This Day in Colonial History (James Otis, Patriot “Flame of Fire,” Killed by Lightning)

May 23, 1783—James Otis, the lawyer who represented what fellow patriot John Adams called “a flame of fire” in the cause of American liberty, only to be struck down by madness when the struggle for American independence reached its climax, died in the same manner he had hoped for: by a lightning bolt.

The death of Otis was much like his life: unnerving, unexpected, violent, and tragic. A vicious coffeehouse brawl 14 years earlier had resulted in a blow to the head, ending, for all intents and purposes, his legal and political career. Except for all-too-short periods of lucidity, the rest of his life had been anticlimactic.

Even schoolchildren not taught to learn much history nowadays are still likely to have heard of (if not recall precisely) such patriots as Thomas Jefferson, John and Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine. It’s much less likely that they’ve heard of Otis. In fact, they might even know more about his younger sister, the brilliant woman of letters Mercy Otis Warren.

Otis deserves better. Even before the Stamp Act, Otis had rallied opposition to arbitrary rule by England with a powerful 1761 speech that became one of the early landmarks of civil liberties in North America. As John C. Miller’s Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda relates, Otis was known as the “American Hampden” and was more important than Sam Adams in the early days of colonial protest.

I first became aware of this fascinating, brilliant and often neglected patriot through the Esther Forbes novel Johnny Tremain. (I was surprised to hear that this Newbery Award-winner from 1944 was still being read by youngsters—or at least by Bart Simpson, persuaded that it would be cool by sister Lisa.)

The scene with Otis is still the one that stands out most vividly in my memory, nearly 40 years after I read it. Late in the novel, just before the outbreak of war, young Johnny is meeting with the Patriot group the Observers when one of its founders, Otis, climbs into the attic.

You can just see the current members of the group rolling their eyes or looking away from their brilliant former colleague. Why couldn’t he just go away? Couldn’t he take a hint that they didn’t want him around? His indiscreet remarks might blow everything.

And now, the madman confounds them, just as he had once confounded Tories. You haven’t been bothered by crown, he says to each of the Observers in turn, until he identifies the cause they’re really fighting for—not the liberties of Bostonians, or even simply Americans, but of people everywhere. “We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills….we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.”

How much of this was true? From all appearances, Esther Forbes invented this dialogue.

But that fictional encounter with Otis had its counterparts in both his eloquent, five-hour, pro bono 1761 defense of 13 merchants who had run afoul of Britain’s Writs of Assistance and an appearance nine years later before his friends that led John Adams to lament, in his diary: "He talks so much and takes up so much of our time, and fills it with trash, obsceneness, profaneness, nonsense and distraction, that we have none left for rational amusements and inquiries...In short, I never saw such an object of admiration, reverence, contempt, and compassion, all at once, as this. I fear, I tremble, I mourn, for the man and his country; many others mourn over him, with tears in their eyes."

Otis' death allowed old comrades such as Adams to remember him at his brilliant best, as the orator who helped popularize the notion that "taxation without representation is tyranny."