Chap. XLII.} 1769. Aug. |
This text is part of:
[305]
in England for his attachment to colonial liberties.1
At Boston he wished not to be thought to have been very closely connected with his predecessor2 At the same moment, ‘I have lived in perfect harmony with Governor Bernard,’ was the time-server's first message to the Colonial Office;3 ‘I flatter myself, he will when he arrives in England give a favorable opinion of me;’ and expressing his adhesion to the highest system of metropolitan authority, and retaining the services of Israel Mauduit as his agent, he devoted his rare ability and his intimate acquaintance with the history and constitution of the Province to suggest for its thorough ‘subjection’4 a system of coercive measures, which England gradually and reluctantly adopted.
Wherever the Colony had a friend, he would artfully set before him such hints as might incline him to harsh judgments.5 Even to Franklin he vouched for the tales of Bernard as ‘most just and candid.’6 He paid court to the enemies of American liberty by stimulating them to the full indulgence of their malignity.
He sought out great men, and those who stood at the door of great men, the underlings of present Ministers or prospective Ministers, of Grenville, or Hillsborough, or Jenkinson, or the King; urged them incessantly to bring on the crisis by the immediate intervention of Parliament;7 and advised the change of the
1 Hutchinson to Lyman.
2 Cooper to Gov. Pownall, 8 Sept. 1769.
3 Hutchinson to John Pownall, 25 July, 1769.
4 Hutchinson to Israel Mauduit.
5 In proof note the whole tenor of his correspondence with Bollan, whom he could not deceive; with Richard Jackson, whose good opinion he for a time won, and with Gov. Pownall and others.
6 T. Hutchinson to B Franklin, Boston, 29 July, 1769.
7 To go no further back than 1769; Hutchinson to T. Whately, 20 Jan. 1769; to R. Jackson, 18 August, 1769; to T. Whately, 24 August, 1769; to Maj. Gen. Mackay, 11 Sept. 1769; to Sir Francis Bernard, 6 Oct. 1769; to person not named, 17 October, 1769; to Sir Francis Bernard, 19 October, 1769; to the Earl of Hillsborough, 20 October, 1769; to T. Whately, 20 or 26 Oct. 1769. [Compare Grenville Papers, IV. 481.] To John Pownall, Secretary of the Board of Trade, a private channel for communicating with the Ministry, 23 Oct. 1769; to Israel Mauduit, 27 Oct. 1769; to John Pownall, for Hillsborough's eye, 14 Nov. 1769; to a person not named, 9 Jan. 1770. This is merely a beginning of references to letters of which I have authentic abstracts or copies, and which urge the extreme interposition of Parliament, against the province, or against individuals.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.