I hope the eyes of the people will be opened, that they will see how easy it is for some designing, wicked men to spread false reports, raise suspicions and jealousies in the minds of the populace and enrage them against the innocent. Dut if [they are] guilty, this is not the way to proceed. The laws of our country arc open to punish those who have oRended. This destroying all peace and order of the community— all will feel its effects . And I hope all will see how easily the people may be deluded, enflamed, and carried away with madness against an innocent man.

I pray GOD give us Better hearts!

What had caused the riot? Resistance to the Stamp Act had genet ally been violent; and individuals, especially the would-be stamp distributors, had commonly been attacked. Hut no one in America had been as deliberately and savagely assaulted as Hutchinson, though he had not been appointed a stamp master and though, as he said, he had opposed the Stamp Act. What was the meaning and what would be the ultimate effect of the attack?

On July fourth, 1776, almost eleven stormy years after the sack of his mansion, Thomas Hutchinson, by now the exiled Loyalist governor of Massachusetts, was awarded an honorary doctorate of civil laws by Oxford University. “Probably no distinction which Hutchinson ever attained was more valued by him,” his nineteenth-century biographer wrote; certainly none so fittingly symbolizes the tragedy of his life. For he was honored as an American- the most distinguished as well as the most loyal colonialborn official of his time. Provincial assemblyman, speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, councillor, lieutenant governor, chief justice, governor, he had gone through the entire course of public offices and of official honors, and he was in addition America’s most accomplished historian. But to the people who on the day of Hutchinson’s award proclaimed their nation’s independence, he was one of the most hated men on earth—more hated than Lord North, more hated than George in (both of whom, it was believed, he had secretly

The distrust and the animosity Thomas Hutchinson inspired surpass any ordinary bounds. The reactions he stirred are morbid, pathological, paranoiac in their intensity.

John Adams was transfixed by him: for fifteen years suspicion, fear, and hatred of Hutchinson were ruling passions. He first recorded his suspicions of Hutchinson in 1760, when he was twenty-five. Five years later he poured out the first of a series of rhetorical cascades against Hutchinson’s “very ambitious and avaricious disposition,” condemned his taking “four of the most important offices in the province into his own hands,” and spoke with bitter ness of his secret network of officeholding kin who together created the “amazing ascendency of one family, foundation sufficient on which to erect a tyranny.” Hutchinson, he said, had not only “monopolized almost all the power of the government to himself and his family” but “has been endeavoring to procure more, both on this side and the other side of the Atlantic.” He was a “courtier,” Adams said, slyly manipulating “the passions and prejudices, the follies and vices of great men in order to obtain their smiles, esteem, and patronage and consequently their favors and preferments”; he was a dissembler, a man of a thousand disguises, hungry for power, for office, and for gain: from him “the liberties of this country [have] more to fear … than from any other man, nay from all other men in the world.” A decade later Adams’ hatred of Hutchinson had become obsessive: “the mazy windings of Hutchinson’s heart and the serpentine wiles of his head,” he wrote, were primary sources of the Anglo-American conflict.

Adams’ opinions, in this case as in so many others, were extreme, but in differing degrees they were widely shared. Josiah Quincy, Jr., convinced “that all the measures against America were planned and pushed on by Bernard and Hutchinson,” went to England in the winter of 1774, with the support of the provincial leadership, in large part to counteract the malevolent influence of Hutchinson and other Tories on administration policy. Samuel Adams, whose political life was formed in struggles with Hutchinson, denied that Hutchinson had true greatness even in evil,for while he was as mad with ambition and lust for power as Caesar, he lacked the c:ourage and intrepidity needed to reduce a free people to slavery. And Mercy Otis Warren in her histoiy of the Revolution devoted page after page to the pernicious influence of that “dark, intriguing, insinuating, haughty, and ambitious” man—so diligent a student of “the intricacies of Machiavellian policy,” so subtle a solicitor of popular support, so hypocritical in his sanctity and ruthless in his lust for power—and to the fatal consequences of “his pernicious administration.”

