Montesquieu was right: “when the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates (or nearly so) there can be no liberty because (just and great) apprehensions may arise lest the same monarch or senate (or junto) should enact tyrannical laws to execute them in a tyrannical manner.” Within a few months of Hutchinson’s appointment to the high bench Otis’ attacks, cast in these terms and publicized again and again, became a blistering indictment. But its effects cannot be doubted. “This book,” Bernard Bailyn writes, “depicts the fortunes of a conservative in a time of radical upheaval and deals with problems of public disorder and ideological commitment.” It is at the same time a dramatic account of the origins of the American Revolution from the viewpoint, not of the winners who became the Founding Fathers, but of the losers, the Loyalists. Hutchinson, Otis pointed out, was a dominant figure in the executive by virtue of being lieutenant governor, in the legislature as a councillor (“I have long thought it… a great grievance that the chief justice should have a seat in the Council and consequently so great a share of influence in making those very laws he is appointed to execute upon the lives and property of the people”), and in the judiciary as chief justice. Hutchinson, Otis pointed out, was a dominant figure in the executive by virtue of being lieutenant governor, in the legislature as a councillor (“I have long thought it… a great grievance that the chief justice should have a seat in the Council and consequently so great a share of influence in making those very laws he is appointed to execute upon the lives and property of the people”), and in the judiciary as chief justice. 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. No one but a Hutchinson or an Oliver had been lieutenant governor of Massachusetts after 1758 or chief justice after 1760. 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. 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. He wrote easily, abundantly, and logically. Plural officeholding was nothing new—it was as common in New England as it was in old England—nor was the doctrine of the separation of powers in its modern form yet felt to impose limits on officeholding. The day after Sewall died, “several gentlemen” (Bernard said they were “the best men in the government”) told Hutchinson they were proposing him for the vacancy. He honored his family’s traditional commitment to the Congregational Church, joining at the age of twenty-four the so-called New Brick Church of his college tutor and brother-in-law, the Reverend William Welsteed, to which he remained faithful, in formal terms at least, until he left America in 1774 and in which he baptized his children. For his prose conveys the same qualities. For almost two decades thereafter Hutchinson had remained a leader of Governor Shirley’s unusually stable political coalition. Governor in 1757 when Lt. Dorr’s index and commentaries catalogue Hutchinson’s errors, correct his misstatements, and warn at every turn of his evil intentions. Governor Phips fell ill and died. Traitor!” I wrote a Boston citizen, und finally, bursting with indignation, “Oh the villain!” “The distrust and the animosity that Thomas Hntchinson inspired… are morbid, pathological, paranoiac.…”, Adams’ opinions, in this case as in so many others, were extreme, but in differing degrees they were widely shared. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson is a biographical study, not a full- 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. James K. Hosmer. 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. Somehow, in ways he did not understand, the world had greatly changed. Harvard University Press. 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. He explained his views again and again, but the only effect this had, he confessed, was to confirm “the groundless suspicions of my having promoted the act.”. The judicious Franklin spoke of Hutchinson’s duplicity and in 1772 decided that he would have to be destroyed politically if the British Empire were to be preserved. 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. They contained no challenge to English authority as such and indulged in no speculative distinctions in Parliament’s power. You are, Governor Bernard wrote Hutchinson in 1769 after handing over to him the colony’s government, “a much prudenter man than I ever pretended to be,” and, he added, with more of a double meaning than he might have admitted, you “will take care of yourself.” Hutchinson knew that his administration would be very burdensome and very precarious, but that, he said, would only “excite in me the more caution and circumspection.” He tried never to overextend himself—“I don’t love to promise too much”—and “never chose to give an opinion suddenly” on a matter of importance. 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. Adams’ opinions, in this case as in so many others, were extreme, but in differing degrees they were widely shared. In my station, restrained from respect to My Lord Fitzwilliam, I should think it my duty to do all in my power to discourage any of his sons from so unequal a match with any person in the province, and I should certainly be highly criminal if I should countenance and encourage a match with my own daughter.” So too he declined a baronetcy, when it was offered to him in 1774, for prudential reasons, but then- prudence within prudence—he “thought it not amiss, however, to ask His Lordship, [that], if I should be reproached with being slighted in England, whether I might say that I [had] had the, The issue, Otis insisted, was not merely the engrossing of political offices but the relationship among these offices. A man who is quiet is as secure in his house as a prince in his castle,” and no act of Parliament can contravene this privilege. 