Hutchinson's Diary: Second Volume

WE made the first volume of this belated publication the subject of an article in this magazine, in May, 1884. Referring to that paper for the personal character and career of Governor Hutchinson ; the reasons, just or unjust, for the odium which attached to him in this province ; his leaving, on permission granted him by the king, for a temporary visit to England, which became a saddened and hopeless state of exile for the remainder of his life from the native land and home which he so fondly loved, we may give a brief rehearsal of his experiences as presented in this second volume. He left Boston June 1, 1774, the day when the Port Act, closing the harbor, took effect. He watched for the development of events, as the news from time to time, amid long delays and exciting rumors, of battles and embittered strife reached England, protracting a struggle to which be hoped that each month would bring a reconciling close. He watched also the same development of measures by the home government, in its fatuous policy of exasperating and vacillating dealing with the rebellion in the colonies, in which passion, contempt, and vengefulness took the place of wisdom and baffled the skill of statesmanship. The second volume of the governor’s Diary begins under date of January 1, 1776. We may allow him an extract under date of September 1, 1778, to give us a retrospect of his condition and experience up to that time : “ The changes in the last four or five years of my life make the whole scene, when I look back upon it, appear like a dream, or other delusion. From the possession of one of the best houses in Boston, the pleasantest house and farm at Milton of almost any in the world, and one of the best estates in the colony of Rhode Island, — free from debt, an affluent income, and a prospect of being able to make a handsome provision for each of my children at my death, — I have not. a foot of land at my command, and personal estate of about £7000 only; depending on the bounty of government for a pension, which, though it affords a present ample provision for myself, and enables me to distribute £500 a year among my children, yet is precarious, and I cannot avoid anxiety. But I am still distinguished by a kind providence from my suffering relations, friends, and countrymen in America, as well as from many of them in England, and have great reason to be thankful that so much mercy is yet continued to me.” The governor died suddenly — though he had been ill — at Brompton Park, near London, on June 3, 1780, six years after he had left Boston, Before his own decease he had lost a beloved son and daughter, who were with him, by consumption. Clinging to the hope that his own bones might rest in his native land, it was his fond wish to transfer thither the relics of his children. Another daughter died within a month after his death. Within the period covered by this volume, the governor had to learn of the Declaration of Independence, the French alliance, the combination of France and Spain against Great Britain, and the successes and reverses of the armies and fleets of the warring parties, with all the rumors of heats in parliamentary debate, and the boldness of the opposition to the government, and the unyielding attitude of the colonies. It is evident that before his death he had sadly admitted to himself that the rupture would end in a final and complete discomfiture of government.

The impression which the candid reader would receive from the first volume of this work will be strengthened as he peruses the second, that party bitterness, traditionary prejudice and patriotic rhetoric have contributed to an over-severity of judgment, and an undeserved personal obloquy visited upon the last royal civil governor of Massachusetts. He was not the malignant plotter, the insidious intriguer of mischief and oppression, which his enemies represented him to be. The extracts from the Diary and Letters of Chief Justice Peter Oliver, — a companion of Hutchinson in exile, — which the editor intersperses through his pages, give the reader the means of comparing the spirits and utterance of these two unhappy men, and of judging how much more mild and considerate of the two was the governor. Before he left Boston and through the remainder of his life, which closed before the colonies had achieved independence, Hutchinson, a man of much intelligence, discrimination, and penetration, maintained most strenuously that the breach with the mother country, with all its irritations and aggravations, was not brought about by the spontaneous and general sentiment of the mass of people, but was inspired by a few self-constituted leaders, who ingeniously, not to say artfully, by disputation, invective, skill in controversy, and the rubbing of a sore which they would not allow to heal, fomented a strife which rapidly matured to open rebellion. There is more ground and reason found now, in all our heaps of revolutionary literature, to sustain this conviction of the governor’s than our patriotic oratory has educated us to imagine. Whoever has accepted the fancy that our Revolutionary War, from its beginning to its close, engaged the spontaneous, hearty. general, and self-sacrificing approval and coöperation of even the majority of all classes of the people of the colonies will do wisely if he will read with care

— it can hardly be with patriotic complacency— the letters of Washington, to refer to no other confirmatory authorities, in which that sometimes impatient but always noble and generous leader gives utterance to his complaints and forebodings. Our independence was achieved and secured by the French alliance, — the sympathy, the money, the war supplies, and the navy of France. Three helpful agencies aided to effect it: First, the adroit and diligent, the ingenious and persistent, efforts of a few able patriots in pressing an original grievance into an ever expanding and sharpening controversy, intimidating the loyalists, and turning a minority on their side into a working majority. Second, the fatal policy of the British government, exasperating, wrong-headed, contemptuous, yet weakly vacillating in its blind and baffled attempts, both civil and military, to undo a folly and a wrong simply by aggravating them. And third, the natural working out of a predestined result

— shall we say by evolution or by Providence?— in the birth of a new nation. We have already noticed the recognition by Hutchinson of the first of these agencies. The working of the second he had full opportunity to watch in England. He had himself opposed and written against the Port Bill. So far from being in sympathy with, he more or less openly and earnestly disapproved of, the subsequent measures of government, as his Diary abundantly attests. He says he was not consulted by the. ministry. As to the third of these cooperating agencies in the birth of our nation, Hutchinson was no seer to forecast it.

