Old State House

Beneath the balcony on the eastern facade, the Governor's Council chamber survives, and its present furnishings repeat the colonial ones. Below, the merchants' exchange bustled, and traders rented basement rooms for their goods. Above them worked the Governor's Council, the colonial assembly, and the highest court. After the Revolution, the state government moved in here, and when it relocated to Beacon Hill, the building acquired the name Old State House.

In February seventeen sixty-one, James Otis went up to the room on the second floor of this building. Until recently, he had served as the Crown's Advocate General at the Vice-Admiralty Court, an institution that heard trade and customs cases. When he was required to defend writs of assistance, Otis gave up his office and the salary attached to it. Now he represented Boston merchants and sought to prevent customs officers from entering their homes and warehouses under a single general authorization.

The building was then called the Town House. The merchants' exchange occupied the first floor, traders rented storage rooms in the basement, and above them sat the Governor's Council, the legislature, and the colony's highest court. That is why the dispute over how to search for contraband in Boston shops was decided here: the judges sat one floor above the people whose property they allowed to be searched.

The death of King George II set the matter in motion. Earlier writs remained valid only for six months after a monarch's death, and customs officials requested new ones. Such a document was called a writ of assistance. It specified neither a particular house nor goods nor evidence of a violation. Its holder could bring a constable, enter a house, shop, cellar, or warehouse during the day, break down a door if resisted, and seize goods found there. There was no need to apply separately to a judge before each search.

Before five judges led by Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson, Otis did not deny the right to search for contraband altogether. He demanded a different procedure: name the place and the goods sought, present grounds for suspicion, and obtain an individual warrant. A general document, he said, placed the inviolability of every house at the discretion of any minor official. For Otis, this was also a break with his own earlier service: he explained to the court why the Crown's advocate had refused to defend an instrument of the Crown.

The judges did not issue a decision at once. Hutchinson requested information on how such writs were used in England. While the correspondence was under way, Bostonians elected Otis as their representative in the legislature in May: giving up a paid office had brought him into public politics. In November, the court heard the case again and unanimously supported the customs service. On December second, official Charles Paxton received the first new writ. The merchants lost, and customs officers continued to use general search authorizations.

Twenty-five-year-old lawyer John Adams sat in the room, hurriedly writing down the arguments of both sides. Almost sixty years later, he called Otis's speech the moment when “independence was born” here. This is a later, noticeably embellished recollection, not a transcript: the immediate outcome was a victory for the customs service. Yet it was Adams's notes that preserved the dispute in which, here for the first time, royal law was set against a limit that, in Otis's view, even Parliament should not cross.

The Governor's Council chamber is still on the second floor, behind the eastern facade and balcony; its present furnishings reproduce those that were here in the seventeen sixties. After the Revolution, the Massachusetts state government moved into the building. It moved to the new Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill in January seventeen ninety-eight—then the former Town House became the Old State House.