Patriots (2 page)

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John Adams came from an honest and hard-working but not particularly distinguished family, and he was contemptuous of the idea that a man’s place in society should be determined by his lineage. And in Boston, few men represented entrenched privilege more clearly than Thomas Hutchinson. The Hutchinsons had been successful businessmen for generations, and Thomas had been brought up to be a member of Boston’s ruling class, although he had to contend with problems within the family. His father suffered from nervous disorders that kept him shut up in his house for weeks and from chronic insomnia, and he had lost two favorite sons and a daughter to smallpox and consumption.

By the time Thomas Hutchinson entered Harvard College,
two months before his twelfth birthday, his character was already formed. His one lapse—he had used a Greek trot to translate a Latin lesson—had caused his tutor to remark,
“A non
te expectare,”
I did not expect it of you. Thomas would remember that rebuke for the rest of his life. He loved history best and wept at the account of Charles I’s beheading.

At college, Thomas began his business career by trading several hundred pounds of fish his father had given him. By graduation, he had built that capital into nearly five hundred pounds sterling. When he married, at twenty-three, Thomas had become an imposing young man, six feet tall. His seventeen-year-old bride was the daughter of a man whose family had been the Hutchinsons’ business partners for four generations. Though Thomas was normally aloof, it was a good marriage. He would remark that the intimacy he found with Peggy Hutchinson was proof that he had a soul.

Hutchinson turned naturally to public service and in 1737, at the age of twenty-six, was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, ignoring his father, who warned him, “
Depend on it, if you serve your country faithfully, you will be reproached and reviled for doing it.” More than Thomas cared to recognize, he had inherited the spirit of his great-great-grandmother Anne Hutchinson, who had been banished to Rhode Island in 1637 as a religious zealot. He might be temperate and rational in his religion, but in a political cause he could be stubborn to the point of foolhardiness. Hutchinson used his mastery of economics to defend Boston’s aristocrats against challenges from a growing party of workers and shopkeepers. When Boston went through periods of inflation, Hutchinson antagonized much of the town by advocating hard-money policies, and in 1749 he had led a move to base the colony’s currency on silver. The economic contractions that followed turned his name into a curse among the town’s working people. When his house caught fire, crowds gathered, shouting, “Let it burn!”

Hutchinson remained within a close circle of family and prosperous friends. He considered it contemptible to seek a wider popularity and described the multitude as “foreign seamen, servants, Negroes and other persons of mean and vile condition.” When his conservative fiscal policies cost him his seat in the House,
the governor had named him to the Council, the more aristocratic upper body. Hutchinson’s career was destined to continue at that higher level. He built a summer house on a hundred acres in Milton, eight miles from Boston, and visitors from abroad assured him they had never seen a finer view than the one from his hilltop.

In 1754, Peggy Hutchinson died at the end of her twelfth pregnancy. Hutchinson had always believed that religion—like sound money—was essential to a well-ordered society, but his faith was no consolation to him now. He buried his wife and moved to Milton with his four children and his new daughter, another Peggy, who had survived.

When Hutchinson returned to public life, he served first as an aide to the royal governor, then as his lieutenant. His ambition revived, and he fought successfully to preside over the Council. He was also a judge of probate, a justice of common pleas and governor of Castle William, the royal fortress in Boston Harbor. His hobby was collecting documents, letters and journals, and he planned to publish his version of the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In Boston’s many taverns, men had not forgiven Hutchinson for his consistent support of the rich and powerful and were troubled by the way he was consolidating his authority. They called him “
Summa Potestatis,” the supreme power, or simply “Summa.” Now he had added the position of chief justice to his collection.

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Hutchinson’s appointment had annoyed John Adams, but it was far more disturbing to a thirty-five-year-old lawyer named James Otis. When the chief justice died in September, Otis had called on Thomas Hutchinson to ask his help in getting an appointment to the court for his father, the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. A previous governor had promised Speaker Otis a place on the Superior Court, and the younger Otis wanted Hutchinson to use his influence with Governor Bernard to secure it.

