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  But the children of these men who so boldly spoke of their small businesses with pride would not be quiet and refused to be unnoticed. Even more daring – or foolish, depending on how the history played out – these men would take up their middling educations and strike at the heart of the oligarchy. Refusing to wait for the oligarchy to find them, these rebels taunted the oligarchs and mocked their ideals. They would assert that the state did not grant privileges but rather God instilled rights; they would declare that governance required their consent.

  Consent? One does not consent to the social structure; it was created that way from the dawn of time. And consent from men who sell wood for a living? who raise pigs? who grow apples to make cider so that their middling friends can drink enough to forget they don’t matter? In a feudal world, all one needed to know is that a man who raises pigs or grows apples is hardly one to demand consent from a lord. Yet by the mid-18th century, these pig raisers and apple growers were becoming known as businessmen. Determination of their importance shifted from their social status to their citizenship status.

  The feudal world was not composed of free individuals but rather groups of people forming a stratum whose obligations in all regards depended on their relationship to the strata below and above them. The concepts of liberty, responsibility and consent as applied to individuals were nearly unknown, certainly outside of theoretical realms. The 17th century exploded with rational philosophers – Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza – who invariably sought an orderly neo-Platonic Republic that a middling class clamoring for rights and liberty could never deliver. Spinoza could have been Rumbolt’s hangman, for it was Spinoza who believed all rights are derived from the state. The idea that apple farmers ought to control their destinies, assist in the operation of their governments, and had natural rights granted by God was not popular in the courts of law, the halls of Parliament, or at the desks of philosophers. At best, such ideas would have seemed foreign and undesirable, at worst, they would seem dangerous.

  In 1778, Samuel Johnson made this characteristic late 18th century declaration: “Depend upon it, sir, every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.” A century earlier, men would not “always take” anything. Lords took. “Men” received what was given to them. Only a man amidst the crumbling walls of feudalism could claim that “Men always take the best they can get.” Sixty-eight years after the commencement of the revolution, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “…trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism; that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery. We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed. But the aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind ….” The trade practiced by small colonial merchants transformed religious vigor into a panoply of legal, political and philosophical apparati that were employed to disrupt and eventually destroy feudalism.

  ***

  Life was good in Massachusetts Province in the summer of 1760. The economy had gone through a war boom, producing goods for the French and Indian war, and though the war was largely over, the economy was still strong. Crime was low, certainly lower than crime in most urban areas of Europe. Employment was high. Businesses were growing. Harvard College was thriving. And Boston was one of the more important ports of the world’s greatest Empire. Now with the French empire dismantled, the British controlled more of the world than anyone. The sugar and tobacco trades were booming, shipping was flourishing, manufactured goods and British woolens were traded world-wide. And the New England shipper-merchant was in the middle of it all.

  The Otis family was a part of that success. Based in Barnstable, about 70 miles south of Boston, the Otis family were not part of the Boston ruling oligarchy, but they enjoyed increasing wealth and importance. The fifth generation of Otises, born in the 1720s-1740s, tended to be educated, had access to the corridors of power, and were members of the wealthiest family on Cape Cod. Colonel James Otis was the leading figure in the family in the 1750s: supplier of nearly 1,000 whale boats to the war effort against France, wildly successful lawyer, Speaker of the House, and holder of myriad minor government positions.

  But by the end of the summer, everything would change. The fuse for the next great war, the American Revolution, was lit on September 10, 1760 when Massachusetts Bay Superior Court Judge Stephen Sewall died. Sewall wasn’t particularly important, but the debate and appointment that followed would tear asunder the colony and create the conditions that nurtured the revolution. Superior court judges were appointed by the colonial governor, and in September 1760 the Massachusetts governor was Francis Bernard, who had just arrived the previous month, having been promoted from New Jersey governor. Bernard, above all else, wanted his tenure to be “quiet and easy.” He was born to a middle-class family in Berkshire, England in 1712, spent seven years at Oxford, and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. He married a well-connected woman who birthed numerous children, nine of whom survived childhood. Bernard studied law, recited Shakespeare from memory, and designed buildings. Harvard Hall was designed by him, as was Bernardston, a town in northwest Massachusetts. Bernard also named the Berkshire Mountains after the county of his birth. Bernard was intelligent, but he was also a pompous dilettante. He fashioned himself a renaissance man, meaning he was widely knowledgeable, largely impractical and mostly blind to his faults. Bernard’s two years in New Jersey were easy but not very profitable. Bernard hoped for an equally eventless but much more profitable tenure in Massachusetts; after all, he had nine children, a wife who expected to live well, and the self-image of the patrician-genius. A man of his status certainly required and deserved a well-paying position. In England, Bernard would have been a middling striver, precisely the type that the aristocrats would have belittled, or, perhaps worse, ignored. But in the colonies Bernard could be the aristocrat, and he expected others to treat him as such.

