James Otis: The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In the excerpts from The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, Otis begins by taking a very eighteenth-century Enlightenment view of the nature of government. He asserts that the nature of man makes government necessary and that this government needs to be “an original supreme Sovereign, absolute, and uncontroulable, earthly power.” He immediately makes clear, though, that he is not advocating despotism. This power, he says, is “originally and ultimately in the people.” Thus, the “person or persons on whom the sovereignty is conferred by the people, shall incessantly consult their good.” He goes on to argue that the end of government “is manifestly the good of the whole” and that the “law of nature” is Salus populi suprema lex esto, or “Let the good of the people be the supreme law” (incidentally, the state motto of Missouri). In this way, Otis appeals to principles of natural law and natural rights, again almost a commonplace among Age of Enlightenment thinkers.

Otis extols the British constitution, referring to the political philosopher James Harrington and his prediction in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) that the British constitutional form of government would reign supreme in Europe. He then makes a clear—and what to some would have been a controversial—assertion: “Every British Subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British dominions, is by the law of God and nature, by the common law, and by act of parliament, (exclusive of all charters from the crown) entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great-Britain.” (It should be remembered the colonies were formed by charters from the Crown, and many colonists tried to assert their rights by appealing not to Parliament but to the king.)

The power to legislate, Otis says, must be placed in the hands of the people, and on this basis he calls for representation of the American colonies in the British Parliament. He cites the Latin maxim Qui sentit commodum sentire debet et onus (“He who enjoys the benefit, ought also to bear the burden”) and turns it around to argue that a people should not be required to bear a burden without enjoying a corresponding right. At the same time, Otis recognizes that Parliament might not be the best judge of what is good for the colonies. He argues, therefore, for the sovereignty of “subordinate legislatures” in the colonies by stating: “It would be impossible for the parliament to judge so well of their abilities to bear taxes, impositions on trade, and other duties and burthens, or of the local laws that might be really needful, as a legislative here.”