Arsonist: The Most Dangerous Man in America

by Nathan Allen

  Given the evidence, the Musquash Cove case was nearly impossible to win, and the manslaughter verdict was greeted as total victory for the defense and abject failure for the prosecution – including the time spent in jail awaiting trial, the defendants received prison sentences of about a year each for murdering Royal Navy sailors. The two critical decisions were to vigorously press for a speedy common law trial and the selection of the jury. Perhaps all those peremptory juror challenges proved fruitful for Jemmy, but a supposedly safe jury can go astray if not offered a rationale for siding with the defense. The Musquash Cove case extended Jemmy’s reputation across the region, heightened his awareness of the inconsistencies in the Acts of Trade and their enforcement, and gave him experience in felonies “upon the sea” that would prove useful fifteen years later when he and John Adams successfully defended another renegade sea captain, Michael Corbet.

  As a result of the “melancholy Affair” in Musquash Cove, the Nova Scotian governor sent his able assistant to Boston on a secret mission. He met with the Massachusetts governor to plan and execute an armed attack on the French military base at Fort Beausejour, Captain John Hovey’s illicit trading post, and the Massachusetts Assembly was finally goaded into enacting a tough statute forbidding trading with the French. Otis returned to Boston, probably with Captain Delap, a Barnstable neighbor of the Otises, landing on December 11th, and a week later Colonel Otis tersely informed Joseph that “your brother is well.” Such was not the case with the Musquash Cove killers; on their release from jail they were seized by a Navy press gang and disappeared into the bowels of the Royal Navy. And while Captain Hovey disappeared from history, the Nancy and Sally reappeared in Boston the following month and sailed for the West Indies, still owned, or re-owned, by John Harris. The general conclusion in Boston is that men who resisted imperial customs with deadly force received nothing more than a slap on the wrist thanks to Boston attorney Jemmy Otis. Merchants, smugglers and rebels would all take note, but so would the customs establishment.

  The period of 1745-1755 began with the lingering turmoil of the Land Bank that nearly tore the province asunder, only to be healed by the unifying battle for fortress Louisbourg. A young Jemmy Otis was just beginning his legal studies under Jeremiah Gridley while his father was first elected to the House of Representatives and his uncle sat on the Governor’s Council. The period ends with the Colonel in firm and ever-expanding political control of the Barnstable county, and Jemmy as a Boston lawyer with an impressive reputation. His brother Joseph was successfully managing the Barnstable businesses. Halifax was a newly established town and fort of some substance that could provide security for British ships.

  The Massachusetts coast was secure, but the Ohio valley was not. About six months before Jemmy returned to Boston from Halifax, on May 28, 1754, 120 Virginians crouched in the woods in Western Pennsylvania. At 6am, their commander gave the signal, and they attacked first with bayonets so as to be as quiet as possible. The Virginians stabbed at their sleeping foe in the dimness of early morning; shots were fired in defense, but within fifteen minutes, ten French Canadians were dead, two more were wounded, and twenty-one were captured. As the French commander rose to read an order declaring the area the property of the King of France, an axe was driven through his skull. The victorious Virginians then followed their commander to a nearby meadow, in which they erected an outpost and named it Fort Necessity. The Virginian’s commander then wrote home to his brother, “I can with truth assure you, I heard bullets whistle and believe me, there was something charming in the sound,” and signed his name, George Washington. The Seven Years’ War had begun.

