In the early days of 1764, Otis was a loyal British subject, living in North America, and enthusiastic about the global growth of the British Empire. But soon his investigations and thoughts caused him to see the evil side of the matter: the Empire was imposed its will upon the colonists in North America, and was in fact fueled by continually imposing oppression on the colonies.
One of the most outrageous injustices imposed on the Americans was Britain’s Stamp Act, a piece of legislation would have economically brutalized the colonies. Coordinated resistance arose: The colonies created the Stamp Act Congress to discuss the matter on a level which went beyond the borders of any one colony and united the concerns of the colonies; the Sons of Liberty organized public gatherings and vocal protests.
Outside of North America, people in other parts of the world watched the developments with interest. Not everyone sympathized with the Americans.
Those who owned and operated plantations in the West Indies, islands in the Carribean, were concerned. They understood that freedom for American colonists would create a desire for freedom among other oppressed people, including slaves.
While the colonists in North America were largely in favor of freedom for slaves, or at least had no strong objections to it, the islands in the Carribean were much more economically reliant on slavery, and found any hint of abolishing slavery to be threatening, as historian Jill Lepore writes:
Nor were the West Indian planters wrong to worry that one kind of rebellion would incite another. In Charleston, the Sons of Liberty marched through the streets, chanting, “Liberty and No Stamps!” only to be followed by slaves crying, “Liberty! Liberty!” And not a few Sons of Liberty made this same leap, from fighting for their own liberty to fighting to end slavery. “The Colonists are by the law of nature born free, as indeed all men are, white or black,” James Otis Jr. insisted, in a searing tract called Rights of the British Colonists, Asserted, published in 1764, only months after he had rejoiced about the growth of Britain’s empire.
James Otis saw that logic demanded that, if he demanded freedom for the colonists from British repression, then he would also favor freedom for slaves. The majority of North American colonists agreed with him.
Decades later, the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 would increase the economic dependence of plantation owners in the southern states. Even with that increase, however, the majority of people in what was by then the United States favored the abolition of slavery.
Reason demanded that the concept of freedom, based on a person’s humanity, be extended to all people. James Otis understood that natural law, based on the structure of the universe and not on human legislation, gave every person the right to liberty. “In the 1760s, he,” as Jill Lepore writes,
saw the logical extension of arguments about natural rights. He found it absurd to suggest that it could be “right to enslave a man because he is black” or because he has “short curl’d hair like wool.” Slavery, Otis insisted, “is the most shocking violation of the law of nature,” and a source of political contamination, too. “Those who every day barter away other men’s liberty, will soon care little for their own,” he warned.
James Otis and his words remain as evidence for one of the strongest defenses of liberty, freedom, and justice in history. He was an intellectual warrior in the cause of justice, and realized long before many of his fellow North Americans that the colonies would and should fight for their independence, and that as a logical extension of that struggle, they would and should also fight to end slavery.
