by Nathan Allen
Despite being small and cohesive, a hierarchy soon developed in Barnstable. Like all feudal stratification, the determination of status and vehicle for advancement was land. Originally, the grants for “seating a congregation” were made to a small group of leaders of the proposed community on the condition that they would distribute land to “such persons as may be fitt to live together there in the feare of God” in such “equall & fitt portions as the several estates, ranks, & quallities of such persons shall require.” Barnstable’s land was purchased gradually from the Amer-Indians with the shrewd disbursement of axes, coats, and fencing. The original nine Dorchester families had laid out house around the inlet at the mouth of Rendezvous Creek and around Coggins Pond. The new group from Scituate arranged lots in the same general areas; families were granted six to twelve acres with the restriction “that no inhabitant shall make a sale of his house or any of his lands until he has offered the same to the proprietors; and, in case the plantation buy it not, then he shall provide a purchaser whom the town shall approve.” Families were required to construct houses on their assigned lots in order to secure dwelling rights, and within a few months, there were thirty-eight families recognized under this scheme, twenty-three from Scituate and fifteen from various other towns.
In 1642, the town contemplated issuing more lots “by common consent” to private landowners from public lands, and the assessment for measuring how much each Barnstable family received was determined by a traditional feudal formula: one-third for each lot already owned, one-third for each voting town member, and one-third “according to estate.” This method of distributing public land into private hands was traditional but clearly biased for original settlers and the wealthy. Chiefly internal population growth required additional distributions of common lands according to the traditional method. By the end of the century, the increasing number of people receiving tiny disbursements of lands would protest the traditional method, but until then, it seemed fair.
John Otis’s wife died in 1653, and the 76-year-old widower married Elizabeth Streame in 1655; multiple marriages resulting from death or divorce were not uncommon. The marriage only lasted two years, as John Otis, the man who dared to leave the old world, died in 1657 at age 76 in Hingham, Plymouth Colony. His will listed £20 in small loans to various men in town, so while he hadn’t participated in politics, he made sure everyone owed him favors. His eldest son, John Jr., was 36 years old. An economic depression gripped Plymouth Colony during the 1640’s while the Puritans were in control of England, hence significantly diminishing Puritan immigration to New England and therefore limiting the demand for new land, food and farming supplies; but once the depression ended in the 1650s, John Otis Jr. began an expansion of the family businesses that would last decades. Using his father’s land, capital lent by his in-laws, and money invested with him by neighbors, he began to widely invest in real estate. He had the obvious challenge of converting an ever increasing amount of his farming operations, and their management, to employees. He also had to build the network of contacts necessary for the distribution of the commodities his farms produced.
The year following his father’s death, John Jr. purchased over a thousand acres of land outside of Hingham, in Scituate, perhaps purely for investment but it’s probable that tax considerations influenced his decision. Though John Otis, Jr. avoided formal politics, he did not abjure from political battles. He refused to pay Hingham taxes in 1650, even rejecting the town constable’s demand for payment. Three years later he still refused to pay town taxes and took his case to the Plymouth General Court; the Court offered to substantially lower Otis’s taxes if he’d only concede before the Hingham congregation that the town could levy them. The issue doesn’t again appear in the records, and it’s assumed that Otis agreed to this settlement; it’s also possible the town decided to let the matter die as John Otis, Jr. – both feisty and wealthy – made for a formable opponent. The core problems were the tax payments that supported the church and tax exemptions for some of the well-connected. John Otis, Jr. again fights the exemptions in 1655 and is eventually joined by a few others. The majority of the town’s voters was not convinced by Otis’s arguments, as notions of tradition and deference allowed the few who commanded the apex of the social mountain to use their position to tax others and exempt themselves. The tax dissenters again stormed the gates of tradition and deference in 1661, and were again rebuffed. John Otis, Jr. left Hingham in 1662 for Scituate, taking with a wife and a five-year-old son, John III. In 1662 he took the compulsory oath of fidelity to New Plymouth and served the first of numerous jury duty assignments. Jury duty was one of the responsibilities of a landowner, and John Jr. fulfilled his responsibilities as a freeman of the Old Colony, but he never engaged in politics beyond this most local level. Over the next few years, John, Jr. would substantially increase his real estate investments; in 1664, he acquired a considerable interest in the quasi-corporate land company Conihasset Partners, with holdings near Scituate, an interest in sixty acres of land in Scituate, and, most importantly, in fall 1667, he purchased the John Smith farm in Barnstable.
John Smith, an original settler and brother-in-law of the future Plymouth governor, sold his “dwellinghouse and lands both upland and meddow Lying in Barnstable on the west side of a place Commonly called the bridge” to John Otis, Jr. on October 25, 1667 for £150. It is curious that John Otis would purchase land in the somewhat closed, religious community of Barnstable, and perhaps it’s odder that Barnstable would sell such a fairly substantial piece of land to someone who was clearly not actively religious. But Otis had lived in Hingham and knew how to get along with religious communities, and, most likely, no one in Barnstable could afford the £150 price for the land that Otis offered. It is safe to assume that Otis wanted the Barnstable land because it was substantial, and the Barnstable proprietors permitted the land to be sold to Otis because the price was substantial. In fact, with the purchase of the Smith farm, Otis’s total real estate holdings were valued at over £1000, making him the wealthiest man in all of Plymouth Colony. Despite the continuing development and diversification of New England society, Barnstable was a traditional, stable community, and the extraordinary exception was the social, religious and political approval of the Otis family.