A “tool of tyrants,” a “damn’d

His official patrons distrusted him. Governor Thomas Pownall, who in 1757 recommended Hutchinson’s appointment to the lieutenant governorship in a letter of elaborate praise—“He has (and deserves, I will pawn my credit and honor upon it) universally the best character of any man in this continent, both as to his head and heart”—left Massachusetts three years later enraged at the conduct of his associate. Both Sir Francis Bernard, who succeeded Pownall as governor in 1760 and who served as Hutchinson’s personal agent in London in 1769-1771, and Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies during the same years, who appointed Hutchinson to the governorship, disapproved of his conduct at several points. F.ven Hillsborough’s benign successor, Lord Dartmouth, the soul of Christian charity, who was extremely well disposed to Hutchinson and eventually became a friend of his, came to believe that Hutchinson had blundered badly as governor and in a bizarre episode attempted, at great cost to his official dignity as secretary of state, to correct what he considered to be Hutchinson’s most costly error. And no less an authority than Lord North, according to the contemporary annalist George Chalmers, believed that Hutchinson, through his indiscretions, had personally precipitated the outbreak of the Revolution.

Thus the great men of the day; but what of more ordinary opinion? One of the most remarkable documents of the age survives to testify. Through the decade that followed the Stamp Act a Boston shopkeeper with the unlikely name of Harbottle Dorr, unknown to history except for a passing involvement with the Sons of Liberty, carefully collected the leading Boston newspapers as they were published and preserved them for posterity in four huge volumes. Not only collected them but, “at my shop amidst my business &c., when I had not leisure to be exact,” annotated them, elaborately, with pungent personal comments on the news of the day and with cross-references in his own pagination, backward and forward to documents supporting or refuting the charges printed in the newspaper columns. And more than that: Dorr bound into the volumes the most important pamphlets of the time and then in conclusion indexed it all, volume by volume, with analytical categories that reveal as clearly as any document of the time the compelling concerns of an ordinary man.

Hutchinson is among the first of these concerns. Dorr’s index and commentaries catalogue Hutchinson’s errors, correct his misstatements, and warn at every turn of his evil intentions. A columnist’s claim that the colonies “had no rights of our own” is

There were some, of course, who disagreed. Hulchinson’s protégé, in-law, and colleague Peter Oliver, in his “Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion,” wrote a lyric apostrophe to Hutchinson’s virtues, which he summarized as “an acumen of genius united with a solidity of judgment and great regularity of manners”—qualities, he pointed out, that nature only sparingly confers. Some who knew Hutchinson only by reputation were amazed when they actually met him. The Bostonians, William Eden wrote in 1774, shortly after Hutchinson arrived in England, “thought Hutchinson a tyrant—I met him on Thursday last, at the Attorney General’s—they might as well have taken a lamb for a tiger.” But these were minority opinions. The feeling was widespread among well-informed Americans that Thomas Hutchinson had betrayed his country; that for sordid, selfish reasons he had accepted and abetted —even stimulated—oppressive measures against the colonies; that he had supported them even in the face of a threat of armed resistance; and that in this sense his personal actions lay at the heart of the Revolution. So it was said, again and again. Was it true?

It is hard to imagine a man less disposed by background or heritage to betray his countrymen than Thomas Hutchinson. His family had helped to found New England, and they had prospered with its growth. Until Thomas only one of the family had been famous: the notorious seventeenth-century Anne, who had refused to adjust her singular convictions to the will of the community, for which she had been banished, to die in exile. But the family’s main interest had never been hers. The Hutchinsons had been tradesmen in London before the Puritan migration; in New England they became merchants and remained merchants, with remarkable consistency, generation after generation. In the course of a century and a half they produced, in the stem line of the family, not a single physician, not a single lawyer, and not a single teacher or minister. The entire clan devoted itself to developing its property and the network

He was born in Boston in 1711. His father, Colonel Thomas Hutchinson, had risen somewhat, though not greatly, beyond the level of his two prosperous merchantshipowner relatives, Elisha and Eliakim. The colonel served on the provincial Council for over twenty years, donated the building for a Latin grammar school (which his son would attend), and improved into provincial magnificence the imposing town house bequeathed to him by a widowed aunt. The colonel’s marriage fitted perfectly the pattern of his classically bourgeois existence. His wife, Sarah Foster, ten years his senior, was the daughter of John Foster, the Boston merchant to whom he had been apprenticed in trade, of status identical to the Hutchinson family’s, who engaged in the same kinds of trade as they did and to whom, by force of the remarkable endogamy that characterizes the family history, Colonel Thomas became triply related by other marriages between the two families.

