Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of the democracy. To encroach upon the royal prerogative, Hutchinson
believed was to endanger the nice balance of the constitution. He was
convinced that “the present easy, happy model of government” was as
near perfect as the ingenuity of Englishmen could devise; that the
welfare of America was dependent upon a proper subordination of the
colonies to the mother country; and that the popular party was plotting
treason against their country and their king. The third volume of
his history is a long argument to demonstrate the wisdom of his own
and Bernard’s administrations. The liberal governor, Thomas Pownall,
Hutchinson disliked, partly because of his easy familiar ways, but
chiefly because he was not a prerogative man.[218] But if Pownall
had been in Hutchinson’s place, the history of the relations of
Massachusetts and England would have run very differently.
It was his ingrained snobbery which, more than anything else, brought
about his undoing. The aristocratic governor never differed with a
lord, and rarely agreed with a commoner. It was intolerable to him that
common fellows should dispute his reasoning or sit in judgment upon
his official acts. It was their duty as loyal subjects to obey without
question the mandates of the King’s appointed spokesmen; and when
town-meeting resolutions, put through by mechanics and petty tradesmen,
criticised his conduct, or refused to accept the decision of the
supreme court that the “Boston massacre” was not legally a “massacre,”
he saw in such acts only the madness of the mobocracy. That the people
should suspect the probity of his majesty’s judges was painful to him.
As partisan bitterness increased, he became acutely suspicious of all
who disagreed with him, and shut his mind against every argument. The
debates and resolves in House and Council “abounded with duplicity
and inconclusive reasonings.” “The disingenuity and low craft, which
appeared in so many of the messages, resolves, and other publick
instruments,” he commented, descended “to the level and vulgarity of a
common newspaper essay.”[219] To the leaders of the popular party, the
group of keen debaters and parliamentarians who kept him constantly on
the defense, he attributed an artful malignancy. The fathers of the
Revolution do not appear to advantage in the pages of his history. The
Otises had gone over to the opposition because the father had been
disappointed on the occasion of Hutchinson’s elevation to the coveted
chief-justiceship. John Hancock’s “ruling passion was a fondness for
popular applause.... His natural powers were moderate, and had been
very little improved by study.” John Adams was a man whose “ambition
was without bounds.... He could not look with complacency upon any man
who was in possession of more wealth, more honours, or more knowledge
than himself,” and he went over to the opposition because of a slight
upon him by refusal of a place on the bench. For Samuel Adams, his
most relentless enemy, Hutchinson’s hatred was boundless. He had
defaulted as collector of taxes and for equivalent of his arrears of
public money he had set up as defender of the public liberties, and he
“made more converts by calumniating governors, and other servants of
the crown, than by strength of reasoning.” His main business in life
was “robbing men of their characters.”
It is unlikely that time will bring any vindication of the later career
of Thomas Hutchinson. He was a stiff-necked official of scrupulous
principle, whose principles were grossly reactionary. He was sincerely
attached to the great ideal of imperial unity, but he conceived of
that unity as embodied in the coercive sovereignty of the crown and
parliament, with Tory gentlemen as exclusive administrators. Samuel
Adams was not unjust in declaring, “It has been his principle from a
boy that mankind are to be governed by the discerning few; and it has
ever since been his ambition to be the hero of the few.” Courteous
and conscientious, with very considerable administrative ability, it
was his misfortune to defend a social philosophy alien to the rough
individualism of his fellow countrymen. He would think only in terms
of imperial centralization, and they would think only in terms of
local home rule. He conceived of the political state as a private
preserve for gentlemen to hunt over, and they conceived of it as a free
hunting-ground for all. He never understood the assertive, capitalistic
America that was rising about him, and in joining issue with it he
destroyed himself. “If we were not mad,” he lamented, “I have no doubt
we might enjoy all that liberty which can subsist with a state of
government.” It was the complaint of the Tory upon a democracy that
preferred self-rule to the blessings of a trusteeship, which, like a
lawyers’ squabble, consumed the estate in fees. Quite evidently the
“mobility,” in the days of Thomas Hutchinson, was running into madness,
for it demanded greater liberty than was compatible with a “state of
government” sanctioned by crown officials--a fact which the royal
governor grieved over but was helpless to restrain.
II • Daniel Leonard • Tory Lawyer
Probably the most finished prose writer, certainly one of the most
cultivated minds, among the notable group of American Loyalists, was a
young man of excellent family, who if events had turned out otherwise
would have made a much greater name for himself. Daniel Leonard was a
Harvard graduate and a member of the Boston bar, an effective speaker,
of some weight in commonwealth politics, and aligned with Hutchinson,
Sewall, and the crown party. In temperament and taste he seems to have
been conspicuously aristocratic. He delighted in fine clothes and
set up his coach and pair to drive from his countryseat to Boston--a
gesture of opulence that excited the laughter of sober people, and led
Mercy Warren to introduce him into her comedy, _The Group_, under the
name of Beau Trumps. According to John Adams, who was a decided gossip,
it was this cavalier love of display that led to his political undoing,
overcoming his native sympathy with the party of revolution.
