Behind the Exhibition: The Otis Family

The question of loyalty concerned all New Englanders as political tensions worsened between the colonies and Great Britain. While most White New England colonists supported America’s right to self-governance, many remained ambivalent about the prospect of a civil war, and a vocal minority made it clear they would continue to support the Crown’s authority.  Discussion and debates over loyalty took place not only in taverns, churches, and meetinghouses, but also in the home. Families found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict, leading to separation and heartbreak.

Such was the case with the Otis family of Boston, whose members were among the strongest advocates for revolution. James Otis Jr. (1725-1783) was one of the earliest colonial legislators to protest British Parliament, and his brother, Samuel Allyne Otis (1740-1814), became the first Secretary of the United States Senate. Their sister Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) was a playwright and poet who infused her writings with political messages.

Samuel and James Otis each married into wealthy merchant families and their wives, Elizabeth Gray (1746-1779) and Ruth Cunningham (1729-1789), were Loyalists. Myth and Memory: Stories of the American Revolution provides a glimpse into their domestic lives through objects made for their homes, in addition to correspondence with their families and friends. As the exhibition shows, the fine and fragile materials of porcelain, canvas, and paper reflected the equally fragile bonds holding these people together, bonds that were frayed or broken throughout the course of the American Revolution.

This soup tureen belonged to Samuel Allyne Otis (1740-1814) and Elizabeth Gray (1746-1779), whose harmonious household was disrupted by the American Revolution. Elizabeth felt torn between loyalty to her husband and her Loyalist father Harrison Gray, a merchant and former Treasurer of Massachusetts who departed for London in exile along with her siblings in 1776. He was her only living parent, her mother having died in 1766.

Elizabeth’s letters to her father, in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, are filled with sadness and their parting.

On June 29, 1776, she wrote:

“Although I see no great probability this will ever reach you, yet I cannot let the opportunity pass without a few lines. It’s not in the power of words to express how much I have suffered for you and the rest of my dear friends since you left Boston, having never received any Intelligence from Halifax, till yesterday. A few lines from Mrs. Hughes informs me you are with my Brother and Sister embarked for London May 12th. Hard is my fate to be thus separated from the tenderest, the best of Parents. . . You may well suppose the Town wears a gloomy appearance to me who has lost so many dear connections. . . I had no other Inducement to return to it, but account of the little folks, who were destitute of Schools when in the country.” 

Elizabeth writes of a fractured community, nearly half of whom had fled the city after the Siege of Boston. Her heartbreak grew heavier with each letter to her father, who had yet to respond, either due to his travels or because their letters might be intercepted.

On August 15, 1776:

“My dear papa I must entreat, if there is any possible way of conveying a line, you would improve it, and tell me weather you think there is the least probability of our ever meeting again on Earth. I own I sometimes indulge the pleasing hope, however slender the foundation. As I ever make it a rule not to say anything upon political matters, you will not expect anything in that way now. I have many things to say in the domestic way, but as I know not whose hands this may fall into I forbear. . . My good partner with the little folks joins me in duty and Love. I wish you would not mention anything in the political way, as it may be a means of my not seeing it.” 

Elizabeth never reunited with her family, dying of illness in 1779. Samuel Otis had the unhappy task of informing his father-in-law, who responded to the news with shared grief and poignant sympathy:

“The tenderness and affection you had for my dear child, make you stand high in my Estimation, notwithstanding we widely differ in our political principles.” (April 25, 1779)

Despite the divided loyalties of their respective families, Samuel and Elizabeth had what appeared to be a loving and affectionate marriage. In his letter to Harrison Gray, Otis wrote: “As she lived a saint, she died an Angel.”

By contrast, James Otis and Ruth Cunningham Otis endured a bitterly unhappy marriage by all accounts. Otis was a brilliant attorney who historians believe may have suffered from bipolar disorder. As described by John Adams in his diary (August 1771): “Mr. Otis’s Gestures and Motions are very whimsical, his Imagination is disturbed—his Passions all roiled.”

Otis’s behavior became increasingly erratic during the 1770s, leading him to all but retire from public life. While his revolutionary opinions were widely disseminated, his wife, Ruth Cunningham Otis, was vocally in support of the colonies remaining under British rule. Their children were equally divided: Elizabeth Otis (1757-1839) married British lieutenant Leonard Brown in 1776, and they spent the war in England. Her father effectively disowned her, but her grandfather, James Otis Sr., left her an inheritance when he died in 1778. Their other daughter, Mary Otis (1756-1807), supported the revolutionary cause and later married the son of Continental Army General Benjamin Lincoln. Their son, James Otis III (1755-1779), fought in the war and died in British captivity in 1777.

The discord between James and Ruth Otis was apparently known to many, including Mercy Otis Warren and her friend Hannah Winthrop, wife of Harvard professor John Winthrop. They each supported a boycott of British goods to protest the Townshend Act levied by Parliament, but Ruth Otis was against such a move. In 1769, Hannah Winthrop shared an unsympathetic description of Warren’s sister-in-law, possibly embellished for the sake of domestic drama:

“I went to see Mrs. Otis the other day. She seems not to be in a good state of health. I received a Visit lately from Master Jemmy [James Otis III]. I will give you an anecdote of him. A gentleman telling him what a Fine lady his mama is & he hoped he would be a good Boy & behave exceeding well to her, my young Master gave this spirited answer, I know my Mama is a fine Lady, but she would be a much finer if she was a Daughter of Liberty.”

In a diary entry from January 16, 1770, John Adams recalled meeting with James Otis and feeling shocked by his behavior: “Otis is in Confusion yet. He looses himself. He rambles and wanders like a Ship without an Helm.” In the midst of what may have been a manic episode, Otis told Adams about his wife: “[Otis] said she was a good Wife, too good for him-but she was a tory, an high Tory. She gave him such Curtain Lectures, &c.”

Mercy Otis Warren was less charitable. In one letter to a friend in January 1776, she called Ruth a “Weak, Infatuated Woman who has heretofore Brought innumerable Difficulties upon her own Family.”

We have no firsthand accounts of Ruth’s own thoughts and feelings; if she wrote about the revolution or her husband, those letters remain undiscovered. Her life is refracted through the lens of those whose contributions to American independence have been preserved and sanctified.

James Otis died unexpectedly of a lightning strike in 1783, and Ruth lived to see America become an independent nation.