  ***

  concatenation of Incidents

  Life went on. James Otis joined Saint John’s Masonic lodge and the Boston Fire Club. He was one of the founders of a law club wherein Suffolk lawyers met regularly at the Bunches of Grapes tavern on King Street, a tavern at which one could buy drinks, concert tickets, slaves, art, and a number of other items. And Jemmy was known to play the fiddle at dances. Fletcher v. Vassall was tried again in the Superior Court, and Colonel Otis soundly thrashed his son. Correspondence among the Otis family members during the 1750s shows a continuing cooperative effort to advance the family’s position in all respects. From Boston to Barnstable streamed legal advice and the latest rumors, “lemmons,” “hatts for my Sisters,” and “Goloshoes for my Mother” were sent, family members were updated on each others’s lives. The mail from Barnstable to Boston brought requests for more letters and help with legal and political errands. In 1753, Jemmy purchased a card table for his sister Mercy that likely was an acquisition in preparation for her impending marriage to James Warren, Jr., of Plymouth. The marriage took place in 1754 while Mercy’s much adored older brother was busy defending his “pirate” clients in Halifax. After living for a period on the Warren family farm on Eel River, the young Warren couple moved into the same house in Plymouth that Otis had occupied while practicing there. This marriage was an expected Otis alliance; there had been a longstanding and close relationship between the two families, and the Warrens held a dominant position in Plymouth just as the Otises did in Barnstable.

  In 1755, Jemmy reached his thirtieth birthday and was now well established and financially capable of assuming the responsibilities of a family. According to tradition, the Halifax case had generated “the Largest fee that had ever been given to any advocate in the Province,” though there exists no documentation regarding the actual amount and source. Jemmy was one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors. One of Otis’s first clients in Boston was Nathaniel Cunningham, Jr., who at that point had been acting as administrator of his father’s flourishing merchant businesses. Captain Nathaniel Cunningham had been a fairly inconspicuous but very successful Boston merchant at the time of his death in 1748. Like most successful merchants of his day, he was a generalist, supplementing his trading activities with real estate ventures in Connecticut, New York, and Boston, which included a wharf, three warehouses, and two tracts of land on the Boston Common next to the Hancock’s. His estate was assessed at £50,000, and after leaving sixty ounces of silver to the Old South church for a communion cup and £9,500 for the poor of the Church, he provided graciously for his family, leaving £10,000 sterling to each of his two daughters, Ruth and Sarah. While Mercy Otis was courting James Warren, young Nat Cunningham was pursuing Sarah Kilby, daughter of wealthy former province agent Christopher Kilby. After cautiously checking Cunningham’s balance sheet, Thomas Hancock, Kilby’s business associate and confidant, recommended the marriage to Kilby. Nat Cunningham and Sarah Kilby married in the summer of 1754 and moved into a magnificent mansion in what is now Brighton, leaving the widow Cunningham and her two daughters on their own. Ruth, then 25 years old, was thus single and wealthy.

  Jemmy Otis and Ruth published their intention to marry March 18, 1755 and were married soon thereafter. Marriage, particularly to an heiress, dictated a substantial change in Jemmy’s lifestyle, and in September 1755 he purchased his first real estate, a house on the north side of School Street just down the hill from King’s Chapel, an ideal location just two blocks from the Town House and Old South, Ruth’s church. In the immediate vicinity, the Otises had a church, a tavern, and a school for neighbors. The following February, Jemmy formally “owned the covenant” before the Old South congregation; Ruth did the same in April. In another move up the social hierarchy, the Otises had their portraits painted by Joseph Blackburn, an itinerant artist of some talent who was painting portraits of eminent Bostonians at that time. Formal portraits were very popular among the merchant class in the 1750s and those wishing to be immortalized on canvas had a wide choice of artists. In 1755 John Smibert was perhaps Boston’s best portraitist; he painted Nat and Sarah Cunningham, Benjamin Prat, and many others. Robert Feke painted portraits of Jeremy Gridley and Oxenbridge Thacher. Ruth’s portrait depicts her as no raving beauty. In 1763, Jemmy was described as a “plump, round-faced, smoothskin, short neck, eagle-eyed politicia
n,” and while he was not yet a politician in 1755, the description is accurately reflected in his portrait. The most intriguing feature of his portrait is the confident half-smile, an expression that was unique to the deadly serious portraits of the period of proper Englishmen secure in their abilities to conquer the world; his nearly smirking lips seem to draw the line between bold surety and knowing secrecy.

