James Otis, Jr., and Slavery Revisited

Back in 2006, this blog’s first year, I wrote a couple of essays describing James Otis, Jr., as a slaveholder.

For those postings I relied on and quoted a passage from John J. Waters’s The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (1968):

Inconsistencies certainly marked most of James’s actions. He rejected both slavery and the belief in Negro inferiority, arguing [in Rights of the British Colonies] that as the “law of nature” made all men free it must be applied equally to “white or black.” Yet he never freed his own colored “boy.”

Waters didn’t provide a citation for that statement. However, his book was and remains the best study of Otis and his relatives, getting beyond the hagiographies of the nineteenth century. And anyone looking at Revolutionary America finds a lot of men who wrote about the blessings of liberty, the evils of the slave trade, and even the problems and immorality of slavery itself without actually detaching themselves from the slavery system.

Recently David Hurwitz asked about the evidence behind Waters’s statement because he’s looking into whether James’s sister Mercy and her husband, James Warren of Plymouth, owned slaves. So I went back to primary sources to see what evidence I could find on the question.

To begin with, it’s clear that James and Mercy’s father, James Otis, Sr., of Barnstable, did own slaves. The vital records of that town list the marriages of “Amaritta and Primus, servants to Col. Otis,” in 1748 and “London, servant to James Otis Esqr and Bathsheba Towardy, an Indian,” in 1760. What’s more, the elder James Otis had a number of Mashpee people indentured to him, as cited in detail by Waters; while legally that was a different situation, in practice it was a lot like slavery.

But what about James Otis, Jr., who left Barnstable to become a leading attorney in Boston? Some of the province’s 1771 tax records survive, and in the years since my original postings they’ve been digitized at Harvard. The entry for James Otis, Esq., of Boston doesn’t list any “Servants for Life” as taxable property. That was Massachusetts’s legal euphemism for slaves. (Likewise, James Warren’s 1771 tax valuation doesn’t list any “Servants for Life.”)

Another place to look for evidence of slaveholding is in people’s wills or estate inventories. David found Otis’s will transcribed in this book. That document is dated 31 Mar 1783, just a few weeks before Judge William Cushing began to declare in court that the new Massachusetts constitution had made slavery illegal. Therefore, if Otis did own slaves in March, he would still have considered them his legal property and could have bequeathed them to heirs. He didn’t.

However, the fact that Otis didn’t mention slaves in his will doesn’t mean he didn’t own any. He didn’t have to list all of his property. Otis devoted most of his will to criticizing his daughter Elizabeth for marrying a British army officer, Leonard Brown, bequeathing her only five shillings. (Here’s more about that couple.) Otis left almost his whole estate to his wife Ruth and daughter Mary, also making them his executrices in charge of dividing it as they chose. They could have dealt with any slaves in the estate without filing an inventory with the probate court—especially since Cushing would soon rule slavery null and void anyway.

This evidence still doesn’t prove that James Otis, Jr., never owned slaves. He could have done so as a young man, before 1771. He could even have inherited slaves from his father, who died in 1778. But historians don’t have the burden of proving a negative, given the gaps in the historic record. Rather, our responsibility is to assemble evidence for the statements we make.

And in this case, based on all I’ve seen, I now revise my 2006 remark. James Otis, Jr., and his siblings grew up in a slaveholding family, but I’ve seen no evidence that as an adult he owned slaves, and in 1771 he definitely didn’t.

“Poor Mrs Brown, who was Betsy Otis”

James Otis’s 1783 will didn’t exactly brim with love for his oldest child, Elizabeth, who toward the end of the siege of Boston had married a British army officer, Leonard Brown.

As I quoted yesterday, Otis wrote that he’d heard his daughter’s husband had left her, and that she was suffering from consumption, and then he bequeathed her five shillings. And that was supposed to be in a moment of sanity.

I haven’t found any indication that those rumors were true. Elizabeth Brown lived for decades. And while I can’t confirm the Browns lived together happily, they remained a couple.

In October 1785, after John Adams became the U.S. of A.’s minister to Britain, Elizabeth Brown contacted him, saying, “my Comp[limen]ts: attend Mrs: Adams and inform her I still retain a pleasing remembrance of the agreeable Week I pass’d with her at Plymouth.” She said that she was living “at Leonard Browns Esqr. Sleaford Lincolnshire”—probably her father-in-law’s house.

The biggest problem Elizabeth Brown faced then was not the lack of money from her father but lack of access to bequests from other relatives. Two months later Brown laid out her difficulty for Adams:

my Grandfather at the Decease of my much’d Hond: Father Bequeath’d me one Thousand pound Lawfull Money which his Executors M: J— and Mr: A— Otis were to pay me, and I expected to receive the interest. untill it was convenient to them, to pay the principal

“M: J— and Mr: A— Otis” were Brown’s uncles Joseph Otis and Samuel Allyne Otis. Her uncle by marriage, James Warren, was supposed to be her attorney in Massachusetts, receiving and passing on the money. But the Otises’ business had failed in the tough postwar American economy, so they didn’t have any cash to send. And Warren wasn’t representing Elizabeth Brown’s interests well.