1974. The family group—five children had survived infancy- was extraordinarily close; the force of cohesion that bound them fits no ordinary description. For he despised the fanaticism of the Puritans, either in its ancestral form, laced as it was with those fine-spun doctrinal subtleties that led men to torture each other in passionate self-righteousness, or in its more modern, more pietistic form, whose crankish adherents “scarce ever settled an account with anybody without a lawsuit.” The career of his great-great-grandmother Anne fascinated and chilled him. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson by Bernard Bailyn, 9780674641617, available at Book Depository with free delivery worldwide. A book entitled The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson written by Bernard Bailyn, published by Harvard University Press which was released on 11 December 1974. On August 14 crowds directed by well-known opposition leaders turned to Hutchinson for the first time, surrounding his mansion and demanding that he “declare to them I had never wrote to England in favor of the Stamp Act.” Since, the leaders said, they respected Hutchinson’s private character, they would accept his personal assurance that he did not favor the act. It is hard to imagine a man less disposed by background or heritage to betray his countrymen than Thomas Hutchinson. In my station, restrained from respect to My Lord Fitzwilliam, I should think it my duty to do all in my power to discourage any of his sons from so unequal a match with any person in the province, and I should certainly be highly criminal if I should countenance and encourage a match with my own daughter.” So too he declined a baronetcy, when it was offered to him in 1774, for prudential reasons, but then- prudence within prudence—he “thought it not amiss, however, to ask His Lordship, [that], if I should be reproached with being slighted in England, whether I might say that I [had] had the offer of such a mark of honor.” To which His Lordship, he reported, immediately replied (and one can picture the patronizing smile), “‘Most certainly.’” Just so, a decade earlier, in sending Richard Jackson copies of Volume i of his History to distribute where they might do the most good, he specified certain particularly important recipients and then instructed Jackson to present a halfdozen other copies “where you think they may be acceptable, as high up as may be in character for me, and order the binding according to the quality of the person.”. 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. They were accumulators, down-to-earth, unromantic middlemen, whose, solid, petit-bourgeois characteristics became steadily more concentrated in the passage of years until in Thomas, in the fifth generation, they reached an apparently absolute and perfect form. But it was not simply a question of manner and sensibilities. The issue, Otis insisted, was not merely the engrossing of political offices but the relationship among these offices. Trusted Writing on History, Travel, Food and Culture Since 1949, On the night of August 26, 1765, a mob, more violent i han any yet seen in America, more violent indeed than any that would be seen in the entire course of the Revolution, attacked the Boston mansion of Thomas Hutchinson, chief justice and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. The next day the streets were found scattered with money, plate, gold rings, etc. (Cam-bridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 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. Virtual Conferences, Working from Home, and Flying Kids, Like many conferences this year, the annual American Academy of Religion­/­Society of Biblical Literature conference will be virtual. But word reached Bernard that Otis’ appointment at this juncture would be inadvisable, perhaps because his brilliant but unstable son James, Jr., was leading the family into doubtful political alliances and was reluctant to use his office as deputy advocate-general of the vice-admiralty court to prosecute violations of the navigation laws. He sought no conquests in a larger world but steady gains in the one he knew. At the same time his differences with the momentarily triumphant opposition forces, with which Pownall had allied himself, had become charged with more than ordinary political meaning. 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. 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. The Ordeal Of Thomas Hutchinson, by Bernard Bailyn This book won the National Book Award in history, and it is easy to understand why. 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. The lips are full but slightly compressed and pursed. Hutchinson had strongly disapproved of the Stamp Act from the time he first heard of it. Dut if [they are] guilty, this is not the way to proceed. The reaction in Boston was immediate and severe. 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. By Bernard Bailyn. His correspondence radiates respect for status and an instinct for small passages through the complexities of the world. Caution, control, and prudence were the guiding principles of his life. 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.”