A Salute to James Otis, My Favorite Madman
A few years ago, when I got to spend a day in Boston, I seized the chance to explore the famous Freedom Trail. This is a walk of a couple of miles (highly recommend) that takes you past all sorts of famous historic sites. I rented the self-paced audio tour and came away with two new heroes. Paul Revere, whom I had heard of, and James Otis Jr. whom I hadn’t.
With the Fourth of July coming up, I wanted to share a little of the story of James Otis, because here was a good, brave man who is never going to get all the credit he deserves because he was literally crazy. This stopped him from doing all the things he might have otherwise done to get him a more prominent spot in the history books. Still, he did enough that President John Adams said that he was, “The most important man of the 1760’s.”
He was born on Feb 25, 1725. He went to Harvard at age 14 graduated at 18 and became a defense lawyer and an outstanding speaker. At this time of course, America was a British colony. Among other indignities, there was a jolly little law called the Writ of Assistance. This allowed officials to enter a person’s home at any time day or night and search it. If anything was damaged, tough luck. As you can imagine, the colonists hated this law, so some British businessmen, arranged for Mr. Otis to give a speech to defend the law to calm down some of the hostile feelings.
Except he didn’t. Instead, on Feb 24, 1761, he gave a five-hour long speech against the law in the Boston Townhouse. Five hours? Can you imagine? Future president John Adams was there along with other men who would later become influential, and instead of falling asleep, they got fired up. Adams said this about that speech, "the child independence was then and there born, every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance."
But Otis was beginning to show signs of mental instability and on his bad days he liked to drink too much, which of course, made things much worse. Still, he wrote several important papers, including one that denounced slavery making him one of the first white men to publicly do so.
Because he was a good speaker, he tended to speak his mind freely and passionately, perhaps a bit too passionately. In 1769, four British customs agents complained about him in letters to England. Otis accused them of slander in a newspaper calling them, “superlative blockheads.” Unluckily, Otis ran into one of these guys in a coffee house. Things might still have been ok, had Otis not made the mistake of trying to defend his honor by challenging the man to a fight. The man grabbed Otis by the nose, and they began to fight with the walking canes gentlemen often carried in those days. I don’t know what kind of cane Otis had, but his opponent had the kind with a knob on the end and hit Otis so hard that it left a knob-sized hole in his head. Otis recovered, sort-of. The doctors of the day plugged up the hole with coins, which gave him the unkind nickname of ‘Jingle Jangle.
The head trauma sent his already iffy mind straight over the edge. He became a full-fledged raving lunatic wandering the streets loudly raging about the political situation or the heavens in general, and then begging forgiveness in his lucid moments. This behavior earned him another nickname, ‘Squire Bluster.’
And then, as if fate wanted to be sure James Otis would never succeed, he was struck by lightning.
Things were tricky on the home front too. His wife was 100% on the side of the English and never budged on her position. She had a great deal to say to Otis, and not always privately. John Adams wrote, “She gave him certain lectures.” That sounds ominous, but to be fair it can’t have been easy to be married to the local madman.
As he grew older, he gave some thought to his death. I imagine most of us, if given a choice, would choose to go peacefully in our sleep. But that’s not the kind of man Otis was. He wanted to go out with a bang. He wrote to his sister, Mercy, “My dear sister, I hope when God Almighty, in his righteous providence, shall take me out of time into eternity, that it will be by a flash of lightning.”
He got his wish. He was standing on the porch at a friend’s house watching a storm roll in, when a flash of lightning struck the post he was leaning on and killed him instantly. He was 58.
It’s in keeping with the luck he had, that even though he spent his life working for the cause of freedom, he died just months before America finally gained its full independence.
I’ll let President John Adams finish this little history.
“I have been young and now I am old, and I solemnly say I have never known a man whose love of country was more ardent or sincere, never one who suffered so much, never one whose service for any 10 years of his life were so important and essential to the cause of his country as those of Mr. Otis from 1760 to 1770.”
With the Fourth of July coming up, I wanted to share a little of the story of James Otis, because here was a good, brave man who is never going to get all the credit he deserves because he was literally crazy. This stopped him from doing all the things he might have otherwise done to get him a more prominent spot in the history books. Still, he did enough that President John Adams said that he was, “The most important man of the 1760’s.”
He was born on Feb 25, 1725. He went to Harvard at age 14 graduated at 18 and became a defense lawyer and an outstanding speaker. At this time of course, America was a British colony. Among other indignities, there was a jolly little law called the Writ of Assistance. This allowed officials to enter a person’s home at any time day or night and search it. If anything was damaged, tough luck. As you can imagine, the colonists hated this law, so some British businessmen, arranged for Mr. Otis to give a speech to defend the law to calm down some of the hostile feelings.
Except he didn’t. Instead, on Feb 24, 1761, he gave a five-hour long speech against the law in the Boston Townhouse. Five hours? Can you imagine? Future president John Adams was there along with other men who would later become influential, and instead of falling asleep, they got fired up. Adams said this about that speech, "the child independence was then and there born, every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance."
But Otis was beginning to show signs of mental instability and on his bad days he liked to drink too much, which of course, made things much worse. Still, he wrote several important papers, including one that denounced slavery making him one of the first white men to publicly do so.
Because he was a good speaker, he tended to speak his mind freely and passionately, perhaps a bit too passionately. In 1769, four British customs agents complained about him in letters to England. Otis accused them of slander in a newspaper calling them, “superlative blockheads.” Unluckily, Otis ran into one of these guys in a coffee house. Things might still have been ok, had Otis not made the mistake of trying to defend his honor by challenging the man to a fight. The man grabbed Otis by the nose, and they began to fight with the walking canes gentlemen often carried in those days. I don’t know what kind of cane Otis had, but his opponent had the kind with a knob on the end and hit Otis so hard that it left a knob-sized hole in his head. Otis recovered, sort-of. The doctors of the day plugged up the hole with coins, which gave him the unkind nickname of ‘Jingle Jangle.
The head trauma sent his already iffy mind straight over the edge. He became a full-fledged raving lunatic wandering the streets loudly raging about the political situation or the heavens in general, and then begging forgiveness in his lucid moments. This behavior earned him another nickname, ‘Squire Bluster.’
And then, as if fate wanted to be sure James Otis would never succeed, he was struck by lightning.
Things were tricky on the home front too. His wife was 100% on the side of the English and never budged on her position. She had a great deal to say to Otis, and not always privately. John Adams wrote, “She gave him certain lectures.” That sounds ominous, but to be fair it can’t have been easy to be married to the local madman.
As he grew older, he gave some thought to his death. I imagine most of us, if given a choice, would choose to go peacefully in our sleep. But that’s not the kind of man Otis was. He wanted to go out with a bang. He wrote to his sister, Mercy, “My dear sister, I hope when God Almighty, in his righteous providence, shall take me out of time into eternity, that it will be by a flash of lightning.”
He got his wish. He was standing on the porch at a friend’s house watching a storm roll in, when a flash of lightning struck the post he was leaning on and killed him instantly. He was 58.
It’s in keeping with the luck he had, that even though he spent his life working for the cause of freedom, he died just months before America finally gained its full independence.
I’ll let President John Adams finish this little history.
“I have been young and now I am old, and I solemnly say I have never known a man whose love of country was more ardent or sincere, never one who suffered so much, never one whose service for any 10 years of his life were so important and essential to the cause of his country as those of Mr. Otis from 1760 to 1770.”