In May 1786, Abigail Adams wrote from London to her sister Mary Cranch about the case:

Poor Mrs Brown, who was Betsy Otis, had all her Grandfather left her, in the Hands of Mr Allen otis and Genll Warren. She has written several Letters to mr Adams upon the subject requesting his advice what to do. Her Father left her nothing. It is very hard she Should lose what her Grandfather left her.

The case hung on. In 1789, Elizabeth’s mother, Ruth Otis, died, leaving her more wealth.

Finally, in February 1790 the Massachusetts legislature passed a law allowing “Leonard Brown and his Wife” to take possession of land belonging to Samuel Allyne Otis as he went through bankruptcy and to sell it to satisfy a debt to them. The attorneys in that settlement were Harrison Gray Otis, Otis’s son, and William Tudor, Adams’s former clerk and father of James Otis’s future biographer.

According to William Tudor, Jr., Elizabeth Brown made “a short visit in 1792” to Massachusetts, perhaps to wrap up those bequests. He also wrote that her husband, “coming into possession of a handsome property, resigned his commission” in the army and retired to a genteel life in the British countryside. That might have been in 1796, when the Monthly Magazine reported the death “At Sleaford, aged 82, Leonard Brown, esq. of Pinchbeck, for many years a magistrate for the district of Kesteven.”

As I wrote yesterday, St. Mary’s church in Pinchbeck contains an inscription about the death of Capt. Brown in 1821. Tudor wrote that Elizabeth Brown was still alive at that time. According to Lincolnshire Pedigrees (which names her father as “Thomas Otis of Boston”), Elizabeth Brown died 18 Apr 1839 at age eighty-two.

That same genealogical book says that Elizabeth and Leonard Brown had a son, also named Leonard, born around 1777. He lived until 1848 and was survived by his widow, Anne. I found gossip about them in Letters of James Savage to His Family, privately printed in 1906. Savage was a genealogist, and in 1842 he went to Britain, determined to track down James Otis’s descendants. Writing from the other Boston, he told his wife what he’d heard about this Leonard Brown: “he was domineered over by his mother, after father’s death, and had only within a short time married his housekeeper or cook, and had no children.” And that was the end of that branch of the Otis family.

“Elizabeth went from hence with the said Leonard Brown”

Elizabeth Otis was born in Boston on 28 Mar 1757, the oldest child of James Otis, Jr., and his wife, the former Ruth Cunningham. Betsy was a small child when her father broke with Massachusetts’s “court party” and the royal patronage system in favor of championing Boston’s Whig merchants through electoral politics. She was twelve years old when her father had his first serious bout of insanity.

As I discussed way back here, Ruth Otis remained politically Loyalist. And as her husband became non compos mentis, she naturally took an even bigger role in raising the children. Ruth and Betsy Otis remained in Boston during the siege while James was outside under doctor’s care.

On 25 Feb 1776, Betsy Otis married Lt. Leonard Brown of the King’s Own (4th) Regiment. According to an inscription in the church in Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire, Brown was born in 1749. He might have been in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and he was definitely wounded at Bunker Hill.

Boston town records of this marriage identify Brown as a gentleman (“Esq.”), but not an officer. The officiating minister was the Rev. Moses Badger, not one of Boston’s pastors but perhaps acting as a Royal Navy chaplain. Badger was a Harvard graduate from Haverhill who had converted from New England Congregationalism to the Anglican Church years earlier.

According to family traditions, Ruth Otis supported Betsy’s marriage, but James Otis was upset when he learned about it. Within a month, the couple evacuated with the royal army to Halifax. During the war, Brown was promoted to captain and reportedly “placed in command of one of the fortresses on the coast of England.”

In 1782, Betsy’s cousin Harrison Gray Otis later recalled, he brought James Otis down from his asylum in Andover to Boston, “at a period when my father [Samuel Allyne Otis] and his friends thought he was recovered.” During this journey, James Otis shared “delightfully instructive” observations about the law and as an exercise for his nephew started to compose his will.

That will, completed the next year, had little to offer his oldest child:

whereas the said Elizabeth went from hence with the said Leonard Brown at the evacuation of Boston to Halifax & thence for England & with him settled at Steaford [actually Sleaford] in Lincolnshire, and as I hear he has left his wife & joined the British Arm[y] again, and the last I hear is that she was in a consumption I give the said Elizabeth five shillings if alive.

James Otis died later in 1783, leaving the rest of his property to his widow, who had remained in Massachusetts, and his younger daughter, Mary, who married a son of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln. But what about Betsy?

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?