Like many men who have attained eminence in public life, James
Otis was the victim in his day of detraction and envy. A
specially malignant slander was current with reference to him and
his father at the period of the patriot's resigning his Crown
post of Advocate-General. The motive for throwing up his
appointment and pleading the people's cause against the Writs of
Assistance, it was at the time said, was the disappointment of
the Otis family at the Chief-Justiceship, then vacant, going to
Governor Hutchinson instead of to Colonel James Otis of
Barnstable, father of our hero. This aspersion of the fair name
of the Otises as patriots and high-minded gentlemen, and the
lying assertion that it was this disappointment that led the
Otises, father and son, to abandon the Crown's side for that of
the people, was cruelly false, and especially so as Hutchinson,
who got the post, repeats the falsehood in his "History of
Massachusetts" in explanation of the Otises turning their coats
and becoming partisans of the popular cause. Nothing could well
be more unjust and untrue, for both men were of far too honorable
a character and too ardently patriotic to justify the slander and
give even the slightest color to the misrepresentation. Were it
necessary more emphatically to characterize the slander as false,
one might confidently point to the happy relations of the Otises
with the other patriots of the time--to men of the stamp of the
two Adams statesmen, to Hancock, Randolph, Warren, and other
leaders of the Revolutionary era, as well as to the contemporary
repute and influence of both men in the heroic annals of the
Colonial period. The times were indeed trying and critical, and
at the outset of the movement for independence and relief from
the irritating aggressions of the Crown, the attitude, we may be
sure, was closely watched and not over truthfully reported, of