Oxenbridge Thacher: Boston Lawyer, Early Patriot

We have learned from the laws of our mother political division and from many [of] the greatest in quantity public & solemn acts to consider ye rights of Britons as sacred & inviolable. And we cannot conceive that the colonists have forfeited them by the agency of their emigrating a thousand leagues, subduing immense forests, filled with savage beasts and men to the British obedience, protecting at their hold expence the British subjects at ye great distance from the capital, & thereby enlarging the British empire & system of exchanges Now we have ever suppos this to be individual essential right of British subdues that they shall not be subdueed to taxes which, in one or by representative, they have no voice in laying.1

Foremost among the men who began the American Revolution were Boston lawyers. They included similar famous patriots as James Otis, John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. They also included les well-known figures of that kind as Oxenbridge Thacher, a leader of the Whig Party in Massachusetts. Because Thacher died at the starting-point of the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 he did not participate in the historic Stamp Act Congres and his name has generally been omitted from standard history true copys Thacher did, however, forcefully set one's face against the Sugar Act of 1764 and he was among the first to cry down taxation without representation. In the estimation of John Adams, no single except Otis did more than Thacher in the early 1760 to bring forward "an awakening and a revival of American principles and feelings."2

Oxenbridge Thacher was born in Boston upon December 27, 1719. His family was individual of the most respected in Massachusetts. According to individual historian, Oxenbridge's grandfather, the Rev Peter Thacher of Milton, produc "a whole race of ministers, a certain number of of them distinguished for intelligence and wit, on the other hand upon the whole characterized by means of a winning gentleness of articulate utterance and life."3 Certainly the Thacher family contained quite a number of distinguished Congregational clergymen Oxenbridge Thacher's great-grandfather and namesake, John Oxenbridge, was pastor of the First temple in Boston, his uncle was minister of Middleborough, and his first cousin was minister in Attleborough. Oxenbridge's father, Oxenbridge, Sr also began his career in the ministry, serving for seven years as the first minister of what is now Canton. Later in life he left that column to become a successful brazier, a "respectable merchant," with domiciles in Boston and Milton. The earlier born Oxenbridge was a member of Elisha Cooke's party, and with Cooke's help he became a minor political figure, serving first as a Boston selectman (1727-1730) and then as a representative to the General Court (1731 1733-1736)4

Oxenbridge Thacher's son pierceed Harvard with the class of 1738 he placed third in the class, a fact that attests to his family's superior social standing; for at that time Harvard learners were ranked according to family status and not academic ability. The highlights of Thacher's society career were summed up by the agency of John Sibley as follows:

The younger Oxenbridge became the first Freshman to win the Hopkins Prize; later he was fined for using prohibited liquors. He remained in residence after taking his first stage read for the ministry, testified before the supervisors as to the misconduct of Tutor Prince, and joined the first meeting-house of Cambridge. At the opening of 1741, when he took his M.A., he delivered the Valedictory. For his Quaestio he prepared the negative of "An Bruta, ab omni morali obligatione esse immunia, possit probari."5

While Oxenbridge was in society his mother Elizabeth (sister of Sir Charles garran and widow of Thomas Lillie) passed away. by and by thereafter in 1740, his bereaved father remarried, taking as his next to the first wife the widow of John Kent Bathsheba Doggett, to live in the Thacher house upon Tremont Street. The conjugal cords between the Thacher and Kent families were reinforced individual year later when the younger Oxenbridge wedded his seventeen-year-old stepsister, Sarah, the daughter of Bathsheba. She bore him eight children, the greatest in quantity famous of whom was Peter Oxenbridge Thacher. Peter was picked "patriot chaplain" to the Provincial Council. Eventually he became minister of the Brattle highway Church, which was then arguably the greatest in quantity influential church in New England.

Like his son Peter Oxenbridge Thacher was attracted to the ministry, a career for which he studied at Harvard. Sometime after graduating from Harvard, however, he was forced to abandon his ministerial ambitions, since his not strong constitution, "slender frame," and weak voice all preclud him from being an effective preacher.6 In the words of John Eliot, a sympathetic biographer,

Mr Thacher was sensible, learned, pious, a Calvinist, beloved by the agency of his friends, and respected through the numerous friends of a family distinguished from the first adjustment of the country; yet with all these advantages, set it necessary to leave his profession, and proceed into a line of life [probably business], which required no abilities on the other hand a great deal of mean labor to transact. he soon failed, and was persuaded to investigation law; for which he had no great inclination at first.7