  Bernard’s primary objective in all decisions was the path of least resistance. He came to Massachusetts to make money and bless the people with his genius, his Oxford education, and his artistic talents. He would design grand buildings and towns for them and entertain the ruling class with wit and poetry, but he was not interested in provincial politics. His administration included Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Secretary Andrew Oliver.

  Given the Otis’s wealth, the Seven Years’ War victory, and the general elation that swept through the British colonies in the fall of 1760, what would drive the Colonel’s 35-year-old son to threaten to set the province on fire? James Otis, Jr., born in 1725 and usually called Jemmy, was a successful Harvard educated lawyer and member of the state legislature. His family had been building bridges in Massachusetts Province – political, social, economic – for 150 years, and Jemmy was threatening to burn them all. He was frighteningly serious, and perhaps more alarming, exceedingly capable. Even his enemies, such as oligarch Peter Oliver, labeled Jemmy a genius.

  By the winter of 1760 this provincial bourgeoisie, one of the wealthiest and most intelligent men in the British colonies, had become fully radicalized. He threatened to set the province aflame though, he confessed, he would likely be consumed in the fire. That his words – a promise and a prophecy – came to full fruition and his predictions about the province and his own life were entirely accurate would be unbelievable if it didn’t actually happen.

  CHAPTER I

  the time is which we have long foreseen

  The town of Glastonbury lies about 130 miles west of London and is most famous for being “Avalon,” the presumed burial ground of King Arthur and his wife, Guinevere; King Arthur is credited with helping unify and establish the country of England. The famous Glastonbury abbey developed into an Arthurian cult. On November 30, 1611, another much less famous man was buried in Glastonbury: Richard Otis, an independent weaver who died in the local alms house. His will, dated the day b
efore, listed his possessions: some clothes, a weaver’s frame board, a chest and a bed. No gold crown and no Excalibur. His few possessions were split among his sons John, Stephen, and Thomas and his two daughters. John was 30 years old when his father died and inherited some of the clothes. He’d been married for nine years and had four daughters. In 1621, his wife gave birth to a son, who they named John Otis, Jr., and the family moved 70 miles west to Barnstaple, a small fishing village almost at the southwestern tip of the island of Great Britain. In 1630 the Otises moved again, paying £30 to captain William Pierce to take the family 3100 miles west to Bare Cove, just south of Boston. John Otis was fifty years old.

  Why the seven-member John Otis family would move from Glastonbury and then from Barnstaple is not readily apparent. They did not appear to be members of any radical or new religious organization; in fact, the southwest of England – the “West Country” – was known for being fairly secular and generally immune to religious extremes. They raised a May pole, which had been banned in most Puritan towns. People worked on Sunday, and drunkards could be found on the streets every day of the week. And despite Richard Otis’s seeming destitution, the family would have been considered “middle-class.” Richard Otis apparently succeeded as an independent weaver, and he and his sons were literate. Further, John Otis could afford the £30 fare to the new world; few of the truly poor could afford the trip to Massachusetts Bay.

  While the Otises were making their way to the new world, many families from Hingham, in East Anglia, were also making their way there. Hingham is about 100 miles northeast of London and 300 miles northeast of Barnstaple; Hingham’s distance from Barnstaple was in both geography and culture. Unlike the West Country, East Anglia was given to religious extremes, and by the second decade of the seventeenth century had essentially viewed itself as a separate religious community; many towns in East Anglia had culturally isolated themselves, and the religious and political tensions that would explode into a civil war a few decades later were festering in East Anglia by 1600. Preachers in East Anglia were routinely convicted of non-conformity, and congregations and rebel preachers often met secretly.

  East Anglia was also economically different from the West Country; while they too had a good number of farmers, the East Anglians were known for their weaving and other textile production. When the Otis family landed at Bare Cove, they found many families from East Anglia. These families usually travelled with their preacher; they tended to be what would have been considered radical Puritans and believed in the strong rule of law and morality. In England, they weren’t so much religiously oppressed as perpetually harassed. When in 1638 Hingham’s radical preacher Robert Peck departed the old world with nearly 120 of his rebellious congregation, the local chancellor celebrated; Peck and his non-conformist friends had been trouble-makers. And yet by 1640 the town of Hingham had petitioned the House of Commons that “most of the able Inhabitants have forsaken their dwellings and have gone severall ways for their peace and quiet and the town is now left and like to be in misery by reason of the meanness of the [remaining] Inhabitants.” In the previous six years, forty families had left Hingham, and the concentration of these families in Bare Cove was such that the name was changed to their town of origin. The gentry had not left Hingham, England and not a single family on the poor relief roll had left Hingham. Rather, the entire middle-class, if the term can be used, had left to find “peace and quiet.”

