USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. II > Part 16
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But whatever might have been the development of the discords in this Province, had the wisest and best man then living been at this crisis made its royal Governor, it was the conviction of many of his contemporaries, as it has been the well-nigh universal judgment of their posterity, that the honor and the ordeal fell upon the worst possible person. Thomas Hutchinson had enjoyed every privilege, distinction, favor, and office which the people of his native Province, where his family had lived since its first settlement, could bestow upon him. He had written laboriously, faithfully, and dis- creetly its earlier history, and his claims to our gratitude and respect for that service must always be ungrudgingly emphasized. He first came into the Council in 1752; had held the plurality of offices before mentioned ; had acted as Governor between Pownall's and Bernard's administration, and filled the chair after the latter's departure. In the vexations which at once came upon him then, he had asked, whether sincerely or otherwise, to be relieved of office; but it is represented that his full ambition was crowned when his commission as Governor, issued Nov. 28, 1770, reached here in March, 1771. Having been in close confidence and sympathy with Ber- nard, however he may have disguised or prevaricated about the fact, he consistently adopted the measures and policy of his predecessor. Of his general course, and of the motives which guided what most certainly appears to have been a crooked and disingenuous line of conduct, one who is interested in the study of his record must judge as discriminatingly as possible- with however strained interpretations of charity, allowing for the heats of the time-from the abundant materials which are readily at hand. There are words of exculpation and palliation set down for him, but they are few, and they do not seem impartial. The prevailing and often con- temptuously and bitterly pronounced estimate of him was that he was untruthful, mean-spirited, unworthily ambitious, sordid, calculating, and cringing. He had given proof of marked ability; had done valuable services to the province and the people; and in matters not conflicting
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with his own lower interests might even claim grateful and respectful con- sideration. Before the full reasons for mistrusting and condemning him were known, the House had even voted to make him its agent at London to secure a recognition of its grievances; but he decided that he could not leave his place. John Adams, who had full means of knowing and esti- mating him, pronounced upon him with stern severity.1 Nor will the force
THOMAS HUTCHINSON.2
1 Works, ii. 278.
2 [There is an original portrait belonging to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which measures 18 × 14 inches, and is supposed to have been painted by Copley. The Society ac- quired it in 1796. (Proceedings, i. 401, 417; Per- kins, Works of Copley, 76.) It was engraved on steel in 1847, and appeared in the N. E. Hist.
and Geneal Reg., October, 1847 ; in Dearborn's Boston Notions, and in some copies of Drake's Boston. The Historical Society also received from Peter Wainwright, in 1835, another like- ness, marked "Edward Truman, pinx., 1741," which had formerly belonged to Jonathan May- hew, and which is followed in the above cut. -ED.]
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of the patriot's utterance be weakened when one reads the counter estimate of Adams made by Hutchinson in the volume which he wrote in England. Two leading facts, however, stand significantly prominent in Hutchinson's record : First, he wrote and exhibited letters addressed to men of influence about the Court and Parliament, in which he strongly pleaded in behalf of the Province in the stand taken by it against its grievances. These letters were not sent abroad. He wrote quite other letters in tone and purport which did reach their destination, and which contained very urgent requests that they should be kept with the utmost secrecy, and that his hand in them should not be divulged. These confidential and disguised communications were of the most offensive tenor to the popular party here, - defamatory of prominent individuals, misrepresenting the truth about persons, opinions, and measures; of a misleading character in statements and advice, and recommending and urging harsh agencies, decided hostilities, and repres- sion through a strong military force to be quartered on the Province. These insidious and treacherous letters, through an ingenious and mysterious agency, in which Doctor Franklin had the principal hand, were obtained in England, sent back here, and gradually made public, to the consternation of an exasperated people. They are now to be read in our Archives, and many of them are in print.
Hutchinson informed the General Court, in June, 1772, that the king had settled upon him a salary of £1,500. It soon appeared also that the law officers of the Province were to receive a royal stipend. The House resolved that these royal salaries were an infraction of the Charter, making the king's officers independent, and masters of the people.
The rapid development of quarrels and resistance, the measures of patriots, dignified and well advised, as offensive and defensive, or tumult- uous, violent, and illegal, find a relation in other pages of this work,1 which follow the wise methods of committees of correspondence, or trace the doings of the "Mohawks" who emptied the tea-chests into the harbor. Thomas Gage, commissioned to supersede Hutchinson as Governor, but in reality coming as general of an army, arrived here May 13, 1774, and was soon followed by his regiments. Hutchinson, whose last act with Gage was to close the port of Boston, sailed for England, a sad and broken man, on June I, and died there in retirement, June 3, 1780, in his sixty-ninth year. In that retirement he wrote a continuation of his valuable history down to the time of his leaving the country. This remained in manuscript till its publication was secured in London, in 1828, largely through the solicitation of the Hon. James Savage and a few others, prompted by the efforts of the Massachusetts Historical Society. It is a matter of grateful recognition . that we have in this volume -what the candid and the just will always highly appreciate - the relation of Hutchinson's own story as told by him- self. He has written it well, with self-restraint, dignity, and without passion, bitterness, or obtrusive malice.2 His pages close, alike on the side of Britain
1 [See Vol. III., Revolutionary Period, ch. i. - ED.] 2 [See Vol. I., Introduction. - ED.]
