“Patriot, Hero, Distracted Person” Online

At the end of the summer Revolutionary Spaces and the National Museum of Mental Health Project debuted an online exhibit titled “Patriot, Hero, Distracted Person: James Otis, Jr. and Mental Health in the Eighteenth Century.” It’s well worth a visit.

For decades the standard American story of James Otis was shaped by the Massachusetts Whigs, particularly his sister Mercy Warren and his admirer John Adams.

That narrative had Otis staunchly leading the political resistance to the British ministry’s corrupt laws until Customs Commissioner John Robinson assaulted him in the British Coffee-House. That severe head injury tipped Otis into bouts of insanity.

In the twentieth century historians noted that Otis’s family had noticed him behaving erratically earlier in life. Adams’s diary and newspapers show that Otis was especially verbose and bellicose in the days leading up to his confrontation with Robinson. The fight in the British Coffee-House might thus have been the result of mental difficulties, not just the cause.

This web exhibit shares all that evidence as well a note from a psychiatrist saying that Otis’s head injury could have brought on or severely exacerbated his manic episodes. It also explores his treatment and family life in more detail than I’ve seen elsewhere.

Without completely neglecting politics, the exhibit thus reframes Otis’s life “from an epic tragedy to a much more familiar story of loss and sacrifice.” It puts particular emphasis on his later years when he was unable to work and often separated from his wife and children. The final page shares artistic responses to his story.

Kate LaPine, Lucy Pollock, Paul Piwko, and their colleagues at Revolutionary Boston and the National Museum of Mental Health Project have produced a website evoking sympathy for Otis as an individual facing human difficulties, not a distant historical figure. It provides a different dimension to our grand Sestercentennial narrative.