  James Otis and his new wife were political opposites, and he would later describe her as “high Tory” and claimed that she gave him lectures about loyalty. “Ruthy” bore their first child, Elizabeth, in March 1757 and their only son, James, in July 1759. It is apparent that Jemmy Otis began to chart his way through the accepted framework of the Boston legal and merchant world. As the son of a well-known merchant, lawyer and politician, Jemmy had unfettered access to provincial Governor William Shirley and the corridors of power, and his own clientele’s stature was growing nearly as quickly as Jemmy’s reputation. In recognition of his rising position among the Boston elite, Governor Shirley appointed Jemmy Otis as a justice of the peace for Suffolk County in September 1756. It was not a significant position of patronage, but it was a first step in the rise to power. Notably, unlike his country father, Jemmy would never need to start that rise at town hogreeve.

  No one could escape the impact of the war between 1755 and 1760, and despite the fondness of the House of Representatives to quibble over martial minutia, the war in America between the British and the French was a struggle for the survival of Massachusetts. The province was exposed to French attacks by land and sea, and the governor made the management of the war in the colonies his own personal project. Since his inauguration as governor in 1741, Shirley had been more attentive than most of his contemporaries of the inexorable strangling of the English colonies by French imperial ambition. Shirley was not a military man but he had a firm understanding of strategic concepts and oft warned the English colonies and policy makers of the urgent necessity of paring the Bourbon lilies.

  Governor Shirley was nearly as perceptive in political strategy as he was in military affairs as he had not only observed but also abetted Governor Belcher’s defeat and thus fully appreciated the value of a broad and loyal constituency in the Massachusetts Assembly. Shirley also understood that turmoil and security threats brought together a disparate collection of competing interests and unified them under his control. Shirley had wielded great power during George’s War and the capture of Louisbourg, and another war would help him tighten his grip on authority. The Otis family was an important part of Shirley’s constituency, and Shirley carefully cultivated Otis friendships and support with patronage, including the acceptance of John Otis IV as a councilor in 1747 and the appointment of Jemmy as a justice of the peace in 1756. And Shirley recognized that Colonel Otis was the key figure, and Shirley’s move was the commission as Colonel of the militia in 1747. Such tokens of patronage probably helped the Colonel overcome doubts he had entertained about the governor’s military and currency reforms, neither of which held much appeal to Colonel Otis’s conservative country constituency.

  The war came home to Boston in 1755. General Edward Braddock landed in Virginia with two regiments, and, accompanied by George Washington, marched to western Pennsylvania to confront the French troops who had reestablished control of the area. The British were surprise-attacked and routed. Braddock himself was mortally wounded and died not too far from the place of Washington’s victory a year earlier. Braddock’s men buried him in the middle of the road and marched over his body to hide the grave so that the French wouldn’t desecrate the body. And before dying, Braddock gave Washington his general’s sash, which Washington reportedly wore into every battle thereafter, including the battles for independence. But the news that most shook Boston and Governor Shirley wasn’t of Braddock’s death but rather of the death of a soldier who died alongside Braddock: William Shirley, the governor’s young son. Shirley would now seek to consolidate support and execute the war against the French with zeal. He turned to the Otises for political support. The governor’s succession to the office of commander in chief of British forces in North America also made Otis feel close to the seat of power. In February 1756, the Colonel wrote Joseph from Jemmy’s School Street house detailing his plans to support the governor and the war and reported his efforts in keeping the House of Representatives in line “notwithstanding we have such a seditious stupid spirit that reigns in our House that everything is gained inch by inch” and then directed Joseph to “make no noise” but to buy six whaleboats and sets of oars “as cheap as you can.” Aside from the usual necessities of war, Shirley made it clear that a prime target of his war efforts would be Louisbourg in particular and Nova Scotia in general. Louisbourg would be recaptured and the region secured so that no French would remain to demand the return of the fortress. Further, there would be need for patrols on upper New York rivers and lakes as the colonists recalled that the French, once defeated in Louisbourg, attacked aggressively and successfully via northern New York. The Colonel’s supply of small whaleboats would be valuable to these efforts.

