James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist | Page 3

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Great Americans of History
JAMES OTIS THE PRE-REVOLUTIONIST
BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH, LL.D. AUTHOR OF A "Cyclopaedia
of Universal History," "Great Races of Mankind," "Life and Times of
William E. Gladstone," etc., etc.
THE CHARACTER OF JAMES OTIS BY CHARLES K. EDMUNDS,
Ph.D.
WITH AN ESSAY ON THE PATRIOT BY G. MERCER ADAM Late
Editor "Self-Culture" Magazine, Etc., Etc.
TOGETHER WITH ANECDOTES, CHARACTERISTICS, AND
CHRONOLOGY

Near the northeast corner of the old Common of Boston a section of
ground was put apart long before the beginning of the eighteenth
century to be a burying ground for some of the heroic dead of the city
of the Puritans. For some quaint reason or caprice this acre of God was
called "The Granary" and is so called to this day. Perhaps the name was
given because the dead were here, garnered as grain from the reaping
until the bins be opened at the last day's threshing when the chaff shall
be driven from the wheat.
Here the thoughtless throng looking through the iron railing may see

the old weather-beaten and time-eaten slabs with their curious lettering
which designate the spots where many of the men of the
pre-revolutionary epoch were laid to their last repose. The word
cemetery is from Greek and means the little place where I lie down.
In the Granary Burying Ground are the tombs of many whom history
has gathered and recorded as her own. But history looks in vain among
the blue-black slabs of semi-slate for the name of one who was greatest
perhaps of them all; but whose last days were so strangely clouded and
whose sepulchre was so obscure as to leave the world in doubt for more
than a half century as to where the body of the great sleeper had been
laid. Curiosity, whetted by patriotism, then discovered the spot. But the
name of another was on the covering slab, and no small token was to be
found indicative of the last resting place of the lightning-smitten body
of James Otis, the prophetic giant of the pre-revolutionary days. He
who had lived like one of the Homeric heroes, who had died like a
Titan under a thunderbolt, and had been buried as obscurely as Richard
the Lion Hearted, or Frederick Barbarossa, must lie neglected in an
unknown tomb within a few rods of the spot where his eloquence
aforetime had aroused his countrymen to national consciousness, and
made a foreign tyranny forever impossible in that old Boston, the very
name of which became henceforth the menace of kings and the
synonym of liberty.
Tradition rather than history has preserved thus much. In the early part
of the present century a row of great elms, known as the Paddock elms,
stood in what is now the sidewalk on the west side of Tremont Street
skirting the Granary Burying Ground. These trees were cut away and
the first section of the burial space was invaded with the spade. Tomb
No. 40, over which the iron railing now passes, was divided down as
far as where the occupants are lying. Within the sepulchre were several
bodies. One was the body of Nathaniel Cunningham, Sr. Another was
Ruth Cunningham, his wife. The younger members of the family were
also there in death.
When the lid of one coffin in this invaded tomb was lifted, it was found
that a mass of the living roots of the old strong elm near by had twined
about the skull of the sleeper, had entered through the apertures, and
had eaten up the brain. It was the brain of James Otis which had given
itself to the life of the elm and had been transformed into branch and

leaf and blossom, thus breathing itself forth again into the free air and
the Universal Flow.
The body of the patriot had been deposited in this tomb of his
father-in-law, the Nathaniel Cunningham just referred to, and had there
reposed until the searching fibres of another order of life had found it
out, and lifted and dispensed its sublimer part into