  Hingham, about 18 miles south of Boston, grew tremendously in the 1630s, but its population never exceeded 2,000. A few had left England because of persecution or economic problems, but the vast majority – particularly the earlier settlers – left because they had a general sense that they weren’t free to live as they wished, to form their towns as they wished and build communities as they wished. Specific religious persecution didn’t really affect the East Anglia communities until the mid-to-late 1630s and didn’t affect the West Country settlers at all. And most were reasonably well-off middle-class farmers, merchants and tradesmen; they had to be in order to afford the fairly high price of passage. So what drove them from their homes in England to the shores of a wild bit of land so remote that it didn’t appear on maps two centuries earlier? What drove their sense that the choices in their lives weren’t fully their own?

  What’s so astonishing about Hingham isn’t any particular fact about the small farming village on the edge of civilization in the 1630s, but rather that we have so many facts. We have letters, diaries, voting records, court records, legislation, land records, receipts, marriage and death records, and everything in between. A highly literate group of middle-class farmers and craftsmen were deliberately and methodically rebuilding civilization, and they were focused on their middle-class needs and interests. A society was being constructed to support the middling farmer and small merchant, not kings or noblemen or warlords who needed to support their armies and castles and bureaucracies. It was a fundamental reinvention of civilization.

  So what would bring the Otis family to the new world? Since they were the 17th century equivalent of middle-class and secular, then no particular economic or religious pressures drove them from their homeland. And though their churches were often chastised for not having a book of sermons or the latest translation of the Bible, the West Country towns were generally left to themselves – at least more so than other parts of England. West Country people were typically farmers, more so than much of the rest of England which tended toward animal husbandry and weaving, and cheap land is vital for a successful farmer. Of course, while the new world offered cheap land, it also had a smaller market for produce. John Otis probably knew some of the families in the new world; he’d probably heard of their experiences and may have sent letters letting them know that he’d soon be joining them. There were many other West Country families in the Plymouth area, and the Otis family seemed to be incorporated quickly into the new world society. And yet, none of that explains why a middle-class, secular family would leave their country. One can only assume that John Otis wanted more – more freedom, more opportunity, and more for his family than England could offer. Despite all that, John Otis clearly retained some lingering fondness for the Old World; he named a hill on his property “Weary All,” the same name of a similar hill that sits alongside The Roman Way in Glastonbury.

  Incredibly, many of the West Country settlers and East Anglican zealots got along in the new world, perhaps because they both sought the same goal: a community in which no authority intervened between the people and their king and God. This was a community devoid of pestering bishops and taxes originating outside of their town. Their town and church, the king and God formed their entire governing structure. Everything else was minimized. The East Anglia Puritans focused on theological debates, and the West Country men focused on acquiring land.

  It wasn’t long before the greater Plymouth area started to become crowded. A Puritan group from London had settled in Scituate, just five miles from Hingham, but by 1639 Scituate had become “too straite for their accommodation” and in their ‘‘lorded plea” to the Plymouth Governor for authorization to establish a town in another part of the province, Reverend John Lothrop confessed that “many greviances attend mee, from which I would be freed.” His “greviances” consisted primarily of one of those predictable theological disagreements that plagued New England settlements that would transform into political discord a century later. In Lothrop’s case, he was trapped between strident immersionists and vociferous latitudinarians, a conflict that had previously divided his London congregation. Bickering over theological minutiae may seem provincial, but it was this fervor that once filtered through the interests of the growing merchant class evolved into the legal and political passion for which the ensuing New England generations would be known.

  The Plymouth Court sympathized with Lothrop’s problems and terminated a conditional grant of the Barnstable district previously made to a Dorchester faction; Lothrop’s group was then given authorization to
move to Cape Cod and establish a town between the nascent villages of Sandwich and Yarmouth. The new town was called Barnstable. In September 1639, the Lothrop community arrived on the Cape with the “presence of God in mercy.” The small number of the Dorchester settlers who still held legal title to their land welcomed the newcomers and provided shelter and food. In December, the newcomers elected two of the original Dorchester settlers, Thomas Dimmock and the minister Joseph Hull, as representatives to the Plymouth Court, and the new town of Barnstable – complete with a restaurant – was launched. Under Lothrop, the Scituate families assimilated smoothly with the Dorchester group with the exception of Reverend Hull. Whether the Scituate minister was the better preacher or politician is not known, but in 1640 Reverend Hull was excommunicated and thereafter disappeared from Barnstable, leaving Lothrop’s Scituate congregation in control. The dual refinement that had taken place by the Lothrop congregation, initially in London and then in Scituate, ensured that only compatible people would have persevered. Physical isolation sheltered Barnstable from the swiftly developing diversity of towns such as Boston, and so from this foundation, Barnstable evolved and expanded while preserving an unusual level of cohesiveness.