John Otis was acceptable to the Barnstable community as he was admitted as an inhabitant before the purchase of the Smith land was finalized. It is possible that he forced the issue because there was no Barnstable man willing or able to match the substantial £150 offer, but the use of such pressure is highly improbable considering his swift integration into the social and economic life of the town. John must have lived on his recently acquired Barnstable farm at least temporarily because in October 1668 he served on a Barnstable Coroner’s jury that concluded that young Isaac Robinson had drowned after ensnaring himself in seaweed whilst chasing geese on a Barnstable pond. John Otis, Jr. remained as feisty in Scituate as he’d been in Hingham, producing and selling cider from his apple orchards without a license. He was fined for the infraction and doubtless was annoyed at the perpetual reach of the law. Concurrently, John Otis, Jr. was assembling a base of operations and business network in Barnstable by other means. His daughter Mary married John Gorum, Jr., the namesake younger son of perhaps Barnstable’s most prominent citizen, in 1674. Captain Gorum was a tanner and owner of the Barnstable corn and flour mill, and when he wasn’t managing his small businesses, he was an untiring citizen-soldier. Also, like Otis and the new generation of upwardly mobile small merchants, Gorum was aiming for heights greater than those of his Pilgrim father, Ralph Gorum. Captain Gorum was conducting business with John Otis in Scituate by 1669, the year that he purchased a shipment of bark from Otis and Increase Clapp for his tannery, which inevitably devolved into a law suit. And yet this problematic bark transaction did not produce much hostility as their children married a few years later. The integration of the Otis family into the Barnstable community was concluded in 1683 when John Otis
III married Mercy Bacon of Barnstable; she was the daughter of Nathaniel Bacon, the patriarch of a family that would spend much of the next century battling with and against the Otises. The Bacons were one of the town’s foremost families, though not as prosperous as the Gorums. John Otis, Jr. was a man of progressive merchant interests wedded to the feudal objective of real estate accumulation, but the marriages of his children so shortly after the Otis family’s introduction into the Barnstable community exhibit an unusual degree of diplomacy and compatibility, and, simultaneously, expansive consideration for the Otis future. New Englanders did not practice arranged marriages as many Europeans did, but parental approval was an essential element that involved not only social and religious compatibility but also property considerations. Interestingly, John Otis, Jr. returned to Scituate and died there in January 1684 at a comparatively youthful 63 years old, but he must have regarded Barnstable as the foundation of future Otis operations. In his will dated January 11, 1684, John Otis, Jr. left an estate of about £1500, designating him the wealthiest man in Scituate and perhaps Barnstable. John Otis, Jr. set a pattern for the family that would be pursued for the next century: assimilate with the community, marry well, and leave as much wealth as possible to the children. The exception to the pattern would be the escalating participation in politics that eventually became the major preoccupation of the 18th century Otises; John Otis and John, Jr. both avoided politics as much as they had avoided religion.
Though John Jr. had taken care of the financial needs of his children, he was leaving them to an exceptionally unpredictable world. The early 1680s was a decisive period for the New England colonies. The war with the New England Amer-Indians, King Philip’s War, had taken a grave toll in lives and property, and engendered broad social disruption at its peak in 1675-76. John Gorum gained fame from leading a company of Plymouth soldiers in a decisive battle against the Amer-Indians on December 19, 1675. Though the war was fairly localized, it was one of the bloodiest wars in the history of North America and was largely centered on Plymouth, which suffered a blinding Amer-Indian counter-attack in January 1677, leaving more than a dozen houses burned and dozens of residents killed. John Otis, Jr. served in the town militia in the summers of 1675 and 1676, at the age of 55, and he was elected Scituate constable, the top law officer in town, in 1677, possibly because of a lack of available men to fill the position. John Jr. spent much of his life in conflict with the law without much consideration for who made or enforced the law, so the irony of the man who drew the constant attention of constables for infractions ranging from refusing to pay taxes to producing cider without a permit ending his life as a constable was perhaps instructive to his children; it’s easier to obey the law if you’re also making or enforcing the law.