. see review Ronald Wheatley rated it really liked it Jul 24, 2014 Shelly rated it liked it May 05, 2012 Gary rated it … Colonel Thomas set the pattern for young Thomas’ life. Even though it started off based on the stamp Act protest. Their enterprises were careful, not grand. Bernard Bailyn's "The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson" is a compelling read for anyone interested in American history and particularly that period from 1760, the end of the French and Indian War, to 1773 the eve of the Revolution. So Hutchinson, still concerned about his lack of technical qualifications and having refused to solicit actively for the appointment but always eager for advancement, prestige, and a major public role, accepted. At least as to his own career, he once wrote, he felt himself to be what he called “a quietist, being convinced that what is, is best.” So he counselled a too-stubborn political ally to “strive to be more of a willow and less of an oak. Her death, he wrote, was the loss of more than half his soul. “This writ,” he charged, in words that John Adams, an eager attendant at the trial, recorded on the spot, “is against the fundamental principles of law. “From the first of her danger I never left my house,” he recalled in later years, “and seldom her chamber.” Her final words, ” ‘best of husbands,’ ” uttered “with her dying voice and eyes fixed on me,” tore him to pieces; he could never forget that agony. Plural officeholding was nothing new—it was as common in New England as it was in old England—nor was the doctrine of the separation of powers in its modern form yet felt to impose limits on officeholding. Was he responsible to a mob? “An act [of Parliament] against the constitution is void, an act against natural equity is void. 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. Bernard knew that Governor Shirley had promised the next court vacancy to the venerable Barnstable lawyer James Otis, Sr., then speaker of the House and, in Shirley’s time, a political colleague of Hutchinson’s. It was the moral basis of the law, not the literal provisions, that primarily concerned him. “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. 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. Second, news soon arrived that the Stamp Act had in fact passed despite all the agitation against it in America and that in passing it Parliament had made no distinctions whatever among the various petitions filed against it; no purpose at all had been served by the prudence Hutchinson had imposed on the House. But beyond that he had been shocked by their pursuit of private gain at the expense of the general welfare, which he took to mean the welfare of the pan-Atlantic polity that had protected the infant colonies for a century and a half, and he distrusted the glib libertarianism by which they justified their resistance to appeals for wartime sacrifices. Hutchinson is among the first of these concerns. The reactions he stirred are morbid, pathological, paranoiac in their intensity. In the scorching heat of the Stamp Act resistance he became a marked man, and explanations were demanded. He knew he had nothing to hide, but should he concede to such intimidation? Reports from the other colonies began to come in. Thomas Hutchinson Government, Author (9-Sep-1711 — 3-Jun-1780) SUBJECT OF BOOKS Bernard Bailyn. and slanderer,” “arch fiend,” “traitor!”—; and at one point writes simply, in smoldering indignation, “Oh the villain!”. O n July 4, 1776, in a moment of particular historical irony, Thomas Hutchinson, the exiled royal governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, received an honorary degree from Oxford University. … Then and there the child Independence was born. which had been dropped in carrying oM.” Hutchinson was convinced that he himself would have been killed if he had not given in to his daughter’s frantic pleading and (led. Their petitions—especially New York’s—appeared to be “so high,” Hutchinson wrote, “that the heroes of liberty among us were ashamed of their own conduct,” and they would have reversed their action if it had not been too late. But Otis, moving ahead of the leading ideas of his time, thinking in his curious and impressive way in terms of circularities, logical contradictions, and the inner flows of forces within institutions, tore into Hutchinson not merely for greedily accumulating a plurality of “lucrative places” but for occupying positions that were incompatible with each other. …, About & Contact | Awards | Catalogs | Conference Exhibits | eBooks | Exam Copies | News | Order | Rights | Permissions | Search | Shopping Cart | Subjects & Series, Resources for: Authors | Booksellers & Librarians | Educators | Journalists | Readers, Harvard University Press offices are located at 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA & 71 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4BE UK, © 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College | HUP Privacy Policy • HU Additional EEA Privacy Disclosures, HISTORY: United States: Colonial Period (1600-1775), HISTORY: United States: Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), deliberate destruction of documents by Trump administration officials on their way out the door, 2020 election results affirmed decades-old political divisions among the American voters frequently lumped together as “Latinos.”, God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan, Bernard Bailyn Is a 2010 National Humanities Medal Winner, 1975 National Book Award, History Category, National Book Foundation. 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