Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
and such other offices as he could not himself possess he maneuvered to
get into the hands of his sons, and brothers-in-law, and dependents.
One of those brothers-in-law, Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather,
who refused to follow his kinsman into the Tory camp, called him “an
avaritious man”; and avaricious of power, even more than of money, he
certainly was.
With his abundant offices and honors, there was every temptation
to conservatism. Unless there was hidden in him some lingering
idealism, some seed of the ancestral radicalism to sprout and grow
into discontent, Thomas Hutchinson was marked for a reactionary.
And unhappily in his conventional soul there was not the faintest
spark of idealism. The enthusiasm of Mistress Anne was washed clean
out of the Hutchinson blood, leaving only the native stubbornness;
which stubbornness, dominating a character cold, formal, arrogant,
dogmatic, unimaginative, self-righteous, was finally to play havoc
with Thomas Hutchinson’s good fortune. The son of a merchant, he was
a careful, methodical soul, who studied how to save and invest; in a
later generation he would have been a great banker, but in his own he
preferred to invest in politics. How suggestive of Yankee thrift is
such an entry as this:
All the time he was at College he carried on a little trade by
sending ventures in his father’s vessels, & kept a little paper
Journal & leger, & enterd in it every dinner, supper, breakfast,
& every article of expense, even of a shilling; which practice
soon became pleasant; & he found it of great use all his life....
Before he came of age, he had, by adventuring to sea from two or
three quintalls [hundredweight] of fish, given him by his father,
when about 12 years old, acquired four or five hundred pounds
sterling.[202]
After a number of years in his father’s countinghouse, learning
the ways of eighteenth-century trade, he abandoned the mercantile
career and entered politics at the age of six-and-twenty. From May
31, 1737, when he first took his place in the House of Deputies
as one of the “Boston Seat,” to June 1, 1774, when he quitted his
country home at Milton to take ship for London and exile, he was a
power in the political life of Massachusetts, reaching eventually
the highest station. During that long period of thirty-seven years
he was a spokesman of the New England gentry, always on the side of
government, never in the opposition. That he ever critically examined
the foundations of his political creed, there is nothing in the printed
record to indicate. He had some of the tastes of the book-lover and
scholar. He was deeply interested in the Puritan past, and his _History
of Massachusetts Bay_ was based on a wide knowledge of manuscript
sources which he had been at great pains to collect. But in spite of a
praiseworthy care for accuracy and impartiality, he lacked the creative
imagination to reconstruct the past. He had pretty much freed his
mind from religious bigotry, but he could not rid himself of a narrow
partisanship, and his treatment of the agrarian movement was grossly
unfair. His shortcomings as a political thinker were more striking. His
knowledge of the political classics was of the slightest. When Samuel
Adams made use of the natural-rights theory, Hutchinson’s comment
would indicate that he had no acquaintance with the theory and had not
even read Locke.[203] He was little given to intellectual interests,
and ill at ease in dealing with general principles. He possessed the
mental qualities of a lawyer rather than a speculative thinker, and his
long immersion in office contracted a mind naturally sterile to the
routine habits of an administrator. He hardened early, and thereafter
he was incapable of changing his views or liberalizing his sympathies.
Consistency he erected into a fetish and once he had taken a position
he would not budge from it. He did not understand the liberal America
that was rising about him--neither the economic forces that were
creating it nor the spokesmen who represented it; and he saw no reason
for change. The House of Hutchinson had prospered under existing
conditions, and other houses would prosper likewise, he believed,
if they were equally honest and diligent. So he went his tactless,
unintelligent way, barking his shins on every liberal tendency of the
times, and hating the men who gave him trouble.
Hutchinson, in short, was a complete Tory, and if we would understand
him and his class, we must first take into account the current Tory
philosophy. Compressed into a sentence it was the expression of the
will-to-power of the wealthy. Its motive was economic class interest,
and its object the exploitation of society through the instrumentality
of the state. Stated thus, the philosophy does not appear to advantage;
it lays itself open to unpleasant criticism by those who are not
its beneficiaries. In consequence, much ingenuity in tailoring
was necessary to provide it with garments to cover its nakedness.
Embroidered with patriotism, loyalty, law and order, it made a very
respectable appearance; and when it put on the stately robe of the
British Constitution, it was enormously impressive. The Tory theory
of the British Constitution may well be regarded as a masterpiece of
the gentle art of tailoring. Government by king, lords, and commons it
asserted, approximated the ideal of a “mixt government,” embracing the
total wisdom of the realm, ruling in the interests of all, avoiding
the evils of class domination, and chastising the refractory only for
the common good. Gentlemen might well praise the “glorious British
Constitution.” It was their little jest at the expense of the English
people, who were content to be exploited by them.
