These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

“The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black,” James Otis Jr. insisted, in a searing tract called Rights of the British Colonists, Asserted, published in 1764, only months after he had rejoiced about the growth of Britain’s empire. Brilliant and unstable, Otis would later lose his mind (before his death in 1783, when he was struck by lightning, he had taken to running naked through the streets). But in the 1760s, he, better than any of his contemporaries, saw the logical extension of arguments about natural rights. He found it absurd to suggest that it could be “right to enslave a man because he is black” or because he has “short curl’d hair like wool.” Slavery, Otis insisted, “is the most shocking violation of the law of nature,” and a source of political contamination, too. “Those who every day barter away other men’s liberty, will soon care little for their own,” he warned.