Few people remember the name Thomas Hutchinson today, but he was once the most hated man in America. And, if Bernard Bailyn, one of the most distinguished historians of revolutionary America, is to be believed, he is also one of the most misunderstood and wrongfully maligned men in American history. Several notable pieces seek to present the story of the American Revolution from the British perspective (Piers Mackesy’s “The War for America” and Christopher Hibbert’s “Redcoats and Rebels” are two good examples), but none have succeeded as well as “The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson,” which casts light on a now largely forgotten historical figure and brings an immediacy to the events of Boston from 1765 to 1774 that is without parallel.
Hutchinson was one of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s leading native sons. His family had been in the colony for over a century; he had been raised and educated in Massachusetts and spent nearly his entire adult life in public service, during which time he earned a strong reputation for honesty and integrity. He served as chief justice and lieutenant governor and then governor during the most tumultuous years in colonial history. According to Bailyn, he tried vigorously and sincerely to steer the colony successfully through the dangerous political shoals of the Stamp Act, Boston Massacre, Suffolk Resolves , Boston Tea Party in the attempt to avoid what he believed would be “the most unnatural, the most unnecessary war” against their British countrymen.
Hutchinson believed that a rebellion in Massachusetts was being fomented deliberately by a small clique of intriguers with selfish motives hiding behind righteous but insincere slogans of liberty and freedom. He maintained that colonial subordination to King and Parliament was natural and proper – indeed, necessary – and firmly believed that the vast majority of his fellow New Englanders would agree with him if they would just listen to reason. The core tenets of his argument were: 1) some abridgement of natural rights is necessary in civil society; 2) there must be some final, unqualified, absolute and unitary authority in every government and in England it was Parliament; 3) as much as it may be desirable, direct colonial representation in a Parliament sitting 3,000 miles away was simply an impossibility; 4) the American colonies could only survive with a powerful protector, and Great Britain was the most powerful and benevolent of possible protectors; and 5) the current colonial charter had worked well for over century – there were thus no structural quick fixes for the challenges facing colonial management, only “imagination, flexibility, and political skill” were required to succeed.
Hutchinson never wavered from these central beliefs and waited in long frustration for his countrymen to see the inescapable and undeniable truth of his position. But it would never come – and he would never understand why. Bailyn writes how Hutchinson experienced the same defeated cycle in each political crisis he faced, from the early days of the Stamp Act, which he had opposed, to his tireless attempts to rescue his reputation and honor while living in bitter political exile in England: “…from high hopes and eager expectations to disillusionment, a search for understanding, bewilderment, and finally despair.” It reminded me of Jeffery Race’s phenomenal book on the communist insurgency in South Vietnam in the early 1960s, “War Comes to Long An.” When asked why the peasants in his district sided with the Vietcong if, as he maintained, they had it so well under the Saigon regime, the local governor shook his head in dumbfounded frustration and answered: “That is something that I have never been able to figure out.”
If Hutchinson believed that the nascent rebellion was the work of a nefarious cabal, the widely held opinion across Massachusetts was that Hutchinson himself was the primary agent in a conspiracy to mislead Parliament into enslaving the colonists so he could fleece them for his personal gain. The governor never put much stock in the rumors assigned to his ill-intent because he knew they were not true and he simply couldn’t believe that reasonable men would pay them any mind.
Two events, more than any other, consolidated the hostile domestic opinion against Hutchinson and ultimately doomed his political career in Massachusetts. First, in January 1773, Hutchinson called the Massachusetts assembly to an emergency session and presented it with a direct challenge via a speech on the fundamental principles of the Anglo-American relationship. It was a profound miscalculation, according to Bailyn. The governor had believed that a complete and open airing of the basic issues would be calamitous for the supposed minority, extremist opposition. The reverse proved to be true. In the speech Hutchinson stuck to his core themes, which he had developed years ago and had adhered to unswervingly. Despite his confidence that his logical views would carry the day, his challenge to the assembly resulted in a heated back-and-forth exchange that only further isolated his position in the colony and pushed the moderates – the very men he was attempted to woe over to the loyalist cause – into the rebel camp. Worse yet, the governor’s new boss, Lord Dartmouth, disavowed the whole affair and was clearly disappointed with the behavior of his distant governor for embroiling the crown in such a public and controversial debate, which did nothing but force the assembly to express, unequivocally, the basic tenets of independence from which they could not retreat. Hutchinson felt that he was doing Parliament a favor by smoking the rebels out into the seditious open and was shocked and flummoxed to learn that his much admired superiors were displeased with his forward leaning and provocative approach.
