James Otis Jr. signed no founding document. He is in the record because John Adams, looking back across more than five decades, said the entire Revolution began with him in a single afternoon, in a Boston courtroom, fifteen years before anyone wrote a Declaration.
James Otis Jr. was born February 5, 1725, in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, the eldest son of a prominent merchant and political figure. He graduated Harvard in 1743, was admitted to the bar in 1748, and by 1756 held the position of advocate general of the Boston vice-admiralty court, the Crown's own prosecutor in maritime and customs cases. When customs officials sought renewal of the writs of assistance, general warrants permitting search of any home, ship, or warehouse without specific cause, Otis was asked, in his official capacity, to defend them.
He resigned instead. He took the opposing case, representing a group of Boston merchants challenging the writs, arguing against the very office he had just left.
Otis argued before the Massachusetts Superior Court for nearly five hours, calling the writs of assistance "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 lost the case. The writs were upheld. But in the audience sat a twenty-five-year-old lawyer named John Adams, who took notes that day and never stopped thinking about what he had witnessed.
American independence was then and there born; the seeds of patriots and heroes were then and there sown. Every man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, namely in 1776, he grew up to manhood, and declared himself free.
In the same speech, Otis declared his own willingness "to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life to the sacred calls of his country," fifteen years before fifty-six men would pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence. Otis said it first, and alone, in a losing argument in a colonial courtroom most of the men who later signed that document had never heard of.
The 1761 speech launched Otis to the front rank of colonial resistance. He served in the Massachusetts legislature, helped organize the Sons of Liberty, was a delegate to the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, and is widely credited with coining the phrase "taxation without representation is tyranny." He mentored Samuel Adams. His oratorical style directly shaped John Adams's own. For nearly a decade he was, by most contemporary accounts, the most prominent political voice in Massachusetts.
In September 1769, Otis confronted customs commissioner John Robinson over public criticism Robinson had made of him. The confrontation turned into a brawl. Otis was struck on the head, and by most contemporary accounts his skull was fractured. He never fully recovered. Peers who had known him as the sharpest legal mind in Massachusetts began to observe that he now, in the words of one contemporary, "rambled and wandered like a ship without a helm."
By 1771 he had left Boston to live with friends and family in the Massachusetts countryside, unable to continue his law practice. He had already burned most of his private papers. He remained intermittently lucid for the next fourteen years: he reportedly took up a borrowed gun and fought at Bunker Hill in 1775, and argued at least one case in court as late as 1778. But the man who had launched the Revolution's opening argument played no organized role in the war it produced.
Otis spent his final years boarding at the farm of Isaac Osgood in Andover, tutoring the family's children and helping with farm work. He had told his sister for years that he hoped, when his time came, God would take him by a stroke of lightning. On the evening of May 23, 1783, standing in the doorway of the Osgood house during a thunderstorm, he got his wish.
Last Friday Evening, the House of Mr. Isaac Osgood was set on Fire and much shattered by Lightning, by which the Hon. JAMES OTIS, Esq., of this Town, leaning upon his Cane at the front Door, was instantly killed. Several Persons were in the House at the Time, some of whom were violently affected by the Shock, but immediately recovering ran to Mr. Otis's Support, but he had expired without a Groan.
He died eight months before the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war he had, by John Adams's own account, started. He never held federal office under the Constitution. He never lived to see it written. He is buried in Boston's Granary Burying Ground, the same cemetery as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the victims of the Boston Massacre. His sister Mercy Otis Warren, who grew up arguing politics across the family dinner table with him, outlived him by thirty-one years and wrote the first comprehensive history of the Revolution he had, by Adams's account, started in a courtroom in 1761.