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and of this Province, the state of guardianship infelicitously exercised and fretfully endured by the Crown of England and the people of Massachu- setts. After that, in the expressive phrase of the great dramatist, -
" The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum." !
In reviewing this brief sketch of the administration of a succession of royal officials sent here to govern this Province after it had for more than fifty years substantially governed itself, the story has been one wholly of restlessness, altercation, and failure. It can hardly fail but that some read- ers may find rising in their minds a question something like this: How was it that among these ten royal Governors there did not happen to be a single one who, either by honest or sinister aim in his policy, was guided by a pre- vailing purpose to conciliate and humor a refractory people; relaxing his own rule, and even the prerogative, in order to adjust an unwelcome au- thority so that it should be as little offensive as possible; and even subor- dinating the direct instructions of the king to the practical exigencies of time and occasion, so that whatever else might be said of him, whether a native or a foreigner, he might win the applause of being a friend of the people? In that number of ten there was a range for a considerable variety in natural temper, disposition, and executive discretion. And even if a popular policy had trespassed upon a literal fidelity to the sworn official obligations of the representative of the Crown, the offender, if kindly and ingenious, might readily have attempted to justify himself, and failing in that might have retired. But not a single one of these Crown officials - least of all one native to the soil - made any measurable advance towards this policy. The people here had very slight opportunity or occasion to reciprocate to a Crown official any complacent favors, as if they stood on a perfectly easy footing with each other. The most that could be drawn from any one of these royal Governors was a promise to plead with the king for certain concessions or relaxations for the future, on the condition that the people in the meanwhile manifested their docility by a patient, if not a cheerful, compliance with his instructions. It would at least have been in- teresting, for variety's sake, to one reviewing the portion of our history just sketched, to have had to recognize at least a single chief magistrate who might be spoken of as a popular favorite, bent upon serving the people rather than the monarch. Even an inclination or a disposition to have espoused the popular and local interests would have been gratefully recognized, and would have availed something. But no trace of any such will or purpose appears in the course of those who held the royal commission here, least of all among those of whom it might most naturally have been looked for, - the natives of the Province. It is to be remembered, however, that with the exception of Hutchinson, these home-bred officials had been to a degree weaned from the habits and principles of the place of their nativity. They had crossed the seas and had changed their minds. They had been
1 Measure for Measure, I. IV.
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conversant with courts and courtiers, with free-thinkers and free-livers. They had had a larger outlook than their compatriots, and had recognized in the straitness, simplicity, and limitations of their countrymen, their often ungenial religious habits, and their provincial notions, qualities which it would be hypocrisy in themselves to indulge. The power of the clergy had made its last and unsuccessful assertion of itself in opposition to the change of charters, with the consequent fundamental innovations which the new one brought with it. The leading congregational ministers in the capi- tal and its near neighborhood were already not wholly in accord as repre- senting the traditional straitness of the former " elders," and a liberal and relaxed spirit manifested itself in some of them towards the imported loyalty which tolerated some unwonted forms and observances. But the country ministers were, hardly with exception, stiffly true to the inheritance for which they had been born and trained. It was by these last that the country rep- resentatives were kept watchful for all that threatened the old ways. These country ministers annually gathered in convention in Boston, at the season of the election ; and they were not likely to forget that their predecessors, "the elders," had been wont to have a share in the councils of the magistrates.