The colony government under the indecisive non-leadership of Governor Hinckley was faltering, and the treasured rights granted by the colony’s charter were to be challenged under the regime of Governor Andros. After suffering years of perpetual and somewhat aggressive insubordination, particularly in the lax enforcement of tariff and navigation acts, Charles II revoked Massachusetts’s charter in 1684. Massachusetts’s charter had been particularly advantageous to the colony because it bestowed an unusually significant degree of local control, which resulted in an unusually significant degree of laissez-faire government. Edmund Andros, the governor of the newly-minted Dominion of New England that eventually extended from Maine to New Jersey, was openly antagonistic to the colonists. He reinstated Christmas, which had been banned since 1659, and permitted Saturday night parties. He brazenly affiliated with the Church of England, permitted town governments to meet only once per year, enforced the Navigation Acts and limited legislative activity. Andros believed that the “Dominion” of the various colonies nullified their individual charters and by 1687 set out to visit each colony to physically seize its charter. Connecticut had a fairly laissez-faire charter that they wished to keep, so when Andros appeared in Hartford in October 1687, he was handed a forgery. With the real charter in their hands, the leaders of Hartford surely laughed at Andros and prayed for his downfall, which would come just 17 months later in April 1689. Andros’s friend and benefactor the Catholic King James II was overthrown, the colonists violently rioted, and Andros attempted to sneak out of Boston dressed as a woman. According to legend, he would have succeeded if it weren’t for his big feet. To this day, the state of Connecticut does not recognize Andros as ever having been governor as the state never surrendered its actual charter. And the Otises kept their distance from the affair; there is no record of the family being involved in the Andros episode in any regard. It’s noteworthy that despite Andros’s hostile attitude toward the colonies and complete disregard for whatever rights and privileges colonists may have had, the inescapable feudal notion of deference kept the oppressed from engaging in widespread armed rebellion.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which the Catholic James was ousted by a united Parliament would reverberate powerfully in Massachusetts Province almost a century later. Parliament declared itself the final and absolute authority in the kingdom and could not be suspended or circumvented by the king. And while the king kept the navy – the “royal” navy – Parliament got the army, henceforth known as the “British Army” and not the “Royal Army.” Though the regime of King James II was chased out of Massachusetts in a dress, the descendant of a Glastonbury weaver would challenge with devastating consequences whether Parliament really had absolute authority.
***
birth of the middle-class
As of 1689, Plymouth was an economic hinterland, with a tax base insufficient to support normal governmental operations and certainly inadequate to cover the continuous expense of securing the area from Amer-Indian attack. Plymouth’s war debts were crushing, and estate taxes hit 17.5% in 1690. Barnstable, more remote than Plymouth, had escaped significant damage from the Amer-Indian war, but six of its men died in the war. Additionally, many leaders from the older generation such as Captain Gorum, John Huckins, Samuel Annable, Henry Cobb, and Thomas Huckins were buried. In 1678 Barnstable’s minister, Thomas Walley, died and would not be replaced for five years. Barnstable was also experiencing a population explosion; between 1653 and 1690 the population grew from about 2,500 to about 10,000. It’s no mystery why Barnstable’s population exploded. Jobs were plentiful, and poverty was low, at about 7%. Land was owned by a wider demographic than in most of New England (and the world, for that matter). In Boston in 1689, the wealthiest 15% of the population owned 58% of the land. But in Barnstable, the top 15% owned only about 35% of the land. So while there was economic stratification in Barnstable, it was certainly less severe than in most other places. But a booming population in times of economic and social stress only exacerbates the problems; militia levies, increasingly onerous taxes, the inability to employ a full-time minister, and the general incompetence of the local government generated cause for concern south of Boston. The population explosion kept land prices high, but it also meant that the Barnstable community was certainly no longer a closed, insular operation. By 1698, Barnstable could not afford to maintain a permanent school teacher and crime and prostitution were on the rise.
Shortly after John III’s marriage in 1683, Barnstable town hired Jonathan Russell, who with his son, Jonathan, Jr., were to command ecclesiastical affairs in Barnstable for nearly seven decades. Despite his ineptitude, Governor Hinckley acknowledged that Plymouth needed restructuring, and the colony was subsequently divided into three counties, with Barnstable as the principal town of the newly created Barnstable County, which encompassed all of Cape Cod. The principal town would be the seat of all government and judicial matters for the county. The town also planned a new main road; the old road had followed the Indian paths and stayed to the high grounds. The new road would run closer to the water and required a series of bridges. The new road made Barnstable more accessible and was near the large Otis farm. A new corn and flour mill was constructed in 1687, which perha
ps was the first of the enormous windmills erected on Cape Cod. And Otis joined a small group of investors to obtain ten acres on the south side of the Cape to build a wool-cleaning mill.
Following the Andros upheaval, John Otis broke loose from the Otis paradigm of avoiding politics. Perhaps his wife, Mary, was the catalyst; she heralded from a family long engrossed in colonial politics. Her father, Nathaniel Bacon, had been a Barnstable deputy to the Plymouth Court for many years and had served as a court councilor for sixteen years. Otis may have concluded that as the area’s wealthiest man he needed to ensure that his interests were being cultivated. After all, the recently departed Andros treated land deeds and contracts rather cavalierly, and a man with significant real estate holdings would likely want to be certain that no government again threatened the sanctity of such deeds and contracts. And John Otis may have concluded that merchant success required expanding his operations outside of bucolic Barnstable and into the larger cities, primarily Boston, which was now recognized as the undisputed political and commercial heart of New England. This conclusion was to be expected once the new 1691 charter joined Plymouth Colony to the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The spokes of the colonial economy inevitably realigned to the new axis indicated by the lines of governmental authority, and Barnstable was now entitled to representation in the General Court in Boston.