by Nathan Allen
Thus Otis was again threatened and labeled insane, and liberty of press was mocked as a means for “dabblers” to voice their opinions. The mockery of the caucus continued in the Evening-Post a week later on March 21 when “E.J.” explained the difference between the “Grand Corkass” and the “Petty Corkass” and the method by which decisions for town meetings were made. Then “E.J.” described the Boston town meeting of the previous week; the March meeting was of particular importance and typically the best attended because offices from moderator to hog catcher were filled, and the March 1763 gathering was much anticipated because it was the first to be held in the newly restored Faneuil Hall. Jemmy was elected moderator and promptly erupted in a “harangue on freedom and English liberty.” His speech contained mostly the usual political clichés proclaiming “this is a proper Season” for the “Burial in everlasting oblivion” of “Prejudices and Animosities.” And yet on the same day the Gazette published his brutal response to “J” that labeled him nothing more than “a Grub street bard” whose writing exposed “the crawling maggots of his mouldy brain.” Rumor spread that Jemmy was writing pamphlets, and the following week – March 28 – the Gazette printed a notice that Jemmy would soon publish three pamphlets: “An Impartial History of the Last Session of the Court,” “A full and true Account of the Grant of Mount Desert,” and “The present political State of Province.” The “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin” article was published just as rumors regarding Jemmy’s new pamphlets were spreading. Jemmy’s pamphlets were never printed, and no trace of them appears in historical records; most likely, Jemmy burned the manuscripts for fear of his life after being advised by friends that his writings were likely treasonous and seditious. This would not have been the first time that Otis was warned that his publications and speeches may be considered seditious and treasonous, and Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin was almost certainly on his mind. The “full and true Account of the Grant of Mount Desert” was perhaps never actually written but rather was intended as a threat to lay bare the inner workings of the Court Party and the Governor. If the Court Party were going to reveal the Popular Party’s secrets, then Jemmy would reveal the backroom deal that secured Mount Desert for Bernard.
The same day as the Gazette printed the notice of Jemmy’s pamphlets, yet another smear appeared in the Evening-Post published under the name of Jehoshaphat Smoothingpain who concluded that Jemmy printed “bitter things against Judges … because thy Great-Grand-Father’s Father’s Cousin-German by the Father’s side was not made a Judge.” Sensing that they were losing, the Court Party now dragged Colonel Otis and the lost Supreme Court appointment into the fracas. Smoothingpain’s article also contains the only other reference to Jemmy’s altercation with the “six yanky officers” referenced privately by Samuel Allyne, and the reference suggested that Otis barely escaped a thorough beating – or worse.
An April 1763 series of articles between Thomas Hutchinson and Jemmy began with Hutchinson claiming that the root of the Popular Party’s discontent lay with Colonel Otis’s failure to be appointed judge in the fall of 1760. Jemmy Otis replied that the issue was hardly a significant concern in 1760 and certainly not an issue in 1763; of course, in 1763, the Colonel held a highly desirable seat on the Council, so Jemmy’s assertion that no one now cared about a failed effort to be appointed judge appeared credible. It was fairly obvious that Hutchinson assumed he’d failed to win the substantive argument so he fabricated an issue out of an event that hadn’t warranted comment for years.
Skirmishes continued with salvos fired by Philo Politiae, J. Philanthrop, Humphrey Plowjogger, U., L.S., S.A., A.Z., T.Q. and the ubiquitous J. “Humphrey Plowjogger” and “U.” were John Adams, and his somewhat pedantic monologues did not garner much attention. By contrast, T.Q. – Oxenbridge Thacher’s nom de guerre – published caustic criticisms of plural office holding printed just prior to the May elections that were forcefully targeted at destroying the Hutchinson-Oliver alliance in the council chamber.
