colonies asserted and proved. He wants to reform Britain, not start a new country. But the logic he sets out, it's like a grenade. Once he asserted that natural law supersedes parliamentary law, that there are rights so fundamental that no government can take them away the tab had been pulled and the grenade thrown. So what's Otis's pamphlet is published? What happened? How is Otis being perceived? Well, you know, at first, of course,

Otis is a great hero. And this is a very powerful and strong pamphlet. And here in the states,

they think it's all great. Now, it does get published in London. And, you know, like I said, this argument at the parliament is not supreme. It's just, you know, that is not going to sit. I did find this, the eminent jurist of the day was a man named Lord Mansfield. And he did offer this opinion, quote, "It is said the man is mad." The book is full of wildness. Meanwhile, in the colonies, counter pamphlets are written customs officers start bad

mouthing him, so Otis responds in follow-up pamphlets. Hot takes flying back and forth. And the consequences are becoming more and more dramatic. People are asking some hard questions.

“Like, what do you mean parliament is supreme? Isn't that treason to say that?”

Don't you get hung for that? You know, these are the questions that are floating around. Yeah, and so how does Otis take that? Increasingly in these newspaper articles that he writes or in these other pamphlets that are sort of the follow-ups, he starts backtracking. He doesn't want people to think that he's not a good Brit. That he's not a loyal British citizen swearing allegiance to the king and recognizing the supremacy of parliament.

He is after all the politician in Massachusetts, a British politician. He writes in one of his subsequent pamphlets, things like, "Of course parliament is the supreme sovereign power." And these, as parliament remains, this is a bream judge from whose final determination there is no appeal. Wow. So you're like, "Oh wait, what happened, Otis?" Yeah, what happened? James, what's going on? And you get a sense that Otis might be just

even a little bit afraid. Yeah, so we're talking about treason. The last one is kind of hard to read. Because it's so full of this kind of language. Check this out. If there's anything offensive, he's referring to his previous pamphlets. He says, "If there's anything offensive and either, I am heartily sorry." And then he refers to himself in the third person and says that the author of these previous pamphlets

has given me authority in his name, humbly to ask pardon, for the least Ioda that may have

“displeased his superiors. What do you make of this? What is your read on him backtracking?”

Well, I mean, I think he was afraid. You know, the pushback was fervent. John Adams, once again,

always with his diaries and notes, always observing the scene, writes that Otis was called a

reprobate and apostate and a trader in every street in Boston. The indignation of all his political friends against him was universal. So now Otis is a baraya, the town goat. Yeah, you can see why he would begin to acquiesce why he would begin to capitulate. You know, we lament him backtracking here, but there's nothing to stop what he's already started in a way. Right, right. And you know, I think Otis, in that pamphlet, he floats so many radical ideas. I mean, when he goes off about racial

he is, he is, you know, he's in a world of his own making. He's in an America that wouldn't exist

“for, well, doesn't exist yet. Yeah, but certainly he sees it, right. And I think all of his boldness”

in the pamphlet, once it hits the, you know, the bus of all this criticism, talk of treason, you know, even the Gallows, you know, makes him realize, well, maybe maybe I did go a little too far. But he does back out. He does retreat and it's kind of horrible to read. This is where things start to get Shakespearean. Otis knows he's not going to win the fight against Parliament. So he starts backing off his revolutionary rhetoric, but he's still mad. He's still

furious, after all. So he starts fighting any fight that he might be able to win. He starts publicly feuding in the papers with some of the customs agents who disagree with him. They're

always fighting each other in the papers. In one article, he calls them, quote, "supportative

blockheads." So one day Otis learns that one of these "supportative blockheads," a customs agent named John Robinson, is coming to Boston. And Otis takes to the newspaper to speak again about the natural rights of man. In the Boston Gazette he writes this line. "I have a natural right if I can get no other satisfaction than to break his head." Now we're parodying himself. Yeah, you know, parody or not. Otis tries to make good on his threat. Otis prouse the bars one night

looking for Robinson and finds him and he challenges him to a duel. Then there and Robinson just grabs Otis by the nose and drags him around now. They both have walking sticks. So they just start beating the crap out of each other. But Robinson gets the upper hand and seriously bashes Otis's skull in with his stick. He is seriously injured, brain injury. A few months afterwards, Adam's visit

seven sees that the heel the gash and has it as always in his diary. You could lay a finger in it.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's bad. And then it just gets worse. The injury proves to be devastating. Otis starts falling apart right there in front of all the

“townspeople of Boston. Remember, this is like a college campus and the hot shot hothead lawyer”

who took on the government with all the bravado in the world is now being described as a quote miserable vagabond rolling in the streets and gutters, a drunkard, a madman shooting guns out of his windows. And then he does something poetically tragic. One night, he is in a rage and one of the merchants in town writes in his diary, Mr. Otis got into a mad freak tonight and broke a great many windows in the townhouse. And remember, that's where he made his speech.

