Arsonist: The Most Dangerous Man in America

by Nathan Allen

  Whatever the source of Otis’s new interest in government, he and his brother-in-law, John Gorum Jr., accepted the vote of the town of Barnstable as representatives to the first General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1692. This was the first time an Otis was elected to major office and the beginning of four generations of Otis rule in Barnstable politics. The first session of the new Massachusetts House of Representatives produced a resolve claiming that the “house may use and exercise such Powers and Privileges here as the house of commons in England may and have usually done there allways having Respect to their Majesties Roy[al] charter …” This new legislative body immediately staked claim to a position equivalent to the House of Commons and only subject to the King and charter. Parliament, of course, would reject the claim, but the issue was far from settled.

  Governance in Massachusetts Province was broadly divided between the House of Representatives, the Governor’s Council, and the Governor. The Governor was appointed from England. The Governor’s primary power was his ability to appoint province officials, such as judges and sheriffs. Those who were connected to the Governor often would accumulate multiple lucrative appointments. The Governor could also call the House into session and suspend it at will. Confusing the Governor’s control was the customs officials and the admiralty courts; while the divisions of power were not always consistent, provincial customs was typically controlled by a customs official appointed from London and whose authority was wholly separate from the Governor. And the admiralty courts, which by the late 1740s operated out of Halifax, Nova Scotia but had jurisdiction over New England, were similarly outside of the Governor’s purview.

  Every town was permitted to elect representatives to the House, with Boston electing the most at four; these four Boston representatives would be known as the “Boston bench.” While other towns could elect a representative or two, no town was required to send a representative, and every year a few dozen towns would send no representatives. Towns would decline to elect representatives for one reason: the town had to pay for all the representative’s expenses. The House of Representatives would debate and pass legislation, write expenses bills, and pay the province officials. The House could withhold legislation, including spending bills, and could withhold or change the pay of provincial officials, such as judges. The House members were elected for one-year terms, and each year’s election was typically held in May, at which point the newly elected members would vote for a Speaker who would generally manage House activities. The Governor could refuse to seat the Speaker, and, assuming he didn’t need any money, could refuse to convene a session of the House altogether.

  The Governor’s Council was somewhat akin to a Senate; it was the smaller, more privileged upper house that typically advised the Governor. It served the useful function of making decisions on controversial matters for which the Governor alone did not want responsibility. The Council members were chosen by a vote of the House members and the outgoing Council members. If one was well-liked and had the support of the Governor, an election to the Council was often for life. The House would typically have over 100 members whereas the Council would have 28 at most. The Governor could refuse to seat a Councilor, though if the Governor were generally competent, he would be on good terms with the Council. As there were so few Councilors and most held multiple offices, the Governor’s Council typically represented the most important 28 people in the province. The Council was often viewed as the governor’s allies whose goal was to support Whitehall’s agenda in a temperate and conservative manner. The Representatives and Councilors together were referred to as the “General Court.” Though obviously they did not operate as a court in the modern sense, the General Court did hear appeals of court cases and a handful of other important judicial matters.

  The route up the political ladder was fairly predetermined. First, it was an unspoken requirement that you were successful in private business; colonists did not often elect men who hadn’t previously been successful landowners, shippers or merchants. In most towns, only a few families therefore qualified to hold public office. Those who aspired to political office would first attend town meetings so that their neighbors could hear their views. Attendance at town meetings was essential to building a base of constituents. Aspiring politicians would join town meeting committees that would address small town issues such as road designation, fence repair, and minor legal issues. The next step would be to get elected hogreeve, the official who keeps track of town hogs (and occasionally other town animals). Hogreeve was a lowly position, but it was the first step on the political ladder. Next would be warden, surveyor, and finally town meeting selectman, with the “first selectman” essentially acting as mayor. While climbing this ladder, one could also become a justice of the peace or an officer in the local militia. It was common for the particularly enthusiastic to hold several positions at the same time. After a period of proving oneself on the local level one could get appointed by the Governor to the lucrative positions such as sheriff, registrar of deeds, or judge of probate. These positions were valued at perhaps as much as £500 per year by the 1740s. One could also get elected to the province-wide legislature in Boston as a representative, and eventually, to the Governor’s Council. One may also pick up more prestigious appointments such as judgeships, the most coveted of which was a seat on the province’s supreme court. Of course, none of these offices required one to forgo one’s daily business, and undoubtedly most of these offices significantly furthered one’s opportunities, whether as a lawyer, merchant, shipper or landowner. It wasn’t unusual for a judge to be a practicing lawyer, and for that judge to also be a sheriff and a councilmember.

