by Nathan Allen
Barnstable would remain intransigent. They rejected the Articles of Confederation and eventually the war. Barnstable did not want to support any centralized organizations of control outside of Barnstable. For Barnstable, independence did not mean transferring power from Britain to Boston. By 1782, Barnstable even refused to pay state taxes. Samuel Allyne wrote of Barnstable that after opposing the “infringement of their liberty and property from abroad, will suffer them to be overturned by licentious abandoned people at home, is to suppose like causes produce directly contrary effect.” Barnstable viewed taxation from both Britain and Boston as “like causes.”
Samuel Allyne’s decision to support the war could not have been easy; his wife was the daughter of Harrison Gray, Province Treasurer under the royal governors. But when the war began, he focused on increasing the money supply, even offering to melt down his own silver belt buckles to increase the circulation of hard currency. He raised supplies for the troops including providing 18,000 uniforms. He would take Jemmy’s place on the Boston Bench, eventually rising to Speaker of the House. “All revolutions are founded in blood,” he wrote in 1782, as he was concerned that Massachusetts quickly return to peace and prosperity. By 1783, both Samuel Allyne and Joseph were impoverished. Joseph refused to sell the Otis farm or sue those who owed him money. By 1785, Samuel Allyne’s creditors were getting restless, and he deeded his Boston real estate to his children and pled poverty. On Samuel’s advice, Joseph Otis likewise deeded the Otis estates in Barnstable to his children. By September of 1785, Samuel Allyne was officially bankrupt and owed £30,000 to creditors. Without credit, the Otis mercantile businesses were ruined.
On April 8, 1789, two days after the newly created United States Senate achieved its first quorum, vice-president elect John Adams convinced the members to elect his friend as their chief legislative, financial, and administrative officer, the first Secretary of the United States Senate. Twenty-two days later, Samuel Allyne held the Bible on which George Washington swore to uphold the Constitution. Samuel Allyne, then 48 years old, had a long list of service to the new government: Quartermaster of the Continental army, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, member of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and John Adams’s longtime ally. He had fully transformed from a businessman apathetic to politics to a political insider. In those early days of the government, the Secretary proved unusually influential as he was the chief negotiator between the Senate, the House and George Washington. It wasn’t before long that Washington’s cabinet secretary desired the surprisingly influential position of Senate Secretary and asked Washington to have Otis removed, but Washington declined, as did the Virginians when they swept to power in 1800. Though the Federalists were resolutely turned from power in the 1800 elections, Samuel Allyne was kept on precisely because the new government was so unstable and fractious and a peaceful transition so uncertain. Southern Republicans and northern Federalists alike mongered rumors of secession and nullification, and Hamilton had been conspiring to raise an Army to not only enforce radical Federalist doctrine but to ‘liberate’ all of the Americas from European influence. Nearly everyone recognized that the diligent, steady, non-partisan Samuel Allyne Otis was an invaluable asset if the new government was to have a chance of surviving. And so Samuel Allyne provided the order and stability that the new government so desperately required and was Secretary until his death in 1814; his 25 years as Secretary is a record that still stands, and he was known for never missing a day of work. His optimism in the new federal government led him to invest every penny he could scrounge together in U.S. bonds, and he remade much of the wealth he’d lost in the war. Samuel Allyne’s eldest son, Harrison Gray, named for the loyalist provincial treasurer, was a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, the Mayor of Boston, a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, Massachusetts District Attorney appointed by Washington, and, by today’s standards, a billionaire.
Jemmy’s sister, Mercy Otis Warren, became a rather famous poet and America’s first female playwright; in the 1770s, she wrote anti-loyalist plays. After the war, she wrote a well-received history of the Revolution that was much more Jeffersonian and egalitarian than her blue-blood peers in Boston would have preferred. She remained close friends with John Adams till the end, though Adams occasionally wrote snarling letters to her complaining about his lack of prominence in her histories. Mercy died in Plymouth six months after her brother Samuel Allyne, in October 1814, at the age of 86. It was at Mercy’s and her in-laws’ houses in Plymouth that the Stamp Act Congress was conceived. It seems appropriate that the dawn of English settlements in New England occurred in the same place as did the dawn of the new nation, and there’s some poetic truth in Plymouth’s claim to being America’s Avalon, that the fourth great grandson of a weaver from that mythical town of King Arthur conceived the new nation in that town on Cape Cod Bay. And that hill on the original Otis property in Hingham that John named “Weary All,” the same name of a similar hill that sits alongside The Roman Way in Glastonbury, was renamed “Otis Hill” and it currently rests alongside “Otis Street.”