The oligarchs had mustered all their weapons in the paper war, and Jemmy’s radicalism was too provocative and unprecedented for many, so he was outgunned. Thacher’s and Adams’s articles were uncoordinated efforts that hit some of the same targets but provided no direct support to Jemmy. Most “friends of government” and former Otis allies believed that the madman had lost his support and alienated the people with his nearly treasonous attacks, yet the Boston town elections of May 1763 proved that the people of Boston resoundingly supported their beleaguered, threatened rebel. Jemmy Otis received 989 votes out of 1089 votes cast, more than anyone else and more than he had ever before received. Thomas Cushing received 899 votes, Royall Tyler 809, and Oxenbridge Thacher 716. It cannot be determined whether this astonishing victory at the ballot box was a spontaneous reflection of the people’s will or the result of the merchants acting through the “caucas,” but not only did it demonstrate enthusiastic support for Jemmy, but it also further radicalized the Boston bench with the replacement of the moderate John Phillips with the radical Oxenbridge Thacher. Phillips was ousted in large part because he had voted against the Popular Party in both the roll call votes of the fourth session. The Court Party almost certainly believed that they had benefitted from the little paper war in Boston, but the people of Boston resoundingly elected radical Popular Party stalwarts to represent them.
But there was a problem. While Jemmy and the Popular Party retained complete control of Boston, they were stunned to find that the Court Party still held a majority in the House. The Popular Party ruled Boston, but the Court Party still had considerable support in the countryside. The Court Party’s revenge against the Popular Party was quick; Edes and Gill were dismissed as printers of the House Journal because of the Otis articles they had printed, and Samuel Cooper, the “silver tongued” Reverend of the Brattle Street Church – the rebels’s church – and Jemmy’s Harvard classmate, was dismissed as House chaplain. Colonel Otis came extremely close to losing his Council seat but was saved by Treasurer Harrison Gray’s intervention, doubtless due to the close ties between the two families. Another friend of government, Sam White, replaced the divisive Ruggles as Speaker; but White was viewed as being more diplomatic and moderate than Ruggles. The Court Party wanted control, but they did not wish to repeat the cold war that broke out during the 1762-63 legislative term.
Jemmy assumed his party would be impotent and resigned; though popular in Boston, they could not seem to make progress in the bigger scheme of the province. Bernard did not celebrate the resignation; he wrote to Richard Jackson that “I doubt not” that Otis was scheming some attack on the oligarchy. And he was correct. Otis did have a plan. Repeating his earlier performance, he returned to the House the next day, apologized, and moved that the governor’s salary be approved, a motion that Governor Bernard considered conciliatory. Bernard, Jemmy recalled, could be manipulated.
Otis’s efforts to destroy the Court Party had failed – for now. As a political leader he had come close to destroying his own party by pushing hard for reforms without having the political power to achieve them. The paper war’s political fallout resulted in complete polarization in the House as evidenced by the dismissal of publishers Edes and Gill and Reverend Samuel Cooper. Samuel Allyne wrote to Joseph Otis on June 18, 1763 commenting on the polarizing and heated sessions in which at least one representative had threatened another with a clubbing. The madness of revolt was indeed spreading. Jemmy had nearly damaged his relationships with the bench and the bar, and he had suggested that his legal practice was flagging. Scoffed at by his peers, Jemmy had become a “mad man” to the Boston elite. He clung to “Mr Cooke the cobbler” just as they seemed to cling to him, the drowning man and the life raft saving each other.
What inspired James Otis’s radicalization in 1762-1763? He had been fighting against the oligarchy, against those in power and those who aspired to it, against plural office-holding and the aggregation of power in the hands of the few, and against “passive obedienc
e.” From Bernard sending the Massachusetts without the House’s consent to the Boston courts’s efforts to exclude non-lawyers, Otis had fought the accumulation of power and exclusion of the unprivileged at every step. And while such Pimps, Parasites, Sycophants, and Pedagogues were easily identifiable with the Olivers, Hutchinsons and Governor Bernard, it became increasingly obvious that these labels also described Jemmy Otis’s own father. It was on May 26, 1762 that Colonel Otis declined his election as Speaker of the House supposedly because he was so infrequently in Boston, only to be appointed to a much-coveted seat on the Council. And the Colonel’s position as Speaker was taken by that odious “friend of government” Timothy Ruggles, a thoroughly loyal Tory. Jemmy must have realized that his father was only slightly removed from Hutchinson and Bernard, and while the Colonel could never achieve Hutchinson’s status, he certainly aspired to such socio-political heights.
