by Nathan Allen
Arsonist
The Most Dangerous Man in America
by Nathan A. Allen
Griffins Wharf Productions LLC
Westport, Connecticut
Arsonist
The Most Dangerous Man in America
Griffins Wharf Productions LLC
Westport, Connecticut
Copyright © 2011 by Nathan A. Allen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-America Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States of America by Griffins Wharf Productions LLC.
First published by Griffins Wharf Productions LLC, July 2011.
www.griffinswharfproductions.com
www.jamesotis.net
James Otis on Facebook.
Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito
Notes on the eBook edition of Arsonist:
Due to the vagaries of eBooks, Otis’s footnotes from the original pamphlets are not reproduced here. They can be found in the hard copy edition of Arsonist and online at www.jamesotis.net.
Further, unlike the hard copy edition, the eBook edition does not contain an index.
Notes, sources, and documents can be found at www.jamesotis.net
Contents
Overture
Chapter One
The time is which we have long foreseen
Chapter Two
Storms & tempests are consequent
Chapter Three
I will kindle a fire
Chapter Four
the Resentor & the popular Conductor
Chapter Five
mad people have overturned empires
Chapter Six
Troubles in this Country take their rise from one Man
Chapter Seven
the Terror of Election
Chapter Eight
a damned faction
Effects
Coda
Pamphlets Written by James Otis
A Vindication
The Rights of the British Colonies, Asserted and Proved (James Otis, 1764)
Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists in a Letter to a Noble Lord (James Otis, 1765)
Sources & Notes
Overture
The early founders of the United States, the rebels of the 1760s, were profoundly radical. The most radical of them were not merely opposed to particular laws or regulations, whether they be about taxes or imports. They were opposed to the strong centralized government that had existed in feudal form for about 1000 years, and in Boston this feudal government was most evident in the oligarchy that essentially ruled the province. The “government” was not simply concentrated in official offices and government employees but rather in the few men who, in conjunction with holding those offices, owned much of the land, controlled most of the major components of the economy, and maintained a hierarchical culture atop which they firmly stood. This government – so different from a modern government – had been only marginally modified for centuries. In every town and province, a few men controlled nearly every aspect of life, and that control was infused throughout the culture. Law, religion and custom alike reflected the tidy, stratified organization of society.
After the revolution, the trappings of feudalism – titles, deference, duels – were transmuted from chivalrous to barbaric. John Adams’s suggestion that the president be called “His Excellency” was met with ridicule; Hamilton’s duel with Burr was met with revulsion. That Hamilton and Burr, men of high esteem and status, had to sneak out of Manhattan at daybreak to duel on a riverside ledge in New Jersey is proof enough that what once was honorable was now taboo.
For the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
Jefferson was paraphrasing a famous 17th century speech from a scaffold by Hannibal Rumbold, who declared:
This is a deluded generation, veiled in ignorance, that though popery and slavery be riding in upon them, do not perceive it; though I am sure that there was no man born marked by God above another; for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him. …
Jefferson owned copies of English histories that reprinted Rumbold’s speech. As Jefferson makes clear, the American Revolution was a signal “to the world,” not a protest about any particular law or statute. Rumbold’s speech is a denouement of a failed challenge to feudalism, whereas Jefferson’s is a celebration of the first successful attempt to precipitate its demise. But how did we progress from Rumbold to Jefferson, from a scaffold in Edinburgh to a neoclassical home of a famed ex-President in Monticello? George Washington wrote in his Circular Letter of 1783, “The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Suspicion, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.” How did “the rights of man” become “better understood”? What was the process? Who were the prime movers? The story of the Otis family elucidates some of the details of the journey.
History is not made in clearly opposed dichotomies – Whigs vs. Tories – but rather in dense thickets of entangled alliances and competing allegiances. James Otis and his father not only knew this grubby truth but also used it masterfully to their advantage. Seamless historical narratives constructed from two clearly delineated opponents are latter-day fabrications. The Revolution was no parade of romantic idealists marching toward an inevitable magical moment and serenaded with a symphony of liberty. In truth, the 1760s were improvised mayhem continually flirting with disaster. A few flourished in the cacophony and transformed what seemed like contemptible and chaotic stagnation into a beautiful mess.
