Читать книгу Collected Political Writings of James Otis - Otis James - Страница 9
Оглавление[print edition page xvi]
[print edition page xvii]
The editor who seeks to publish Otis’s political writings faces a problem: Otis often wrote anonymously. I have done my best to track down as many of his political writings as possible, even though it is virtually impossible to produce a comprehensive edition. The only major published writing of Otis that is certainly from his pen and that does not appear in this edition is his work on Latin prosody.1
The five pamphlets Otis published in his lifetime are readily identifiable as his, as are certain newspaper essays that appeared under his own name. When we turn to Otis’s anonymous and pseudonymous writings in the newspapers, the task gets a bit more difficult. That Otis wrote the series of essays signed “John Hampden” in late 1765 and early 1766 is clear. It is also clear that he penned the essays signed “Freeborn American” or “F.A.” that constitute his 1765 pamphlet Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists. In a Letter to a Noble Lord. That being the case, we can conclude that when “Curious” published a query for the author of the Noble Lord essays in the August 19, 1765, edition of the Boston Gazette, it was Otis who penned the response that appeared in the August 26 issue of that year. For that reason, I have included both. Similarly, since the two essays signed “F.A.” that appeared in the Boston Gazette in March 1766 are responding to criticisms of Noble Lord, presumably they came from Otis’s pen.
Beyond that, the identifications must be based on informed speculation unless and until more evidence appears. It is highly likely that Otis was the author of the essay on writs of assistance that appeared in the Boston Gazette in January 1762 that is reprinted here. This volume also includes the two-part essay signed “John Hampden” from the November 24 and December 1, 1766, issues of the Boston Gazette, on the assumption that someone else did not steal Otis’s pen name. As mentioned above, Otis signed the essays that
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became his pamphlet Letter to a Noble Lord “F.A.,” and scholars have identified Otis as the author of the essays that seem to pick up that signature by “Freeborn American” and “Freeborn Armstrong” that appeared in the Boston Gazette not long after the Noble Lord essays were printed.2 These essays are reprinted here as well. Helen Saltman identifies Otis as the author of two essays on the fight concerning Massachusetts’s agent in London,3 and they are included in this volume.
The scholarly apparatus of this edition is minimal. I have sought to equip readers with the basic tools that they need to understand Otis’s writings in the general introduction and the section introductions. This approach will allow the reader to experience the texts as part of a live and ongoing debate about the nature and purpose of a free society. Notations that might lead readers to approach the text as an artifact of a strange and foreign time and place have therefore been minimized. Translations of Latin and French material are provided. The text retains Otis’s footnotes in their original format (usually marked by symbols, such as asterisks or daggers); all new editorial notes, including the translations, are indicated by arabic numerals. If a Latin translation is needed in an original footnote, the translation appears in brackets after the Latin in the note itself.
As much as possible, the original spelling and punctuation have been retained. That has been easiest for the essays from the Boston Gazette. Because I turned to Charles Mullett’s fine edition of Otis’s pamphlets, I have allowed his editorial procedure to stand for those pamphlets, although I have silently corrected one or two typos that snuck into his edition. I have also followed Mullett’s practice of noting the original pagination of these pamphlets (in angle brackets inserted in the text). In a few instances, generally in the newspaper essays, when a word could not be determined due to the illegibility of the original source, I have put the assumed word in brackets with a question mark. Mullett chose not to print Otis’s 1765 pamphlets in chronological order. I have returned them to their original order of publication.
The section on the Writs case presents a peculiar challenge, as the case was argued twice, and parts of Otis’s argument were recorded (or reproduced) only at a later date. The first two texts in part 1, the notes on the case, are from the pens of John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr., as published by Quincy’s
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grandson Samuel Quincy in 1865 in his Reports,4 as is the final piece in this section, “A Sample Writ of Assistance.” As stated above, the spelling and punctuation of the original have been retained, except for the expansion of certain common abbreviations (“the” for “ye,” “that” for “yt,” etc.). In one or two places where eccentric spelling makes it difficult to determine with certainty the precise word intended, the likely term has been inserted in brackets. The case being short, Adams’s and Quincy’s notes are reprinted in their entirety, in addition to the notes of Otis’s pleadings. John Adams’s reconstruction of Otis’s argument is taken from The Works of John Adams, as edited by Adams’s grandson, Charles Francis Adams.5
The source for Otis’s pamphlets is Charles Mullett’s edition, published in the University of Missouri Studies in 1929.6 For Quincy’s Reports on the Writs of Assistance case I have used the edition in the University of Michigan’s “Making of America” digital archive. Otis’s Boston Gazette essays are taken from the newspaper itself, with the assistance of the microfilm edition of the essays from the Early American Newspapers series. The Boston Gazette became available in a digital edition after this project began. I turned to it late in the process to clarify bits of text that are unclear in the microfilm edition. All have been rekeyed for this edition.