Jemmy’s sister Mary, who had married John Gray, brother of Province Treasurer Harrison Gray, remained loyalist and left for England when war erupted in 1776. She would never see Jemmy again. She and Samuel Allyne both married into the Gray family, and the war put an ocean between them.
Ruth Cunningham Otis, that heiress who’d marry the most brilliant lawyer in the province, was widely despised by the other Otises, particularly Jemmy’s sister Mercy, who in 1776 wrote of “a weak Infatuated Woman who has heretofore Brought innumerable Difficulties upon her own Family.” It had been suggested that Ruth was partially to blame for Jemmy’s insanity or, at least, his inability to recover. Regardless, Ruth was bitter to the end, blaming problems seen and unseen on the rebellion and asserting to her dying day that the British government was preferable to the new government. Ruth and Jemmy’s daughter Elizabeth married a British officer and moved to England, probably to the delight of her mother. Her father never forgave her and left her a paltry five shillings in his will. Their other daughter Polly married Benjamin Lincoln, Jr., who probably would have delighted her father. Polly’s father-in-law was General Lincoln, the man who acted as a referee in the Veazie v. The Inhabitants of the Town of Duxborough case of 1748, one of Jemmy’s first cases, and who officially accepted Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781; Lincoln would become the new nation’s first Secretary of War and Lt. Governor of Massachusetts. Ruth died in 1789. It was Polly who informed John Adams that she “had not a line from her father’s pen.” According to Polly, her father took “great pains” to collect everything he wrote and, as with the continent and eventually himself, “committed them all to the flames.” Was it fear that the true role of “our chairman” in the “Confederacy” would be discovered? That charges of sedition and treason would be brought? Or madness?
Nathaniel Wheelwright, the great private banker whose insolvency in January 1765 proved fertile ground for rebellion, fled Boston in March 1765 – less than two months after his insolvency. He left behind three sons, one living with the reverend of King’s Chapel, one with his maternal grandmother and one with his paternal uncle. He also left behind his wife, Ann Apthorp, his business partner’s sister. Disgraced, Wheelwright hopped a ship to Central America, never to return. He died in 1766 in Guadalupe of yellow fever. His business partner, Charles Ward Apthorp, had purchased a bit of real estate upon moving to New York – 50 blocks of the Upper West Side, from 89th to 99th streets, from Central Park to the Hudson river. Charles’s death inaugurated law suits – beginning in 1799 – that would last over 100 years. The primary dispute seemed to be whether the city should compensate the landowners when it created city streets on what had been entirely private land. By the early 1900s, the suits were valued at $125 million.
Capt. Dan Malcolm, that smuggler who had flaunted the rebels’s control of Boston by openly importing brandy without paying taxes and dr
ank from Paul Revere’s “Glorious 92” punchbowl, died in 1769. The British did not forget him. His gravestone reads, “A TRUE SON OF LIBERTY A FRIEND TO THE PUBLICK AN ENEMY TO OPPRESSION AN ONE OF THE FOREMOST IN OPPOSING THE REVENUE ACTS ON AMERICA.” The gravestone still stands at the old North Burying Ground, covered with the marks of the musket balls that British soldiers fired at it when they used the North Burying Ground as a military camp at the opening of the war. Around the same time, British soldiers also cut down the Liberty Tree.
