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2 Writs of Assistance THE CONCORD REVIEW 19 © 2004 The Concord Review, Inc. (all rights reserved) Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize 2005 JAMES OTIS, JR.’S, ATTACK ON WRITS OF ASSISTANCE: A TURNING POINT IN THE LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS AND THE BIRTH OF INDEPENDENCE IN AMERICA Brandon Hopkins [13,137 words] What was the American Revolution? The American Revolution was one of the great turning points in the history of mankind. It marked the beginning of the end of slavery, led to the founding of the first large and stable republic in history, and inspired the establishment of govern- ments based on the natural rights of man all over the world.1 In the minds of most Americans, the American War for Independence began on April 19, 1775, when shots were fired on Lexington Green.2 John Adams said, however, that our War for Indepen- dence was not the real American Revolution. That, he said, occurred in the hearts and minds of the people during the fifteen years prior to 1775. In 1815 John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson: As to the history of the revolution, my Ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and a Consequence of it. Brandon Hopkins is a Junior at the Waterford School in Sandy, Utah, where he wrote this paper for Diana Jennings’ Issues in History course during the 2002/2003 academic year. 20 Brandon Hopkins The revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected from 1760-1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.3 In another letter to Hezikiah Niles written in 1818, John Adams said: What do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations...This radical change in the principles, opinions, senti- ments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolu- tion.4 For John Adams and perhaps many others, this change of mind and heart began in February 1761, the day that James Otis, Jr., a prominent Boston attorney, attacked the legality of Writs of Assistance in the Superior Court of the Royal Colony of Massachu- setts. John Adams was an eyewitness to this event and took notes during the trial. Adams preserved these notes and described the trial in his Autobiography. Throughout his life, John Adams was unceasing in his praise of James Otis, Jr., and his family. In 1785 he wrote the following to Thomas Jefferson in regards to the Otis family: I declare, I don’t believe there is one family upon Earth to which the United States are so much indebted for their Preservation from Thralldom. There was scarcely any Family in New England had such Prospects of Opulence and Power under the Royal Government. They have sacrificed them all.5 In 1823 shortly before his death, John Adams met with and wrote numerous letters to a Judge William Tudor to assist Tudor in writing a biography of James Otis, Jr. In addition to helping Tudor with Otis’s biography, Adams conceived of having a paint- ing done to commemorate Otis’s contribution to the revolution- ary movement during the Writs of Assistance trial. However, the painting was never undertaken. John Adams’s sons, Charles Francis Adams and John Quincy Adams, in the biography of their father, The Life of John Adams, spoke of the tremendous impact Otis had on their father. They observed, “It is apparent that [Otis’s] arguments in February THE CONCORD REVIEW 21 1761 opened a new world before him [John Adams], and he entered it with unhesitating step.” Likewise, a modern biographer of John Adams, Page Smith, described how Otis’s attack on Writs of Assistance influenced Adams: It is given a man to be once so moved, so transported as John Adams was. These are the experiences that touch and transform; these are the moments in which truth seems to have descended from heaven in the inspired word. An old man’s hindsight must have its due, for it is indeed in such moments that men are remade and revolutions conceived. Born from the authentic word, they grow in the darkness of men’s hearts and minds until they are ready to dispute with the powers of this world the issue of man’s destiny on earth.8 Military historian and Revolutionary War scholar John Galvin believes that James Otis, Jr., played a major role the events that led to the War of Independence. Galvin’s list of turning points in the march toward American independence differs from those of other historians. He agrees with Adams that the Writs of Assistance trial was the first of these turning points. He states: The turning points in the march of events from loyalty to revolution are not the crises usually mentioned (Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, massacre, tea party, Port Bill). The first clear turn down the road to revolution was Otis’ attack against the writs of assistance in 1761. When he followed this with his Vindication in 1762, he established the first popular doctrinal basis for the defense of the province charter and the repudiation of Parliament. Otis’ early challenges set the tone of response to the Stamp Act and created the environment that brought radical Samuel Adams into the House of Representatives in 1765. The united efforts of Otis and Adams through the period of the Townshend Acts (1767-1769) resulted in the destruction of the court party on the issue of whether or not the circular letter would be rescinded. Then, with Otis gone, Adams organized the provincial committees of correspondence, which became the backbone of the resistance in Massachusetts and later in the other colonies. Adams was unable to move until the times made it possible—but to a great degree the profound shift of loyalties from the king to the provincial charter came about through the work of Otis.9 According to Galvin, Otis viewed himself as a loyal subject of the British crown and as a devoted student, admirer, and practitioner of the most enlightened legal system in the world. Throughout the 22 Brandon Hopkins pre-Revolutionary period Otis fought to preserve the natural rights of man as guaranteed in that collection of laws and statutes that had come to be known as the British Constitution. In the courts, in the colonial legislature, on the streets of Boston, and on the roads of New England, Otis sought to protect his countrymen from those who threatened the rights of Englishmen. In the process of pointing out the illegality and irrationality of Britain’s colonial policies during the pre-Revolutionary period, Otis unin- tentionally laid the legal and philosophical ground work for the revolutionary American independence movement that Samuel Adams spearheaded.10 In the introduction to a series of biographical sketches written for the National Gallery on the leaders of the pre-Revolu- tionary era, Lillian Miller describes the philosophical impact that Otis had on the Patriot movement: In denouncing the writs [of assistance], James Otis, Jr., not only condemned what he believed to be their illegality as ‘the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive to English Lib- erty, and the fundamental principles of the constitution,’ but in doing so he argued that every man had a ‘right to his life, his liberty...his property.’ Furthermore, he defined these rights as ‘writ- ten on [man’s] heart, and revealed to him by his maker.’ They were, Otis maintained, ‘inherent, inalienable, and indefensible by any laws, pacts, contracts, covenants, or stipulations, which man could de- vise...’ Spoken in 1761, the idea that these words express was to become so deeply ingrained in the minds and hearts of Americans in all parts of the colonies that it would animate the explosive chain of events recounted in this narrative, and [fifteen] years later find fuller and finer utterance in the Declaration of Independence.11 The idea that Otis made a major contribution to the revolutionary movement stands in striking contrast to the views of a surprising number of historians who either say nothing of Otis’s contributions or who, like Lawrence Leder, tell us that “Otis had no ground in legal precedent and so took an emotional position, challenging Parliament’s right to authorize unreasonable searches and seizures, and alleging that a man’s home was his castle. Otis lost his case without winning a moral victory as had Patrick Henry (empha- sis mine).”12 This historian suggests that Otis’s Writs of Assistance THE CONCORD REVIEW 23 trial had little impact on the American independence movement. The writings of Tudor, Adams, and others tell quite a different story. The purpose of this paper is to show how important the Writs of Assistance trial and the contributions of James Otis, Jr. were to the American Revolution by re-examining the context and con- tent of the trial, the immediate reaction of Otis’s contemporaries to it, and the long-term effects of Otis’s attack on Writs of Assis- tance on the American Revolution principally through the eyes of John Adams. The Context of the Attack on Writs of Assistance The seeds of the controversy over Writs of Assistance were planted early in the reign of George II (1727-1760), when sugar plantation owners in the British West Indies complained to Parlia- ment that American colonial merchants were trading with plant- ers in the French West Indies instead of with them.
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