The last royal governor of Massachusetts. An historian of great ability but whose merits as such were not recognized by his contemporaries. His “History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay,” the third and last volume which was not published till nearly fifty years after his death, begins with the year 1628, and closes with the year 1774. He published also a “Collection of Original Papers” relating to the same subject.

Personal

  Fled, in his old age, from the detestation of a country, where he had been beloved, esteemed, and admired, and applauded with exaggeration—in short, where he had been everything from his infancy—to a country where he was nothing; pinched by a pension, which, though ample in Boston, would barely keep a house in London; throwing round his baleful eyes on the exiled companions of his folly; hearing daily of the slaughter of his countrymen and conflagration of their cities; abhorred by the greatest men and soundest part of the nation, and neglected, if not despised by the rest, hardened as had been my heart against him, I assure you I was melted at the accounts I heard of his condition. Lord Townsend told me that he put an end to his own life. Though I did not believe this, I know he was ridiculed by the courtiers. They laughed at his manners at the levee, at his perpetual quotation of his brother Foster, searching his pockets for letters to read to the king, and the king turning away from him with his head up, etc.

  Few who sat upon the bench in the last century were more deserving of commendation than Judge Hutchinson. His character in this capacity was irreproachable. His learning, even in the science of the law, was highly respectable, and, when we consider his early education, was indeed remarkable. He possessed great clearness of thought, and excelled in that most difficult property of a good judge, a clear and intelligible statement of the case upon which he was to pass. It is a traditionary anecdote that, after listening to the charges given his associates, juries were in the habit of remarking when Hutchinson rose to address them, “Now we shall have something which we can understand.”… In his official character he had great readiness and capacity for business, and was faithful and laborious in the performance of his duties. He was a fluent and graceful speaker, a vigorous writer, and a respectable scholar…. Had be lived at almost any other period of our history, with the same industry and application of his powers, his fame would have survived as that of an useful, honorable, and honored man.

  No servant of the Crown ever received more slander, personal abuse, and misrepresentation, than Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts, and yet his descendants have allowed a whole century to elapse without making an effort to defend his character. Time will show that it did not need defending, and the delay is an advantage to all parties, for we can now examine the situation calmly and dispassionately, which it was impossible to do during the prevalence of political excitement. We would wish, therefore, to speak without offence, and endeavour to re-unite in the bonds of friendship those ties which were unfortunately loosened at the time of the dispute.

  Few Americans of the Revolutionary period have had a more lasting renown than Thomas Hutchinson, and few have been more leniently judged on a second hearing. Abused for his virtues, condemned in his absence, feared, hated, and maligned to a degree which now seems absurd, the lapse of a century has left his fellow Bostonians ready to see and acknowledge the really attractive side of his character…. One can almost affirm that he was a loyalist by stress of reason rather than by conviction or sympathy. His soul yearned for his native land, his best wishes were for his countrymen, he felt himself an alien in the England which swallowed him. But the conviction of the absolute correctness of his position in regard to the logical supremacy of Parliament paralyzed every movement of his heart or of his intellect.

  Hutchinson’s good breeding and high character made him popular in society, where he made the acquaintance of Gibbon and General Paoli, and he paid frequent visits to court; but as a consistent Calvinist, he regarded Garrick and playgoing with only qualified approval. He was also engaged in writing the third volume of his “History,” covering the period “from 1749 to 1774, and comprising a detailed narrative of the origin and early stages of the American revolution;” but it was not published until 1828, when his grandson, the Rev. John Hutchinson, edited it. He was created D.C.L. at Oxford, in 1776. During the last years of his life he bore with fortitude the loss of his property and the ingratitude of his countrymen; but the death of his daughter Peggy, followed by that of his son Billy, broke him down, and he died on 3 June, 1780. He was buried at Croydon.