In his opening statement for the Writs of Assistance case, Otis said, “The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentlemen, or a man, are, to sacrifice estate, ease, health and applause, and even life itself to the sacred calls of his country. These manly sentiments in private life make a good citizen, in public life, the patriot and the hero.” The mad man who was developing in 1762 and 1763 was a man torn between his country and his father, a man who could have chosen a life of ease and wealth but instead chose the path of patriot and hero. John Adams, James Bowdoin and many others would eventually join him on this path, but in 1763, Jemmy Otis just seemed like a crazy friendless traitor.
CHAPTER VI
Troubles in this Country take their rise from one Man
Governor Bernard was attempting to neutralize Jemmy Otis and the Popular Party using the customary method of purchasing peace, and the Colonel knew that Jemmy’s paper war would make peace valuable to the Court Party. One component of Bernard’s scheme was the Colonel’s promotion to the Council in May 1762, but Bernard could not grasp that blatant patronage was precisely what so infuriated the Colonel’s son. Naïve to this reality, the governor remained committed to his scheme, doubtless applying the only gambit he knew, and offered Colonel Otis additional appointments in Barnstable County in late 1763. Colonel Otis was quite willing to use his son’s insolence to his advantage. According to Hutchinson, the Colonel approached him in the spring of 1763, at the height of the paper war, to offer a truce. Hutchinson reported the conversation to his friend Israel Williams on April 15:
The former [Colonel Otis] just before the Court, rose desired to speak with me in the Lobby & mentioned that we used to think alike etc. I told him he could not be insensible of the injurious treatment I had received from his son & that the Monday before he had published the most virulent piece which had ever appeared, but if he would desist & only treat me with common justice & civility I would forgive & forget everything that was past. He replied it was generous. . . .
Of course, peace would not come cheaply; the Colonel would surely be compensated for silencing the pen of Jemmy Otis. On November 17, 1763, Hutchinson again wrote to Israel Williams and reported that Bernard’s scheme was progressing as appointments were pending and both Otises “keep themselves silent.” On February 1, 1764, Bernard appointed Colonel Otis as “first Justice” of the Barnstable Inferior Court and judge of Probate. These offices confirmed the Colonel’s near total control of Cape Cod, and because they were appointed, not elected, positions, the Colonel would not need to continually campaign for reelection. By 1764, the Colonel held nearly every position of importance on Cape Cod and had a seat on Boston’s highest deliberative body as he was a Councilor, chief justice of the Barnstable Inferior Court, judge of Probate, and Colonel in the militia. And collectively the Otis family power in Barnstable was formidable; his son Joseph was, until February 1764, sheriff of Barnstable County, militia captain, and justice of the peace, as was Solomon Otis, the Colonel’s brother.
But Governor Bernard grossly misread Jemmy Otis’s motivations. In a Gazette article published on February 28, 1763, Otis warned that his silence could not be bought, that he would accept no “office” in exchange for “good behavior.” And his warning proved accurate. Bernard later observed that “no sooner were these patents sealed [offices granted to the Colonel] than Otis renewed his hostility against Government with fresh Vigor.” The pressure of such political patronage must have been considerable on Jemmy. Almost certainly, his father and brothers felt that Jemmy’s crusade against the oligarchy was damaging their business and reputations; his crusade was damaging his own law practice. And almost certainly Jemmy’s Tory wife, Tory sister Mary and her Tory husband, and Samuel Allyne’s soon-to-be father-in-law and the provincial treasurer, pleaded with Jemmy to forgo the little paper war lest it become a greater war. Imagine the family tension: Jemmy’s little brother was married to the province treasurer’s son; Jemmy’s sister was married to the treasurer’s brother – and Jemmy, up until now the superstar genius of the family, had declared war on the entire structure. Before 1764, Jemmy’s political campaigning and philosophical explorations typically aimed at local targets. These first assaults focused on the local practical problems of customs abuses, plural office-holding and the corresponding issue of the separation of powers. The substantial exception to these local problems was Otis’s battle against the writs of assistance in which he addressed the issue of parliamentary sovereignty and hence governmental power in general. Under immense pressure from all sides in 1764 – government, family, business – Jemmy almost achieved a comprehensive expression of his intricate political philosophy on an imperial scale. Now, Jemmy would integrate these issues into a comprehensive practical philosophy on the justification of authority: comprehensive in that its scope applied to all government authority and practical in that it was an academic philosophy chambered into a powerful weapon with a hairpin trigger.