  Governor Hinckley had followed these very steps in his rise to power; though born in England, he emigrated to Scituate at the age of 17 and at 21 moved to Barnstable, where he would remain until he died in 1706. He was a deputy, representative, magistrate, court assistant, deputy governor, commissioner, councilor and governor. He was a paradigmatic colonial politician under the charter. But now governors were appointed from London, and political dynamics changed considerably; the recently minted Dominion of New England was converted in the separate colonies, with Massachusetts officially the “Royal Colony of Massachusetts.” Concurrently, the perpetual skirmishes between the British and the French continued, as both battled for control of the world’s seas. Piracy was rampant, particularly off North America’s east coast and in the Caribbean, and to address that problem, authorities enlisted privateers, essentially private pirates legitimized by a government. Scottish born New Yorker William “Captain” Kidd was one such privateer. Corrupt New York governor Fletcher, who was known to accept bribes from pirates among other indiscretions, was replaced by the Queen’s Treasurer, Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, and the new governor enlisted the aid of Captain Kidd to secure the coasts of New York and New England, of which Bellomont was also governor. Kidd sailed to England to receive a letter of marque from King William III, thus legitimizing his piracy – at least to the British. Sailing down the Thames in his huge, new ship, Kidd passed a Royal Navy ship and declined to salute, as the custom of deference required. The Navy ship fired a cannon at Kidd’s ship, and Kidd’s crew responded by saluting the Royal Navy with their derrières. Kidd then sailed for New York and supplemented his crew with a variety of New York thugs. Bellomont was an investor in Kidd’s privateer enterprises, and when Kidd was implicated in piracy and landed in Boston to obtain legal aid from Bellomont, the governor had him arrested. Kidd was hanged in London and Bellomont lasted all of two years as Massachusetts governor. Life in the colonies was indeed chaotic.

  John III served several terms as Plymouth’s representative and in 1703 was elected to the prestigious Governor’s Council, a position he held until his death in 1727. He was also a justice of the Court of Common Pleas for Barnstable County as of 1702, judge of probate as of 1714, and, if that wasn’t enough, county treasurer, Barnstable town clerk, justice of the peace for the Mashpee
Indians, and, with Gorum, co-commander of the Barnstable militia. So much like his father, John III was also often in court, but as judge rather than defendant. John also twice served on the extraordinary “oyer and terminer” courts that adjudicated the most serious matters, including piracy, murder, and witchcraft. It was oyer and terminer justice Increase Mather who concluded that “It were better that ten suspected Witches should escape, than that one innocent Person should be condemned.” John Otis would later serve on a joint committee of the General Court to determine restitution for the victims of the witchcraft trials.

  The evolution of John Otis and John Gorum as dominant forces in local governance is indicative of this seminal stage in the development of a political consciousness within the colonial merchant class. Otis and Gorum were characteristic of a new generation who operated in a transitional era between a seventeenth century wherein small businessmen were neither much respected nor particularly included in the political calculus to an eighteenth century wherein such men would increasingly wrest power from the feudal class. Another man indicative of the new generation of leaders was Reverend Jonathan Russell. While the same generation as Otis and Gorum, Russell was educated at Harvard. When Russell began his ministry in 1683, there were only seventy communicants, or full church members. Whether Russell’s move to require that both parents be members of the church in full communion before their children could be baptized was purely driven by conviction cannot be known, but it was certainly far more orthodox than John Lothrop’s liberal views of church membership. Russell’s requirement was likely the catalyst for John Otis to enter into full communion in 1693 and resulted in a church membership that nearly doubled in ten years.

  Otis, Gorum, and Russell embodied the attitudes of the new generation best characterized as energetic, prudent builders – of businesses, of churches, of government. This new generation began with the uncertainty of the 1670s and 1680s but found firmer footing in the Glorious Revolution and the new charter government of Massachusetts that was so vital to the optimism needed for builders to invest in the future. Otis’s primary preoccupation was land, which is apparent in his involvement in town affairs between 1696 and 1703 when the final divisions of common lands were made: his name appears repeatedly as committee member, surveyor, arbitrator and grantee in Barnstable Town Records. Yet he was also constantly expanding his trading business beyond Cape Cod. Like Otis, Gorum also maintained his base of operations in Barnstable, but he appreciated the adventurous life of a soldier and was one of the early enthusiasts of amphibious warfare as commander of the whaleboat force in Maine in one of the interminable skirmishes with France. Gorum’s Maine experiences caused him to start land speculating “to the eastward.”

  John III began with the Barnstable farm and then constructed the woolen cloth making mill in 1689 as the first of his manufacturing enterprises. He secured the approval of the town in 1696 to build a 1600 sq. ft warehouse near the center of Barnstable village at the mouth of Rendezvous Creek and not far from John Gorum’s wharf. The warehouse and the wharf would be the heart of Barnstable’s maritime ventures and fundamental to Otis’s commercial enterprises, as both Barnstable and the Otis family rose with the rising tide of New England merchants. The term “New England merchant” covered a gamut of colonial society, starting with Boston dandies such as Charles Lidget and Samuel Shrimpton who wore powdered wigs, rode in horse-drawn coaches, and enjoyed economic and social symbiotic relationships with the oligarchs of London. Below the powdered wig princes of Boston were men such as Samuel Sewall and Wait Winthrop, who had deep Massachusetts connections, but likewise earned their living from the London-Boston trade. Though he might conduct regular business in Boston and have a seat on the Governor’s Council, John Otis III was still a country trader whose economic and social life was a world away from the powdered wig princes. It is possible that a man of Otis’s ambition and abilities could have achieved the success of a Sewall or Winthrop, and his reasons for not making the attempt likely reveal the difference between the attitudes of Boston and Barnstable. John Otis choose to grow his business far removed from London and even Boston, thus distancing himself from direct contact with England, the source of great merchant prosperity. Barnstable’s harbor was shallow, was mined with shifting sand bars, and certainly had no future as one of the world’s great ports. Thirty ton sloops entered the harbor with trepidation, and ship captains much preferred to dock in Boston or even Plymouth. In consequence, John Otis’s business typically focused on shipping modest quantities of pork, beef, fish, grain, wool, whale oil, leather, and other local products to Boston and returning with textiles, hardware, and imported manufactured goods to be either sold directly to customers on the Cape or distributed to country traders.

