On Feb. 24, 1761, our first patriot lit the fuse that sparked the American Revolution. Very few people remember his name.

It was James Otis. A successful lawyer and politician in Boston, he spoke for nearly five hours before Boston’s Superior Court in opposition to the Writs of Assistance, an odious idea that would have allowed customs officials or their surrogates to break into homes, offices, attics, cellars, boats and wharves, supposedly to seek out contraband.

As John Adams later recapitulated his speech, Otis said, “Now, one of the most essential branches of English literature is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle ... and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Customs-house may enter our houses when they please; we are commandeered to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, break locks, bars and everything in their way; and whether they break through, as well as the customs-house officers. The words are, ‘it shall be malice or revenge, no man, no court can inquire.’ Bare suspicion, without oath, is sufficient.”

It was a given that Otis should lose the case because he was addressing a Crown court. That was a pyrrhic victory for the Mother Country. The writs were rarely enforced, and Otis became a hero to colonists. He alone in Boston was dubbed the Patriot.

In one of the greatest Colonial orations before the Revolution, Otis had issued a ringing rebuke to overweening central government that led to the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Adams marveled, “Then and there was the first scene and the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.”

Otis was just getting started. Elected to the Legislature in 1761, he took strong exception when colonial Gov. Bernard illegally assigned a 72-pound expense to the provincial assembly. The expense, Otis said, belonged to the governor, not the Legislature. It was a question of freedom. Otis published a 53-page pamphlet called “A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives of the Providence of Massachusetts-Bay” that became a philosophical basis for the War of Independence.

In yet another pamphlet, “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” Otis evocatively took on taxation without representation while branching into other areas that interested him:

“Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl’d hair like wool instead of Christian hair, as ’tis called by those, whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument? Can any logical inference in favour of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or short face? Nothing better can be said in favour of a trade, that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in a tyrant ... It is a clear truth, that those who barter away men’s liberty every day will soon care very little of their own.”

Others had attacked the slave trade; Otis, almost uniquely, attacked slavery itself. His ground-breaking argument was cited 60 years later in the British debate over emancipation.

Equally amazing was his support of women’s rights, no doubt influenced by his respect for his sister and best friend Mercy, who, as Mercy Otis Warren, became a fiery poet and satirical playwright on behalf of the Colonial cause and wrote a history of the Revolutionary War.

Otis was a founder of the Stamp Act Congress. So why don’t we remember him? The man had serious mental health issues. In 1771, he wandered the streets, insulted strangers, jumped out of windows. A panel for the Boston Board of Selectmen concluded that he was “A Distracted or Lunatick Person” in need of immediate custody.

Otis spent the last 12 years of his life in the care of others. According to possibly apocryphal family lore, Otis said when it came time for him to die, he wanted to be killed by lightning. On May 23, 1783, a lightning bolt threw him to the floor, dead at 58.

What would he think of events today? Here’s an educated guess.

“It’s great that there’s a woman at the head of the ticket, but her opponents will do anything in their power — legal or illegal, violent or nonviolent — to keep her from taking power. Not my idea of the democracy I championed.”

“We fought the war for our freedom against a monarch, and now we’re giving presidents the power of kings!”

“We opposed theocracy so much that we separated church and state, and we’re paying for religious schools. Really?”

So that’s how Otis might think. But what would he do?

Simple: Pray to be struck by lightning.

Jim Kaplan of Northampton is a bridge columnist and author of the pamphlet “First Patriot: The Extraordinary Life of James Otis.” He can be reached at jkaplan105@gmail.com.