And he goes there one night, smashes out all the windows. Oh, where he made his first fiery speech. Right. He just goes there at night and just spashed out the windows. Just throws hot rocks through all the windows. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. But then in 1771, he's declared lunatic, L.U.N.A.T.I.C.K. Now, yeah, the pre-webster spell I know what I'm taking. That's right. Which is some sort of like category of mental state, you know, at the time. Otis leaves Boston. He's politics and law in

all the arguments about parliament and the superlative blockheads and he retires to a farm to convalesce and stops running pamphlets and newspaper articles, stops outlining a version of a country only he can see. But pretty soon, others start to see it too. Samuel Adams spreads Otis' argument now filed into the sharpest slogan of the age. No taxation without representation. In 1768, John Hancock's ship, the liberty, gets seized while smuggling Madeira wine. Hancock comes out

the other side, a revolutionary, throwing in with the sons of liberty, putting his fortune behind

the cause. Some of them turn fast like that. Others, like Jefferson and Washington, come to

“it slowly, talking themselves into treason one year at a time. But here's the thing. They came”

to it together. They had committees and taverns and each other. When Hancock needed a lawyer to defend him, his friend John Adams took the case. And one, it was a whole crowd of men radicalizing in the same direction at once. But not Otis. So the whole war happens. He is

Right. Yorktown, the British surrender. And it's 1783. And we're about to, we're in route to signing the Treaty of Paris and become a country. So somewhere in that year, John Hancock decides to have a big party. He is John Hancock. And he invites everybody. It's a big

“party. And somebody, I think it's Hancock, who comes up with the idea that we should invite James Otis.”

Because, you know, he was there at the beginning. Right. And this is right at the time when people realize, you know, books are going to be written about them now. Statues are going to be carved. They won. We're starting a new country. And so they invite Otis out of respect, you know. And and he comes, there's not much written about this party. But you can't imagine it. In the Hancock manner, the finest home in all of Massachusetts Bay, they must have been drinking

Medira wine, John Hancock's famous smuggled good, or the rum punch that was the preferred

drink of the revolutionary elite. And the toasts, there must have been toasts, a war had been fought

in one, lives had been lost, and an unlikely colony had beaten the most powerful empire on earth. And all the while, James Otis is there. Old friends, familiar faces, celebrating the victory of a battle, heed surrendered. He could probably imagine the statues and the plaques, the parades and the holidays to come. What was this like for Otis? Most of what we know comes from what a nephew of his recorded. And so the nephew of Scartsim, not only out of the party, out of Boston, and back to the far.

And we just have this one sort of bleak note that, you know, immediately after this dinner, his nephew tells us he just kind of breaks down the way the nephew describes it is. There was a visible oscillation of his intellect. He was overwhelmed by the recollection of past days, impressed probably with greater force, by the presence of Hancock and others, of the convives and by the scene altogether. It's hard to imagine what Otis was thinking when

he was at that party. But, you know, very few of us ever get to see the road not taken. You know, we take our road, you know, the significance of the cross poem, of course, is that we all take the roads we take and then we make up lies about how we made the right decision.

“Yeah, yeah, right. That's what that belongs actually about. Because most of us never get to see the other”

bath. Yeah. But, Otis did. He goes to that dinner and there it is. The other bath. They're all sitting around him. I can't imagine the, just the gravity of that revelation. Certainly that alone would have made a man insane. He was alone when he was a revolutionary and he was alone when he wasn't a revolutionary.

He was a man always out of step. But it took him taking that first step. The revolution he missed

required a singular voice to crack through the status quo and electrify the people who came after him. He's taken back to the country, back to the farm. And a few months later, it was just a lovely May spring afternoon and nice shower started. He steps out onto the porch of the Osborne farm in Andover and a single bolt of lightning came out of the sky and killed him.

“Get out of here. Yeah. That's how he died. Oh my god. It's mythical. It's not even Shakespearean.”

It's like Greek and Roman and Shakespearean and biblical. All in one. I think it's sort of fitting that he is taken out like a god. That's the final sort of compliment for Otis. There's here. Here's how you know Zeus will take you down. Absolutely. Yeah.

What an amazing story. I get so much fun. Thanks for letting us all know about the tragedy of

James Otis. Really something else. It's the glory in the tragedy. I mean, there's so many great things that come from Otis and just got, wow, the price of that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of daring and that kind of ambition, that's James Otis. Jack hit is an author and contributing

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