ion aristocracy. His father Peter while well off had a strong yeoman background, got on well with the local Indians and possessed, according to Bowers, a "love of liberty and human rights."
Members of their families had been leaders in community and colony-wide politics, particularly Otis's, whose father Otis, Sr. had been in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for 15 years and was its Speaker and leader of the rural popular party at the time Otis became active in colonial affairs in 1760-1761. Jefferson was associated with the interests of the Piedmont frontiersmen in Virginia, independent farmers, who were, according to Bowers, "essentially democratic, men with no real affection for England." Both men attended leading colleges, Otis Harvard and Jefferson William and Mary, where they imbibed the classics and other Brtish and Enlightenment works in political philosophy, history and literature. They were trained and practiced as lawyers.
Both men shared a strong aversion to tyranny in any form. In 1764, Otis said "tyranny of all kinds is to be abhorred, whether it is in the hands of one, or of the few, or of the many." In opposing the writs of assistance issued by the Crown to enforce the customs laws and to curtail smuggling in the Port of Boston in 1761, Otis said they were "the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of the Constitution that ever was found in an English law book." Otis and Jefferson shared the belief that the colonists shared what Otis called the same "rights, liberties and privileges" as other Englishmen, which were rooted, according to Otis, in "the law of God and nature, . . . the common law, and . . . acts of parliament." Both men agreed, but Jefferson was to expound at greater length, according to Mapp, that "legitimate authority to rule was derived from the consent of the governed." The concepts of the natural rights of man,...