by Nathan Allen
His brother and fellow Harvard graduate Solomon likewise was successful only to the degree that he could parlay his family’s assets into pursuits that interested him. While he remained on good terms with his family throughout his life, Solomon certainly strained every connection he had. Solomon freely traded on the Otis name, opening lines of credit that he almost certainly couldn’t pay. His young nephew, Samuel Allyne, was bemoaning his uncle’s profligate ways as late as 1766, knowing that all Otis’s had to honor a debt created by Solomon. Solomon’s older brother John routinely invested in his dubious ventures and honored his debts, including one venture costing the enormous sum of £500. Unlike his father, Solomon was better at losing money than making it.
John III’s youngest son, James, married a woman from Wethersfield, Connecticut; in the early 18th century, it would seem a bit odd to search so far from home for a bride, but the choice was based on family connections. Joseph Allyne, a descendant of one of Barnstable’s founders, moved from the family farm a mile east of the Otis home to Plymouth and married Mary Dotey, a descendant of one of the Mayflower Compact’s signers. While in Plymouth, Mary gave birth to two daughters, Elizabeth in 1700 and Mary two years later, but by 1705, when their third daughter was born, they had moved on to Wethersfield. And yet the Allynes were more than neighbors of the Otises; Joseph Allyne’s older brother, Thomas, had married Elizabeth Otis, John III’s sister, so James’s far ranging search for a wife was no search at all. On May 14, 1724, twenty-two year old James Otis married twenty-two year old Mary Allyne before Elisha Williams, Connecticut legislator and Wethersfield tutor of the Yale students and soon to become rector of Yale at New Haven.
While James wasn’t sent to Harvard as his older brothers were, evidence suggests he was his father’s favorite, most likely because as James matured it became apparent he was quite like his father. Unlike his older brothers, James had the drive, intelligence, social skills and organizational ability to increase the merchant and political empire his family had been building for three generations. As his father’s favorite, James was thus a favorable match for the Allynes. Joseph Allyne would inherit part of his father’s Barnstable estate, but how much fell into Mary’s possession is unknown. James would be heir to all of the Otis’s Barnstable properties and businesses. The Great Marshes neighborhood, to which the bride and groom returned, had slowly become West Barnstable. In 1700 Governor Bellomont had mandated that the town militia be divided into two companies, with Captain Gorum leading the “first foot Company,” and Captain John Otis the “second foot Company in said Town,” the latter being the men of West Barnstable.
A similar separation divided the Barnstable church. Minister Jonathan Russell died in 1711, and at the subsequent town meeting John Otis, now a colonel, submitted the controversial proposal that the congregation be divided into two. Substantial disagreement ensued that may have involved the competency of Jonathan Russell, Jr., particularly as successor to his very accomplished father. The issue was eventually decided according to John Otis’s proposal, and two new meetinghouses were constructed, the East Parish in 1716 and the West Parish in 1717. When the West Parish was completed, young Minister Russell chose to remain with the Otis family in the West Parish. Six years later his parishioners erected a steeple on their meetinghouse and crowned it with a gilded weathervane imported from England.
West Barnstable prospered in its new independent status. The neighborhood along the new county road was inhabited by the Otises, the Hinckleys, the Crockers, the Bacons, the Allynes, and the Howlands. Their homes were bordered by smaller houses, and on the outskirts at Scorton Creek, north of the Otis farm and near Cape Cod Bay, stood the huts of local Indians who had shunned the Mashpee reservation to work as servants and field hands. The Court House, taverns, wharves, warehouses, and most businesses were all to the east in the main town of Barnstable. West Barnstable then appeared to be a very isolated world, but it could not evade the English ideas of political deference and social status and the Puritan idea of hard work, and such ideas were all apparent in most of the Otises. The achievements and subsequent influence of this family were supported by the Englishman’s focus on land ownership synthesized with the talent to succeed in an expansive range of economic pursuits. The merchant renaissance qualities of the Otis family’s leaders seemed to have been perfectly designed to bridge the chasm from the early period when the son of a middling Glastonbury weaver stepped ashore, initially focusing on subsistence and survival, and the turbulent early eighteenth century when those who succeeded were clever, persistent generalists.
And yet the most significant evidence that the sands of history were quickly shifting is that we know so much about a small group of middling farmers eking out an existence at the edge of the civilized world. The families of Plymouth and Barnstable in the 17th century were highly literate, concerned with recording their transactions and ideas, wanted to implement a system of law and order, and boldly determined to create a fully functioning economy out of nothing. For the first time in the West, the driving force behind historical events was small farmers and tradesmen, not lords and clerics.
