by Nathan Allen
It is doubtful Otis either needed campaign advice or used it because his political appeal was on a different plane. Like his forbears in Hingham and Barnstable, Otis would create a path in history supported by farmers and small merchants instead of by aristocrats and the government. Perhaps for the first time in America, a major politician’s power would be wholly derived from below and not from above. Otis’s ability to get elected without any support from above in itself proved to be an obvious new danger to the oligarchy. It seemed that growing segments of society – farmers and merchants – were becoming independent of the controlling forces of feudalism. The colonists had long since left behind the church, constantly resisted the meddling influence of lords, and now had supported and promoted a man whose power and approval existed outside the ruling elite. Approval of the ruling elite was a necessary act of deference in the feudal world as it served to acknowledge and consent to the social hierarchy; resisting that approval was a rebuke of the hierarchy, a demand for a new order, and an invitation to anarchy. A few in the Boston oligarchy would recognize this – Hutchinson seemed to on occasion – but most, such as Bernard, would be perplexed and dismayed at the lack of deference.
To illustrate how busy he was in 1761, Otis could not be present at the meeting that started his legislative career because he was arguing cases before the Superior Court on its circuit. On May 7 and 8, the court sat in Barnstable, where Otis won a reversal for Joseph Gorum against Samuel Sturgis, and on the second day he suffered a defeat at the hands of the Colonel. Sam Sturgis was the father of Mary Sturgis, the wife of Jemmy’s younger reprobate brother Joseph; the colonial merchant world was quite small and the plethora of lawsuits did not necessarily generate animosity. This second week in May was also likely the occasion of the marriage that joined his sister Mary with John Gray, the brother of oligarch Harrison Gray, Treasurer for Massachusetts province. And three years later Harrison Gray’s daughter Elizabeth would marry Jemmy’s youngest brother, Samuel Allyne.
The Otis’s family and business connections were expanding during this period. Joseph proved an able manager and was the force behind the significant expansion of the Otis shipping business. Various in-laws provided useful contacts that helped the Otis’s expand their shipping and trading businesses to Philadelphia and the Carolinas. Samuel Allyne had taken his bachelor’s degree at Harvard in 1759, and, like his older brother, his master’s degree in 1762. And in another indication of the Otis family’s rising stature, while Jemmy was listed at 13th place in the Harvard social rankings, Samuel was ranked second. After graduation, Samuel considered following his brother’s footsteps into the law, but he changed his mind and began to “trade” in a small way. Yet just like Jemmy, Samuel Allyne wanted to live in the big city; he had no interest in carving out a life in Barnstable as Joseph had. In some ways, Samuel Allyne was much like his brother Jemmy: both were cerebral and drawn to the big city. In this sense, Samuel was nothing like Joseph, who probably seemed a bit like a country dolt to the Boston elite. But unlike Jemmy, Samuel Allyne was drawn to Boston high society, to fashionable parties and witty banter. In his letters home to his brother Joseph, Samuel Allyne comes across as a saucy, facetious playboy. And unlike Jemmy, Samuel Allyne is noticeably a man of privilege. It’s not surprising that Samuel Allyne married into a wealthy, well-connected family. And after he graduated with a master’s degree from Harvard and rejected the idea of going into the law, he borrowed a very large sum from his father and essentially opened a liquor store “on the South Side of the Town Dock” where he had “for Sale at the Lowest Rates, fine Jamaica and Barbados Rum, and Molasses.” One gets the impression that Samuel Allyne was a bit of a rum expert. By May 1764, he was advertising across the page from Jolley Allen in the Gazette; he was still at “Store No. 5, Southside of the Town-Dock” and offered for sale “New Rice & Pork …Hogg’s Fatt …Lisbon Salt” along with the usual “Rum, Molasses & Sugars” all “At the very lowest Rates by Wholesale and Retail.” Samuel didn’t offer the money-back guarantee that Jolley Allen did.
