Why thomas hutchinson was a loyalist

As this letter was traveling to England by sea, his royal appointment as governor of the colony was en route to Boston aboard another ship. They may have literally been ships passing in the night. In , Benjamin Franklin obtained a series of correspondence between Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, his lieutenant governor. Franklin sent the letters to Samuel Adams who used them to wage a propaganda campaign against the governor.

Franklin and Adams had become political opponents of Hutchinson. Many of the ideas contained within the letters were taken out of context. As a result, Hutchinson was unable to stop further unrest in Massachusetts. Colonists opposed the Tea Act of , which benefited the East India Company at the expense of local merchants.

It also raised the duty on the popular beverage. In protest, patriots in cities other than Boston had ships carrying tea return to England. As royal governor, Hutchinson ordered that the three ships in Boston Harbor be unloaded and the duty paid.

Two of his sons were tea brokers. Approximately 7, people gathered in the Old South Meeting House on December 16, to protest his actions. When Hutchinson once again ruled that the cargo be unloaded and the tax paid, the crowd spilled out of the meeting and headed for the waterfront. Numerous patriots masquerading as Mohawk Indians boarded the ships and threw the tea into the Boston Harbor. After the Boston Tea Party , Hutchinson sailed to England in to help defuse the growing tension between the Colonies and the British government.

The war broke out before he was able to return. Hutchinson went into exile in England where he advised the British government about American affairs until his sudden death from a stroke in Ironically, Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work as Colonial governor on July 4, His former home in Milton, Massachusetts, which is now a nature preserve, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ask about our Virtual Tour programming! He was governor during the Tea Party and prompted the dumping by obstinately insisting that the tea remain in the harbor for unloading. In his famous stolen letters, which fell, by way of Benjamin Franklin, into the hands of patriots in Boston, Hutchinson wrote little that he hadn't already expressed publicly.

But the most well-known passage— "It is better to submit to some abridgement of our rights [as Americans], than to break off our connection with our protector, England"—damned him forever in patriot eyes. Hutchinson's was only the most notable version of a familiar story during the American Revolution. This Site. Google Scholar. Author and Article Information. Liam Riordan. Online Issn: The New England Quarterly 90 3 : — Cite Icon Cite. Abstract A history of the book approach to Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts Bay published recovers his commitment to preserve facts and his place in eighteenth-century historiography.

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