An English oration
Contributors: Morison, Samuel Eliot, 1887-1976, donor
Series: Collections of the Harvard University Archives; Harvard in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; Colonial North American Project at Harvard University
Published: 1783
Language: eng
Format: Commencement address,
Number of pages: 17
Subjects: Commencements; Republicanism; Oratory; Students; Sources; History; Early works to 1800; Harvard College (1636-1780). Class of 1783; Harvard University
Description: Paper notebook containing a handwritten copy of an essay titled "An English Oration" composed by Harrison Gray Otis for the 1783 Harvard Commencement. The essay discusses the American Revolution and begins, “An Omission of the usual appeals..."
Notes: Received from S. E. Morison in 1939.

Harrison Gray Otis (1765-1848), a United States senator and mayor of Boston, was born in Boston on October 8, 1765. He received an AB from Harvard in 1783, an AM in 1786, and an LLD in 1814. He was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1786 and served in Massachusetts state government before being elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1797. He served one term, and was appointed a United States district attorney in 1801. Between 1802 and 1817, Otis again served in the state legislature, and in 1814, Otis became a judge of the Boston Court of Common Pleas. From 1817 to 1822, Otis was a United States Senator, and served as mayor of Boston from 1829 to 1831. He was a Harvard Overseer from 1810 to 1823, and a Fellow from 1823 to 1825. Otis died on October 28, 1848.