Of course, Samuel Allyne referred to himself as an importer, and, of course, much of his imports would have been smuggled. This new store formalized the informal trading he had been doing as the Boston branch of the Otis Barnstable operation. After starting with liquor, Samuel Allyne branched out, using his connections – mostly his father-in-law – to secure good deals; he specialized in buying large quantities of highly profitable goods, so his business went in the direction of the next great deal and included everything from Irish linens and whale oil, to rice and fish. From 1761 to 1765, brothers Joseph and Samuel Allyne would make trips to the Carolinas, Georgia, Jamaica and Guadeloupe to secure markets for beef, flour, rum and wood products. They sold cheap fish in the Caribbean and imported rice and hard currency into the province. The Otises also began a very lucrative business importing salt from Antigua. By the summer of 1763, Samuel Allyne was urging Joseph to expand their merchant and shipping businesses to the Mediterranean and was pushing for a trip to Bilbao, Spain; he wrote to Joseph to “think it a good Scheme much better than lounging here with my fingers in my mouth.”
From the start Samuel Allyne and Joseph argued about the proper method of keeping accounts, with justification. There was the firm of James and Joseph Otis, plus the individual trading accounts of the father and his sons to keep straight, and often it was difficult to determine who owed whom what amount. It is apparent, however, that Samuel got his start with Barnstable capital; by June 1763 he acknowledged owing the sizable sum of £437 to the family firm. Samuel Allyne was about twenty years younger than his brothers Joseph and Jemmy, and he felt he was always treated like the baby. The Colonel and Joseph were complaining to Samuel Allyne about the way he conducted business, perhaps as pretext to deny his travel request to Spain, and Samuel replied that only God could make him obey their directions. But the addition of Samuel Allyne to the Otis operations proved profitable. Clearly more astute than Joseph, Samuel Allyne had an intuitive sense for commodity trading, and he wrote letters to Joseph explaining how very little family capital could be employed in shipping to generate substantial incomes. He rigged and manned the family’s six large ships in Boston and helped coordinate the very profitable whaling expeditions. These operations produced almost £5,000 profit in the years 1762-1765.
Samuel Allyne certainly wasn’t all business. Many of his letters to Joseph were sarcastic; he knew that Joseph wouldn’t be certain whether or not the letters were to be taken seriously which, it seems, caused Samuel to delight even more in sarcasm. He suggested that women’s brains be dissected in order to determine what they were thinking, and also suggested to Joseph that woman “are the best bed fellows in the world, so god bless them.” And while he sought advice from Jemmy, not his father or Joseph, Jemmy mostly stayed out of the family business, and most business arguments were conducted between the Colonel, Joseph and Samuel Allyne. Neither Samuel Allyne nor Joseph was particularly interested in politics, except in how it affected their businesses. In that regard, they were similar to Hutchinson; the government existed to further their financial interests. Samuel Allyne’s interest in politics typically consisted of expressing either amusement or alarm to Joseph about Jemmy’s fireworks. In October 1761, Samuel Allyne wrote to Joseph, “Govr B__d is a busibody in S Davis’s Affairs; tis true he says he is poor & wants to what money he can of us: but whether this is the case, or if tis whether he ought to oppress the industrious mercht to fill his pocket or gild his own Chariot with another’s Gold; or aggrandizing his family with his neighbour’s property: I dont pretend to say.” And typically, that sentiment was the extent of Samuel Allyne’s interest in politics in the early 1760s.
More Superior Court sessions kept the Otises from taking their seats in the House; the Court met on May 12-14 in Plymouth where Jemmy faced his father across the counsel table in seven cases; Jemmy won three of them. While in Plymouth, the Colonel and his son stayed in James and Mercy Otis Warren’s home. James War
ren would eventually surface as a rebel leader, and Mercy would be a radical of the Jeffersonian republican sort – too radical for many eminent Bostonians such as John Adams. One can only imagine what the Colonel, his son, daughter and son-in-law discussed at the dinner table in those May spring nights; the fire of independence would soon burn hot in the three younger diners, and it’s undeniable that Otis’s arguments – “An Act against the Constitution is void: an Act against natural Equity is void: and if an Act of Parliament should be made, in the very Words of this Petition, it should be void” – were almost certainly discussed. And it’s probable that the Colonel – the wily politician who’d been rejected and humiliated by the oligarchy – counseled the younger generation in how to navigate the tumultuous political waters that lay ahead. Perhaps they were deliberating what it would mean to “shake the province to its foundation.” Three years later the father and son would stay again at the Warren’s house and hatch the plot that would spread the flame from Massachusetts to the other 12 colonies. They were consumed with their legal practices, but perhaps they also entertained foundation shaking scenarios over dinner.