CHAPTER II
storms & tempests are consequent
When John Otis III died in 1727, he had accomplished exactly what his father before him had: tripling the value of the family’s assets. He was one of the three wealthiest men in the county, owned three slaves that were listed with the “swine” in his estate inventory, was a member of the Governor’s council, and had a real estate, merchant and shipping business that dominated lower Massachusetts. His sons were militia captains, registers of probate and deeds, and town clerks. And the minister who attended to his funeral was his son-in-law. Only the beloved youngest, James, seemed to be staying out of public office and public affairs.
James’s wife, Mary Allyne, bore 13 children, only seven of whom survived infancy. This was the lowest survival rate of any Otis family since they arrived to the New World. The first was born on February 5, 1725 and was named after his father, James Otis, Jr. He grew up in the Otis family estate on the Great Marshes of Barnstable surrounded by relatives, indentured servants, farm hands, and slaves. He was an only child for barely a year when Joseph was born on March 6, 1726. His sister Mercy joined the boys two years later. In 1730, sister Mary was born, and in 1732 Hannah arrived. The next three children, Nathan, Martha and Abigail, all died in infancy. Elizabeth joined the group in 1739 and Samuel Allyne in 1740 – Samuel almost always included his mother’s maiden name in his own. Sarah, born in 1742, did not live to see her first birthday and neither did another Nathan, born in 1743. When a final child was born in 1744, a girl, mother Mary refused to name her. The unnamed child soon died.
While James Jr., Mercy, Joseph and Samuel Allyne would become prominent members of the Barnstable clan, the lives of the children of Mary Allyne and James Otis would take every conceivable turn over the ensuing three decades. One would be the local brute, one the spinster, one the famous historian, one the urban playboy, one the insane revolutionary, and one the traitor. This family would perhaps have greater influence over revolutionary politics than any other family, and yet when the smoke cleared, they would have all but destroyed the mercantile empire started five generations earlier by the son of a Glastonbury weaver.
James Jr. was typically called “Jemmy,” which was a nickname used not only in Barnstable but also during his years in Boston as an adult. Jemmy’s childhood was probably spent catching alewives and trout in nearby Bridge Creek, helping the hired hands – perhaps local Indians – pick apples in the family’s orchards to be fermented into cider, and shooting the innumerable ducks that populated the Great Marshes that abutted the family’s West Barnstable farm. The Otis boys probably made more than one trip to Sandy Neck to watch the whalers painstakingly strip the sheets of blubber from the whale carcasses and witness the great iron kettles over blubber fed fires. It was a horrifically malodorous process, but the smell was one of prosperity, and the whale boats that w
ere perfected on the Cape were to provide Jemmy’s father with a valuable avenue to enter province affairs as well as cradles for a breed of mariner – the Capeman –who would become legendary a few decades later. And perhaps he caught a ride with his father on the family horse to Barnstable village to see the wharf, Otis’s warehouse, or visit the Court House.
Jemmy was too young to appreciate the most significant event of his childhood: the death of his grandfather, John III, in November 1727. James Otis, Sr., though a young twenty-five, abruptly found himself in charge of the sprawling Barnstable businesses. While James held junior status in the family as the third son, his father had willed him his silver headed cane, a symbol of family authority. But this was no surprise to his older brothers; when the patriarch had made out his will three years earlier, he had made the executors his wife and his third son. It was clear to everyone who John III had expected to be most successful. Jemmy’s life would be deeply influenced by the gifts and expectations bestowed upon his father by his grandfather.
John III had made sizeable gifts and loans to some of his children, but even with these deductions his estate was valued at almost £5000. The assessment was made in the spring of 1728 and recorded a business inventory of £60 and “Disperate” debts of about £1000, which are not numbers that appear to correlate to a vigorous business. The business was successful and continued to be so; the Otises had managed to nearly sell their warehouse bare by the end of the winter, much on credit, so the payments due that spring were considerable. At the same time the Massachusetts economy was depressed by currency devaluation; deteriorating currency values and cyclical currency instability was a permanent feature of business in Massachusetts colony and produced the vacillating values of all businesses. In 1727, James Otis was a mere 25-years-old, the head of a growing family, and the supervisor of a trading business and a large, diverse farming operation. Though his business was complex, James Otis remained a simple country trader by Boston standards. Moreover, he was expected to assume his father’s position as a community leader. These were great expectations, and the fact that James Otis thrived amid such expectations reveals much about his determination and talents.
The Barnstable town meeting in the spring of 1724 had selected 22-year-old James Otis as its juror to serve at the Plymouth term of the Superior Court; it was a small honor but an honor nonetheless as petit jurors typically served on a series of juries during the Court’s local term. After this introduction, civic responsibilities increased rapidly, and community affairs gave James Otis little respite. Just before his father died, James was selected by the town to join a committee to prevent “Indians, Negroes, and other disorderly persons” from frequenting taverns at night. The following year, James was selected to be a town surveyor and was asked to join a committee to “draw up something” about controlling stray animals on Sandy Neck, the large beach area that stretched between the marshes and Cape Cod Bay. In 1732, James Otis’s escalating civic stature became evident when a small emergency erupted in the Barnstable school. On August 15th, James Otis was moderator of the town meeting for the first time; it was almost certainly not by accident that the foremost issue on the agenda was the town school because young Jemmy Otis had just reached the age when New England boys began some kind of formal education. The town was “Destitute of a School by Reason Mr. Bennet (with whom the Agents say they agreed) Neglects to keep School.” The meeting appointed Otis chairman of a committee of sixteen to find a solution for their indolent teacher, and allotted £65 to pay for that solution – a considerable increase over the prior year’s education budget.
