Arsonist: The Most Dangerous Man in America

by Nathan Allen

  Newspapers up and down the coast reported the “assassination.” John Robinson was soon on a ship back to England. Boston voters were accustomed to James Otis being labeled insane, and they re-elected him to the Boston bench in the May 1771 elections. Except this time, he truly was insane and would spend some time “unwillingly detained” in Barnstable in the mid 1770s with his father, and, after his father died, most of his time limited to the Osgood’s Andover farm, drinking, mumbling, lost in a fog. Titles were commonly bestowed on the important, and as his father was referred to as a colonel, Jemmy was now oft referred to as “Patriot Otis” and the “Chairman.” In 1772 he was given the position as Chairman of a committee “to ascertain the Sense of the People,” as Sam Adams wrote, but such positions were largely recognition of Otis’s importance to the cause; his contributions now were chiefly ceremonial.

  Otis’s influence on revolutionary politics is obvious; in forcing the ideas of rights and consent into the colonists’ consciousness, he created the platform to envision independence from Britain, from slavery, from government. His fight was not so particularly against a regime that oppressed him; he was wealthy and more a part of the ruling oligarchy than different from it. His fight was against a regime that oppressed anyone, not just by obvious tactics – as Hutchinson often argued the oligarchy in Boston did not – but simply by the way in which society was structured. A practical philosopher and a rebel, James Otis provided the means by which the people could free themselves from the feudal hierarchy that had shackled them for a thousand years.

  George Hewes, a poor and mostly unskilled shoemaker and cobbler, was thought to be one of the last surviving participants in the events that preceded the Revolution, so he was interviewed often in the 1830s as the states celebrated various anniversaries of those events. Hewes tells one story of being invited to visit John Hancock after repairing one of his shoes. Hewes washed himself, put on his best clothes, and walked to Hancock House. A servant answered the door and told Hewes to wait in the kitchen. A few minutes later, Hancock appeared and invited Hewes into the sitting room. Hewes was scared “almost to death.” Hewes gave a “pretty” little speech that he had prepared, announcing how honored he was to be in Hancock’s presence and complimenting the merchant on everything Hewes could imagine. Hancock pressed a coin into Hewes’ hand and thanked him for the compliments. He called for wine, and they each had a glass, clinking them together to make a toast, an act that Hewes had never before witnessed. Still horrifically frightened of Hancock, Hewes thanked him and attempted to leave as quickly as possible. He bowed, repeated his compliments, and, before he could run out, Hancock asked him to visit again next year. Hewes said he would but never did.

  That was early 1763; Hewes – grateful, frightened, mystified – played perfectly the role of deferential commoner to Hancock’s feudal lord. But Hancock had no reason to meet with Hewes, yet did so and invited Hewes to meet again. It was as if Hancock were aware that though now they were nearly lord and serf, someday soon they would be equals. The times would be altered, and as banker to the revolution, John Hancock would press coins into the hands of many rebels so that one day a man like Hewes could visit a John Hancock without being overcome with fear and trembling.

  Sixteen years later, the still greatly impoverished Hewes got a job on the ship Hancock. But before the ship sailed out, he walked by the ship’s Lieutenant on the street. The Lieutenant demanded that Hewes remove his hat; Hewes rejected this act of deference and refused to sail with any man who required it. So Hewes quit that ship and found another job. It was 1779, and George Hewes refused to remove his hat for any man. The times were indeed altered. The ideas of rights and consent had infiltrated the colonists’s consciousness. The chains of the feudal social structure had been broken, and a poor man like George Hewes could now confidently refuse to sail on the Hancock. One suspects the ship’s owner knew perfectly well that his coins pressed into the right hands would lead to such a result. George Washington had copied his “Rules of Civility” from the 16th century Bienseance de la Conversation, demonstrating how little had changed over centuries. But now, just three decades after young Washington spent his days transcribing “In putting off your Hat to Persons of Distinction, as Noblemen, Justices, Churchmen, &c., make a Reverence, bowing more or less according to the Custom of the Better Bred,” Bienseance de la Conversation died in the streets of Boston.

  Henry Hulton, that Custom Board commissioner who had stepped off the boat on November 5, 1767 and haughtily laughed at the parading mob, soon too discovered that the times were altered. Writing in February 1770, he observed that colonials’s attitudes were disconcertingly and increasingly different from those of England’s residents:

  The servant will not call the person he lives with, Master; and they have the utmost aversion to wearing anything in the shape of a livery, or performing any office of attendance on your person, or table; We have however a Coachman, who had the fortitude to drive us in spite of the ridicule of his Countrymen, who point & look at him, with contempt, as he passes by.

  The people are very inquisitive, and what we should call impertinent; they never give one a direct answer, but commonly return your question, by another; and if you fall in with them on the road, or at a public house, they will directly inquire of you, who and what you are and what is your business.

