Otis' happiness, however, such as it was, lay outside his home. His marriage with Ruth Cunningham, which took place in 1755, was far from being happy. Incompatibility of temper, and radical and stubborn differences in political principle and sentiment, were the main ingredients in the chalice of bitterness and woe which both, doubtless, helped to fill. His only son, a youth of promise, entered the navy as midshipman, and died at eighteen. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married a loyalist, Captain Brown, who was wounded at Bunker Hill,--an alliance that much distressed him. The sad fortune of his second daughter, Mary, was another source of grief. She had married Benjamin Lincoln, eldest son of General Lincoln, who received the sword of General Cornwallis at the surrender of Yorktown,--a young lawyer of considerable promise; but he died at twenty-eight.
It is necessary to remember that in the great drama of the Revolution, Otis was only one of many distinguished actors, and that, in order to appreciate the part he played so well, we shall require to give a brief and rapid sketch of the political situation at the time. The sudden assertion of the spirit of liberty, which the British Parliament and the Provincial Legislature, acting under its direction and control, strove to check and subdue, was the awakening of the colonial communities, not simply to a consciousness of their political rights, but, also, of a new-born power to maintain and defend them. During the first hundred years of colonial history King and Parliament, occupied with affairs of an absorbing character at home, knew little, and cared even less, about the fate and fortunes of the men and women, who, for the sake of conscience and religious freedom, had left the land of their birth and best affection, and were engaged in a heroic contest with nature, on a wild, desolate, and distant coast. The early colonists were left to a liberty almost as unfettered as the wild animals and savage tribes whom they dislodged from their native forests. When, however, the infant communities had grown strong and prosperous, and had initiated a system of commerce which bade fair to become expansive and lucrative, they at once attracted the attention of the State authorities in the land of their origin. When the conflict with Parliament began, the rights and immunities claimed by the American colonies, were not matters of statute and charter. The prescriptive right, which is founded in long-established custom and usage, rather than in positive enactment, was the ground of resistance to the encroachments of the Provincial Executive. When James Otis, in pleading against the "Writs of Assistance," said, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," he stated a great political principle; he indicated the great palladium of popular liberty; but deeper than that principle, in the hearts of the colonists, lay the sense of uneasiness at the prospect of having the privileges of one hundred and fifty years in any way compromised, disturbed, or imperilled. This was the spirit of Franklin, in his "Hints for a Reply to the Protest of the Lords against the Repeal of the Stamp Act:" "I will freely spend nineteen shillings in the pound," said he, "to defend my right of giving or refusing the other shilling; and, after all, if I cannot defend that right, I can retire cheerfully with my little family into the boundless woods of America, which are sure to afford freedom and subsistence to any man who can bait a hook or pull a trigger." This was the spirit of Otis when he complained that Parliament regarded the British colonies in America rather as "a parcel of small, insignificant conquered islands, than as very extensive settlement on the continent," with a future of unlimited development in store. This, too, was the spirit of Hawley, when, with a boldness outstripping that of Otis himself, he said, "The Parliament of Great Britain has no right to legislate for us." The latter sentence is memorable as being the first instance in which the power of the British Parliament was distinctly denied in a colonial legislature.