Otis had gone to the Hutchinson mansion in Boston’s North End, one of the town’s most beautiful houses. Most Bostonians knew that the Hutchinson family looked down on the Otises, but
James Otis, who was quick-tempered and haughty, had put aside his pride to make the call. Hutchinson, approaching fifty, was slender and fair, with the assurance of privilege. Otis was plump, with a round face and a short neck, but his eyes were keen and he exuded energy. Although he had studied law, the one book he had published was a study of Latin poetry.

Otis had put his appeal diffidently. If Mr. Hutchinson himself had any interest in serving on the high court, he would not say another word about his father. Hutchinson swore later that he had told Otis candidly that he had considered the appointment but that he wasn’t sure he would accept if Bernard offered it to him. Otis had left convinced that Hutchinson had said he would turn it down.

Soon after, Otis had called directly on Governor Bernard. The town of Boston was almost an island, linked to the mainland by a narrow road called Boston Neck, and as Otis was riding his horse toward the governor’s mansion he saw Thomas Hutchinson coming the other way in a carriage, apparently returning from his own audience with the governor. Then there were other disturbing portents about the appointment. Some of Boston’s established merchants were openly questioning whether Speaker Otis was qualified to sit on the Superior Court. Over the years, he had done many favors for the colony’s conservative governors, but his career had begun fifteen years earlier, in rougher times, when election officials sometimes reached into the hat that doubled as a ballot box and threw out all of the opposition votes.

Speaker Otis’ first bill in the House had set a bounty on
Indian scalps—one hundred English pounds for males twelve years or older, fifty pounds for women. And although the Otises were an established New England family, Speaker Otis had worked as a shoemaker in his youth. Since two thirds of the members of the Massachusetts House listed “farmer” as their primary occupation, that was no disgrace, and Otis had gone on to become a prosperous lawyer. But he had always regretted his lack of a classical education and had made sure that James went to Harvard College and then to study law under Jeremiah Gridley, the colony’s finest legal scholar.

Memories among Boston’s aristocracy were long and unforgiving. Conservative merchants were arguing that Speaker Otis was
backed by the same men they had been fighting for years—Boston’s retailers, innkeepers, others of the lower classes. Thomas Hutchinson had told friends that Otis had become speaker of the House only because he had done
“little low dirty things” that no reputable person would stoop to doing.

Two months passed after James Otis’ appeal to Hutchinson until, in mid-November, Governor Bernard told Hutchinson that he wanted him as chief justice. Hutchinson warned him that he might be courting trouble by disappointing the Otises, and he added that around town James Otis was threatening violence if his father was not chosen. But Bernard offered Hutchinson the job and added that whatever his answer, he did not intend to appoint Speaker Otis.

Hutchinson accepted. For years, the king’s ministers in London had passed him over for the governorship, and he had served under three governors from England. It seemed unlikely that he would ever hold the highest title, although he had several consolations beyond his judgeships. As lieutenant governor, Hutchinson was already the colony’s deputy executive. As president of the Council, he was its ranking legislator. Now he would hold the highest judicial post.

When he heard about the appointment, James Otis was enraged. Aside from the insult to his father, Otis believed that Hutchinson would hold two titles too many.
Montesquieu’s
The Spirit of Laws
had been published a dozen years earlier, and Otis had been impressed by its argument for separating the three branches of government. But now, because Otis had tried to get the post for his father, his criticism of Hutchinson’s expanding power could be dismissed as coming from a disgruntled loser. And Hutchinson’s friends did soon accuse Otis of making wild threats against the colony’s government. They said he had vowed to set the
province in flames, though he himself might perish in the fire. Everyone knew that Otis was proud of his Latin scholarship, and his antagonists clinched their charge by quoting a line from Virgil that Otis was supposed to be repeating:
“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.”
(If heaven I cannot bend, then
hell I’ll stir.) Otis’ political allies called the allegation a lie. They said no one would become frenzied over such a trivial setback. But in Boston’s small world, Otis was well known. John Adams, who was eager
to learn from other men’s success, had been studying Otis carefully and admired his agile mind. But he had also watched Otis’ quick temper cause him to stutter and had seen Otis’ muscles twitch even when he was sitting still. Everything about Otis’ tense brilliance made the reports of his threats entirely plausible.