In this game of political pretense Hutchinson willingly shared. He
knew that Parliament did not represent the English people; that it was
controlled by a group of landed gentlemen with mercenaries in their
pay; and yet in reply to repeated charges he revealed no hint of the
truth, but reiterated the familiar Tory interpretation in the face of
shrewd enemies who knew that he was insincere. In private among other
gentlemen, Hutchinson was frank enough. He knew what was at stake
in America--whether political control should remain in the hands of
“gentlemen of principle and property,” with the assistance of English
Tories, or whether it should pass into the hands of the majority. And
so while declaiming against mobs, and preaching loyalty to the best of
kings, he secretly busied himself with influential persons in devising
methods to frustrate the Whig ambitions. Moreover in dealing with his
enemies he was a thorough realist. In his comment on American Whigs and
their political methods, he set down many a shrewd and just estimate
of their actions and motives. But in defense of the English ministry
he refused to face reality. He quibbled and misrepresented and denied,
stooping to dirty politics to hold his party together and strengthen it.
At the moment when Hutchinson assumed the duties of governor the
situation was tense. Bernard had muddled things sadly, and “the
rage against him became, at length, so violent, that it was judged
necessary to recall him,”[204] and he slipped off to England to receive
a baronetcy and a pension. But he had brought the commonwealth to
the parting of the ways, and Hutchinson found himself in a difficult
position. The roots of the trouble are laid bare in the following
affidavit of Bernard:
In the Province of Massachusetts Bay, when civil authority
was reduced so low as to have nothing left but the form of a
government, and scarce even that, an enquiry into the causes of so
great a weakness in the governing power was unavoidable; and there
was no entering upon such an enquiry, without observing upon the
ill effects of that part of the constitution of that government,
whereby the appointment of the Council is left to the people, to be
made by annual election; and yet the Royal Governor, in all Acts
of prerogative, is subject to the controul of the Democraticall
Council. This solecism in policy has been as hurtful in practice
as it is absurd in theory, and it is the true cause of the extreme
imbecility of the power of the crown in this government, at times
when the exertion of it is most wanted. This is not an observation
of a new date; it is of many years standing; ... ever since he has
felt the effects which the popular constitution of the Council
has had upon the Royalty of the government, which is above three
years ago; within which time, he has seen the King deprived of
the service of every man at the Council Board, who has resolution
enough to disapprove the opposition to the authority of the King
and the Parliament, and their supremacy over the _American_
Colonies. This, and this only, is the foundation of the charge
of their endeavouring to overthrow the charter; whereas his real
desire has been, that the charter should have a more durable
stability, by means of a necessary alteration, without which, he
is persuaded it cannot have a much longer duration; as the abuse
of the appointment of the Council now prevailing, must oblige the
Parliament to interfere sooner or later.[205]
The more thoughtfully one considers this frank statement the more
clearly it appears what grounds for party dissension lay in the
“solecism” of a constitution whereby the “Royal Governor, in all Acts
of prerogative,” was “subject to the controul of the Democraticall
Council.” It would not be easy to patch up a working compromise between
an absentee prerogative and the local democratic will; one or the
other must be sovereign; and because the terms of the charter enabled
the democracy to nullify the prerogative, Bernard concluded that the
charter must be revised and the abuse corrected. In this Hutchinson
agreed, and from the imperial point of view not without reason. “By
an unfortunate mistake,” he wrote in apology to Gage, “soon after
the charter, a law passed which made every town in the Province a
corporation perfectly democratic.” With every passing year the mistake
was becoming more unfortunate, and the vital problem before government,
in the opinion of Hutchinson, was how to correct this unfortunate
mistake, together with other like mistakes, with such happy skill as
to check the democratic branch without arousing popular resentment. On
this reef Hutchinson foundered.
As early as 1764 the meddlesome Bernard had proposed to the home
government a complete remodeling of colonial governments on the English
Tory plan; and by way of suggestion he forwarded some proposals looking
to the eventual consolidation of the several colonies under a single
royal government, the erection of a house of lords as a balance to the
popular party and a comprehensive tax policy. It was one of numerous
suggestions then being made for incorporating America into the British
Empire, and extending the imperial power over the continent. Bernard’s
bias is sufficiently revealed in the following:
86. There is no government in America at present, whose powers
are properly balanced; there not being in any of them, a real
and distinct third legislative power mediating between the king
and the people, which is the peculiar excellence of the British
constitution.
87. The want of such a third legislative power, adds weight to the
popular, and lightens the royal scale; so as to destroy the balance
between the royal and popular powers.
88. Although America is not now ... ripe enough for an hereditary
nobility; yet it is now capable of a nobility for life.
89. A nobility appointed by the king for life, and made
independent, would probably give strength and stability to the