Thomas Hutchinson

American politician and historian

• Born: September 9, 1711
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: June 3, 1780
• Place of death: London, England

As the last civilian to serve as royal governor of Massachusetts, Hutchinson had the tragic experience of watching the union between his province and Great Britain dissolve, in spite of his strenuous efforts. He wrote a remarkably objective and thoroughly documented three-volume history of Massachusetts, from its beginning to 1774.

Early Life

Though a great-great-grandson of the brilliant Anne Hutchinson, who had been banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her unorthodox religious views, Thomas Hutchinson was a man devoid of fanaticism, religious or otherwise. Born to the large family of a prosperous Boston merchant, and connected through marriage to similarly wealthy and prudent Rhode Islanders, Hutchinson presented the perfect picture of the Puritan turned Yankee. Studious and even scholarly from childhood, he entered Harvard College at the age of twelve, completed his degree at age seventeen, and earned a master of arts degree by completing a thesis at age twenty. By that time, he had already earned several hundred pounds by trading on his own account and was part owner of a ship. His main efforts, however, were on behalf of his father’s firm, which he inherited while still in his twenties.

In 1734, Hutchinson married Margaret Sanford of Newport. Of their many children, five lived to maturity: Thomas, Elisha, William (Billy), Sarah (Sally), and Margaret (Peggy). His wife died shortly after the birth of Peggy in 1753, and Thomas Hutchinson never remarried. He remained, however, a most devoted family man, wearing himself out attending to the concerns of his children, with whom his commercial and political affairs were endlessly intertwined.

The prosperous young merchant began his political career in 1737 with election to two important posts: selectman for Boston and representative of Boston in the provincial legislature. There he quickly distinguished himself for his wide-ranging knowledge of political and commercial matters and for his patient and self-effacing industry. Though always eager to please, Hutchinson was also a man of principle, boldly defending the interests of Massachusetts in its boundary dispute with New Hampshire, and standing against any paper-money schemes that tended to defraud creditors or otherwise destabilize the currency. In 1741, Parliament dissolved a Massachusetts land bank whose creation Hutchinson had opposed. This dissolution brought about the financial ruin of the father of Samuel Adams and may partly explain the relentless and even obsessive zeal that Adams later showed for the autonomy of Massachusetts, and against the character of Hutchinson.

In 1749, Hutchinson’s years of service in the legislature were rewarded by election to the council; Massachusetts was the only royal colony in which the right of nominating councillors rested with the elected representatives rather than with the royal governor. Hutchinson’s term as councillor was followed by a series of other important offices, many held simultaneously: justice of common pleas for Suffolk County, probate judge, representative to the Albany Congress of 1754, and lieutenant governor of the province, from 1758. In all of these posts, Hutchinson acquitted himself with distinction; unfortunately, the career for which he is remarkable in American history was coincident with the rise of the American Revolution, whose progress Hutchinson, for reasons usually honorable and never contemptible, felt compelled to oppose at every step.

Life’s Work

In 1760, Thomas Hutchinson accepted a still more distinguished position, the chief justiceship for Massachusetts. In accepting the offer from the new governor, Francis Bernard, Hutchinson knew that there had been some sort of prior understanding that the position, with its fixed salary and high prestige, was to have been offered first to the elder James Otis. Hutchinson was, however, remarkably well qualified, and he had no assurance that the elder Otis would receive the appointment if he himself declined it.

What Hutchinson could not realize was that his new post would immediately cast him as the villain in a political melodrama. The French and Indian War (1754-1763) had brought forth great exertions on behalf of the colonies of British North America, but the inspiration for those exertions, William Pitt the Elder, insisted on the enforcement of the acts of trade and navigation. To assist his customs collectors in their duties, he called for the use of open-ended search warrants, called writs of assistance; far from being foreign to the English constitution, these had been used in England for many years. The younger James Otis quit his own profitable position as attorney for the Boston Court of Vice-Admiralty in protest against these writs and argued in Chief Justice Hutchinson’s court that the writs were in principle unconstitutional because they contradicted the English principle that one’s home (and by extension a merchant’s warehouse) was one’s castle, and no officer of the law could invade it without a special warrant duly sworn, showing evidence presumptive of breaking the law.

