Eloquence for a Losing Side

THE MORNING AFTER National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University, several hundred students at Forest Hills High Schools in New York City walked out of school. As the angry students milled about the building--liberals' "Don't forget Kent State" mingling with radicals' "Organize to smash the state"--the school's principal noticed that someone had dropped a briefcase on the floor. "Get hat briefcase out of here," he snapped. "What will people think?"

Thomas Hutchinson--the Tory governor of Revolutionary Massachusetts whose ordeal Bernard Bailyn sets forth with intelligence and sympathy--would have known exactly what to think. He's have had a well-reasoned, documented analysis proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the whole business was the work of a few hard-core agitators, and that the National Guard's deplorable mistake, like the deplorable war it appeared to safeguard, merely played into the agitator's hands. Unlike Mr. Balser, the principal, Hutchinson could have expressed this analysis convincingly, and acted on it rationally, with historical erudition and political astuteness. But to judge by Bailyn's account of Hutchinson's career after some soldiers he nominally governed killed five townspeople in what became known as the Boston Massacre, Hutchinson might just as well have spent his time worrying about briefcases on the floor. For his analyses and maneuvers had no more meaning to his times and little more effect.

Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution dealt with the political philosophy of American radicals--their belief that only constant, militant vigilance and strict adherence to governmental forms limited by internal balances could check the corruption power inevitably causes among its possessors. Ideological Origins is a book remarkable for its wit and its style, as well as its persuasiveness. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson is only slightly less well written, but it approaches the Revolution from the other side--from the point of view of someone whom the Revolutionaries saw only as a traitor to his country and would-be murderer of its liberties.

From his own point of view, Hutchinson was neither of these and his exile from a hostile Massachusetts caused him deep sorrow. "Nothing can be more polite than my entertainment," he wrote of life at an English country estate:

...exactly at eleven, as many servants as there are of gentlemen and ladies, come in with each of them two wax candles, and in procession we follow to the gallery at the head of the great staircase, and file off of different rooms. This is high life: but I would not have parted with my humble cottage at Milton for the sake of it.

Hutchinson never stopped complaining that the private letters Benjamin Franklin obtained and circulated in Boston, setting off an outburst of hatred for Hutchinson, were distorted. He never stopped insisting that by the words, "there must be an abridgement of English liberties," he had not meant that there should be an abridgement of English liberties, but that Parliamentary representation for the colonies was so unfeasible that there had to be an abridgement, that there already was an abridgement, and that people should therefore try to minimize rather than overcome it.

It was all useless, naturally. To people convicted that English liberties should not be abridged, even the best explanation of why they were was simply irrelevant--and when it was coupled with measures to strengthen and cement the government doing the abridging, treasonable as well. In the same way, the complexity of Hutchinson's position on the Stamp Act--that thought it was an ill-conceived tax which people should petition Parliament to repeal, rejecting Parliament's authority to pass it struck at the foundations of the English government that protected all American freedoms--meant little to his opponents. They were engaged in resisting the power he defended, and what mattered to them was his argument's practical political effects--the extra strength a man of his background and position could lend what they considered an arbitrary power. Whatever similarities of ancestry, social rank and ideology they shared. Hutchinson and the Revolutionaries were on different sides--and so it happened that Mercy Otis Warren moved into his house at Milton, while Hutchinson filed off to different rooms.

ULTIMATELY, the Revolutionaries even accepted the absurdity to which Hutchinson tried to reduce their arguments. If he was right in saying that sovereignty was indivisible, that the only alternative to an absolute power was absolute independence, then they would pick absolute independence--and he, still trying to induce the sovereign to act intelligently, would be as much an enemy as the sovereign himself. Two centuries later, people would hear that leaving briefcases on the floor to hold an illegal antiwar march presaged the end of education and government as they had known it, and decide that maybe that would be a good thing. Similarly, Hutchinson's undeniabley correct prediction

--every individual must take the consequence of a mistake if he attempts to stir up the body of a people to a revolt and should be disappointed--

could only set off greater action against him and the legally established process he represented, when it was read by people already starting to implement his earlier proviso--

the body of the people may rise and change the rulers or change the very form of the government, and this they may do at all times and on all occasions, just when they please.

It's the great strength of Bailyn's book that it understands and apparently sympathizes with both sides--but especially with Hutchinson, the embattled loser--and yet acknowledges that the future and America's hopes lay with Hutchinson's opponents.