Colonel Thomas set the pattern for young Thomas’ life. He was industrious, charitable, unaffected, unworldly, and clannish. A strait-laced, pious provincial, he read the Scriptures to his family mornings and evenings and devoted himself to trade and to the welfare of his kin and community. For over thirty years, his son later recorded, Colonel Thomas “kept a table on Saturdays with a salt fish or bacalao [codfish] dinner.” To this unpretentious feast he regularly invited only four close friends, all of them merchants, two of them relatives; only “now and then,” his son recalled, was a clergyman added to the group.

For young Thomas, the future governor, there was no break in the continuity of family and community life. He entered Harvard at the age of twelve, where he developed not so much the intellectual interests that later became important to him as his ability and resources in trade. At the time he entered college, he recalled a half century later, his father undertook his proper education by presenting him with “two or three quintals of fish.” From this humble capital he managed to build, by “adventuring to sea” through his college years, a fund of £4-500 sterling, which, combined with an inheritance from his father, became a fortune, by provincial standards, by the time of the Revolution: in cash fifteen times his original capital, and in real estate eight houses, including the Boston mansion he had inherited, two wharves and a variety of lots and shop properties in Boston, and in suburban Milton a country house universally admired for its simple beauty and splendid setting and a hundred acres of choice land.

Additional property in cash and real estate came to

Four years later, at the age of twenty-six, Hutchinson entered politics. He was never thereafter out of it, and he maintained an altogether consistent policy in defense of what, until the great issues of the 1760’s intervened, were widely considered to be the basic interests of the colony. As representative of Boston to the Massachusetts House from 1737 to 1749 (with the exception of a single year) and a councillor for the succeeding seventeen years, he distinguished himself by his effective defense of a hard-money policy and by his equally determined defense of the territorial integrity of Massachusetts and of its chartered rights. So convinced was the community of Hutchinson’s “disinterestedness and integrity,” Pownall reported in 1757, that even those who most sharply disagreed with him continued to respect him, even to revere him. In the end Hutchinson’s views on the money question prevailed, in part because of the shrewd use that Massachusetts, led by Hutchinson, was able to make of the specie it received from the English government as repayment for its contribution to the war against France; and in part because when in 1741 the issue developed into a crisis that threatened violence, Governor Jonathan Belcher had seized the initiative and stamped out the incipient rebellion by force. There was no limit, Belcher wrote Hutchinson in a portentous letter of 1741, to what political fanatics would do; they would even defy Parliament, for the common people were told by their leaders that they were out of the reach of the government of England, and the Assembly was made to think they were as big as the Parliament of Great Britain. “They are grown so brassy and hardy as to be now combining in a body to raise a rebellion. … I have this day sent the sheriff and his officers to apprehend some of the heads of the conspirators, so you see we are becoming ripe for a smarter

In 1740 Hutchinson was sent by the colony to England to plead the case of certain Massachusetts landowners whose property had fallen to New Hampshire in a Crown ruling on the colony’s boundary, and he negotiated repeatedly, almost annually, with the border Indians in the interest of his native colony, managed the province’s lottery, supervised the financing of the Louisbourg expedition of 1745, dealt with other colonies on joint military efforts, and adjudicated boundary disputes with Connecticut and Rhode Island.

It is hard to see what more he could have done to serve his countrymen or how, as a leader of the establishment in trade and politics, he could have been more enlightened.

Yet in the end his services were forgotten and he was cursed as a traitor in the land of his birth—cursed not merely by the wild men, the alarmists, the political paranoids, and the professional agitators, but by some of the most stable, sensible people of the time, many of whom knew him personally. There was, they said, some deep flaw in his character, some perversion of personality, some profound “malignancy of heart,” that had turned his patriotism into treason and led him to sacrifice the general good for the most sordid, selfish gain.