The first session of the newly elected House opened in the Town House on May 27, 1761, and Colonel Otis again took his seat as Speaker by unanimous vote. Sitting in the Speaker’s chair, the Colonel could look down the rows of benches that lined the walls and spy the famous Boston bench occupied by his son and his three colleagues. Was this the foundation shaking that Brigadier Ruggles so feared? The assured and composed Colonel was the archetypal country trader and lawyer and the undisputed master of his county, representing a confection of mercantile, legal, agricultural, and social interests that was incurably attached to Boston by the delicate threads of patronage and economics. The Colonel represented the practical needs and desires of the “combination of Merchants,” not their theoretical positions. Conversely, the Boston bench comprised of the arsonist Jemmy Otis, the steadfast Thomas Cushing, and the political operator, Royall Tyler, represented Bernard’s feared “Confederacy,” a group who increasingly sought to break those delicate threads of patronage and economics that tied the people’s needs to the oligarch’s desires.
Even this “Confederacy” – the Speaker and the Boston bench – consisted of only five of 123 men, many of whom were puppets whose strings were manipulated by powerful merchants or farmers and “the King’s friends” whose primary purpose was to promote government policy in exchange for government patronage. Despite this, a number of powerful and independent minds also existed in the House. Colonel Choate of Ipswich was as skilled in parliamentary combat as Colonel Otis. Brigadier Timothy Ruggles, now of Hartwick in Worcester County and Elijah Williams of Hampshire County, one of the River Kings of the Connecticut valley, also held seats in the House. Then there was the mercurial Chambers Russell; a judge of Vice Admiralty and Superior Court justice, he had resigned from the Council the preceding month likely due to the mounting attacks on plural office-holding and the appearance of what Mayhew labeled “undue influence.”
The Boston bench had, however, been the source of almost every instance of defiance ever since the elder Elisha Cooke rebelliously led the House as Speaker in the 1680s, and Boston’s exceptional advantage of having four representatives in the General Court gave its bench strength beyond its numbers. The Council was elected each year by the new House and the previous year’s Council; in theory, a unified House could determine Council membership. In practice, however, a combination of custom, perceived exclusivity, and feudal deference had preserved a Council overwhelmingly loyal to the governor and government; the Council held the prerogative of being “the King’s friends.” The resignation of Chambers Russell from the Council and the election of James Otis to the House were, however, harbingers of the erosion that would destroy this combination of custom, perceived exclusivity, and feudal deference. And as an omen, the new representative’s first maneuver was to attempt to block Hutchinson’s election to the new Council, but the effort was futile, and the voting produced no substantial shift in Council power. The radical’s plan was too radical in 1761. And according to plan, Thomas Flucker was also elected to the Council.
The General Court, composed of the House and the Council, was now formally organized, and Governor Bernard gave the opening address, which wistfully reflected the era of Charles I more than recognized the quickly shifting sands of 1761. He asked the members “to lay aside all divisions and distinctions, especially those (if any there be) that are founded upon private views. … Let me recommend to you, to give no attention to declamations tending to promote a suspicion of the civil rights of the people being in danger.” There was no doubt in the minds of the audience that his remarks were directed to Jemmy Otis and the Popular Party, nor was there doubt in Bernard’s mind as to the meaning of the House’s reply that “your recommendation … shall have its weight. It is our intention to see for ourselves. …” Bernard was asking the General Court to be a friend of government; the Court was non-committal.