Francis Bernard, the man who only wanted an easy administration and to make some money, really never knew what hit him. Naïve and clumsy as he was, he had Whitehall and Parliament on one side and Otis and the rebels on the other; it’s doubtful anyone could have prevented the inevitable collision. Bernard went back to England and was appointed to the Board of Revenue for England, which is ironic because it was precisely the issue of revenue – Molasses Act, Stamp Act, etc. – and the Declaratory Act that echoed the oppression of Ireland and ignited the widespread rebellion. Once the war broke out, he lost his beloved Mount Desert Island. John Adams would later label King George III “the mad idiot” and in the midst of stabilizing the new country declare that George’s “idiocy is our salvation.” Adams had witnessed the gift of executive idiocy decades earlier in Francis Bernard; Adams was keenly aware that such “idiocy” was key to manipulating a successful outcome, just as he had seen the Colonel and Jemmy Otis use Bernard’s idiocy to their advantage. As a token of appreciation to a faithful ally of the Revolution, the western half of Bernard’s beloved Desert Island was granted to John Bernard – Francis Bernard’s son.
Andrew Oliver, the high ranking member of the oligarchy and stamp distributor whose business and house were destroyed during the Stamp Act riots of 1765, became Lt. Governor in 1771 when his brother-in-law, Thomas Hutchinson, became governor. Andrew died of a stroke while in office on March 4, 1774, and Peter could not attend his brother’s funeral because he feared the mobs that controlled the streets. Andrew’s son Stephen would flee to England when the war broke out; in 1801, he married 27-year-old Sarah Hutchinson, daughter of the last British governor of Massachusetts. The vast fortunes of both Thomas Hutchinson and Peter Oliver were confiscated. Both wrote books about the colonies, and both believed they had acted honorably and reasonably and were the victims of an inferno of insanity that swept through the colonies.
Timothy Ruggles, the loyalist sent to the Stamp Act congress to ensure that what happened didn’t happened, only to creep his way back through New England to find the House had censured him for not signing the Stamp Act resolves, remained a staunch loyalist. Ruggles created the “Ruggles Covenant,” a loyalist pledge to oppose any colonial congress and to remain loyal to the king. Once the war broke out, Ruggles crept his way to Nova Scotia, leaving his daughter Bathsheba behind enemy lines. Ruggles was much despised, but nothing could be done as he’d escaped. But his daughter made herself a viable target when she plotted with two AWOL British soldiers to have her husband killed. The murder was successful; the cover-up was not. Bathsheba begged for leniency as she was five months pregnant, but the leader of the Massachusetts Executive Council, John Avery Jr., signed her death warrant anyway. Bathsheba was hanged July 2, 1778 before a crowd of 5,000 in Worcester. She was the first woman executed in the United States. John Avery Jr. was a member of the Loyal Nine, the high command of the Sons of Liberty.
Brutal righteousness swept from the villages of Massachusetts to the highest offices in the rebel nation, as Major John Andre would discover in 1780. A highly regarded British officer of flawless comportment, Major Andre was caught attempting to facilitate Benedict Arnold’s treachery. Washington’s officers, most notably Hamilton, recommended that Andre be held prisoner for the length of the war, a sentence befitting a man of his rank. But Washington knew what John Avery and the townspeople of Worcester knew and what many others, again notably Hamilton, had failed to yet appreciate: the war Washington’s army waged wasn’t merely against the British; it was against feudalism. A criminal’s sentence would be determined by his crime, not his rank or lineage or gender. Washington’s officers protested; at the least, they argued, Andre should be shot as an officer. Yet Washington, like Jemmy Otis, possessed an uncanny ability to sense a larger picture even when the picture was apparent to few others. He ordered Major Andre to be hanged as a commoner, and he was the next day.
Ironically, it was Nova Scotia, the land that Massachusetts Province had fought so hard for in the 1740s, that provided refuge for fleeing loyalists such as Timothy Ruggles. The Louisbourg campaign of 1744 had been a powerful unifying force for the province, and the return of Louisbourg in exchange for Madras, India had planted a seed of doubt about the mother country’s loyalty to the province. And now, that stretch of land was a haven for those disloyal to the cause.
And that single student who studied law under Jemmy Otis in 1754? Pelham Winslow would become Major Pelham Winslow, British Commander of Castle William, Britain’s primary fort during the siege of Boston and a place of refuge for loyalists. The fort was soon taken and would subsequently be renamed Fort Independence.