Today, we stand on the shoulders on George Washington, and in 1783, Washington stood on the shoulders of the revolutionary generation of the 1760s. Few of those men made it into the new government, and that was probably for everyone’s benefit. They were fighters, not compromisers. They were agitators, men who could convince the masses that they’d been wronged and provoke mobs to tear down private homes. These infantry soldiers brawled in the streets and in the media. They were not suited for the conciliatory mending that was needed after the war and in the new government. They were, quite literally, ready to die for their rights, and thus largely incapable of living with wrongs. If the rebels of Boston had been a part of the Constitutional Congress in 1787, no compromise on slavery would have been made, and thus no unified country would have emerged. The rebels were a necessary core ingredient to the conception of the country, the foundation on which everything else was built, and yet had no place in the country they conceived.
For it was these men – Otis, Sam Adams, Oxenbridge Thacher, Jonathan Mayhew, Thomas Cushing, Patrick Henry – who conceived the country. It was men such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton who midwifed the count
ry, and we raise it now. And yet this conception, so vital yet so ignored, occurred in the violent yet fertile grounds of Boston and Virginia in the 1760s. And no one was so instrumental to that conception as James Otis, Jr., the forgotten infantry soldier who made the general’s glory possible.
While the Spirit of ’76 burned for decades after the fact, in 1760 it smoldered in the hearts of few. Otis’s arguments in the early years of that decade seem innocuous now because they were widely adopted a decade later; many of his most strident opponents in the early 1760s became hardened rebel allies by the end of the decade. Yet as Otis explored the meaning of “the rights of man” and attempted to apply that phrase to governance, he was attacked, labeled crazy, and ensnarled by whispers of sedition and treason. To be accused of being crazy wasn’t new; John Adams too would later be accused of mental instability by none other than Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Conjuring rumors questioning an opponent’s mental health was a common political maneuver and every major political figure who had enemies, which is all of them, at some point was attacked with innuendo questioning his mental faculties. But Otis was unique in his fiery defense of principle and his unyielding application of ideas that struck at the very core of the West’s modus operandi – feudalism.
Boston produced many rebels, trained as lawyers and reared in contentious New England politics, for whom all meaningful progress began with an argument. Consensus may have been the objective, even in Boston, but consensus was forged in fire. Otis, like John Adams later, usually prepared for every discussion by gathering kindling. In 1760s Boston, the opposing factions could meet at no middle ground because no middle ground existed. In order to construct the appearance of compromise, Otis could not position himself in some centrist position but rather planted one foot on each of the shaky extremes that were battling for power. The rebels viewed this as betrayal and the royal governor thought Otis only needed time to plant his second foot on the oligarchy’s shaky bit of earth. Both were wrong. Otis’s goal in this perilous straddling of extremes was the hope of destroying one before they moved so far apart as to destroy him. In 1794, Thomas Jefferson wrote “the consequent disgrace of the invading tyrants is destined … to kindle the wrath of the people of Europe against those who have dared to embroil them in such wickedness, and to bring at length, kings, nobles & priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with blood.” England was “the dead hand of the past,” and Otis’s objective was nothing short of putting feudalism in Rumbold’s place on the hangman’s scaffold of history.
It has been argued that the American Revolution “does not appear to resemble the revolutions of other nations in which people were killed, property was destroyed, and everything was turned upside down. … The American revolutionaries seem to belong in drawing rooms or legislative halls, not in cellars or in the streets. They made speeches, not bombs; they wrote learned pamphlets, not manifestos … They did not kill one another; they did not devour themselves.” The idea that the Revolution was a proper affair conducted by gentlemen in drawing rooms is but an illusion, an historical slight-of-hand wherein the victors pull a cordial philosopher out of the fog of war. To be sure, the American Revolution was different from most. Serfs did not rebel. Slaves did not revolt. Rather, it was the wealthy, college educated – the very people who had the most to gain if nothing happened and the most to lose if their efforts failed – who tried to make something happen. If one were given to over-generalizations, one could characterize the revolution as argued by Harvard trained lawyers, funded by global shippers, and sustained by the energy and gravitas of Virginian planters. In any iteration of a feudal system, these men were the lords and nobles, and yet it was this confection of the privileged who risked their lives to drive a stake into the heart of the feudal system.
And as referenced in that celebrated phrase, these men risked “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Misunderstood among that inventory is “sacred honor.” While leveling the structure of feudalism, men of the 18th century could not escape the value of their family name. To risk one’s “honor” meant to risk one’s children, their ability to be educated, conduct business, and live successfully. The sins of the father were borne by their children and quite possibly for many subsequent generations. The rebels of the 1760s wagered their lives, homes, businesses and children, and Otis’s story illustrates the devastating effects of that gamble. That the story is encapsulated in that brief phrase in the Declaration of Independence is evidence that Otis’s wager was far from unique.