What do we know of the personality of Thomas Hutchinson, his character, his style and sensibility? Surprisingly little. Of all the people who worked with him, struggled against him, cursed and denounced him, not one left a sketch of his character or even of his appearance more detailed or perceptive than James Otis’ remark that he was “a tall, slender, fair-complexioned, fair-spoken, ‘very good gentleman.’ ” John Adams, who wrote voluminously about him and was capable, beyond any other American of the eighteenth century, of casting a character, left polemics but no account of his person. Only one authentic portrait of Hutchinson exists, painted in London when Hutchinson was thirty. It is superficial but incidentally revealing. It shows a person dressed in utmost simplicity, slim in form, with a narrow face and undistinguished features. The lips are full but slightly compressed and pursed. There is a wisp of a smile, but no real attempt at expression. The overall effect is that of constraint, simplicity, and an almost total lack of emphasis, flair, or style.

It is not much to go on, but it is suggestive. For his prose conveys the same qualities. He wrote easily, abundantly, and logically. But the style is not only unaffected and unadorned in the extreme, devoid of images, figures of speech, thin even in adjectives, but so lacking in emphasis, so unpunctuated, so still , as to seem at times inarticulate. The same could be said of almost every expression of Hutchinson’s personality. He was by instinct political, not philosophical; inductive, not deductive; he sought to succeed in the world he knew, not transform it. At least as to his own career, he once wrote, he felt himself to be what he

He rarely wrote an important letter only once. Drafts, notes, and revisions of letters abound in his papers; in them one can trace successive alterations and excisions that soften the edge of his original thought. Richard Jackson was one of his most intimate correspondents; he was the only person, in England at least, to whom, for a brief period, Hutchinson expressed his more or less unqualified opinions. Yet in 1762, when affairs were in fact placid in Massachusetts, he carefully removed from a letter to Jackson the sentence “We have violent parties in our little mock Parliament, and sometimes the public interest gives way to private piques and prejudices, as well as with you.” Whole letters on important topics are drafted, redrafted, and then if the sentiment is found still to be injudicious, or likely to be thought so, left in draft and filed away with the notation “not sent.”

In all ways he was cautious and temperate. He permitted himself no ostentation in clothes. A laced coat, he said, was “too gay for me”; he preferred “a grave, genteel waistcoat,” for, he wrote, he “would not be singular.” As governor he had hoped to make do with his father’s old carriage, but his friends told him his station required a more fashionable one. He agreed, then wrote his agents in England to get him one—secondhand, at a substantial saving: “it can’t be too plain if neat and light,” he wrote. None of this was senseless penny-pinching or dour prudery, and he was no misanthrope. He had no objection to stage plays, banned by the General Court of Massachusetts; he collected statuary (in cheap reproductions); and he hung in his hall a variety of paintings and fashionable prints, among them Hogarth’s “Marriage àla Mode” series, in “rich frames and glass.”

In religion too he was rational, circumspect, and cool. He honored his family’s

A true religious life to Hutchinson meant simply the worship of God and rectitude. He judged the practice of religion by its results in human terms: “The longer I live the less stress I lay upon the modes and forms in religion, and do not love a good man the less because he and I are not just of the same way of thinking.” He did not think that integrity and virtue ultimately depended on a belief in the supernatural; such a belief, he felt, as often bred stupid superstition and cruel bigotry as it did decency, tolerance, and justice in human dealings.

Deeply bred—locked tight—in the culture of an intensely Protestant, mercantile province of the British world and heir to its establishment, he felt no elemental discontent, no romantic aspirations. He sought no conquests in a larger world but steady gains in the one he knew. Like his ancestors before him, he was an accumulator, a slow, relentless acquisitor, and he remained such even after his formal retirement from business in the early 1760’s. But though the desire for gain was an essential part of his nature, he was never crudely avaricious—he was too intelligent and too much a neo-Puritan ascetic for that. His lifelong search for profits, like his quest for power and influence and status, was never ruthless and never flamboyant, and it was deeply conservative in that it presumed the structure of life as it was. Like so many ambitious and modestly creative people, he needed a stable world within which to work, a hierarchy to ascend, and a formal, external calibration by which to measure where he was.