Otis’s appeal was too technical and too much restricted to the upper classes to produce a crisis at that time, but it set forth the arguments that the American colonies would use to deny to the Crown and Parliament of Great Britain sovereignty over their colonies. Otis invoked an authority higher than judges, courts, royal governors, prime ministers, or even parliaments and kings: He invoked the very spirit of the British constitution and the now-familiar doctrine of natural law, and he maintained with great vehemence that any laws or actions that violated such sacred principles must simply be nullified.

Hutchinson had absorbed the same general views of politics as Otis. He understood the principles of John Locke and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. He was also a practical man who understood something of the workings of law and justice, and it occurred to him at the very outset of the revolution that, should each colony review for itself the acts of Parliament in the light of natural law, there would be an end to the empire, for with the best will in the world, no two people could exactly agree on how natural principles should be applied to particular cases. The chief justice therefore upheld the writs of assistance and thereby ensured the enmity of the Otises. They began to point out that, besides holding several lucrative and powerful offices himself, Hutchinson had close relatives in several others, notably his brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, member of the council since 1746 and secretary of Massachusetts since 1756, and Andrew’s brother Peter, a justice of the superior court since 1756. A young, ambitious, and agitated attorney named John Adams also pointed out that Hutchinson had never formally studied or practiced law.

With the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, Chief Justice Hutchinson became the object of continual public attack. He knew all too well how little he deserved such attacks, for he was nothing if not energetic in writing letters, and he had continually warned his correspondents in England that efforts to raise Crown revenues by direct taxation in Massachusetts would bring trouble rather than money. Such was Hutchinson’s conception of his duty, however, that he never made these opinions public and was, instead, obliged to enforce in his court the very revenue acts he had tried to forestall. Worse, Andrew Oliver, somewhat less sensitive to the issue than his brother-in-law, accepted the potentially lucrative stamp agency for Massachusetts. At least it would have been lucrative had the citizenry been prepared to pay the stamp tax, but they were not. On August 15, 1765, a crowd inspired by radical speeches (and perhaps some rum) hanged Oliver, along with one of England’s prime ministers, Lord Bute, in effigy. Participants in the protest then demolished one of Oliver’s commercial properties, believing it to be the future stamp office. Finally, they barraged the secretary’s residence with stones until every window was broken and much was destroyed within. Hutchinson, never a coward, tried to disperse the mob, only to be driven back in a shower of stones himself.

Oliver prudently resigned the stamp agency, and no revenue stamps were sold between the passage of the Stamp Act and its repeal the next year. The mob sprang into renewed life, however, on August 26, attacking the homes of two customs collectors, taking special pains to destroy their records. That evening, the mob besieged the home of the chief justice himself, driving him and his family out, and either stealing or wrecking everything within. A friend rescued the manuscript of the second volume of Hutchinson’s The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1764-1828), which one of the marauders had dropped in the street. No one was ever indicted, let alone convicted, for the calculated destruction of private property in 1765, though Hutchinson much later received some compensation from the Massachusetts assembly. He received a vote of no confidence, and for the first time since the 1740’s, neither Hutchinson nor Oliver was returned to the provincial council. Nine years before the Revolutionary War began, and ten years before the Declaration of Independence, to be both a paid servant of the Crown and a friend of the people of Massachusetts was impossible.

Furthermore, while Samuel Adams’s majorities in the Boston town meeting and the Massachusetts assembly still stopped well short of denouncing the king, George III, or advocating independence, the royal law, as distinct from that of Massachusetts, was a nullity in Massachusetts. Attempts to revive it were met with swift, concerted action both in dignified resolutions drawn up in assemblies and by violence directed at any who presumed to defend the Crown’s prerogatives.

Thus, in the wake of the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, it was not the townspeople who had provoked the riot who had to stand trial but the British soldiers who had fired their weapons in self-defense. Though the particular soldiers were acquitted, Samuel Adams made so much of the event that he was able to force Hutchinson to withdraw all six hundred troops from the city of Boston and keep them in barracks at Castle William. By this time, Hutchinson was acting governor, for Francis Bernard had fled to England, never to return. In 1771, Hutchinson accepted the governorship in his own right, though with reluctance and misgivings. Already under attack for calling the assembly to meet in Cambridge, to remove it somewhat from the turbulence and influence of the Sons of Liberty, he was now attacked for receiving his salary from the Crown. Virtually all the political wisdom of the eighteenth century argued for the independence of the branches of government, but Hutchinson was represented as a traitor to his native province for accepting and even defending the independence of the Massachusetts legislature.