The expansion of Otis’s political philosophy may have been the natural progression of internal meditation on the issue of authority, but Otis was never purely academic and evolving circumstances in the Empire demanded his attention. First, the issue of plural office-holding was fatigued due to overuse and of limited credibility because Jemmy’s own family held a significant collection of offices; it was an issue that reeked of hypocrisy and on which Jemmy was conspicuously vulnerable. Second, once Grenville assumed substantial control of the British government in the spring of 1763 as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was determined to ensure financial stability for the realm. Current revenues were inadequate and threatened the Empire’s ability to maintain its global power as the interest payments on the Seven Years’ War debt alone consumed over half of all revenue; further, total expenses did not appreciably decline with the end of the war. Domestically, the English were taxed as much as was feasible; real estate was taxed at rates perceived to be the maximum possible and taxes on cider were producing riots instead of revenue. It seems that the residents of England couldn’t be taxed any more. While the English at home claimed to be over taxed, it appeared evident that the English abroad were under taxed. Lord Bute granted Grenville the authority to locate troops in the colonies, and though Grenville may or may not have considered that decision as such wise, financial support of the troops provided the perfect rationale to raise taxes on the colonists. And once an array of colonial taxation was established, however minimal the taxes may be, the administration could then raise those taxes with little opportunity for colonial protest.
While Grenville’s office embarked on planning the implementation of colonial taxes, the Commissioners of Customs advocated a few immediate changes that did not require parliamentary approval. One such change required that all possessors of customs commissions perform their commission in person, rather than essentially leasing their commissions to oft corrupt proxies who would then engage in pre-arranged agreements with smugglers. This customs change did not so much alter the regulations as much as the official attitude toward their implementation; bending the rules would no lon
ger be permissible. Further, the Royal Navy, enlarged by the war effort but increasingly available to assume non-military duties, was itself enlisted into the customs enforcement. Armed with customs commissions and authorized by Grenville’s “Hovering Act” to seize vessels within two leagues – about six miles – off the American coast for Acts of Trade violations, the Royal Navy ensured that colonists grasped that the days of laissez-faire and largely untaxed trade were over. With the political climate as it was in England, and with a new, strict, ministry devising long term plans for the reordering of the empire, the London lobbyists for the colonies were very important men. Jemmy and his Popular Party had dismissed William Bollan out of spite and high cost and had supported his successor, Jasper Mauduit, despite ill health and lack of success. But the real reason for Bollan’s dismissal and Mauduit’s appointment may have been precisely what Peter Oliver feared: the Popular Party’s political alignment with Boston’s radical preachers. It seems clear that Mauduit was known to Boston’s radical ministers in the 1750s but unknown to the Massachusetts political class. Jasper Mauduit was not so much the Popular Party’s candidate as the Black Regiment’s candidate, and the Popular Party’s commitment to Mauduit was more a commitment to Mayhew and the radical preachers. The mystery of why the Popular Party would so defend a lobbyist who appeared less than fully competent is somewhat unraveled by the revelation that even Mauduit didn’t particularly desire the position; in his reply to a letter of criticisms from the House, Mauduit reminds the House that he never desired the lobbyist position. So if Mauduit was fairly unknown to the Boston politicians in the early 1760s, was not qualified for the position, and did not desire the position, then why was he elected lobbyist? Peter Oliver had feared that the radical preachers would align with the radical politicians, and Mauduit was the proof that it had happened.