His correspondence radiates respect for status and an instinct for small passages through the complexities of the world. So he wrote the son of an earl who sought his daughter Peggy’s hand that such a marriage would do “the greatest honor to me and my family,” but “it cannot be approved of by

Sensitively attuned to a world of status, bland, constrained, realistic, unromantic, ambitious, and acquisitive, he was, for all his hatred of religious zeal, the Puritan manqué. For he retained the self-discipline and seriousness of the colony’s stern founders and something of their asceticism; but he lacked their passion, their transcendent vision, and above all their inner certainty.

For he was never fully confident of his abilities, and weaknesses of health, to some extent perhaps hereditary, added to his uncertainties. Never very robust, in April, 1767, well before the major crisis of his career had developed, he suffered what appears to have been a nervous breakdown—he was, as he put it, “paralytic” for six or seven weeks—and only gradually regained his health. He was never thereafter free of worry, about himself as well as about the world. Night after night as governor he lay awake struggling to find the proper path for the authority he represented, worrying whether he had the wisdom and the physical and psychic strength to guide the colony to peace. Repeatedly, in the ordeals of the seventies, his energy ebbed, his spirits flagged, and he hovered at the edge of collapse.

His refuge in the increasing turmoil of his life remained what it had always been, his family. He was deeply affectionate with those closest to him and profoundly involved with their lives. However convenient and inevitable his marriage to Margaret Sanford may have been, it proved to be a relationship of intense intimacy. They spent in all eighteen years together, and she bore him twelve children. Such was his attachment to her, he later wrote, “that she appeared in body and mind something more than human.” Her death after childbirth in 1754 was

The family group—five children had survived infancy- was extraordinarily close; the force of cohesion that bound them fits no ordinary description. It was not merely that they lived together harmoniously until the older children married; not merely that as adults they gathered to watch together the ship carrying one of them overseas until it passed over the horizon; nor that their family letters over a period of almost fifty years express continuing affection, intimacy, and trust. More than that: they could not bear to break away and sought to keep the group intact, to tighten the bonds, even in the centrifuge of marriage.

At the height of the family’s prosperity, in the early i77o’s, the extent of endogamy, already visible in the Foster connection in the previous generation, had become a public phenomenon. For the fact was undeniable that by successive intermarriages the Hutchinsons had become a large and tight-knit tribe with an extraordinary accumulation of high offices.

The genealogy is important. Three family groups—the Sanfords, the Hutchinsons, and the Olivers—were involved. Margaret Sanford, Thomas Hutchinson’s wife (distantly related to him by birth), was the second of three sisters. The older sister, Mary, married Andrew Oliver, who became secretary of Massachusetts when Hutchinson became lieutenant governor, and lieutenant governor when Hutchinson became governor. But that is only the start of the relationships between the Oliver and Hutchinson families. In the year of Hutchinson’s accession to the governorship and Oliver’s to the lieutenant governorship, their children—Hutchinson’s eldest son, Thomas, Jr., and Oliver’s daughter Sarah—married. But these two were already related in their own generation, for in the previous year, 1770, another Hutchinson child, Sarah, had married an Oliver, Dr. Peter Oliver, Jr., Andrew’s nephew. And then to conclude the series, the families were related yet again in 1772, when a third Hutchinson child, Elisha, married Mary Oliver Watson, Peter Oliver, Sr.’s, granddaughter. And political relationships kept pace with the development of kinship ties. Andrew Oliver’s brother Peter—brother, that is, of the lieutenant governor and father-in-law of one of the governor’s children—had been associate justice of the superior court since 1756 and became chief justice when Hutchinson resigned that post to assume the governorship. Thus all of the three Hutchinson children who married, married Olivers, and they did so during the first three years of Hutchinson’s governorship. And thus, too, three brothers and brothers-in-law occupied simultaneously in the 177° s the governorship, the lieutenant governorship, and the chief justiceship of Massachusetts. No one but a Hutchinson or an Oliver had been lieutenant

