Free John Adams - SA by David McCullough Page A

chief villain. A lifetime later, Adams would vividly describe Otis as he had been in his surpassing moment, in the winter of 1761, in argument against writs of assistance, search warrants that permitted customs officers to enter and search any premises whenever they wished. Before the bench in the second-floor Council Chamber of the Province House in Boston, Otis had declared such writs—which were perfectly valid in English law and commonly issued in England—null and void because they violated the natural rights of Englishmen. Adams, who had been present as an observer only, would remember it as one of the inspiring moments of his life, a turning point for him as for history. The five judges, with Hutchinson at their head as chief justice, sat in comfort near blazing fireplaces, Adams recalled, “all in their new fresh robes of scarlet English cloth, in their broad hats, and immense judicial wigs.” But Otis, in opposition, was a “flame” unto himself. “With the promptitude of classical illusions, a depth of research... and a torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried away all before him.” By Adams's account, every one of the immense crowded audience went away, as he did, ready to take up arms against writs of assistance. “Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain,” Adams would claim. “Then and there the child independence was born.”
    But by 1765 it was the tragic decline of James Otis that gripped Adams. At meetings now, Otis talked on endlessly and to no point. No one could get a word in. “Otis is in confusion yet,” Adams noted a year or so later. “He rambles and wanders like a ship without a helm.” Adams began to doubt Otis's sanity, and as time passed, it became clear that Otis, his hero, was indeed going mad, a dreadful spectacle.
    “The year 1765 has been the most remarkable year of my life,” Adams wrote in his diary that December. “The enormous engine fabricated by the British Parliament for battering down all the rights and liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread through the whole continent a spirit that will be recorded to our honor, with all future generations.”
    “At home with my family. Thinking,” reads the entry of a few nights later.
    “At home. Thinking,” he wrote Christmas Day.
    *   *   *
    WITH THE REPEAL of the Stamp Act by Parliament in the spring of 1766, and the easing of tensions that followed in the next two years, until the arrival of British troops at Boston, Adams put politics aside to concentrate on earning a living. He was thinking of politics not at all, he insisted.
    He was back on the road, riding the circuit, the reach of his travels extending more than two hundred miles, from the island of Martha's Vineyard off Cape Cod, north to Maine, which was then part of the Massachusetts Bay Province, to as far west as Worcester. As recalled in the family years later, he was endowed for the profession of law with the natural gifts of “a clear and sonorous voice,” a “ready elocution,” stubbornness, but with the “counter-check” of self-control, and a strong moral sense. He handled every kind of case—land transfers, trespass, admiralty, marine insurance, murder, adultery, rape, bastardy, buggery, assault and battery, tarring and feathering. He defended, not always successfully, poor debtors, horse thieves, and smugglers. He saw every side of life, learned to see things as they were, and was considered, as Jonathan Sewall would write, as “honest
[a]
lawyer as ever broke bread.”
    In 1766, like his father before him, Adams was elected selectman in Braintree. But so active had his Boston practice become by 1768 that he moved the family to a rented house in the city, a decision he did not like, fearing the effect on their health. He established a Boston office and presently admitted two young men, Jonathan Austin and William Tudor, to read law with him, in return