Yet the ill-repute and odium, under the burden of which Hutchinson so sadly left his native land, followed him across the ocean, and were accepted by the opposition in Parliament as helpful to argument against government. Hutchinson records that Fox. in assailing the ministry in the Commons, urged the withdrawal “ of the pension to a late governor, Mr. Hutchinson, that firebrand and source of the American disputes.” The diarist, then prostrate by illness, and within three months of the close of his life, enters this placid comment on the invective: “ Happy should I be if I could as well acquit myself for all other parts of my conduct through life as for the part I have taken in this controversy.”

In that melancholy and plaintive retrospect of his fortunes which we have quoted above from the governor’s Diary, it will be noticed that he gratefully recognizes his own favorable fortune in contrast with those of his fellow-exiles in England. His reference, of course, is to the refugees or loyalists, who were then crowding to London, in the character of poor relations, greatly annoying and embarrassing the officers of government. They were indeed a forlorn and wretched company, most of them delicately bred and previously in affluent circumstances. They brooded over and uttered their woes, told of their losses, sacrifices, and miseries, and hung round the offices and the treasury, seeking pleaders and patrons for allowances and pensions. They were kept at fever heat by the rumors and the gazettings which told of the alternations of the conflict on this side of the water, and by the successive measures of a blundering and discomfited ministry. “ Washington had died of a fever!” “Washington had been shot!” Washington had sent in his resignation to the Congress!” were the tidings repeated at the New England Coffee House, where these victims of suspense resorted. Hutchinson records that they were once left for seventy days without tidings from America. He invited groups of the more distinguished of these exiles to dinner. It was remembered and repeated that, from the first outbreak in this country of mobs, riots, burnings, plunderings, and insults, against those who were on the side of government, British officials, civil and military, had covenanted that support, redress, and full reparation should be made to such sufferers. The ministry, Parliament, and the king had solemnly ratified these promises. The sufferers and pleaders in London were eager in pressing their claims. Government staggered under this demand, as the public debt was becoming well-nigh unmanageable. At the peace it tried to shift the responsibility for redress to these loyalists upon our Congress and legislatures. But Franklin thwarted the scheme. The British government had not promised to compel us to indemnify the loyalists, but to do so itself. In the end it fulfilled its promise with a degree of generosity.

Hutchinson beguiled the weary months and years of his exile by mingling with moderation in social enjoyments, by attending court days till bereavements and indifference made them unattractive to him, by visiting occasionally public shows, and by frequent country journeys, sharing the hospitality of friends, and interesting himself in matters of history and antiquity. But all the while he carried with him the ache of homesickness, and a longing to get back to his beautiful farm, to the simple ways of living, made more winning by contrast with an artificial and heartless society around him, and to the cherished friends of his youth and maturity.

We do not recall any reference before this to a curious fact noted in the following extract from the Diary: —

“ November 22, 1777. At Lord Townshend’s, Portman Square. Lady T. asked me if I had a mind to see an instance of American loyalty, and, going to the sofa, uncovered a large gilt head, which at once appeared to be that of the king, which it seems the rebels at New York, after the Declaration of Independence, cut off from the statue which had been erected there, and sent to Fort Washington, in order to fix it on a pole or pike ; but by some means or other it was buried, and after the surrender of the fort Montresor took it into his possession, and sent it to Lord T., which he received last night. The nose is wounded and defaced, but the gilding remains fair ; and as it was well executed, it retains a striking likeness.”

The reference is to a leaden-gilt equestrian statue of George III., executed by the celebrated Milton, of London, which the citizens of New York had erected on the Bowling-Green, in 1770, as an expression of their satisfaction at the repeal of the Stamp Act. On the evening of July 9, 1776, after the public reading of the Declaration of Independence, amid the rejoicings and tumults of the populace, the statue was dismembered, and parts of it were run into bullets, “ to assimilate with the brains of the adversary.” It is very likely that the fact came to the knowledge of the king as an unpleasant reminder of the decapitation of Charles I.

One task occupied the assiduous diligence and engaged the best abilities of Governor Hutchinson during these years of trouble, for which we owe him a debt of unqualified regard and gratitude. In his peaceful and prosperous times he had written and published two volumes of the History of Massachusetts, a work of thorough and patient research, impartial, and in every respect commendable and admirable. Though he left behind him here so much that he valued, he fortunately carried with him journals and public documents from which he was able to digest the contents of a third volume. This was edited and published by his grandson, Rev. John Hutchinson, in 1828, five hundred copies being prepared for the American market, by agreement. It covers the period between 1749 and 1774, and is mainly a relation of the author’s administration and that of his predecessor, Sir Francis Bernard. No fair-minded reader can peruse this volume without a sympathetic regard, and even a warm esteem, for the writer. It relates, under various phases, one continuous and embittered controversy. Yet it is chastened and dignified in tone and spirit, wholly free from querulousness, and not to be challenged in its statement of facts. While it is free from all malignity and special pleading on his own behalf, the author tries to be fair in judging the motives and reporting the sayings and doings of those who badgered and hectored him by putting the worst construction upon his course as the sworn servant of his king.