  These people seemed to Hulton to be a new breed incapable of acknowledging an innate hierarchy in society and mocking those who did. The “Coachmen’s” countrymen were not pointing and ridiculing a man as he passed by; they were ridiculing feudalism. Jemmy’s repeated efforts to maintain order amidst the chaos recognized that the rebellion was not merely against a political structure but against the entire social structure, and such a fundamental alteration in the source of authority for both institutional and interpersonal relationships could so easily slide into anarchy.

  As Jemmy Otis surveyed the early 1770s landscape, he perceived the possibility of unstoppable, impending anarchy. “Cursed be the day I was born,” he told his doctor. As Otis observed just a few years earlier, the presence of armed customs protection and enforcers only served “to hasten on with great rapidity” the rebellion, and the fire did indeed spread quickly. The Boston Massacre, 1770. North Carolina armed rebellion, 1771. Colonial Committees of Correspondence, 1772. Attack and torching of a British customs ship off Rhode Island, 1772. Tennessee declares itself semi-autonomous, 1772. Sons of Liberty expand operations down the coast, 1773. Boston Tea Party, 1773. Intolerable Acts, closing of Boston Port, effective revocation of Massachusetts charter, and widespread quartering of British soldiers in colonial homes, 1774. British military under General Gage take control of Boston, 1774. Gage begins to confiscate gun power and weapons, 1774. Battles of Lexington and Concord, 1775.

  In 1815, John Adams asked, “Who shall write the history of the American Revolution? … Who can write it?” Reflecting on the stages of history that he shared with so many and probing for the decisive act that mobilized the lumbering gears of revolution toward their inevitable conclusion, one cold night in February 1761 eclipsed all else; Adams denied any plan to “make a speech for” Jemmy but then proceeded to make several about the night of February 24 that Jemmy Otis birthed “the child Independence.” In 1816, John Adams observed that “1760 to 1766, was the purest period of patriotism … the revolution was complete, in the minds of the people, and the union of the colonies, before the war commenced in the skirmishes of Concord and Lexington ….” In gauging the importance of the participants, Adams declared that “the characters the most conspicuous, the most ardent and influential in this revival, from 1760 to 1766, were, first and foremost, before all and above all, James Otis; next to him was Oxenbridge Thacher; next to him, Samuel Adams; next to him, John Hancock; then Dr. Mayhew ….” And in assessing Otis, Adams concluded that “if Mr. [Patrick] Henry was Demosthenes and Mr. Richard Henry Lee, Cicero, James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekial united.”

  Writing in the late 1770s, Pe
ter Oliver did not yet know the rebellion’s outcome. He did not know that he would never return to the colonies nor retrieve his property. His letters from the late 1770s show a man not so much embittered as perplexed, for he had so quickly plummeted from Boston Brahmin to refugee. And he blamed one man: the “young Mr. Otis, as he was the first who broke down the barriers of Government to let in the Hydra of Rebellion.” Bernard, too, blamed Jemmy Otis, writing to Secretary of State Petty on December 22, 1766 that “Troubles in this Country take their rise from, and owe their Continuance to one Man.” Bernard, Oliver and Adams had quite divergent opinions about the causes of the American Revolution, but they agreed on one detail: James Otis, Jr. started the fire.

  ***

  revenge

  The Jersey was a British man-of-war stuck in the mud in Wallabout Bay, a small Brooklyn bay near the present-day Williamsburg Bridge. She had been stripped of her rigging and fittings; there was no sail, and no way to sail her. But the British preferred that the Jersey wasn’t sailable. She was a prison ship.

  The British seemed to perfect the concept of the prison ship during the war. The first ship, the Whitby, was a cattle ship converted to hold men. They could keep their clothes and bedding but were given nothing else. They were fed once every few days, and the food they were given was whatever was too rotten for the British soldiers to eat. They were provided no medical care. The colonial prisoners aboard the Whitby set fire to the ship in October 1777 knowing that they would die: being burned alive was preferable to the torture of being caged on the prison ship. By all appearances, the almost certain death that occurred to the prisoners of the Whitby was by design.

  Conditions aboard the Jersey were considered worse. Food was brought aboard every three days; some days, the prisoners were given raw meat and not permitted to cook it. There were no fruit or vegetables. The ship was never cleaned, and sometimes the men were kept below deck all day. On hot summer days, the heat and stench were horrifying. Scurvy, yellow fever, smallpox and dysentery ravaged the 400 to 1200 prisoners kept aboard. Prisoner Christopher Vail kept a journal: “we suffered very much for food and fresh air. We were … all put down between decks. At sun down there was as many people lay on deck as to touch each other all round the deck … And the fore part of the ship full of sick prisoners with the fever. There was only one passage to go on deck at a time. And if a man should attempt to raise his head above the grate he would have a bayonet stuck in it. Many of the prisoners was troubled with the disentary and would come to the steps, and could not be permitted to go on deck, and was obliged to ease themselves on the spot. And the next morning for 12 feet around the hatches was nothing but excrement. ...”

