The Otis Family and the Revolution: On Just Missing Out

Heritage

Jul 11

Most Americans know the mythology of the American Founding—its key events, characters, and narrative arc. However, few high school history classes examine the roads not taken in this particular historical moment, or the coincidences that altered its trajectory. As a result, things get lost. Among the lost things in the canonical story of the American Founding are two of its most brilliant thinkers—a brother and a sister from the same family. By the hand of fate, neither had the chance to contribute to the Founding in any meaningful way. While most Americans know the mythology of the American Founding, few know of the Otis family.

James (“Jemmy”) Otis (b. 1725) and Mercy Otis (Warren) (b. 1728) were, respectively, the eldest son and daughter of Mary Allyne and Colonel James Otis Sr. of West Barnstable, Massachusetts. Their father was a well-respected country lawyer, who, despite his lack of education, retained a sterling reputation among the men who would go on to become the first American revolutionaries. Colonel Otis was a colorful man, unusual in many ways and, in a course of action decidedly unusual for the time, had his daughter Mercy educated alongside her brother during their childhood. Though Mercy’s education did not continue to Harvard as Jemmy’s did, their side-by-side studies led to a powerful and lifelong intellectual companionship. Throughout Jemmy’s Harvard career, his sister remained one of his favorite interlocutors, and they studied many of his course texts together. It was through Jemmy in his Harvard years that Mercy first encountered John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, which served as the cornerstone for both of their theories of politics.

As they grew up, Jemmy became an important figure in Massachusetts politics leading up to the Revolution. He was one of the Sons of Liberty and was close friends with Samuel Adams and his barrister cousin, John. Though known in his circles as a firebrand, Jemmy was also a skilled political rhetorician. The five treatises he published included appeals for the equality of women and enslaved people and, by some reports, John Adams attempted to mimic his speaking style. Jemmy was in many ways the beating heart and foremost mind among the Sons of Liberty, poised to become one of its central leaders as the movement for American independence gathered steam. This was not to be, however. Jemmy’s political career came to an early and unfortunate end in 1769, during an altercation with a British officer who caned Jemmy over the head multiple times, causing lasting brain damage from which Jemmy never fully recovered. Later, in her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, Mercy recorded her brother as one of the first victims of British hostility leading up to the Revolution.

There is no telling what grand purpose Jemmy Otis might have served in the American Founding had he not been sidelined so early in the fight for American independence. There is much to suggest that Jemmy would have been a core leader in the American Revolution, and would have had a hand in crafting the Founding documents. Therein, he may have been a powerful and convincing voice for the rights of women and enslaved people; his charismatic presence and thoughtful theory of politics likely would have made him a force to be reckoned with among the other giants of the Founding generation. Instead, this important voice of the Revolution simply faded away. Jemmy died in 1783.

After Jemmy’s injury, Mercy, then married to Son of Liberty James Warren, continued the legacy of his political and philosophical causes by way of her pen. She published for the first time (after much prodding on the part of John Adams) in 1774, when her poem on the Boston Tea Party entitled “Squabble of the Sea Nymphs; or, the Sacrifice of the Tuscararoes” appeared anonymously in the Boston Gazette. Over the next several decades, Mercy became the “Muse of the Revolution.” She wrote five propaganda plays in support of American independence, as well as two five-act tragedies. She wrote poetry, usually with overt political themes, which appeared at interim in newspapers and in a summary volume in 1790. Her 1788 pamphlet entitled “Observations on the New Constitution” is considered a lynchpin in securing the Bill of Rights. And, finally, at the end of her life, she had a hand in crafting the enduring memory of the American Revolution, with her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution.

To the extent that Mercy Otis Warren is remembered at all, she is typically remembered as an Anti-Federalist. Herbert J. Storing, the key historian of the Anti-Federalists, paints her as no mere garden-variety agrarian in this regard, but perhaps the single most systematically consistent and philosophically sophisticated of her compatriots. And thus, the second twist of fate in the lost revolution of the Otis family: though she may have been the best thinker among the Anti-Federalists, Mercy’s female voice limited her opportunity to participate in the deliberations. She could not vote, let alone participate in the debates over the Founding documents. Her political ideas were relegated to what she could publish, and the Anti-Federalists enjoyed few victories at the Constitutional Convention. Had Mercy Otis been born male, might she have stepped into Jemmy’s shoes following his injury, having her brand of political thought listened to and respected? Might she have led the Anti-Federalists to more success in 1787? Of course, it is impossible to know for sure, but it is difficult not to think that she may have done all that and more.

An elegiac sadness permeates Mercy’s History of the American Revolution, which she published in 1805. In it, she laments the trajectory of the American political order, even just twenty years after the Revolution. With nearly Tocquevillian prescience, she predicts all manner of coming malaise. Simmering just beneath the surface of these concerns is the history of her own family, which she weaves throughout the narrative of the American Revolution. The story of the Founding, for Warren, was also a story of her family’s lost significance. The Otises, by rights, ought to have been on par with the Jeffersons and Hamiltons of the Founding. Their ideas, more liberal and more prudent than so many of the other Founders’, ought to have had wider currency. Instead, the Otises remain among the ranks of the forgotten—their lost ideas a great loss indeed for the project of American politics, both then and now.

Discussion Questions:

Does the story of Mercy Otis Warren make you rethink America’s founding? In what way(s)?
What does the family history tell us about contingency in history?
How do family histories connect to the larger political history? How do they matter?

Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.