  Joseph was also informed that the Colonel had “made way” at Jemmy’s suggestion “for a captain’s commission for Mr. White” who was to quietly enlist a company of whaleboat men with the understanding that when enlisted they would purchase their supplies from the Otis store. The Colonel also directed Joseph to recruit the sailors they would need for their own operations. The Colonel also secured a promotion for James Allyne, a relative of the Colonel’s wife, “for the family’s sake.” Feeling confident of English reimbursement, Colonel Otis directed Joseph to advance the enlistment bounty money from Otis family funds. The Colonel was preparing to fully support Shirley’s efforts in the Seven Years War with a small fleet, supplies and sailors, and this was precisely the kind of broad-based provincial support a successful politician needed.

  Of course, the Hutchinsons and Olivers were also planning to profitably support the war. The province had slipped into a bit of chaos, and the economy had slumped after George’s War had ended. When Peter Oliver heard that some French-Canadian Indians had attacked a frontier town in 1750, he wrote to the Colonel, “Pray set your Head and Heart on making Paper Money next Session …. Blessed Times! The Golden Age is returning. We shall all be Kings, Priests, and any Thing else we incline to.” No war broke out in 1750, but the oligarchy that ruled Boston knew that war brought political unity and opportunity for profit. Colonel Otis would, for the first time, be a part of the elite’s profitable support of the war.

  Shirley executed the war plans with ferocity, and though he did not succeed in capturing Louisbourg during his brief stint as commander, he did execute the wholesale expulsion of over 12,000 suspected French supporters from Nova Scotia. Thousands more French loyalists died, and their land was offered to colonists who supported the British. When Louisbourg was recaptured, there would be no Frenchmen left on Nova Scotia to exchange it for Madras, India, if such an exchange were ever again considered. In return for his support, Shirley promised Colonel Otis the next vacancy on the Boston Superior Court and urged Otis not to seek a seat on the Council because of his value in the House; but when Richard Saltonstall resigned from the bench later that year, Shirley appointed Peter Oliver. The Colonel must have suspected the problem: Shirley was losing his grip on power, and in order to solidify his support among the Boston ruling elite, he had to appoint the powerful and connected Peter Oliver. On August 9, 1756, Shirley returned to Boston from the humiliating ceremony in York where he turned over his military command to the better connected Lord Loudoun. Loudoun would fail miserably as governor of Virginia and commander of North American forces and would himself be replaced a little over a year later.

  But conspiracy was afoot; Shirley had been governor long enough, and others coveted the position. James DeLancey, chief justice and de facto governor of New York, together with other New York merchants, were bitter that Shirley directed all war contracts to Massachusetts merchants. DeLancey su
rely wondered why New York rivers and lakes were being patrolled with Otis-made boats. The New York merchants colluded with a 34-year-old secretary and advisor named Thomas Pownall, who had recently arrived in New York from London and was keen to gain a position of power in the colonies. And finally, French forces had just taken and destroyed Fort Oswego, a vital British fort in upstate New York on Lake Ontario. Someone had to be blamed. And not by coincidence, Thomas Pownall would sail from New York to assist the members of Parliament in assessing who should bear the blame.

  Jemmy, in writing to his father, exulted that “Shirley is arrived and like to remain Govr as long as he pleaseth.” This was naïve; Shirley departed for England in October to defend his political life, leaving the Otis family and other Shirley supporters mired in political uncertainty. Spencer Phips, the ailing lieutenant to the governor who remained in Massachusetts to administer the province, died six months later; without leadership, government power rested on the Council where Hutchinson and other oligarchs warily jockeyed for position, and the government as an active force slipped into confused stagnation. If Colonel Otis had ever agreed with Shirley not to run for a Council seat, he was now not subject to such restrictions.