JAMES OTIS.
After a statue of James Otis, by Crawford, in the chapel at Mount Auburn. The usual portrait of Otis is by Blackburn, painted in 1755, and now owned by Mrs. H. B. Rogers. The earliest engraving of it which I have noticed is by A. B. Durand in Tudor, and again in the Worcester Magazine (1826), vol. i. It has been engraved by W. O. Jackman, J. R. Smith, O. Pelton, and best of all by C. Schlecht, in Gay's Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 332. Cf. Loring's Hundred Boston Orators, and the woodcut in the Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 6. The earliest engraved likeness is probably a rude cut on the title of Bickerstaff's Almanac (1770), which is reproduced in Lossing's Field-Book of the Rev., i. 486.
There is a photograph of the house where Otis was killed by lightning (May 28, 1783) in Bailey's Andover, p. 86. Cf. Appleton's Journal, xi. 784. The principal detailed authority on the career of Otis (born, 1724; died, 1783) is William Tudor's Life of James Otis, which Lecky, in his England in the Eighteenth Century (iii. 304), calls "a remarkable book from which I have derived much assistance." Francis Bowen wrote the life in Sparks's Amer. Biog., vol. xii. John Adams had an exalted opinion of Otis, and Otis's character receives various touches in Adams's Works (x. 264, 271, 275, 279, 280, 284, 289-295, 299, 300). Bancroft depicts him in 1768 (vol. vi. 120, orig. ed.), but he failed rapidly later by reason of the blows he received in an assault in Sept., 1769, provoked by him. Cf. Greene's Hist. View (p. 322); D. A. Goddard in Mem. Hist. Boston (iii. 140); Barry's Mass. (ii. 259).
One of the ablest as well as one of the most temperate expressions of the stand taken by the colonies was in Stephen Hopkins's Rights of the Colonies examined; published by Authority (Providence, 1765).[169]
Similar arguments were set forth in behalf of Connecticut by its governor.[170]
Already, in 1764, when Oxenbridge Thacher printed his Sentiments of a British American, he had formulated the arguments against the navigation acts and British taxation, which ten years later, in the Congress of 1774, Jay embodied in his Address to the British People.[171]
John Adams, in later years, when distance clarified the atmosphere, looked upon the conflict which Jonathan Mayhew waged with Apthorpe, and with the abettors of all schemes for imposing episcopacy on the people by act of Parliament, as the repelling of an attack upon the people's right to decide such questions for themselves, and as but a forerunner of the great subsequent question.[172]