  Each morning, the men were awakened to the sound of a British soldier yelling, “rebels, turn out your dead.” The corpses would be sometimes just thrown into the water, sometimes buried in shallow graves just on shore. Bodies would float around the ship and colonial women would rebury them on higher ground. Between 1780 and 1783, about five corpses were turned out each day for a total of almost 12,000 – more than all the colonial causalities in all revolutionary war battles combined. To be sent to the Jersey was to be sentenced to death.

  Famous prisoners of war and officers, such as Ethan Allen, were sometimes paroled into Manhattan. They knew they couldn’t leave and agreed to remain on the island and not cause trouble; British officers sometimes invited them to dinner. It was the everyday soldier who was kept on the prison ship – or the subject of revenge. One day not unlike any other day during the war, the British soldier on duty called out, “rebels, turn out your dead.” One of the five corpses dragged up to the deck was familiar to the soldiers; it was Master Jemmy, the only son of the famous rebel leader. The British surely knew that James Otis was the Resentor & the popular Conductor and the rebel leader. It was no accident that his 18-year-old son, once captured, was sentenced to death on the Jersey.

  What James ever knew of his son’s fate – or anything at that point – is questionable. In late 1782 Jemmy’s nephew, Samuel Allyne’s son Harrison, brought his uncle from Andover to Boston. The Otis house in Boston was abuzz with visitors, invitations, and hopes that he had recovered. John Hancock, now governor of the state of Massachusetts, visited and insisted that his old friend attend a large party. Jemmy did, and after his condition deteriorated. He made his will and, at his brother Samuel’s suggestion, returned to the Andover farm. His will beings, “In the name of God, Amen. –I James Otis, being in no kind fear of death, though by some called the king of terrors, and by old Bannister in his will a sergeant, I make this my last will and testament.” The will is dated “31st day of March, in the year of Jesus Christ one thousands seven hundred and eight three and of the assumption of declaration of the Independence of the thirteen United States of North America, the seventh year.” Precisely six weeks after his return to the farm, on the afternoon of Friday May 23, a brilliant thunderstorm was sweeping across New England. The insane rebel walked to the doorway of his room of the Osgood farm house in Andover, Massachusetts. As the rain poured down and the thunder boomed, Jemmy was drawn to the yard, and the “Isaiah and Ezekial united” who set the continent aflame was struck down with fire from the heavens. Mr. Osgood rushed to him but nothing could be done. The bolt of lightning had killed Jemmy Otis instantly.

  Later that summer, King George’s representative signed the Treaty of Paris, which begins:

  Article 1

  His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free, sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.

  Effects

  Exactly one month after the “assassination” of James Otis, John Robinson married Anne Boutineau, whose older sister was married to the Lt. Governor of Nova Scotia. The ceremony took place at Boston’s Trinity Church. Otis filed a lawsuit against Robinson for the assault to the staggering sum of £3,000 – recall that Otis recovered £75 in damages the previous year for Mein’s assault on John Gill. Otis won £2,000 in damages plus costs, and Robinson posted a bond and sailed for England on March 16, 1770, the week after the Boston Massacre. Robinson returned to Boston in August 1772, acknowledged his fault and begged forgiveness. Otis accepted the apology and discharged the damages. Robinson paid court costs and once again returned to England.

  Colonel Otis died in 1778, at 76 years old. Like the three generations of Otises before him who died in America, he left his children far wealthier than his father had left him. But that wealth wouldn’t last much longer. Just as the residents of Barnstable were not much interested in the Lank Bank, they also were not much interested in independence. They were known as the only town in Massachusetts not to vote for immediate independence in 1776. Joseph and Samuel Allyne, like their father, remained moderate in their views and focused on the family businesses. But when the war began, Joseph and Samuel Allyne marshaled the vast resources of the Otis business empire to support the effort. Joseph was elected to the House and took control of the Barnstable militia, even mustering and marching toward Lexington when news of that battle reached Barnstable. The Colonel convinced the town to withhold all tax payments from Gage’s government. Joseph sent uniforms for 80 soldiers to his cousin, Jonathan Otis, in Newport in February 1775. Samuel Allyne joined the war department and procured supplies from the Otis warehouses. Supplying all it could in the early years of the war and suffering from naval blockades, Cape Cod soon endured severe shortages of war materiel and basic necessities. In 1778, rebel government leader and future president of the Massachusetts Senate Jeremiah Powell informed Joseph Otis that he could let the prisoners of war starve to death in order to reserve enough food for Cape Cod residents. Every househol
d on Cape Cod was expected to contribute whatever food, money, clothing, or weapons it had; total war had come to Cape Cod.