Not Your Father's Founders (20 page)

Kittery, Maine
1744–October 5, 1818
A Man Without a Plan

Jeremiah and his brothers Gideon, John, William, Dennis, and Joseph were ardent patriots and business owners in Massachusetts. They and their father, Morris, were in the lumber business in Machias.

The citizens of Machias were in dire need of supplies from Boston in the spring of 1775. Because of British naval activities along the New England coast, supplies were hard to come by via sea, which was the most expedient transportation route at the time. Conversely, it was difficult for local lumber producers to send their products to Boston.

That was the situation when Boston merchant Captain Ichabod Jones arrived in Machias on June 9, 1775, with two sloops,
Unity
and
Polly
, carrying badly needed provisions. A British navy schooner,
Margaretta
, commanded by James Moore, accompanied Jones's ships to protect them.

Jones enraged the citizens of Machias by demanding that they sign a paper agreeing to trade their lumber to the British for the supplies he brought with him, and also guaranteeing to protect him and his property. Jones refused to distribute supplies to those who would not sign.

Then, Jones asked Moore to bring
Margaretta
close to the docks with guns ready to fire, presumably in an attempt to intimidate the citizens into agreeing to Jones's terms. The intimidation attempt failed.

The patriots in Machias hatched a plot to capture Moore and his officers while they attended a church service, intending to prevent them from accompanying Jones back to Boston. The British caught wind of the plot, jumped out the windows of the church, boarded their ship, and escaped to the safety of the harbor. That was when the O'Briens and their friends entered the fray.

The O'Briens acted spontaneously, which was often the case among patriots at the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

The O'Briens secretly invited their friends from nearby Mispecka and Pleasant River to join them in their private revolution. Once the
Margaretta
reached the safety of the bay, O'Brien, his brothers, Joseph Wheaton, and several other patriots—about forty men in all—sprang into action. Armed with guns and the only three rounds of ammunition they had among them, swords, axes, pitchforks, and anything else they could get their hands on, the men jumped aboard the
Unity
and sailed toward the
Margaretta
. Another group, led by Captain Benjamin Foster, joined O'Brien in a smaller sloop.

The battle was short and swift. O'Brien led a masterful attack on the
Margaretta
in that June 12 encounter. Captain Moore, realizing that he was outmanned and outmaneuvered, tried to escape. He failed—and paid with his life. In one hour the patriots killed Captain Moore, his helmsman, and two other crew members. They wounded five more. One American was killed during the battle; six were wounded, one of whom died later. (Conflicting reports suggest that there were ten British sailors and marines killed and ten wounded, compared to four Americans killed and nine wounded.)

O'Brien became an instant—and emboldened—hero. The battle that earned Machias the title of the “Lexington of the Sea” was the launch point for additional exploits by Captain O'Brien.

Following his victory at Machias, O'Brien refitted
Unity
with
Margaretta's
guns, renamed it
Machias Liberty
, and sailed off aboard his privateer to find more prizes. He and his crew captured two armed enemy schooners and their crews off the Bay of Fundy in Canada and took them to Cambridge. The ships O'Brien captured—the
Diligence
, a British coast-
survey vessel, and her tender—had been dispatched from Halifax to retake
Margaretta
.

He delivered the prisoners directly to General Washington. The general was impressed. He recommended to Massachusetts government officials that they appoint O'Brien to command of his prizes. They agreed, and awarded O'Brien the first captain's commission in the Massachusetts State Navy.

O'Brien's navy career was short, but adventurous. He maintained his command of
Machias Liberty
for two years. His brother William served as a lieutenant. Another brother, John, was a lieutenant aboard the captured
Diligence
.

The provincial government assigned
Machias Liberty
and
Diligence
to intercept supplies for the British troops. They operated along the northeastern coast for a year and a half, taking several prizes. After that, Jeremiah took command of a privateer named
Hannibal
that his brother John and others had built at Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Two British frigates captured
Hannibal
off the New York coast in the late 1770s. The British confined O'Brien for six months on a guard ship,
Jersey
, then sent him to England and held him in the infamous Mill Prison. He escaped after a few months and made his way back to Maine.

Later, he received an appointment as the federal collector for the Port of Machias, which he held until his death. The navy he fathered lives on.

