“Weak in Arms Void of Virtue, Honor, or Honesty”

Here are some more of the slashing character sketches published in the 8 May 1770 Nova Scotia Chronicle in the guise of detailing a “Tragi-comic Farce” about to the published.

John Dupe, Esq; A Senator, a Man of Fortune, but not of his own acquiring---A Man of weak Capacity and like tainted Meat devoured by the Vermin about them, who drew his Money out of the Cashiers Hands Not trusting to the Loyalty of his Country Men—He is remarkably melancholy on his Loss of Lady Beaver.

Poor Iammy, a Senator, who was the Leading Man in Politicks, but disappointed in Offices of Profit—He stands now ready arm’d to kill any Person who may be mader than himself.

Maria—His Wife, a worthy virtuous good Woman, comforting her Children, and bemoaning his unhappy Fate.

Thomas Wister, an Man weak in Arms Void of Virtue, Honor, or Honesty, whose compounds has poison’d his own Body and Soul, since that he has been finding out an Art to poison the Minds—Private Confessor to Admiral Renegado.

William Town, Regulating Clerk to the Parish—Procurer of Knights of the Post, and Secretary to Admiral Renegado, and Justice Gutts; also Secretary to the Caulkers Club, and chief Compiler of the Country Parish Resolves.

I think these are allusions to merchant John Hancock, lawyer James Otis, his wife Ruth Otis, most likely Dr. Thomas Young, and Boston town clerk William Cooper, respectively.

John Mein identified Hancock as “John Dupe” in his “Key to a certain Publication,” now at the Houghton Library, so that’s an easy one.

Back in October, Mein called Otis “Counsellor Muddlehead,” but by this time people recognized that he was mentally ill. Otis’s wife was indeed known as a Loyalist.

I’m guessing the references to “compounds” and “poison” were hints that “Thomas Wister” was a physician, hence the radical Dr. Young. This page never introduced “Admiral Renegado” at all despite these two allusions to that character. But the 5 Feb 1770 Boston Chronicle had used “Admiral Renegado” as another name for William Molineux, already introduced in the Nova Scotian item as “William the Knave.”

The paragraph on “William Town” contains several pointers to William Cooper, plus a reference to the “Caulkers Club” or caucus. This might be the first publication connecting that mysterious word for a political group to the profession of caulking, and it appears to be a joke.

The article offers no explanation of “Justice Gutts,” and I can’t find the Boston Chronicle using that name anywhere. Perhaps that was an alternate name for the next entry in the article: “Richard Glutton, Esq; a regulating Magistrate.” But I’m not sure who that’s meant to be.

TOMORROW: Mysteries and questions.

“Otis got into a mad freak to-night”

With everything else going on in Boston in the wake of the Boston Massacre, I don’t want to lose track of James Otis’s mental state.

In early September 1769, Otis was speaking extravagantly, monopolizing conversation, and annoying even his fan John Adams. Then he got into a coffee-house fight with royal appointee John Robinson, suffering a severe blow on the head. The following month, Adams wrote rather favorably of the result.

But early in the new year, Otis went into another manic period. Adams wrote in his diary on 16 Jan 1770:

Last Evening at Dr. Peckers with the Clubb.—Otis is in Confusion yet. He looses himself. He rambles and wanders like a Ship without an Helm. Attempted to tell a Story which took up almost all the Evening. The Story may at any Time be told in 3 minutes with all the Graces it is capable of, but he took an Hour.

I fear he is not in his perfect Mind. The Nervous, Concise, and pithy were his Character, till lately. Now the verbose, roundabout and rambling, and long winded. He once said He hoped he should never see T[homas].H[utchinson]. in Heaven. Dan. Waldo took offence at it, and made a serious Affair of it, said Otis very often bordered upon Prophaneness, if he was not strictly profane. Otis said, if he did see H. there he hoped it would be behind the Door.—In my fathers House are many Mansions, some more and some less honourable.

In one Word, Otis will spoil the Clubb. He talkes so much and takes up so much of our Time, and fills it with Trash, Obsceneness, Profaneness, Nonsense and Distraction, that We have no [time] left for rational Amusements or Enquiries.

He mentioned his Wife—said she was a good Wife, too good for him—but she was a tory, an high Tory. She gave him such Curtain Lectures, &c.