But the coup de grace against Hutchinson came later that summer when a portion of private letters he had written to Thomas Whatley were stolen (an action abetted by Ben Franklin in London) and then made public in the colonies. It was a bombshell. When the letters arrived in Boston it was under the promise that they not be copied or published, but word quickly spread, the political effect was explosive, and the impact on Hutchinson’s career were catastrophic. Hutchinson insisted that the letters were only a select few taken entirely out of context. He insisted that his comments were more about facts on the ground and not his opinion, let alone his preferred state of affairs. However, for colonists already predisposed to hate him, the words written in private correspondence by their native born governor were shocking. Yet for many it merely confirmed what they long believed about Hutchinson: that he was conspiring to deprive the colonists of their freedom and capture all power and wealth for himself and extended family, which included the equally hated Olivers. One quote in particular was especially offensive, revealing, and highly cited: It was impossible, Hutchinson had written Whatley in the 1760s, for “a colony 3,000 miles distant from the parent state [to] enjoy all the liberties of the parent state…there must be an abridgement of what are called British liberties.”
Bailyn claims that Ben Franklin purposively generated the crisis as part of a “scapegoat” plan. That is, by exposing and destroying a few perfidious colonial agents, Hutchinson foremost among them, Anglo-American relations could be wiped clean and improved with a new set of colonial leaders. However, all Franklin succeeded in doing, the author says, was crushing once and for all Hutchinson’s life and career in Massachusetts.
One final note of praise for “The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson” is necessary. This book makes palpable the hatred and violence and brutality of revolutionary Boston. The highly principled and moral citizens we like to think of today as freedom fighting Patriots appear in these pages as bullies and thugs. As Bailyn demonstrates, they instilled terror in the hearts of innocent men – and their even more innocent and defenseless wives and children – merely for observing the laws that were rightfully established by their King and government. Two episodes are noteworthy. The first is the assault of Nathanial Rogers, Hutchinson’s crippled nephew who opposed the non-importation movement of the early 1770s. Bailyn describes how the Boston mob “…threatened him physically, smashed the windows of his house, terrorized his wife until she refused to stay at home, dumped tubs of ordure at his door,' and twice smeared his house withthe vilest filth’ (…a mixture of urine and feces).” And then, a few years later, how “John Malcom, a customs officer notorious for his temper and erratic zeal, had been tarred and feathered by an uncontrollable mob, then beaten with clubs and rope until he agreed to curse the governor as an enemy to his country, and finally carted half naked through the snow for four hours before being released, so frozen he rolled out of the cart like a log,' the flesh hanging off his backin steaks.’”
In the end, Hutchinson’s defeat was total and devastating. He spent his final years in misery, a refugee in London, a stranger in a strange land, teetering on the edge of financial and personal bankruptcy, his reputation in ruins, horrified by the short-sightedness and mean-spiritedness of the opposition and appalled at the self-absorbed, distracted, libertine ways of the ruling elite that he had worshipped from across the Atlantic all his life. It was a crushing realization to come in the wake of his personal destruction in the defense of London and Empire and everything he thought it stood for. He spent his final years pining for his native country, especially his beautiful country estate at Milton, and agonized over the fate of his family and possessions. He would watch in agony as his beloved daughter and son succumb painfully to tuberculosis before he died in June 1780, leaving the world nearly penniless, his reputation in tatters, and knowing that American independence would almost certainly be achieved.
Bailyn concludes this fascinating and illuminating biography with an encomium to his subject. It is worth quoting in full because it captures the powerful, positive force that the author ascribes to a man once hated and now forgotten, but perhaps worthy of our respect, if not admiration. “For besides being honorable to a fault, sincere, industrious, and profoundly loyal to the community of his birth, [Hutchinson] was also more tolerant and more reasonable than those who attacked him and drove him into exile. He never sought to suppress contrary opinions…Nor did his seek revenge against those who injured him. More intelligent, tolerant, experienced and perceptive – and less sanctimonious and self-righteous by far – than most of those who opposed him, he was yet overwhelmingly the loser.”
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