Harrison Gray Otis, an American statesman, nephew of James Otis, born in Boston, Oct. 8, 1705, died there, Oct. 28, 1S48. He graduated at Harvard college in 1783, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1780. In 1790 he was elected from Boston to the state legislature, and succeeded Fisher Ames in congress where he soon became a leader of the federal party, he served two terms in congress, and in 1801 was appointed United States district attorney for Massachusetts. Subsequently he became a member of the state legislature, and was speaker of the house from 1803 to 1805, and president of the senate from 1805 to 1811. He was chairman of the legislative committee which in 1814 reported in favor of calling a convention of the New England states at Hartford to consider the best mode of redressing the grievances inflicted on those states by the war with Great Britain. He was a leading member of that convention, and was one of the three commissioners appointed by Massachusetts to go to Washington and make a representation to the federal government. In his "Letters in Defence of the Hartford Convention" (Boston, 1824) he defended the character and intentions of that body.

In 1814 he was appointed judge of the court of common pleas of Massachusetts, which office he held till 1818, when he took his seat in the United States senate, to which the legislature had elected him in the preceding year. In 1820, in the debate on the Missouri question, he advocated with great force the restriction of the extension of slavery. In 1829 he was elected mayor of Boston, and in 1832 retired from public life. He was distinguished as a popular orator, and during his later years strongly opposed the anti-slavery movement.