Thomas Hutchinson

Thomas Hutchinson was the last civilian governor of Massachusetts, opposed the Stamp Act and enforced it anyway, and died in exile in England describing himself as an American. He was Boston-born, a Harvard graduate at sixteen, a merchant and then a public official who accumulated the offices of lieutenant governor, chief justice and councillor simultaneously, which his enemies found intolerable. He argued privately against the Stamp Act as impolitic while insisting publicly that Parliament had the legal right to pass it; a mob destroyed his house in 1765 and scattered the manuscript of his history of the colony in the street. In 1773 letters he had written to a British official, in which he suggested there must be an abridgement of what are called English liberties in the colonies, were obtained by Benjamin Franklin and published in Boston, and his position became impossible. It was his refusal to let the tea ships leave the harbour without unloading that produced the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. He left for London in 1774 and never returned. His History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay is still used, partly because he had the documents. As lieutenant governor he faced the Boston Massacre in March 1770, moved the troops out of the town to stop a general rising, and let the soldiers stand trial before a Boston jury, which acquitted most of them with John Adams defending. He had made himself unpopular twenty years earlier by pushing through the retirement of Massachusetts paper money in favour of silver, a reform that worked and that debtors hated. Massachusetts confiscated his property and named him in an act of banishment. He died at Brompton, outside London, in 1780, and his diary and letters were published by a great-grandson in the next century.

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