James Otis’s Fight
In February 1761, almost four months after George III’s ascension, the first major controversy surrounding imperial policy gripped Boston politics. That month, royal customs agents visited James Otis, a thirty-six-year-old, stout attorney who served as the province’s advocate general. The agents sought Otis’s support in enforcing writs of assistance, legal documents that empowered royal officials to search property for smuggled goods. Because these writs could be deployed without warning, express permission, or probable cause, Otis considered them a threat to private property. He abruptly resigned his commission.
The controversy reached its climax in the final weeks of February when Otis spoke before the Superior Court on behalf of merchants. Described as having “a clear, concise, and nervous manner,” Otis could burst into fierce oratory if the occasion called for it, and that day did. “It appears to me the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book,” he declared.
To Otis, the writs invited a tyranny that would swallow up English liberties. “It is a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer,” he said. “Everyone with this writ may be a tyrant.”
They made agents unaccountable, allowing them to “reign secure” in their “petty tyranny” while spreading “terror” and “desolation” throughout the province. They endangered “the most essential branches of English liberty,” Otis argued, “the freedom of one’s house.”
Such fear, he assured the court, such “wanton exercise of this power is not a chimerical suggestion of a heated brain. A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege.”
Some people would use writs as a weapon. “What a scene does this open!” he exclaimed. “Every man, prompted by revenge, ill humor, or wantonness, to inspect the inside of his neighbor’s house, may get a writ of assistance.”
Aside from being intrinsically dangerous, Otis argued that the writs were unconstitutional. “No acts of parliament can establish such a writ… An act against the constitution is void.”
Twenty-six years old and self-described as looking like a “short, thick, fat Archbishop of Canterbury,” John Adams took notes and beamed with awe and patriotism. “Otis was a flame of fire!” Adams recalled fifty years later. “Every man of an immensely crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take [up] arms against writs of assistance.” The crowd, Adams recalled, “went away absolutely electrified.”
Otis, in effect, was the first American colonist to denounce the authority of the British parliament over certain aspects of colonial affairs in so memorable a fashion.
The historian George Bancroft described Otis’s fight as “the opening scene of the American Revolution,” the first battleground of which took place in a courtroom. Otis’s sister, Mercy Warren, wrote that Otis “was the first champion of American freedom.”
Otis managed only to delay the inevitable. In November, the court unanimously upheld the legality of the writs.
Undeterred by the loss, Otis continued to fight. In the newspapers, he denounced the court’s decision. “Every man in this province will be liable to be insulted by a petty officer, and threatened to have his house ransacked, unless he will comply with his unreasonable and impudent demands,” he wrote. “Will anyone, then, under such circumstances, ever again boast of British honor or British privilege?”
Otis’s chief concern was the safety of English liberties. “These rights and securities, we have with other British subjects gloriously defended against foreign invasions,” Otis encouraged, “and I hope in God we shall always have spirit enough to defend them against all other invasions.”
Otis made a stand—one that had profound reverberations. “Then and there,” Adams recalled, “the child Independence was born.”
Three years later, amid further parliamentary concerns, Otis wrote, “The colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.”
More than a defender of English rights, he was one of the earliest defenders of human rights.