Hutchinson’s last effort to preserve British rule in Massachusetts was the cause of its final and irreversible collapse. He refused to allow three ships laden with tea to return to England until the new imperial Tea Act had been observed. By the time the Sons of Liberty had deposited the tea in Boston Harbor, Hutchinson’s last shreds of reputation had been destroyed in Massachusetts by the publication of several of his private letters to England, stolen by Benjamin Franklin (whose reputation in England was subsequently ruined, making him a confirmed radical) and printed, against Franklin’s express instructions, in Massachusetts. The letters were improved, for patriotic purposes, by selective editing, but they did not grossly misrepresent Hutchinson. He had frequently called for more British power, to overawe what always seemed to him a radical and wrongheaded minority.

In June, 1774, Hutchinson turned over the government of Massachusetts to General Thomas Gage and set sail for England. After war broke out in earnest in 1775, the provincial assembly of Massachusetts declared Hutchinson and his family outlaws and confiscated all of his property. He would never return. At first welcomed as a patriot and hero by the Crown, Hutchinson received an honorary degree from Oxford on, of all days, July 4, 1776. Soon enough he found himself an unimportant exile; to be sure, he had a comfortable pension, but all that he had spent a lifetime building was gone. Cruelest of all, his son Billy and his youngest daughter Peggy died in England before he himself died in 1780. He did, however, have time to complete his history. Even though it told the story of the revolution that had driven him into exile, the third volume retained the objectivity and the love of Massachusetts that had characterized the work from its beginning.

Significance

Thomas Hutchinson was a hardworking man of learning and high principle, but he was at least in part responsible for the tragedy that overtook him. However reluctantly he accepted high offices, he left himself open to the charge of using royal influence to support his personal power and wealth. Ultimately desiring the best of both worlds—power from the Crown and popularity with the people—he sacrificed the latter. The American Revolution was carried in public meetings; cut off from the people by his Crown appointments, Hutchinson lost his political standing in a community he had worked hard to build and actually celebrated in its first full-scale history.

Bibliography

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. The influential book that first explored revolutionary thought and accounted for its intensity.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1974. A modern biography, concerned especially with the character and thought of Hutchinson.

Calhoon, Robert McCluer. The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760-1781. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. A comprehensive treatment of the Loyalists, and a book in which Hutchinson figures prominently. Calhoon shows that “all sorts and conditions of men” were Loyalists, not just wealthy Crown appointees, and they came from all parts of the colonies.

Freiberg, Malcolm. Prelude to Purgatory: Thomas Hutchinson in Provincial Massachusetts Politics, 1760-1770. New York: Garland, 1990. Freiberg examines Hutchinson’s political activities before the Revolutionary War.

Galvin, John R. Three Men of Boston. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976. The story of the revolution in Massachusetts, focusing on Hutchinson, James Otis, and Samuel Adams. The writing is admirably clear, and the events are rendered in an exciting way.

Hutchinson, Thomas. The Diary and Letters of His Excellency, Thomas Hutchinson. 2 vols. London: Searle and Rivington, 1883-1886. Difficult to find, but an important collection of Hutchinson’s writings. Hutchinson sometimes was more candid in his diary than in his historical writings or in official letters.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay. Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1764-1828. Reprint. Edited by Lawrence S. Mayo. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936. Hutchinson’s masterpiece in a fine modern edition.

McFarland, Philip. The Brave Bostonians: Hutchinson, Quincy, Franklin, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. Examines the lives of Hutchinson, Benjamin Franklin, and archpatriot Josiah Quincy in 1774, the year following the Revolutionary War. McFarland uses excerpts from the men’s papers to describe how and why they chose to be either Loyalists or patriots.

Norton, Mary Beth. The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. A sad but interesting tale, encompassing both the trials of uprooted Americans and those British officials overwhelmed by claims for compensation, rewards, or mere subsistence.

Walmsley, Andrew Stephen. Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 1999. A biography that traces Hutchinson’s decline from a respected Boston politician to one of the most vilified men in the colonies. Walmsley maintains Hutchinson’s defeat was a classic political power struggle.