West Barnstable, Massachusetts
February 5, 1725–May 23, 1783
Hidden Father of a Nation

James Otis Jr. was not anti-Britain early in his career, but he became that way. He graduated from Harvard in 1743, when he was eighteen. There he studied law under noted jurist Jeremiah Gridley. Five years later, he was admitted to the bar. Eventually, he became a public employee, but not for long.

In 1756, Otis accepted a position as the king's advocate general to the vice-admiralty court of Boston. He did not like what he saw in his responsibilities as advocate general, part of which involved prosecuting smugglers.

The British were heavy-handed in their law enforcement policies regarding smuggling. They had passed a series of Acts of Trade and
Navigation between 1650 and 1767 that subordinated the colonists' interests to their own. Those laws aggravated the Americans.

When the British passed a tax-laden Molasses Act in 1733 to
protect British West Indies planters from competition provided by
their non-British producers in
the French West Indies, it infuriated the colonists—especially the distillers who needed the commodities to make their own spirits.

Very few people in America took paying the tax seriously. That rankled the British and led to more austere taxes in 1764, when they replaced the Molasses Act with the Sugar Act. The colonists did not like the new tax any more than the one it replaced. That was one of the reasons they decided to split from the British.

Otis felt guilty about prosecuting smugglers, because the innovative British had introduced a new legal tactic called writs of assistance to help them find, try, and convict the violators. The writs did not assist anybody but the British.

The writs of assistance were general search warrants that allowed customs officials to enter houses and places of business whenever and wherever they pleased to look for unspecified contraband. Otis believed the writs of assistance were unconstitutional, even if the colonists did not have a written constitution. He did something about it.

Otis resigned his position in 1761 to defend smugglers against the vagaries of the writs of assistance.

He presented a spirited defense against the writs of assistance in a classic February 1761 court case. Otis's eloquent five-hour presentation to the court explaining why the writs were unconstitutional captured the attention of a young attorney sitting in the courtroom, John Adams.

Despite Otis's brilliant performance, the court upheld the writs of assistance. That disappointed Otis and his clients, but it did not dissuade him from continuing his resistance to the writs or the laws with which they were associated. Like other patriots (including his sister, Mercy Otis Warren), he turned to the pen as his weapon of choice.

In 1764, Otis produced an insightful pamphlet,
Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved
. He also wrote
A Vindication of the British Colonies
and
Considerations on Behalf of the Colonies
, in which he attacked the British idea of “virtual representation” in Parliament (the idea that one can be represented by a decision-making process without being able to vote for those who make the decisions) and the philosophy of the Navigation Acts, which he claimed inhibited the trade of the colonists' manufactured products.

Otis was not afraid to challenge the British in court or writing, join organizations formed to help the colonists express their distaste for the king's policies, or take action against them. He became a member of the Sons of Liberty, and attended the Stamp Act Congress of 1765. Significantly, he introduced the motion in the Massachusetts assembly proposing that the congress be convened.

In September 1769, Otis wrote a satire of the local commissioners of customs that appeared in the
Boston Gazette
. John Robinson, an enraged Boston customhouse official, reacted to what he perceived as a libelous account of him and confronted Otis the next day, attacking him with a cane. Robinson beat Otis viciously around the head with his weapon. The aftereffects of the attack produced periods of mental instability in Otis that plagued him throughout the rest of his life and rendered him incapable of participating in public affairs at a time when his guidance was needed.

Otis achieved a moral victory as a result of the affair. He sued Robinson and was awarded £2,000 in damages. But Robinson offered a public apology, which Otis accepted and declared that he was satisfied. That ended the affair—but Otis paid the price in the long run.

Sadly, instead of becoming a patriot leader, Otis became a figure of public ridicule. He spent his days wandering around Boston, subjected to jeers from people who forgot or ignored his significant contributions on their behalf prior to 1769. History has not been kind to James Otis Jr. He does not receive the amount of credit due him for his contributions to the patriots' cause. Strangely enough, he did not have a lot of time to consider them after the Revolutionary War ended.

Misfortune plagued him once again on May 23, 1783, when a bolt of lightning struck and killed him. That was a bizarre ending for the once-popular patriot whose strokes of genius had helped pave the way for American independence.