He wore a broad gold lace round the rim of his hat, he made his
cloak glitter with laces still broader, he had set up his chariot
and pair and constantly traveled in it from Taunton to Boston. This
made the world stare--it was a novelty. Not another lawyer in the
province, attorney or barrister, of whatever age, reputation, rank,
or station, presumed to ride in a coach or chariot. The discerning
ones soon perceived that wealth and power must have charms to
a heart that delighted in so much finery, and indulged in such
unusual expense. Such marks could not escape the vigilant eyes of
the two arch-tempters, Hutchinson and Sewall, who had more art,
insinuation, and address, than all the rest of their party.[220]
Under the pen name of “Massachusettensis,” Leonard published a series
of weekly letters addressed to “the Inhabitants of the Province of
Massachusetts Bay,” running from December 12, 1774, to April 3, 1775,
a fortnight before the affair at Lexington. They were begun soon after
the adjournment of the Continental Congress, and may be taken as the
final statement of the Tory argument. They were exceedingly skillful
partisan pamphlets, adapted with great adroitness to current prejudices
and old loyalties. Their main appeal was to the psychology of the
colonial, and if the springs of that psychology had not been sapped
by the rising liberalism, the appeal would have been extraordinarily
persuasive. Probably the King’s cause was never presented more
convincingly, and the American Tories were delighted with the
letters. “On my return from Congress,” said John Adams, “I found
the Massachusetts Gazette teeming with political speculations, and
Massachusettensis shining like the moon among the lesser stars.”[221]
He at once replied to them under the pen name “Novanglus,” beginning
with a slashing attack in which the seventeenth-century republicans
are called in to refute Leonard, and then reciting some plain facts
about the British government and its American spokesman, which somewhat
tarnished the latter’s eulogies. But he soon strayed off into abstract
disquisition, and the controversy was brought to an abrupt end with the
news from Lexington.
As in most Loyalist pamphlets, Leonard’s appeal was primarily to
the law and the constitution, and it is tagged with references to
statutes like a proper lawyer’s brief. But underlying the argument is a
political philosophy which fairly represents the current Tory theory.
The immediate purpose of the Letters was to make the rebellious spirit
of the colonial Whigs toward their lawful sovereign appear both wicked
and groundless, dangerous to the peace and well-being of society and
inspired by the personal ambitions of demagogues. This major purpose
involved him in two main arguments: first, on the heinousness of
rebellion in general; and second, on the special heinousness of the
Whig leaders. Leonard’s political philosophy is implied rather than
elaborated. With other American Loyalists he evaded broad principles;
nevertheless his total argument rests on a philosophical foundation too
well known to be glossed over. He derived immediately from Hobbes, and
he follows the _Leviathan_ in his exaltation of the sovereign state.
Men in a state of nature, he argued, live in a condition of anarchy,
with the hand of all against all. Amid such chaos civilization is
impossible, and the common need of security for person and property
impelled men to erect the coercive state as an instrument of social
protection. It first arose and has since been maintained from the
necessity of holding in check the spirit of anarchy which continually
threatens from the ambitions of designing men. This is the great danger
that lies always in wait, ready to destroy society. Government is a
guarantee of the protection of the weak against the strong, and every
friend of law and order must enlist his loyalty on the side of the
lawful prince against all who would foment rebellion; for rebellion is
the mischief-maker that unlooses all the evils of Pandora’s box.
This was no more than the familiar stock-in-trade of the Tory,
nevertheless Leonard becomes quite terrifying in describing the evils
of sedition:
Rebellion is the most atrocious offence, that can be perpetrated
by man, save those which are committed more immediately against
the supreme Governor of the Universe who is the avenger of his
own cause. It dissolves the social band, annihilates the security
resulting from law and government; introduces fraud, violence,
rapine, murder, sacrilege, and the long train of evils, that riot,
uncontrouled, in a state of nature. Allegiance and protection are
reciprocal. The subject is bound by the compact to yield obedience
to government, and in return, is entitled to protection from it;
thus the poor are protected against the rich; the weak against
the strong; the individual against the many; and this protection
is guaranteed to each member, by the whole community. But when
government is laid prostrate, a state of war, of all against all,
commences; might overcomes right; innocence itself has no security,
unless the individual sequesters himself from his fellowmen,
inhabits his own cave, and seeks his own prey. This is what is
called a state of nature.[222]
The “seeds of sedition” having been sown, they spring up and bring
forth fruits of death; the “people are led to sacrifice real liberty to
licentiousness, which gradually ripens into rebellion and civil war.”
And what is still more to be lamented, the generality of the
people, who are thus made the dupes of artifice, and the mere