It is likely that some readers of the second volume of the Diary and Letters will find more matter to engage, as they certainly will much more to amuse, them in the contributions which the editor makes to it from his own pen and fancy than from the records of the governor. The work is indeed unique in the license and lawlessness of the method of its editorship. The course of the proper narration is interrupted by the most irrelevant matter introduced into the text, and in what the editor regards as “the degrading position of footnotes.” Some of this is of a highly comical character. Thus we have philological, etymological, and grammatical criticisms, conceits, moralizings, and hortatory warnings mingled with fragmentary allusions to gossip, with scraps of pedigrees, biography, and history. A kindly allowance for all these discursions and whimseys of the editor may be made on the score of his age and the peculiar type of Englishmen of which he is an admirable specimen, — musing, moralizing, anecdotical, oracular, used to deferential attention, and making the subject of his fond study and reminiscences the pivot on which the history of the world revolves. Commenting on a reference of the governor’s to some delay in the consummation of a marriage between a mature couple, the editor gives us a note beginning as follows : “ Tastes and preferences are infinite, and they are unaccountable. There are many agreeable, accomplished, and estimable old maids in the world. They may have become so from choice, or,” etc.

Again, the governor records that on a visit to Lord Hardwicke he had thoughtlessly referred to the recent suicide of a Mr. Stanley, and adds, “ I never thought, until I came home, of his brother Charles, who died just in the same way. I then recollected or fancied that he was in some degree of confusion,” etc. Now the editor, seeming to fear lest the moral digestion of his readers may not be able to assimilate the warning, gives them a note as follows : “ When you are in general society, never reflect on those who have been hanged, for you know not whose toes you may tread upon ; and never speak of your pedigree or your coat armor, for there may be those within hearing who never had either.” Yet the editor gives many pages to this matter of coat armor,” and follows genealogies of very ordinary persons into particulars really as unimportant as would be the succession and distribution of crops of cabbages and turnips. We must forgive him for all his contemptuous allusions and his sharp criticisms, as referring to this country, the home of some of the most distinguished of his own lineage, for he apologizes for and takes them all back in his closing colophon. He says, “ When Americans have made reparation for all the slander and misrepresentation which they have persistently heaped upon the governor during the last one hundred and twenty years, then we shall be quits. It is time to bury the hatchet. Farewell.”

Some facts, of easy explanation, concerning his subject, appear to have escaped the notice of the editor. Under dates of November 7 and 13, 1776, the governor refers to a small pamphlet which he had published anonymously, as “ A Letter addressed to a noble Lord, etc.,” a copy of which he sent, with the following note, to the king: “ Governor Hutchinson, being prompted by zeal for your majesty’s service, and a desire to expose, and as far as may be to frustrate, the very criminal designs of the leaders of your majesty’s deluded, unhappy American subjects, has wrote and caused to be printed a small pamphlet. which he begs leave to lay at your majesty’s feet, humbly entreating your majesty’s forgiveness of this presumption.” This pamphlet, the editor says, is unknown to him. He might have found the paper in Almon’s Remembrancer, Vol. IV. It is made up of strictures on the Declaration of Independence, the reasons given to justify which the writer pronounces “ false and frivolous.”

Under date of November 20, 1777, the governor records, “ I sent the Bishop of Rochester a set of my History and the Collection to day, as I had done to the Bishop of London yesterday, and from both received very polite cards.” The editor supposes “the Collection to be of his speeches to the House of Representatives.” It was that invaluable volume of Hutchinson’s, published in Boston in 1769, entitled A Collection of Original Papers relative to the History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay.

The editor, taking note of Hutchinson’s unwillingness to listen a second time to Lord Chatham, who “ had frequently uttered expressions calculated to encourage insubordination and embroil the two countries,” makes it the occasion of a most murderous assault of his own on the opposition members in both houses of Parliament, as having given aid and comfort to the rebels. He writes : “ It may be assumed that if half a dozen members out of each chamber had been hanged, a very sedative elfect would have been produced in the colonies.”

It would seem as if the editor must have noted the facetious items which occasionally appear in the journals about the possible payment by our government of the debt of our seceding States. For, looking farther back for a case of reparation, one would infer that he is not entirely without hope of sharing a compensation for the losses of his ancestor as a loyalist by confiscation. He quotes the following from the governor’s Diary, with his own comment in square brackets : “ ‘ Perhaps I may not live to have my estate restored to me, or to receive a compensation, but, I hope my children will.’ [Aside—They haven’t yet. Patience ! patience !]”