James Otis, the Pre-Revolutionist

by John Clark Ridpath; G. Mercer Adam; Charles K. Edmunds

The trial evoked an attendance of all who could be admitted, and of many more. The officers of the crown were out in full force, and resolute patriotism completed the crowd. John Adams was one of the spectators.

Another element in the dramatic situation was the fact that James Otis had, in the meantime, received the appointment to the crown office of Advocate General, to which an ample salary was attached. In this relation it would be his especial duty to support the petition of the custom-house officers in upholding the Writs of Assistance and in constraining the executive officers of the province to support them in doing so.

This contingency brought out the mettle of the man. When the revenue officers came to him with the request that he defend their case, he at once resigned his office, and this being known the merchants immediately sought his services as counsel to uphold their protest against the Writs. For his assistant they selected Mr. Oxenbridge Thatcher.

Otis accepted the invitation without a fee. His action involved the loss of his official position as well as his means of living.

It chanced at this time that his old law preceptor, Jeremiah Gridley, was selected as King's Attorney, and it fell to his lot to take the place which Otis would not accept. Thus master and pupil were brought face to face at the bar in the hottest legal encounter which preceded our rupture with the mother country.

The trial that ensued has been described by John Adams, an eye witness of the whole proceedings. He gives in his works a description of the conduct of the case as it was presented for and against the crown, and also notes of Otis's argument.

After the pleas were presented and other preliminary matters arranged, Mr. Gridley addressed the court in support of the government's position. He defended the petition of the custom-house officials as both legal and just. Two statutes of the time of Charles II, empowering the court of Exchequer to issue writs such as those which were now denied, were adduced. He then cited the statute of the sixth year of Queen Anne, which continued to inforce the processes which had been authorized in the twelfth and fourteenth years of the reign of Charles.

Still more to the point were the statutes of the seventh and eighth years of William III, which authorized the collection of revenue "in the British plantations" by officers who might search both public and private houses to find goods that had evaded the duty. These statutes Mr. Gridley claimed as a warrant for the like usage in America.

In answer to Gridley, Oxenbridge Thatcher,[1] himself a lawyer of no mean abilities, spoke for the counter petitioners. His plea was a strong confutation of Gridley's arguments. After this brief address Mr. Otis rose to continue the plea for the people.

Of the speech which followed we have no complete record or wholly satisfactory summary. It is to John Adams, and to the notes which he made on the occasion, that we must look for our opinion of what was, if we mistake not, the greatest and most effective oration delivered in the American colonies before the Revolution.