What explanation there might be for such extraordinary inbreeding is a question that eludes the historian’s grasp as it did contemporaries’. But its effects cannot be doubted. It created a family situation of maximum reinforcement for Hutchinson, upon which he relied heavily in the great ordeal he faced. But at the same time it helped isolate him from the community at large and intensified his clashes with other, competing family groups, which, like the Otises and the Adamses, reacted bitterly to the exclusiveness of Hutchinson’s family ties. More important, it resulted in an immediate environment of thoroughly like-minded people who would support him in his views without criticism or serious discussion. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated, for nothing in Hutchinson’s own range of sensibilities disposed him to understand or equipped him to deal with the new currents that were moving Anglo-American politics in the 1760’s.

Somehow, in ways he did not understand, the world had greatly changed. While in formal terms he had reached a point of eminence close to his highest aspirations, he had also become the target of a political opposition more passionate, less rational, and less manageable than anything he had known before. From time to time, even in the years before the Stamp Act, it occurred to him that he was in the midst of a revolution that would destroy the British Empire and the structure of public life as he had known it. But he dismissed such fears as irrational and hence groundless. The colonists, he confidently informed alarmists in the late fifties, “must be stark blind if they could not see that an independence upon Great Britain must prove their ruin, and therefore they would not aim at it for centuries to come.” But the problem of what seemed to be irrational opposition to constituted authority would not disappear, nor would the personal animosity that accounted for the destruction of his property. The political opposition was in its essential characteristics new, and Hutchinson was to be its victim.

Until 1757 Hutchinson had been one of those establishment figures who knew how to find their way successfully through the paths of factional intrigue. As a young man he had had Governor Belcher’s favor, and in 1740 Hutchinson had gravitated to Belcher’s successor, the ambitious and well-connected English lawyer William Shirley. For almost two decades thereafter Hutchinson had remained a leader of Governor Shirley’s unusually stable political coalition.

Governor Thomas Pownall, who succeeded Shirley as governor in 1757, elevated Hutchinson to the lieutenant governorship, but he was a man with whom Hutchinson would struggle, directly or indirectly, for the rest of his life.

Pownall’s administration was a brief interlude between the long, late-colonial era of William Shirley, which had nourished the young Thomas Hutchinson’s success in trade and politics, and the disastrous decade of Sir Francis Bernard, in which Hutchinson’s failure began; but though brief it was a critical interlude. For in these

The new governor, Francis Bernard, was the ideal type of the patronage appointee in the first British Empire. A well-educated barrister whose only administrative or political office in England had been the recordershipof the town of Boston in Lincolnshire, he had practiced law until the financial needs of his ten children drove him to seek more lucrative employment in the colonies. Through the patronage of his wife’s influential uncle, Viscount Barrington, he was appointed to the governorship of New Jersey in 1758 and then, feeling socially and culturally isolated there and seeking a better-paying position, managed to have himself transferred, at the age of fifty, to Massachusetts. He was a decent man who had simple, uncomplicated desires: peace and quiet, the respect of those he ruled, some comradeship in literary matters, appointments for his six sons, and a substantial income—from salary, from fees, and from lucrative investments. As far as he knew, the prospects in Massachusetts were excellent. “I am assured,” he wrote shortly before he arrived in Boston, “that I may depend upon a quiet and easy administration.” True, he had heard from Pownall the discouraging news (along with accounts of investment opportunities in northern New England land) that the total income of the Massachusetts governor, from salary and “all advantages and contingencies,” was only £1,200 sterling; but he thought he could live more cheaply in Boston than in many other places, and in addition he would have far better opportunities for educating and providing jobs for his children there than he had had in Perth Amboy. Moreover, in Boston, “perhaps the most polished and scientific town in America,” he was sure he would find the “refined conversation and the amusements that arise from letters, arts, and sciences … many very conversable men, tolerable music, and other amusements to which I had bid adieu not without regret.” Finally, he had heard that the Massachusetts governor had (in the fortress to which he would repeatedly flee in the years to come) “a very pretty place to retire to, a pleasant apartment in Castle William, which stands in an island about three miles from the town at the entrance of the Bay.”