MOTIVES CHAPTER II. FIRST INFLUENCING ADAMS AND JEFFERSON ΤΟ OTIS ON THE IN POLITICS SPEECH OF JAMES WHY ORATORS DID NOT TAKE THE LEAD IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. AT T the moment when the struggle between England and the Colonies broke out, Jefferson was still a light-hearted student, devoted almost exclusively to elegant literature and pleasure. It was on witnessing the resistance elicited by the arbitrary acts of Parliament that his political feelings were first aroused. Two young men, born very far from each other, under very different conditions, but destined often to come in contact during their lives, and to expire on the same day-the anniversary of the great event that has illustrated their names-John Adams, the son of a large New England farmer, and Thomas Jefferson, the elegant companion of Fauquier, received analogous impressions from two events, which occurred within four years of each other, and which they both agree in considering as the respective points of departure of the revolution in Massachusetts and Virginia. John Adams was twenty-four years of age. Canada had just been wrested from France by the combined efforts of the colonists and the mother-country. The 20 SYMPTOMS OF DISCONTENT. calm and prosperity of the British provinces in North America, for a long while disturbed by the enterprises of their brave and adventurous neighbours, seemed to be now permanently assured; but, in spite of so satisfactory a result, there was a general feeling of discontent and restlessness, especially in New England. Disquieting rumours were rife in Boston; charters, so it was said, were menaced; Great Britain, taking advantage of the imposing attitude she had acquired by her recent triumphs, and of the presence of her troops in America, was about to recast the provincial constitutions, extend the power of the Crown, and give a death-blow to liberty. These Englishmen are going to play the devil with us,' said John Adams to a young lawyer of the name of Sewall. "They will overturn everything. We must resist them, and that by force. I wish you would write in the newspapers, and urge a general attention to the Militia to their exercises and discipline; for we must resist in arms.' I answered, All this, I fear, is true; but why do you not write yourself?'* They both hesitated. John Adams distrusted his own talent, and Sewall was afraid of committing himself. The moment had now arrived, which is the first stage in all revolutions, when men's minds, beginning to ferment, still wait in suspense, excited and perplexed, for some external impetus, which shall have the effect of propelling them on their way, and of assigning them the position they are to occupy. It was the severity of the Custom-house regulations which gave rise to the earliest opposition in Massachusetts. The Puritan merchants were not always * Adams's Works, vol. ii. p. 78; vol. iv. p. 6. thorough-going Englishmen, and such of the subjects of Louis XV. as did not directly menace their tran⚫quillity, and could put money in their pockets, were deemed very fit objects for their good offices. Sometimes, by purchasing the connivance, at others by eluding the vigilance, of the governors, they established a contraband trade on a vast scale with the French West Indian colonies, made no scruple of provisioning the enemies' fleets and garrisons, and smuggled into the American ports various descriptions of foreign merchandise to avoid the high duties imposed upon them by the Acts of trade. In spite of his partiality for his transatlantic countrymen, Pitt could not overlook such flagrant irregularities. In a tone that admitted of no reply, he gave peremptory orders for their prevention. The Custom officers became now particular, and, finding their means of search and prevention insufficient, applied to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts for what were called writs of assistance, granting a general power of search, under authority of which they claimed the right to ransack private property, enter and examine private dwellings, and compel the first comer to lend. them a hand. The legality of these warrants, placing as they did the public at the mercy of the lowest custom-house officer, was disputed by the citizens of Boston, who made an application to the Supreme Court to refuse their issue. In his capacity of provincial advocate-general, James Otis, then five-and-thirty years of age, was called upon to support the claims of the Admiralty. A considerable facility and cleverness in enlivening the dry science of precedents with considerations of a general nature, a vigorous talent, a haughty and feverish warmth of feeling and expression, a dogmatic and aggressive tone, an intractable pride, had already procured him many admirers and many enemies among his brother barristers. In point of fact, however, neither his intellectual power, nor the brilliancy of his imagination, nor yet the depth and extent of his learning, were commensurate with his own estimate of them or with his reputation. He was a man of a proud, hard, violent temperament, at the mercy of a brain acting without purpose and easily misled. Constitutionally irritable, and of a whimsical fantastic humour, he was alternately a prey to outbursts of rash exaltation, and to suggestions of distrustful timidity; open by turns to the noblest inspirations, and the merest personal considerations; but, like many of those who are destined to die mad, he had the faculty of profoundly impressing the minds of his hearers. His family was among the most devoted adherents of the Crown. As the recompense of long services, the office of Chief Justice had been frequently promised to his father. The place had become vacant, and the political gossip of the province announced the appointment of Colonel Otis as certain, when it was given to Hutchinson, an unpopular and intriguing man, known as a notorious place-hunter. Wounded by this affront to his father, and anxious to do something agreeable to the public, which sympathised with him, the young advocate-general fired up against the proceedings of the Admiralty, refused to defend them, sent in his resignation, undertook the defence of the people, and then, as Hutchinson expresses it, from a small spark there came a great fire.' In the month of February 1761, all the leading men in Boston flocked into court to hear this unexpected champion of public liberty. Lost in the crowd, the studious, choleric John Adams, endeavouring to take notes, but too excited, as he tells us, to put down anything in order, carried away from the discussion impressions the more heated in proportion as they were vague, and which, even in old age, he could not recall without marked emotion: 'But Otis was a flame of fire! . . . . . He reproached the nation, parliaments, and kings, with injustice, ungenerosity, ingratitude, cruelty. With a promptitude of classical allusion, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eye into futurity, and a torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried away everything before him. . . Every man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. . . I have no scruple in making a confession, with all the simplicity of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that I never turned over the leaves of these statutes, or any section of them, without pronouncing a hearty curse upon them. . . . 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.'* 'The child' remained for several years in its cradle, asleep, and unheard of by America. The war-cry raised in Massachusetts had hardly resounded beyond the province. It was this province alone which the proceedings in the Supreme Court concerned; and the means of publicity were too scanty, the colonial populations too dispersed and divided, provincial patriotism too exclusive, for a purely local transaction to vibrate * Adam's Works, vol. x. pp. 247, 314, 362; letter to Tudor, 1817-1818. The question of the legality of the writs of assistance was never decided judicially. The case was adjourned on the pretext of getting information from England, and no judgement was ever |