—

James Otis’ energy and his unpredictable moods had been apparent even when he was growing up. Pressed into playing the violin for friends who wanted to dance, he had thrown it down and run off to the garden, shouting, “So fiddled Orpheus and
danced the brutes!” He had entered Harvard in 1739, at fourteen, young but not as remarkable as Hutchinson’s going before he was twelve. He had frittered away his first two years but then began coming home on vacations to Barnstable and locking himself up with his books. He spent seven years at Harvard, earned the traditional master’s degree and was in no hurry to start working. He spent a year and a half reading the classics at home before he began to study law.

James Otis’ apprenticeship with Jeremiah Gridley seemed to harness his mercurial temperament, and at last he gave his father reason to be proud, a welcome development at a time when the Otises’ neighbors accused James’s younger brother of getting their black nanny pregnant. Gridley also had a classical bent, and the young man’s years with him were congenial except for the assignments in Sir Edward Coke’s impenetrable volumes. After his apprenticeship, Otis set up practice briefly in Plymouth, but he tired of small-town life and moved to Boston. Soon he was collecting the largest fees in the province. But money didn’t drive James Otis, and he often didn’t bother to hide his indifference.

Each year on November 5, gangs from North and South Boston paraded through the streets in a ceremony called Pope’s Day. It was an American version of England’s Guy Fawkes Day, commemorating the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when a band of Catholics had tried to blow up King James I and the Parliament with him. In New England, the occasion had become the excuse for a brawl; an almanac summed it up,
“Powder plot is not forgot. ’Twill be observed by many a sot.” Each gang carried a large effigy of the Pope, and the two parades collided in an explosion of
rocks and fists. After one such melee, Otis was hired by men charged with breaking windows and doing other damage. In court, he defended the tradition and argued that a few youths had simply gone on a spree with no malice and doing little harm. Otis won an acquittal and refused a fee.

At the age of thirty, he made a love match with Ruth Cunningham, a reserved, pretty woman entirely committed to the conservative principles of her merchant father. She brought with her a handsome dowry, which Otis immediately put in trust as an inheritance for their children.

By the time Otis went to Hutchinson on behalf of his father, he held a well-paid post as the king’s advocate general in the Vice-Admiralty Court at Boston. But he refused to argue for the crown’s customs officers in the writs-of-assistance case, and when the merchants asked for his help in opposing them Otis responded enthusiastically. “In such a cause,” he said, “I
despise all fees.” Before Hutchinson joined the Superior Court late in December 1760, James Otis resigned his royal commission to prepare for the legal battle of his life, and John Adams had come to court to witness the result.

Jeremiah Gridley, Otis’ tutor in the law, was acting as the king’s attorney, and he opened the case with the crown’s arguments. He admitted that the writs had provoked widespread antagonism by infringing on the common rights of Englishmen, but he defended the principle of a search warrant. How could a state protect itself against foreign enemies or subversives at home? Which was more important, protecting the liberty of an individual or collecting the taxes efficiently? Gathering public money must take precedence.

Many in the audience were not convinced, remembering the case of a man named Ware, who had acquired a writ from a customs official who casually endorsed it over to him. When a justice ordered a constable to bring Ware to court for profane swearing on the Sabbath, Ware had listened to the charge and then asked the judge if he was finished. “Yes,” said the judge. “Very well, then,” said Ware, “I will show you a little of my power. I command you to permit me to search your house for uncustomed goods.” Ware tore up the judge’s house from attic to cellar. When he finished, he started all over again at the constable’s house.

Gridley returned to his seat, and Otis’ co-counsel, Oxenbridge Thacher, spoke. Thacher had briefly studied divinity, because he was ambitious and clergymen ranked at the top of Massachusetts society. When his voice proved too weak to reach beyond the pulpit, he had turned to law, launching his career by taking the divorce cases his fellow lawyers shunned. But Thacher had begun to distrust Hutchinson’s growing power, and now his voice was echoing through the colony. Hutchinson had mocked his new attachment to the workingmen’s faction by remarking that Thacher had not been born a plebeian but seemed determined to die one. Thacher’s opposition to the writs had dismayed the conservatives more than anything James Otis had said, since they couldn’t discredit him as a vengeful troublemaker.