The king's governors were, without an exception, loyal to him. No evidence or instance has been disclosed, to our knowledge, of intrigue or bargaining which required a weakening of that loyalty, even to allay popular opposition, much less to advance popular measures. There seems to have been something in the conscious dignity of holding a commission from the parent country over one of its wilful and restive progeny, which made the king's governor identify himself with the authority of the master. His honors received from the king were higher than any which he could receive from his subjects, even if they were likely to add any of their own. Nor were the conditions and difficulties of office-holding of a sort to be relieved by any conciliatory policy. In this representation of foreign dictation and con- trol, there was a direct necessity of restricting the liberties of the people and of opposing what they knew to be their own interests. The single and avowed purpose and demand of the royal councillors that the colonists should not engage in any manufacturing industries, nor even be free to barter any goods or wares of their own households over their own borders, one with another, had in it every quality of injustice and tyranny. A spe- cial effort under this edict aimed at the suppression of the manufacture of woollen goods. Flocks of sheep might nibble over the pastures and yield their fleeces for the spinning and carding of the good wives in all our rural settlements; nevertheless Britain insisted upon the right to weave cloths for us, and forbade our making our own. The harsh demand suggests to us the domestic discipline by which a mother takes away the clothing of a refractory young urchin, and sends him to bed in the daytime. Industry, ingenuity, and thrift worked like electricity in the very fibres and muscles of the true yeomanry of Massachusetts. Knowing well under whose ser- vice and wages they and their boys and girls would surely come if not fully
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employed, they had naturally supplemented the labors of the farm with those of the shop, the mill, and the factory. The coming in hither, about 1718, of a considerable company of Scotch Irish from the neighborhood of Londonderry, had stimulated the business of raising and spinning flax, and the manufacture of linen. Quite an enthusiasm was excited in Boston for this enterprise. A town-meeting was held, at which good Chief-Justice Sewall presided, for the purpose of establishing spinning-schools for the instruction of children. A building was erected for the purpose opposite the present Park Street meeting-house. Quite a jolly festivity was made on one occasion when the Common was covered by the good women of the town all busy with their spinning-wheels, and waited upon by a crowded concourse of admiring friends of the other sex.1 It was a curious mani- festation of the unmaternal and jealous spirit of the mother country toward her step-daughter, that as the Governors sent over information about the introduction of one or another handicraft here which, while drawing upon the natural resources of our people, would make them independent of the products of the workshops of England, an interdict or repressive condition would be placed upon it; and in proportion as our own manufactures were suppressed the duties on imported articles would be raised. Britain began then the policy which she has pursued up to our own time, of employing exclusive trade and protecting tariffs while aiming to the end of constituting herself the workshop of the world, and having attained the result through machinery and pauperized labor, demanding that other Governments adopt the principles of free-trade. During Bernard's and Hutchinson's adminis- trations the people adopted as a resource for self-protection, and as an offset to English selfishness, the policy of making non-importation agree- ments. This measure was a galling one to English merchants and traders, as their warehouses soon became glutted with the goods which had been finding so lively a market in the colonies. It was an act of apparent self- denial and disablement, the liberty to subject themselves to which could not be denied by any Parliamentary bill; and the destruction of the tea gave occasion for a vengeful attempt to destroy the whole trade of Boston by closing the port. This act in turn engaged sympathy for the suffering people of the town, opened every access to it from the adjoining country by land into a highway for pouring into it needful supplies, and was the most effective measure for making even the most distant colonies to feel that they had a common cause as the basis of a future union.
Emphasis has been fairly laid in previous remarks upon the fidelity, never swerved by any attempts to win popular favor, with which all the royal Governors studied to secure the prerogative and to obey the instruc- tions of the king and his councillors. So far they deserve the credit of faithful service under hard conditions. But if we proceed to ask whether they served their monarch discreetly, if they interpreted with keen sagacity the current in which they were moving and tried in vain to direct a safe
1 [See Mr. Scudder's chapter in this volume. - ED.]
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course, and if they gave right information and good advice to the rulers across the water, we find reason to withhold anything like commendation from those Governors. The question has often been discussed as to the precise date and occasion, if there were such, when an opinion, purpose, or resolution was first reached in Massachusetts that looked to an asser- tion of absolute independence of the royal authority, with a conscious effort and preparation for achieving it. Extreme opinions have found for- cible expression on this point, and the records of individuals and of bodies of men from town-meetings up to the Continental Congress may be quoted in support of either and both those opinions. Our leading patriots have been denounced as hypocrites, or double-tongued, on the strength of the assertion that their speeches and writings contain equally distinct disavowals of aiming for an independence, connected with professions of hearty loyalty to the Crown, and also demands, threats, and defiances which are consistent only with an assurance that if they were not already independent they meant to be so. All this is true. These utter inconsistencies of avowal and . purpose are to be found in the writings and were upon the lips of the pa- triots of those days. But they are wholly divested of all real duplicity and deception when viewed in connection with the ever-shifting phases of affairs and the development of the quarrel. It is true, likewise, that if a measure of like character, but on a large scale, with that referred to above in the interview between Franklin and Chatham, had been attempted as between our House of Representatives and a royal Governor instructed for the pur- pose, it would have been futile. Suppose the king had instructed his vice- roy to invite our General Court, after the fullest deliberation, and with the encouragement that their results would be considered with equal wisdom and candor, to propose some scheme or plan on which, to the satisfaction of both parties, the colony should henceforward stand in its relations to the mother country, -it is very plain that no such scheme could have been agreed upon. The policy and the assumed prerogative, which would have been of axiomatic authority for the mother country, was in direct and irre- concilable antagonism with the estimate and basis of their natural rights held by the people of Massachusetts.