As did his father in his first term as a representative, Jemmy quickly emerged as a leader, serving on more important committees than any other member. The Colonel, as Speaker, had significant involvement in committee appointments, but there are no indications that his recommendations opposed the wishes of the House, and even Governor Bernard acknowledged the mounting prominence of “the head of the Confederacy.” In reporting to John Pownall, the Secretary to the Board of Trade and brother of the previous Massachusetts governor, in a letter dated July 6, 1761, Bernard wrote: “The Assembly keeps in very good temper; all necessary business is properly done, notwithstanding an opposition is kept up (seldom raising the minority by one third) by Mr. Otis, Junr. who has been Mr Barrons faithfull Counselor from the first beginnings of these Commotions.” Bernard was still wistfully hoping for his easy term as governor but knew that “Mr. Otis, Junr.” lurked in the shadows.
Five days later Bernard suspended the General Court, and Otis seemed no nearer to vitiating the friends of government, likely because no issue yet presented itself that could be leveraged to increase the minority Popular Party to a majority. Otis targeted a message from the governor stating that during the recess – that is, after suspending the General Court – he had found it necessary to man the province ship so that it could protect the fishing fleet from French privateers. As there was no appropriation for this purpose, the governor had borrowed the necessary funds and now asked the House to repay the loans; the House commenced on a “long debate” and eventually acquiesced to the governor’s request but would not let the issue rest for long.
Concurrent with the trials of Gray v. Paxton, Erving v. Cradock, and Benjamin Barons’s ongoing saga, events were congealing to supply the awaited issue from which Otis could capitalize in order to increase the size of his “Confederacy.” Heavy war expenditures in New England were sharply increasing the trade deficit with the mother country, and just as the trade deficit deteriorated for Massachusetts, the gold-silver price ratio in Europe shifted, thus generating unusually high demand on the already low supply of silver in the colonies. So the depletion of the silver supply aggravated the ongoing need for more silver. On August 28, 1761, Boston merchant John Rowe wrote his English agents that “The money which has been circulating in this Country begins now to be shipt off … Abt Twenty thousand pounds were shipt p[er] the Chesterfield & should another man of war come here tis like a Larger sum may go.” And merchant Thomas Hancock alerted his friend Thomas Pownall that sterling bills were commanding a premium of as much as seven percent. Sterling was being drained from the colonies at a frightening rate.
And yet another development was fuelling the fiscal crisis. In June 1761, a trader was caught passing counterfeit silver specie. The criminal was quickly convicted and sentenced to stand in the pillory where he was promptly besieged with rotten eggs. Reportedly, the most energetic participant was Dr. Seth Hudson, a notorious scoundrel who was in Boston only to answer charges of payroll fraud. A month after the co
unterfeit specie trial, Dr. Seth Hudson himself was jailed along with his accomplice, Josh Howe, for forging province notes. Hudson’s scheme attracted far more attention than the counterfeit specie scheme because the amount ran into hundreds of pounds, and the victims were prominent men.
Just as the Seven Years War was reaching its conclusion, the counterfeiting problems were agitating the crowds; men desperate to climb out of debt or buoy their post-war-boom finances turned to desperate acts of counterfeiting. Samuel Allyne wrote to Joseph explaining the low prices at which he sold a warehouse of Cape Cod leather: “I can only inform you of the dulness of business is being swallowed up in the noise of war, this day the proclamation for war will be read when Shoe boys whores & fine Ladies will muster as thick as at the Hudsonick Shew.” The “Hudsonick Shew” occurred on the day Dr. Seth Hudson was pilloried and whipped after his conviction for counterfeiting. Samuel Allyne concluded that business was difficult in uncertain times. A small counterfeiting problem was turning into a significant political crisis because of the increasing debt and decreasing availability of silver. Governor Bernard was troubled enough by the counterfeiting schemes that he was finally able to disregard his obsessive documentation of Benjamin Barons’s treachery and call the General Court into session on November 12, 1761. The governor’s speech was a compilation of customary political clichés, but he stressed that the purpose for the session was “a particular Business that requires immediate redress.” The “particular business,” he stated, was counterfeiting, a problem that appeared to concern all equally, without regard to political affiliation. But Otis and his minority managed to craft the ostensibly non-partisan issue into casus belli.