While the Massachusetts Bay General Court had become concerned with education at an early date, a long tradition of inattention and neglect festered in the area south of Boston. As early as 1647, the Court ordered all the towns to employ teachers and additionally required the larger towns to establish “grammar schools” with masters capable of delivering an education that would produce applicants capable for admission to Harvard. The Court’s order had been embraced with apathy in Plymouth Colony, which was conspicuously unpopulated with the college educated. It was 1658 before education was even mentioned officially in Plymouth colony, and then the Court merely announced that the towns “ought to take into their serious consideration” the problem of educating their young; it was a typical charter-era laissez-faire exercise of central authority – more suggestion than admonition and more admonition than regulation. Various tepid measures were attempted, such as the earmarking of the uncertain revenues from the Cape fishery, which amounted to nothing more than paying for education with nature’s lottery; but eventually it was the incorporation of Plymouth into the Province of Massachusetts Bay and the concern of such men as James Otis that gave momentum to education funding and reform. Barnstable organized a common school to teach reading, writing, and some math at an unknown date. Any possible beneficial consequence from this modest beginning was frustrated when objections from residents on the south shore necessitated a division of the already fractional school year between north and south in 1714. New England towns such as Barnstable developed the archetype of the modern school board when they found it impractical to govern the day to day problems of the school in the town meeting. Matters of “settling” a teacher and arranging for school sessions in private homes was delegated to “Agents” and committees such as the one headed by James Otis.
By 1732, Jemmy’s father was likely growing increasingly aware of his own academic limitations – he was the son who didn’t attend Harvard – and thus began to insist on the best possible education for his first born. Not surprisingly, the Otis committee created a “grammar school” to supplement the problematic common school that had been theretofore Barnstable’s educational system. The committee devised a complex schedule with the unreliable Mr. Bennet for rotating grammar school sessions in four locations, one of which was the John Howland home close to the Otis farm. The grammar school curriculum began with two years of “common” – meaning English – reading and writing, and then the students were immersed in Latin, and later Greek. By about the age of ten, the boys began Latin regardless of whether they were equipped to study the new language; it was an unsympathetic pedagogy but the survivors secured an education that would possibly satisfy the rigid entrance requirements of Harvard. The two or three month sessions at the traveling grammar school were hardly enough to give a student a depth of familiarity with Cicero, Virgil, Isocrates, and Homer, but fortunately Jemmy could call on his uncle, Jonathan Russell, Jr. to fill the gaps left by Mr. Bennet. Russell tutored Jemmy for college and by the summer of 1739 considered his 14-year-old student ready to undergo the rather grueling Harvard admissions process.
On June 21, 1739 the Boston Weekly News-Letter announced that the President and Tutors would “attend the Business of Examination” for those who desired admission to Harvard during a two day period in July. Of all the boys who began grammar school with Jemmy seven years earlier, only four students – John Crocker, William Bourne, Lothrop Russell, and Jemmy Otis – considered themselves college bound. Before the advent of packet boats, the trip from Barnstable to Boston was a two day ride on horseback, with an overnight stop in Plymouth town. It is likely that the anxious Cape Cod applicants made the expedition with their fathers. It is also probable that this was the first time these boys had been exposed to the bustling activity and powdered wig princes of the provincial metropolis, Boston.
The actual examination must have been an overwhelming affair for a country boy from Barnstable. The applicants presented themselves before President Edward “Guts” Holyoke and the four tutors. After something of an interview, the applicant would be thoroughly examined in reading and writing Latin and Greek – Virgil, Tully, the New Testament, the rules of prose and Greek noun and verb declinations. It was a remarkably comprehensive exam. Those who passed then acquired a copy of the College Laws that the president and tutors signed as evidence of admission. Then the newly admitted students’s fathers paid five
pounds to the steward and furnished a bond for an additional forty pounds against future bills for food, sweepers, and the glazier. In September 1739, Jemmy Otis, fourteen and a half years old, set out for Cambridge to begin a new life. He registered at the Buttery in Old Harvard Hall where the seemingly omnipotent steward held forth as registrar, dormitory officer, and man in charge of nearly everything nonacademic. Old Harvard, which stood on the site of the present Harvard Hall, contained not only the Buttery, but also the kitchen, library, a public hall, and rooms for two tutors and a dozen students.