  He was buried at Croydon on the 9th of June. It would scarcely be possible for a human life to close among circumstances of deeper gloom. He and his children, to be sure, were not in want; his balance at his banker’s was £6387 15s 3d. In every other way utter wreck had overtaken his family and himself. His daughters and his youngest son, dispirited, dropped prematurely at the same time with him into the grave. The prospects of the elder sons seemed quite blasted. In daily contact with him, a company of Loyalist exiles, once men of position and substance, now discredited and disheartened, were in danger of starvation. The country he had loved had nothing for him but contumely. To a man like Hutchinson public calamity would cause a deeper pang than private sorrows. No more threatening hour for England has probably ever struck than the hour when the soul of this man passed. It was becoming apparent that America was lost, a rending which easily might be fatal to the empire, and which her hereditary enemies were hastening to make the most of. To America herself the rending seemed to many certain to be fatal. While the members were thus being torn away, destruction seemed to impend at the heart. At the moment of the death, London was at the mercy of the mob in the Gordon riots. The city was on fire in many places; a drunken multitude murdered right and left, laying hands even upon the noblest of the land. Mansfield, because he had recommended to the mercy of a jury a priest arrested for celebrating mass, saved his life with difficulty, his house with all his possessions going up in conflagration. The exile’s funeral passed on its way through smoke and uproar that might easily have been regarded as the final crash of the social structure. No one foresaw then what was immediately to come; that England was to make good her loss twice over; that America was to become the most powerful of nations; that the London disorders were on the surface merely and only transient. In Hutchinson’s latest consciousness, every person, every spot, every institution dear to his heart, must have seemed to be overwhelmed in catastrophe. Such was the end of a life thoroughly dutiful and honorable!

General

  Hutchinson, whose writing is more worthy of the dignified title of history than any other American composition during our colonial state.

  The only monument of his mind is his “History of Massachusetts,” written with lively inquisitiveness and a lawyer-like criticism; though without a glimpse of the great truths which were the mighty causes of the revolutions he describes. He was philosophic, if to know somewhat of the selfish principles in man be philosophy; otherwise he was blind, except to facts.

  His “History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay,” which, in its completed form, brings the story down to the very year of the author’s exit from the colony, may fairly be called a praiseworthy production, even from the literary standpoint. One old book may be valuable as an original authority, another may be prized for its quaintness of autobiographical detail or social chronicle. Hutchinson’s work offers something more than this, and deserves some credit for its literary style. Notwithstanding the marked political opinions of the author, one feels a confidence in his statements greater than that reposed in the writings of the professional moralist Cotton Mather. Naturally, Hutchinson never attained a tithe of the popularity enjoyed by Increase and Cotton Mather in their capacity of historians; politics had crowded literature to the wall, and Hutchinson was not the man to get an impartial hearing in his lifetime. But it is now apparent that he possessed an ability shared but never fully displayed by Thomas Prince: that of accumulating, studying, and assimilating historical materials, and placing them before the reader in an orderly and intelligible form. It is this ability that makes the historian; and in the maturity and thoroughness of Hutchinson’s work we find the beginning of the second and principal period of historical literature in America. More than this one cannot claim; to say less than this would be injustice. In Hutchinson’s diary and miscellaneous papers are sometimes to be found a loftiness of thought and a transparency of diction which are similar to the good literary qualities of the “History.”

  Governor Hutchinson was fortunate in respect to materials for his work, having access to many documents and sources of information long since lost. From these he compiled, with excellent judgment and rare scholarship, a work which will always be regarded as the highest authority.

  That in these volumes Hutchinson has illustrated the fundamental virtues of an historian, and that he deserves to be ranked as, upon the whole, the ablest historical writer produced in America prior to the nineteenth century, are conclusions as to which there is now substantial agreement among scholars…. A great historian, Hutchinson certainly was not, and, under the most favorable outward conditions, could not have been. He had the fundamental virtues of a great historian—love of truth, love of justice, diligence, the ability to master details and to narrate them with accuracy. Even in the exercise of those fundamental virtues, however, no historian in Hutchinson’s circumstances could fail to be hampered by the enormous preoccupations of official business, or to have his judgment warped and colored by the pre-possessions of his own political career. While Hutchinson was, indeed, a miracle of industry, it was only a small part of his industry that he was free to devote to historical research. However sincere may have been his purpose to tell the truth and to be fair to all, the literary product of such research was inevitably weakened, as can now be abundantly shewn, by many serious oversights and by many glaring misrepresentations, apparently through his failure to make a thorough use of the important sources of information then accessible to him, such as colonial pamphlets, colonial newspapers, the manuscripts of his own ancestors and of the Mathers, and especially the general court records of the province in which he played so great a part. As to the rarer intellectual and spiritual endowments of a great historian,—breadth of vision, breadth of sympathy, the historic imagination, and the power of style,—these Hutchinson almost entirely lacked. That he had not the gift of historical divination, the vision and the faculty divine to see the inward meaning of men and of events, and to express the meaning in gracious, noble, and fascinating speech—Hutchinson was himself partly conscious.