The Revolution was so radical precisely because it was so unlikely. And it was conducted by gentlemen philosophers and street brawlers alike. People were killed, private homes were destroyed, and everything was turned upside down. Mobs ruled streets and manifestos rolled off printing presses. And a few were consumed by the radicalism of the ideas they brought to life. The methods that brought forth the American Revolution are oft obscured because the society it created was unique to history. And yet battles, blood, passion, betrayal, high-minded idealism and ruthless acerbity – all the usual ingredients of revolution – were abundantly present in the American Revolution.
That the Revolution was focused on breaking the bonds of feudalism in general, and not only the bonds with England, can be gleaned from the fact that the English were the among the freest people on earth, and the colonists the freest among Englishmen. There were no bloodthirsty thugs, no murderous tyrants, no gulags, no “reform through labor” prisons. Taxes were not high in the colonies – in fact, they would have been considered very low for Europe. Laws were not particularly oppressive; most lived as they wished. There were no vast ecclesiastical organizations dictating rules, no priestly courts, extensive church taxes and immense church properties. There were no dukes taxing the profit out of the work of serfs, legislating against the merchant class, conspiring with the church to maintain their exclusive hold on property and wealth. The English colonists in North America had none of that oppressive feudalism with which to contend or even the remnants of feudal oppression for it had never existed in the colonies. They were utterly free of the usual systemic domination of feudal society and even largely free from its history. To argue that the colonists were rebelling strictly against the British would be to claim that a hand should be amputated for a splinter in the finger. The enemy was not England but feudalism. This explains why it was soon observed that Otis’s works and the Boston rebels would shake “all four” continents. It was clear by the mid 1760s that the effects of Otis’s argument would carry far beyond England. This further explains why in the 1780s the men who were constructing the new government knew their decisions would affect the world, and the country with which they were most concerned was France. It seemed so clear to them that a France free from feudalism could be a dynamic force in the world. It was inevitable in nearly every conversation about the debate with England that consequences beyond England were referenced. The colonists were very aware that the whole world – the feudal world – was listening to their discussion about rights and consent.
Otis’s combustible ideas were not all consumed by the Revolution; they ignited over the next century whenever some aspect of feudalism would again stake its claim against modernity. The piecemeal death of feudalism was perhaps inevitable; the rapidity of its death was not. More importantly, because a cogent argument for feudalism’s replacement was often not readily available to many other revolutions, they devolved into chaos or recursions into variants of feudalism.
It may be argued that inherited circumstances shape administrations, not vice versa, but for the death of a minor judicial figure to precipitate widespread rebellion takes a special kind of executive idiocy and a unique person to recognize and manipulate that idiocy to advantage. At least as far as Boston was concerned, by 1766, the Revolution was inevitable. The brilliant propagandists, manipulators and activists who conceived the revolution were not constituted to manage the brutal reality of war or to operate the compromising
minutiae of peace. Yet in 1760, one man forced a discussion that few others desired. And when he was ignored, mocked and reviled, he retreated, gathered more kindling, and relit the discussion. The fire eventually caught until, in Jefferson’s words, it began to “kindle the wrath of the people of Europe.”
Traditional economic models that focus on labor, capital, population and technology cannot explain what happened in the West in the second half of the 18th century. Traditional political analysis likewise fails. They both neglect to take into full appreciation the fundamental operating system of the time. The breakdown of feudalism began at the edges, where men of middling means created businesses, began trading, and constructed a new paradigm for describing themselves and their activities. Such men had always existed, but in the 18th century, they began to be respected. They began to seek office to expand control over their lives; they built their own churches and schools and created their own communities. More than anywhere else, these were the men of Plymouth and Barnstable in Massachusetts Bay colony. Significantly more important than their purely economic or political activity, their ability to control their lives and ascribe to themselves dignity and import laid the foundation of a revolutionary era. The generations of the early 18th century moved into their new and liberated bourgeois roles timidly; they seemed to sense that their escape from the dominating force of feudalism was tenuous and depended on moving quietly so that the oligarchs would notice not – too much noise from the edge of the civilized world might wake the master. In the early 18th century, most of the British North American colonies were of little import to Britain and France and of practically no import to anyone else. The escape from feudalism depended on the situation staying that way.