James Bowdoin started as a loyalist and was the author “J” in the paper war, roundly criticizing Otis and defending the oligarchy. And yet by the mid 1760s he would largely agree with Otis’s earlier radical positions, becoming a great critic of Hutchinson, who would reject Bowdoin’s appointment to the Council in 1769. Bowdoin would become the Massachusetts constitutional convention’s president, delegate to the first Continental Congress, and governor of Massachusetts in 1785 – a full convert to Otis’s incendiary position. Thomas Cushing could, at best, be described as a tepid supporter of the rebels, but he too eventually became an advocate of independence. Along with John Hancock, Bowdoin and Cushing took turns as the first governors of the state of Massachusetts.
And what of Charles Paxton, the odious omnipresent Commissioner of Customs who in 1760 directed his deputy to ask the court for a writ of assistance? John Adams later wrote of Paxton that he was “the essence of customs, taxation, and revenue,” and that he appeared at one time “to have been governor, lieutenant-governor, secretary, and chief justice.” Rebels hung his effigy on the Liberty Tree more than once, though on one special occasion it was hanged between those of the devil and the pope. He was driven by angry mobs to take up protection at Castle William. He and his family escaped Boston in 1776 and went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and, shortly thereafter, England. He died in obscurity in 1788, living at the house of a fellow tax collector. Paxton’s legacy lives on in the town named after him about 50 miles west of Boston. Paxton, Massachusetts was incorporated in February 1765, a month before Parliament passed the Stamp Act. The bell that still rings from the Paxton, Massachusetts Meeting Hall was cast by Paul Revere.
Coda
John Singleton Copley, the most famous colonial painter of his day, painted portraits of the Colonel and his wife Mary Allyne, their daughter Mercy Otis Warren, her husband James, Elizabeth Gray Otis, John Hancock, Andrew Oliver and Sam Adams. The portraits of Mercy and James Warren, John Hancock and Sam Adams hang in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as does Peter Oliver’s portrait. The Boston Museum also has a group portrait of the Oliver brothers – Peter, Andrew and Daniel – painted when they were young adults. Elizabeth Gray Otis’s portrait hangs with her husband Samuel Allyne’s portrait in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Samuel Allyne’s portrait was painted by Gilbert Stuart, another famous artist whose portrait of George Washington graces the one dollar bill. Andrew Oliver’s portrait also hangs with Elizabeth and Samuel Allyne in the National Gallery. In life, the Colonel and his wife Mary Allyne were always deemed to be rural folk, and in death they are still far from the madding crowd; their portraits hang in the Wichita Art Museum.
Jemmy Otis midwifed the philosophical concepts of rights and consent into the world of practical politics, a world whose feudal spirit was both horrified and intrigued by “the child Independence
.” The man who promised to “kindle such a fire” oft stood alone amidst the flames in 1762 and 1763, and the now assumed wisdom of the separation of powers and “unalienable rights” began under a cloud of sedition and doubt. In those early years of apprehension and rejection, Jemmy employed newspapers and pamphlets to affect elections and government that has molded the way media operate, and by late 1765 he had persuaded thousands to risk their lives, fortunes and sacred honors to raise that child. The concept of judicial review bears the imprint of his theories about the role of the judiciary in the legislative process. He helped modernized the practice of law and politics while maintaining that the credibility of both rests on their access to all. His argument against general search warrants is enshrined in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The fire he lit is immortalized in the Statue of Liberty, who holds the flames of freedom high to enkindle the world. Lady Liberty’s head is encircled with a halo of seven rays, signifying that the torch is to ignite all seven continents just as Jemmy’s 1761 election would “shake all four.” She holds a tablet of the law inscribed with an updated confirmation of Jemmy’s Anno Liberatus Primo – JULY IV MDCCLXXVI – and the chains of feudalism lay broken at her feet. His insistence – at times bombastic, at times menacing – on the primacy of individual rights and the inevitable absurdity of slavery and voter property qualifications reverberated long after he lay lifeless on a rain soaked yard in Andover; it was as if he saw the future and couldn’t wait to get there and failed to understand why others were dawdling. His dogged pursuit of consent indeed shook “all four” continents. This “Isaiah and Ezekial united” had a tempestuous life, charged with passion and fury and fueled by a burning pursuit of solutions to problems that few knew existed. And his faith in the pursuit and belief in the solutions fused wholly with the consciousness that led to rebellion and created the republic.