  Profiting in this environment was likely more thorny than it had been thirty years earlier when competition was less relentless. By 1700, profitability required the cunning and nimble trading for which Yankees were to become famous – spices, tea, a bit of smuggling, and, above all, the ability to stay liquid by demanding quick payment from customers and delivering slow payment to suppliers. John Otis III mastered this business model. Shortages of currency and the declining availability of credit (one often triggered the other) was likely the source of more business failures than any other cause, and this lethal combination was in full effect at the beginning of the 18th century. The persistent scarcity of currency and the informal and slow judicial machinery together shaped a credit structure that favored the attentive and clever. County court records are crowded with law suits for unpaid invoices and requests for execution judgments, so despite its faults, the lumbering, archaic legal system provided an essential component to the expanding class of small businessmen. The courts compensated for a lack of currency and credit, and until the ladder problems were addressed, the former would remain indispensible. The debtor who could outmaneuver the creditor in the courts while quickly collecting outstanding invoices could achieve substantial liquidity. Of course, Barnstable, still on the edge of civilization, had no banks to extend credit lines to businesses, so this confection of business acuity and legal maneuvers – it probably can’t be labeled a credit structure – provided the necessary capital and begat a component indispensable to the development of colonial merchant enterprise and political thought: the country lawyer. At the time, Plymouth colony did not have a single lawyer with formal legal training, so John Otis, like many of his fellow merchants, became a self-taught country lawyer out of necessity: first to file and argue his own collection suits and defend against similarly impatient creditors, then serving as attorney for other merchants who hadn’t the time, ability or presence to handle their own cases. John Otis’s legal work was always tangential to his merchant activities, but it coalesced with and informed his efforts as legislator, justice of the peace, and justice of the Court of Common Pleas and fulfills the image of a merchant renaissance man. Each vocation – merchant, farmer, politician, lawyer-judge, and militia officer – buttressed the others and confirmed his function as a principal force in the evolving southern Massachusetts economy. By committing himself to politics, he had broken the pattern established by his forebears, but he was unwilling or unable to make the decisive choice that would have been compulsory to achieve the life of a powdered wig prince: relocating to Boston. Everything known about John Otis indicates his great ambition, and it’s unknown whether provincialism or discomfort with the Boston-London connection kept him in Barnstable.

  The Otis family grew by four sons and two daughters between 1685 and 1702. His eldest son, John IV, was born in 1687 and his youngest son, James, was born in 1702. The eldest, Mary, married her cousin Isaac Little, who would be appointed to the Governor’s Council in 1743. The other daughter, Mercy, married Jonathan Russell, son of the town’s preacher and who would inherit his father’s prominent position. For a man of John III’s prominence, it was expected that one or more of his sons obtain that passport to prominence: a degree from Harvard College. John IV and a
younger brother, Solomon, took their degrees at Harvard and were the evident choices to assume their father’s influential role on Cape Cod. The heir to the Old Colony’s greatest fortune married Grace Hayman, a very wealthy daughter of a Rhode Island merchant who was supplemented with a £2,000 marriage “settlement.” John IV became both a lawyer and a doctor, but he apparently performed at less than the highest level in either profession. In the 1720s he practiced law in Barnstable, where his father was chief justice. The Superior Court named him King’s attorney for a term in the absence of the attorney general, and he was appropriately appointed justice of the peace for Barnstable County in 1739 at age 52. The following year John IV became embroiled in the Land Bank that would be a recurring pock on the body politic for over a decade. He was elected to the Governors Council by the pro-Land Bank General Court in 1741, but Governor Belcher refused to seat Otis and a dozen other “pro Bank” men. The failure of the Land Bank, consequent successes in Louisburg, and the arrival of Governor Shirley combined to make John IV an acceptable Council member and he was elected again in 1747, completely bypassing the customary years of service in lower positions. He remained a councilor until his death in 1758 at age 71. Notwithstanding his position on the Council and his other offices, including justice of Common Pleas and judge of probate, John’s life suggests that of an aristocratic dabbler; compared to his younger brother James, John seemed to drift through life relying on the cachet of being the eldest son of the county’s wealthiest man and a Harvard graduate.