In short, I never saw such an Object of Admiration, Reverence, Contempt and Compassion all at once as this. I fear, I tremble, I mourn for the Man, and for his Country. Many others mourne over him with Tears in their Eyes.

The turmoil in Boston after the Massacre appears to have riled Otis more. On 16 March, the merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary: “Mr. Otis got into a mad freak to-night, and broke a great many windows in the Town House.”

At the time, Otis was still officially one of Boston’s representatives to the House of Representatives that met in that building. Obviously, he was in no condition to remain in that seat.

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.

The Downfall of James Otis

Earlier this month the Smithsonian magazine website shared Erick Trickey’s article on James Otis, Jr.—“Why the Colonies’ Most Galvanizing Patriot Never Became a Founding Father.”

In the 1760s, only Patrick Henry and John Dickinson rivaled Otis as a leading voice for resistance to Crown policies—as advocate for the Boston merchants in the writs of assistance case; as a pamphleteer; and as a politician at the head of Boston’s town meeting, the Massachusetts General Court, and the Stamp Act Congress of 1765.

Trickey writes:

All that defiance damaged Otis’ marriage. Ruth, a loyalist, disagreed with her husband’s politics. “He mentioned his wife—said she was a good wife, too good for him—but she was a Tory,” John Adams wrote in his diary. “She gave him certain lectures.” Meanwhile, as tensions rose in Boston, Otis worried that the colonies would soon reach a boiling point. “The times are dark and trying,” he told legislators in 1769. “We may soon be called on in turn to act or to suffer.”

His words proved all too true. That summer, he learned that the four British customs commissioners [actually only four of the five] in Boston had complained about him in letters to London. Enraged, he accused them of slander in a local newspaper. They were “superlative blockheads,” he wrote, threatening to “break [the] head” of commissioner John Robinson. The next night, Otis found Robinson at the British Coffee House near Boston’s Long Wharf and demanded “a gentleman’s satisfaction.” Robinson grabbed Otis by the nose, and the two men fought with canes and fists. The many loyalists in the coffee house pushed and pulled Otis and shouted for his death. British officers stood by and watched.

Otis was left bleeding. Months later, he still had a deep scar; “You could lay a finger in it,” John Adams recalled. The trauma unhinged his already fragile psyche. He started drinking heavily, expressing regret for opposing the British, and wandering Boston’s streets.

The fight between Otis and Robinson always makes me think of dueling, though New England men of their generation weren’t actually good at that practice. The nose grab, the beating with a cane—those were ways one gentleman showed contempt for another, implying he wasn’t on the same social level. In this case, each man tried to mete out the same treatment at the same time. Otis got the worst of the moment, but Robinson had to leave America.

“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?

Ruth Otis: no Daughter of Liberty

Ruth Cunningham, daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant, married James Otis, Jr., in 1755. He was the son of an important gentleman from Barnstable and Boston's most brilliant young lawyer; people anticipated a bright career in the royal patronage system for him.

The marriage probably turned out to be more than Ruth Otis bargained for. In the early 1760s James decided to throw his lot in with the Boston merchants and then with the popular party in Massachusetts politics. Ruth still favored the Crown. Plus, there was the whole madness thing to deal with.

Here's a not very sympathetic letter about Ruth Otis from Hannah Winthrop, wife of Harvard professor John Winthrop, to Mercy Warren in 1769. Warren was Otis's sister-in-law. Both she and Winthrop, and all three women's husbands, were strongly in favor of a boycott of British goods to protest the Townshend Act.

I went to see Mrs. Otis the other day. She seems not to be in a good state of health. I received a Visit lately from Master Jemmy [James and Ruth Otis's son, also named James, then age ten]. I will give you an anecdote of him. A gentleman telling him what a Fine lady his mama is & he hoped he would be a good Boy & behave exceeding well to her, my young Master gave this spirited answer, I know my Mama is a fine Lady, but she would be a much finer if she was a Daughter of Liberty.

Ruth Otis never changed her mind politically. When she died in 1789, she reportedly still preferred the British government to the new U.S. of A. that her brother-in-law Samuel A. Otis had gone to work for.

Ruth outlived both her husband, who was struck by lightning (yes, struck by lightning) in 1783, and her son, who died at British captivity in 1777. Of her two daughters, one married a British officer and moved to England; the other married the son of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln of Hingham. So the family remained split.