James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist | Page 4

the viewless air.
Over the grave in which the body was laid is still one of the rude slabs
which the fathers provided, and on this is cut the name of "George
Longley, 1809," he being the successor of the Cunninghams in the
ownership of Tomb No. 40.
Here, then, was witnessed the last transformation of the material,
visible man called James Otis, the courageous herald who ran swinging
a torch in the early dawn of the American Revolution.
The pre-revolutionists are the Titans of human history; the
revolutionists proper are only heroes; and the post-revolutionists are
too frequently dwarfs and weaklings. This signifies that civilization
advances by revolutionary stages, and that history sends out her tallest
and best sons to explore the line of march, and to select the spot for the
next camping-ground. It is not they who actually command the
oncoming columns and who seem so huge against the historical
background--it is not these, but rather the hoarse forerunners and
shaggy prophets of progress who are the real kings of men-- the true
princes of the human empire.
These principles of the civilized life were strongly illustrated in our
War of Independence. The forerunners of that war were a race of giants.
Their like has hardly been seen in any other epoch of that sublime
scrimmage called history. Five or six names may be selected from the
list of the early American prophets whose deeds and outcry, if reduced
to hexameters, would be not the Iliad, not the Jerusalem Delivered, but
the Epic of Human Liberty.
The greatest of these, our protagonists of freedom, was Benjamin
Franklin. After him it were difficult to name the second. It is always
difficult to find the second man; for there are several who come after.
In the case of our forerunners the second may have been Thomas
Jefferson; it may have been Samuel Adams; it may have been his
cousin; it may have been Thomas Paine; it may have been Patrick
Henry; it may have been James Otis, the subject of this monograph.

It is remarkable to note how elusive are the lives of many great men.
Some of the greatest have hardly been known at all. Others are known
only by glimpses and outlines. Some are known chiefly by myth and
tradition. Nor does the effort to discover the details of such lives yield
any considerable results. There are great names which have come to us
from antiquity, or out of the Middle Ages, that are known only as
names, or only by a few striking incidents. In some cases our actual
knowledge of men who are believed to have taken a conspicuous part
in the drama of their times is so meagre and uncertain that critical
disputes have arisen respecting the very existence of such personages.
Homer for example--was he myth or man? The Christ? Where was he
and how did he pass his life from his twelfth year to the beginning of
his ministry? What were the dates of his birth and death? Shakespeare?
Why should not the details of his life, or some considerable portion of
the facts, compare in plenitude and authenticity with the events in Dr.
Johnson's career?
It seems to be the law of biography that those characters who are
known to the world by a few brilliant strokes of genius have as a rule
only a meagre personal history, while they whose characters have been
built up painfully and slowly out of the commonplace, like the coral
islands of the Atlantic, have a great variety and multitude of materials
ready for the hands of the biographer.
James Otis belonged to the first of these classes. There is a measure of
elusiveness about his life. Our lack of knowledge respecting him,
however, is due in part to the fact that near the close of his life, while
he was oscillating in a half-rational condition between Andover and
Boston, with an occasional visit to Plymouth, he fell into a fit of
pessimism and despair during which he spent two days in obliterating
the materials for his biography, by destroying all his letters and
manuscripts. He did as much as he could to make impossible any
adequate account of his career or any suitable revelation of his
character as developed in his correspondence. Over and above this,
however, the materials of his life are of small extent, and fragmentary.
It is to his formal publications and the common tradition of what he did,
that we must turn for our biographical and historical estimate of the
man. In this respect he is in analogy with Patrick Henry who appears
only fitfully in history, but with meteoric brilliancy; or with Abraham

Lincoln the narrative of whose life for the first forty-five years can be
adequately written in ten pages.