Delete comment from: Boston 1775
I don’t recall that tweet, David Hurwitz. There’s a new book about James Otis and Mercy Warren titled Minds and Minds by Jeffrey H. Hacker. It doesn’t include the anecdote you described, but it does discuss both siblings’ public arguments against slavery.
That anecdote sounds like one that Samuel Adams’s descendants told about him and a woman working in his household named Surry. It seems clear that Adams and his second wife accepted Surry as a gift and later granted her freedom. What’s not clear is how much time passed between those actions.
As for the comments from Brooklyn, there’s no doubt Otis published strong arguments against “slavery.” Sometimes, as in that quote about the writs of assistance, he clearly didn’t mean the chattel slavery of the sort his father practiced. At other times he clearly did refer to enslaved Africans and their natural rights.
The question about Otis is how his actions matched his words. Plenty of American gentlemen of his time deplored slavery in theory and depended on it in practice. Colonial Massachusetts and Virginia legislatures voted to end the transatlantic slave trade, which Otis decried, but that wasn’t the same thing as ending the practice of slavery and slave-trading within those colonies.
John Waters wrote in his biography of the Otis family that even as James Otis, Jr., criticized slavery in his political writing he continued to keep an enslaved servant. However, that book contains no citation for that particular statement, and we haven’t been able to find evidence for it. It may yet be out there, or Waters might be mistaken.
Massachusetts’s 1771 tax record doesn’t list James Otis, Jr., as owning anyone. It’s possible that he never owned slaves, or that he owned someone earlier in his life and chose to stop, or that his enslaved servant(s) died or escaped and thus relieved him of the dilemma. If any new evidence comes to light, I’d be happy to share it here.
Jul 31, 2022, 4:04:15 AM
Posted to James Otis, Jr., and Slavery Revisited