The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson

...Nor in the economic, class-conscious sense beloved by Marxist and Progressive historians...

...I turn," he states, "to the losers sympathetically in order to explain the human reality against which the victors struggled and so to help make the story whole and comprehensible...

...Why...

...To the cautious, calculating Hutchinson, however, continued American dependence on Great Britain in the 1760s and 1770s was a necessity...

...In Hutchinson's record as Governor and as defender of the rights of Parliament, patriots of every rank saw not misplaced good will, not even honest error, but willful, deceitful malevolence...

...But Bailyn's work has a pertinence that transcends its immediate subject...

...According to Bailyn, Hutchinson never perceived the "deep-lying, almost universal, fears of absolutist government" which motivated his enemies...

...Suddenly the experience of a beleaguered Loyalist governor of Massachusetts seems relevant indeed...

...One finds little evidence in this book of "the optimistic and idealist impulses" that Bailyn says motivated the advocates of the Revolution...

...One such "lost cause" which is increasingly receiving sympathetic understanding, if not defense, is that of one of the most despised minorities in American history: the Loyalists who were crushed in the Revolution...

...This inescapable fact of life inexorably meant that Parliament had to retain ultimate sovereignty over the colonies: Hutchinson hoped that Parliament's power would rarely have to be invoked, but the internal stability and external security of the colonies required some dependence on England and even some restrictions on colonial freedom...

...So noticeable is this current interest in the losers that one colonial historian, Pauline Maier, has observed wryly, "The Loyalists lost the Revolution, but they seem to be winning the Bicentennial...

...It is one of the conclusions of Bailyn's splendidly written biography that most of these charges were completely false...

...The jacket of The Ordeal goes further: Bailyn, it asserts, "gives us a general commentary on a rigidly conservative, rationally self-interested political establishment" that was obsessed by a "fear of conspiracy" and that resorted to "law and order" and "growing duplicity" to subdue its "fierce opposition...

...The result, as those who have read Bailyn's previous works have come to expect, is a brilliant and provocative book that is a model of historical craftsmanship...

...So fierce, so unremitting was the struggle that as many as 80,000 Loyalists—those who stood by Great Britain—were eventually driven into exile...

...He never understood the extent to which his entire political culture—not just his "demagogic" rivals—was already permeated by libertarian thought...

...Eliot's statement is not, of course, literally and invariably true...

...It is a fact too little known outside historical circles that the drive for independence, 1775-1783, was opposed by at least one-fifth of the American population...

...Bailyn succeeds in helping the reader to feel Hutchinson's plight and to see his world as he saw it...

...He had plotted to "abridge what are called English liberties" in the colonies, all the while concealing his criminal intent...

...Rather, Bailyn believes that the time has come when a comprehensive, balanced understanding of the Revolution is finally possible...

...Far from being a "vile serpent" (as John Adams called him), Thomas Hutchinson emerges in Bailyn's book as an honorable, prudent, reflective man who avoided appeals to passion and strove always to be thoughtful and judicious...

...Of the proliferating recent studies of Loyalists, one of the most impressive is Bernard Bailyn's biography of the most important one of all: Thomas Hutchinson, the last native-born colonial governor of Massachusetts...

...In this indirect fashion, he emphasizes anew how genuinely radical, in many ways, our Revolution was...

...This remarkable concentration of offices in two families did not violate the canons of the passing age, but it greatly disturbed Hutchinson's enemies, ever fearful of executive encroachments and fortified by libertarian ideology...

...The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson is a vividly written, poignant story of the defeat, humiliation, and destruction of a capable, decent, and increasingly helpless man who never accurately fathomed the passions and aspirations of the Revolutionary movement...

...Are the flaws which Bailyn attributes to Hutchinson—a "calculatingly pragmatic approach to politics," "insensitivity to the moral ingredients of public life," and unresponsiveness to new and strange aspirations—the typical weaknesses of conservatives in power...

