Hutchinson, Thomas

views updated

Hutchinson, Thomas

HUTCHINSON, THOMAS. (1711–1780). Royal governor of Massachusetts. Great-great-grandson of the famous Anne (Marbury) Hutchinson (1591–1643), who emigrated from England with her husband and children in 1634 and was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her religious beliefs, Thomas was a leader of the conservatives in the colony before the American Revolution. He entered Harvard at the age of thirteen, graduated in 1727, and three years later received his master of arts degree.

Wealthy, able, and socially part of what he called the "better sort," his first big step in alienating the "common sort" came in 1749, when his leadership succeeded in establishing "hard money" as the medium of exchange in the colony. He did this through his plan to call in the major portion of the inflated bills of credit, which the government had been issuing since 1690 without adequate backing, and paying these off at the rate of eleven to one by using the £183,650 that England had sent to reimburse Massachusetts for its expenses in the Louisburg expedition. This measure, like the abolishing of the Land Bank (1740–1741), was to the benefit of persons living on fixed incomes and of creditors—who, naturally, were of the "better sort"—and was tremendously unpopular with debtors. He attended the Albany Convention of 1754 and probably had a hand in drafting the famous Plan of Union that is primarily associated with Franklin's name. In 1758 Hutchinson became lieutenant governor, and in 1760 he became chief justice, a position to which the father of James Otis had aspired. Hutchinson opposed the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act, but only because of their adverse effect on British as well as on colonial trade. Loyal to the authority that had commissioned him, however, he made every effort to enforce the unpopular acts.

Hutchinson had given the popular leaders of Boston several reasons to believe he had a personal interest in enforcing the British measures they found so objectionable. Already a wealthy man, he appropriated more than his fair share of offices and salaries, which brought him perhaps three hundred pounds a year in days when an ordinary family could live comfortably on forty pounds a year. His brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, was a stamp distributor. So on the night of 26-27 August 1765, his home was sacked by the Boston mob. In the absence of Sir Francis Bernard, he was acting governor during the period 1769–1771. In the latter year he became governor and served until 1774. Hutchinson weathered the resistance to the Townshend Acts, but during the subsequent lull in agitation he proved his congenital inaptitude for the post he held. The Hutchinson letters affair in 1773 was his final undoing. Then, he unwisely used his influence for the personal profit of himself and his sons, Thomas and Elisha, in the matter of the East India Company's tea being sent to America. Compounding this, Hutchinson—in refusing to facilitate the removal of this tea—played into the hands of the rabble-rousers and brought on the Boston Tea Party on 16 December 1773.

Although he did not know it at the time, he was through. On 29 June 1774 he reached England, and a few days later he spent two hours reporting to George III on the situation in his province. General Gage had meanwhile taken over as governor, but the understanding was that Hutchinson would return to that post when the crisis was over. Hutchinson had no idea that he would have more than a few months to wait, and he urged on the London authorities a policy of conciliation that he had not followed when he was in a position to do so in Boston. So it was that those of the "common sort" rose as leaders of the American Revolution, and Hutchinson never realized his hope of laying his "bones in New England."

He was an historian of note, publishing the first volume of his History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1764 and writing the third while exiled in England. (It was published in 1828). He also wrote a pamphlet, Present State of the Bills of Credit (1736); The Witchcraft Delusion of 1692 (1780); and many other works of a political and historical nature.

In 1768 Hutchinson constructed an imaginary dialogue between abstract characters he named "European Englishman" and "American Englishman," in which the two sides of the imperial controversy exchanged their views with calmness and mutual respect. Never before and never again did Hutchinson come so close to revealing to himself his own divided mind and political ethics. The very names of the speakers in his dialogue suggest how similar—and how vastly different—Hutchinson believed imperial officials and colonial politicians were to each other. There was no more telling a moment in the history of Loyalism.