The royal Governors did not divine the real truth on this fundamental point; or, if they did so, they failed to represent it to the monarch, and offered advice as to repressive measures and intimidation by an overawing military force quartered here, which was of the most misleading and mis- chievous character. There may be found to-day in the official papers sent home by all the royal Governors, - with the single exception of those of Sir William Phips, - the most distinct assertions that the animating feeling and intent of all the disaffection here were consistent only with an absolute resolve to be independent of all royal and parliamentary control. This popular revolt from authority was, however, alleged to be not a spontaneous and permanent resolve of the people, but to be inspired, renewed, and kept in passionate manifestation mainly by a few wily and able demagogues, who
VOL. II .- 10.
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plied all their arts and tricks to deceive and stimulate the people. The consequent advice, therefore, was that a military force should be quartered here, and that the aforesaid demagogues be sent to England for trial for treason. On the whole, we may conclude that Britain gained nothing by that change in our Charter which put us under governors commissioned by the Crown, instead of allowing us, as before, to choose our own. Connecticut, which was left through all this period to enjoy its old privilege in this re- spect, was not found to be any more fretful under a foreign allegiance, or any more ready to renounce it when the crisis came, than was Massachu- setts to be released from guardianship.
In connection with this sketch of the administration of the Province by Crown governors, some reference must be made to those who as members of the Council shared their executive functions. As previously noted, the royal authority was by the Charter to be represented here by a Council of twenty-eight members, who should balance the power exercised by the popular branch of the legislature in the House of Representatives. The king initiated the membership of this council when the Charter took effect, by naming those who it was his pleasure should compose it. He did the same thing again, as we shall soon see, when the Charter, royal prerogative, and the relation of subjects to the mother country were about to be re- nounced forever by the people in assertion of their absolute independence. It might reward the research of any curious inquirer to explain by what purpose and through whose advice and information the king selected the particular men named in the Charter as the first members of it. Doubtless, Mather and the other agents had the privilege of exercising some influence or of offering some suggestions on this important matter, as they had in indicating Phips as the first governor. But the very object of the council, with the functions intrusted to it, signified that the king relied upon it as well as upon his governor to represent his authority, and in fact to sustain and re- inforce that of the governor against any excess of popular influence. The king and his advisers were sufficiently astute to look to it that in the first composition of the council reference should be had to his own supposed interest and wishes. It happened that all those whom he nominated in the instrument were residents in the province. Not one of them came over here as a stranger to present himself first as a councillor. Still the king in- tended to have, and thought he had secured on the executive board, some who should represent his prerogative. And such there were, and such there continued to be, in men who, as dividing issues opened wider, stood stoutly with the governor against the spirit, tendency, and measures of the popular branch in the legislature. The king's advisers then, in his selection, must have known who there were here who were in more or less sympathy with his own interests and views. The existence of such a class in the higher ranks of the magistracy and society, who were known to be prerogative men, will call for brief notice further on. No serious trouble occurred under the
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short administration of Phips on account of the first composition of the council. With few exceptions, of perhaps a half-dozen whom the House would never have nominated for the honor, most of its members were ac- ceptable to the people. And when on the following year, at the first elec- tion, the House nominated councillors for the governor's approbation, there was rather an increase on the board of those who were even in sympathy with the old order of things. But from that date onward one of the chronic altercations between the Governor and the House centred upon his irritation over some of its nominations, his rejection of them, the resentment of the Representatives, and their efforts to circumvent his opposition in that direc- tion. Phips had negatived only a single nominee. Dudley vetoed five of those offered to him by election of the House. The House on one occa- sion showed its temper by choosing for its Speaker a rejected councillor. This provoked the Governor to claim a right to veto the Speaker, - opening a new strife which, as has been seen, was settled in favor of the Crown's offi- cial by a "Supplementary Charter." Thenceforward the governor's aim was to secure a council on the majority, at least, of whose members he might rely to embarrass or prevent the full enactment by the House of any mea- sures offensive to himself. The consequences were a succession of feuds, of conferences, of acts of cross policy, and a constant shifting of the bal- ance of power, with attempts at mutual circumvention between the two bodies. On occasions, each of them sent its special agent to the king and pleaded its own rights and grievances. During the period of the administra- tion by the Provincial Charter, the Council was in the main in real or forced sympathy with the royal Governor, though there were some critical seasons on which it temporized or stood out against him. As the final struggle was matured in its more exasperating measures of Parliamentary dictation and popular resistance, the Council became powerless as an arbitrator, and its composition according to the Charter gave way to the arbitrary designa- tion by the king of a body known as "Mandamus Councillors."
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