...every significant political honor that he could hope to acquire was bestowed upon him...

...Hutchinson, it was alleged, had repeatedly lied to his British superiors about American goals and intentions...

...We must strive, says Bailyn, to understand why intelligent and honorable men could ever oppose the Revolution...

...But there is a sense in which his aphorism is shrewd indeed: if causes can be defeated on the plains of history, they are seldom extinguished in the realm of historiography...

...Bailyn's book is not, of course, written as a "tract for the times...

...He did not support such hated British measures as the Stamp Act, which, in fact, he had opposed...

...It is impossible to read Bailyn's biography without feeling compassion for an individual who, whatever his opinions, seems not to have deserved the strident and sometimes vicious attacks that helped to drive him from his native land...

...So Hutchinson argued again and again—to be greeted with ever-increasing vituperation and disdain...

...For more than a decade Bailyn has immersed himself in the tracts and pamphlets of the men who forged the independence movement and has become an outstanding authority on the ideology of the Revolution...

...When, in 1773, Benjamin Franklin obtained in England some of Hutchinson's confidential correspondence with British officials and promptly "leaked" it to patriots in Massachusetts, the residual effectiveness of the Loyalist governor was destroyed...

...In presenting this analysis of Hutchinson's career and character, Bailyn runs certain risks...

...Able and estimable though he was, Hutchinson was a victim of the transition...

...Just as we are preparing to celebrate our victorious Revolution, the "lost cause" of Loyalism is enjoying a revival...

...Indeed, in the decade that followed he became Chief Justice and then Governor of the province...

...he properly states that his subject is the eighteenth century, not the twentieth...

...Hutchinson believed that his principal enemies were demagogic agitators who irresponsibly stirred up the passive masses for selfish ends...

...For it is precisely by means of the author's respect for the Governor that Hutchinson at last receives a decent hearing before the bar of history...

...The eras of "heroic" and "Whig" interpretations, with their inherent limitations of perspective, are past...

...Harvard-educated, successful in business and politics, widely respected, this fifth-generation Yankee was—or so it seemed—destined for even greater success...

...To Hutchinson it was only prudent and logical that Parliament retain absolute theoretical control over the colonies...

...He did not secretly attempt to sell out his native province...

...For while Bailyn recognizes that the Revolution obviously had "social consequences," it was "in its essence" a "political and ideological" event...

...On the very eve of the nation's two-hundredth birthday, however, scholarly work on this subject has blossomed...

...For the questions posed by Hutchinson's career have a somber urgency that seems likely to intensify...

...In an intriguing way The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson is a book for our era—a book which conservatives especially might ponder...

...From this limitation flowed a fatal consequence: his underestimation of the breadth and power of the forces he sought vainly to control...

...Or will he be destroyed by self-righteous spokesmen for our era's "new politics," "new morality," and "beliefs and passions that grip people's minds...

...If a government waits passively until a radical challenge has become a "clear and present danger" to its very survival, has it not already waited too long...

...Not in the bloody sense of more recent upheavals, although there was plenty of rioting and intimidation in Massachusetts before 1775...

...What is the best way—is there a "best way"—to contain destructive "passions that grip men's minds" ? How can government and its supporters work to defuse an ideology that sees malevolence in the most prudent of measures...

...Few causes are so forlorn that they will not one day find someone to defend them—with the pen, if not the sword...

...within two years his home in Milton was seized and still more of his private letters published in distorted form...

...in 1760, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts was forty-nine years old...

...Yet so relevant are the dilemmas with which Governor Hutchinson struggled that we are almost inevitably reminded of modern politics on nearly every page...

...Is the underestimation of radical ideologies a characteristically conservative vice, or is it more commonly a rationalistic, liberal one...

...Not, he hastens to stress in the preface, because he has become a latter-day Loyalist—although his treatment of Hutchinson is sympathetic in many respects...

...Moreover, by presenting the losing side so vigorously and perceptively, Bailyn enables us to measure the vigor of the forces which ultimately vanquished the Loyalists...

...Therein, says Bailyn, was the source of Hutchinson's "ultimate failure": his inability to comprehend the "moral indignation and the meliorist aspirations" of the "new politics" of the 1760s and 1770s...

...In adopting such an approach Bailyn need not argue with Hutchinson, still less point out the radical alternatives to the Governor's position...

...But it would all turn to ashes, and in the end his career lay in ruins...

...Hopes may fade and dreams may wither, but the arguments of historians go on for generations...

...It was self-evident that in a world of ravenous nation-states a close, protective tie with England was essential...

...and a nephew was Associate Justice...

...Already highly regardedfor The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and The Origins of American Politics, Professor Bailyn has turned in his latest work to a study of the principal bete noire of John Adams and thousands of other Revolutionaries...

...For as Bailyn explains in his preface, he has written a work "which depicts the fortunes of a conservative in a time of radical upheaval...

...the past of every country is strewn with causes that are irrecoverable...

...In the early 1770s, for instance, when Hutchinson was Governor, his brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, was Lieutenant Governor...

...But if this third and, in Bailyn's view, most profound stage of historical comprehension is upon us, knowledge of only one side—the winners—is not enough...

...It was all downhill thereafter: within a year of this sensational episode, he was in exile...

...And it is wise, I think, that we are...

...Hutchinson was an ambitious, acquisitive individual whose very success understandably stimulated his foes' apprehensions...

...It is the conservative fate in the 1970s to live in a time of radical upheaval, and the ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson may some day be our own...

...And yet the verdict cannot be so one-sided...

...For although he explicitly criticizes Hutchinson's limitations in the book and declares his own pro-Revolution sentiments in the preface, most of the biography evokes sympathy for an unjustly maligned figure...

...Bailyn portrays the dilemmas and sorrows of Hutchinson so effectively that the "new politics" of the 1760s and 1770s appear in a rather unedifying light...

...In short, Hutchinson practiced the "old politics" just at the point that the Age of Walpole was giving way to what R.R...

...How does a counterrevolutionary leader successfully cope with a mass movement whose tendency—whether admitted or not—is revolutionary...

...another brother-in-law was Chief Justice of the Superior Court...

...Eliot, one suspects, would have savored the irony...

...More than that: when he yielded the governorship in 1774 to General Thomas Gage, he was almost universally regarded throughout Massachusetts not merely as a failure but as a traitor...

...But perhaps this is exactly the effect that Bailyn intended his book to have...

...the "wholeness" of the Revolution can now, at last, be grasped...

...To his foes Hutchinson's very words, his very arguments smacked of tyranny and treason...

...Despite the fact that these letters contained nothing that Hutchinson had not said publicly, they were quickly published all over America—and were regarded as convincing proof of Hutchinson's nefarious designs...

...As a friend said to me recently, one of the key questions of contemporary politics has yet to be decided: will a conservative leader be able—will he be allowed—to govern America effectively...

...Now, quite deliberately, he has altered his focus...

...Other books—notably The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution—have already done that...

...he could not transcend "the received wisdom" and the "accepted morality...

...These are questions not just for Hutchinson's time but for ours as well...

...However respectful Bailyn's portrait of Hutchinson may be, he clearly indicates that the Loyalist governor was not without faults...

...Asa product of a hard-nosed political world of patronage and self-interest, Hutchinson—according to Bailyn—simply could not understand "the passions of the age...

...History is contingent, he seemed to be saying, and the fortunes of nations can change in the most drastic ways...

...Palmer has called "the Age of Democratic Revolutions...

...Despite their obvious importance, the Loyalists have until lately been rather neglected by historians...

...He had wronged his countrymen to gain privileges and favors from Britain and had worked to destroy the ancient harmony within the empire in order to advance the cause of tyranny and his private greed...

...Hutchinson died in England in 1780, a reviled and broken man...