#And the admissions person talked about going over my old transcript and seeing what counts already towards the degree I want

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(A rather unflattering portrait of a young Thomas Hutchinson)

In this episode, we begin the first of a two part look at the life and career of Thomas Hutchinson, one of the last governors of colonial Massachusetts, and one of the last politicians of the old-school Puritan style.

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Transcript and Sources:

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 31: Thomas Hutchinson.

Over the last few episodes, we’ve followed the history of several New England colonies through the middle of the eighteenth century, seeing how their cultures changed and how a new way of thinking about politics emerged, in which partisanship and factionalism replaced deference and restraint.

Today, we’re going to zoom in even further on this change, by focusing in on the life and career of one Massachusetts politician in particular, Thomas Hutchinson. We’ve already briefly heard about Hutchinson back in Episode 27. He was the contemporary historian who wrote the first major history of Massachusetts.

He was also a career politician, who was in office pretty continuously from 1737 to 1774. So his career spans most of the period we’ve been discussing. And it also spans these two political mindsets, the deferential and the partisan.

When Hutchinson was first elected to the General Court, it was as an old school politician, in that quasi-oligarchic way, but as the years passed the ground slowly shifted under his feet and, as we’ll see, he became increasingly out of step with the citizens he was trying to serve. Although he kept climbing the political ladder, eventually becoming governor shortly before the American Revolution, he also became a hated figure within the colony. In particular, he remained loyal to the British empire even as public opinion was shifting violently in the opposite direction. In the end, the War of Independence overwhelmed him and he spent his last years in an unhappy exile in England.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Thomas Hutchinson was born in 1711. He was a descendant of Anne Hutchinson, that religious dissenter who had been expelled from Massachusetts in the 1630s and gone on to become one of the founders of Rhode Island. But her descendants didn’t live up to her legacy of rebellion.

Since then, the Hutchinson family had spent the last few generations as merchants, slowly climbing up the economic and social ladder. By the generation before Thomas, the family had done pretty well for themselves and his father served as a magistrate in the upper house of the General Court for 20 years. According to the historian Bernard Bailyn, “They were accumulators, down-to-earth, unromantic middle-men, whose solid, petty-bourgeois characteristics became steadily more concentrated in the passage of years until in Thomas, in the fifth generation, they reached an apparently absolute and perfect form.”

A studious child who preferred reading to playing, Thomas Hutchinson began attending Harvard at age 12, a few years younger than normal. His class had only 38 students in it. Obviously Harvard was a bit different than it is today. It was a finishing school for elite teenagers as much as anything.

In fact, that sort of elitism was built into Harvard. At the time, Harvard ranked its students by the "supposed dignity” of their families. So students who came from prominent families were ranked higher, which determined who ate first in the dining hall and other symbolic things like that. Like modern legacy admissions on steroids I guess. It was very clear who was on top. And according to historian Richard R. Beeman, “those rankings had real relevance to political success later in life: in the eighteenth century if a general court representative had ranked in the top half of his Harvard class, he had an 80 percent chance of emerging as a significant leader of the House.” Further evidence for that old deferential politics I keep talking about. Hutchinson was ranked third out of 38. So pretty good.

He graduated with a master’s degree after three years. Afterwards, he got to work further improving his family’s position. He was a hard worker and I suppose being a merchant came very naturally to him. According to Beeman, “By 1776 he had increased the original capital inherited from his father fifteenfold; he owned eight houses, two wharves and assorted lots and commercial properties in Boston, and a wonderful ‘country’ home on a hundred acres in Milton, Massachusetts”. So under Thomas, the Hutchinson family’s self-improvement continued at a rapid pace.

Like most people back then, his life was marred by personal tragedy. He had 12 children, but only 5 survived infancy, and his favorite daughter died of tuberculosis in her early 20s, while his beloved wife died in childbirth. He never remarried afterwards, which was unusual.

So, what sort of person was Hutchinson? In his own words, “My temper does not incline to enthusiasm.” And that sounds about right. He was bland, maybe somewhat priggish. According to Bailyn, almost none of his contemporaries even described his personality in any detail. Nothing beyond calling him a “very good gentleman” or “a young gentleman of exact virtue [and] a good natural sense”. While he was an influential guy, I don’t think his personality left a big mark on anyone. He dressed plainly, he didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Even his writing was dull, according to Bailyn. Hutchinson carefully edited everything he wrote to avoid any unnecessary provocations. Bailyn describes his account of the American Revolution as “one of the most impersonal, bland, and circumspect accounts of revolutionary events ever written by a participant”.

Well, it may have been bland, but apparently he was a good historian by the standards of the day. He was careful with his facts and he took pains to be fair to both sides of every issue, unlike almost all of his contemporaries.

But, all in all he was a very buttoned down guy. A petty-bourgeois Puritan merchant down to his core.

Though actually in religion he was no old school Puritan. He remained with the Puritans his whole life, but by disposition he preferred a modern, tolerant, rational church. He didn’t care too much about doctrine. In fact, he himself said that he was sympathetic to Anglicanism and that if he’d been born an Anglican he would’ve remained one. Puritanism for him was more a matter of tradition than anything else.

Maybe that’s not too surprising, since his openly acquisitive career as a merchant would have been a bit frowned upon in previous generations. I’ve been calling him a Puritan, but it might be more accurate to say post-Puritan. The rigidity and uprightness -- or self-righteousness, maybe -- of Puritanism remained, even as the religious fervor receded. He tried hard to make money, but he was no big spender. He tried hard to move up in political life, but he was full of self-doubt.

Hutchinson began his political career at a very young age. He was only 26 when he was elected to the lower house of the General Court as a representative from Boston. He was by no means a beloved politician, but he was respected for his “disinterestedness and integrity” in the words of one contemporary.

Back then, service in government was mostly seen as a chore. Political office didn’t pay very well, and traveling to the capital was often burdensome in both time and money. There were opportunities for corruption and nepotism, but the financial benefits were much smaller than today, especially relative to the other options at hand. Still, it would’ve been expected that someone like Hutchinson would do his duty.

He immediately joined the house’s leadership and just nine years later he was chosen as speaker, the highest position in the lower house. This was a much faster career path than most politicians would’ve been on. More typical would’ve been to start out as a selectmen or some other town official and stay at the local level for a while before being sent to Boston. It helped a whole lot to have been born into a prominent family like that. It almost guaranteed you a position in the assembly’s leadership if you wanted it.

It was expected that politicians would come from well-established families -- and the higher the office the more well-established the family should be. Plenty of politicians in the modern era come from prominent families of course -- think about the Kennedys or the Bushes -- but back then it was an expectation, something that was seen as actively desirable.

Money was part of it. It was thought that wealthier men would be more immune to corruption, especially since holding office didn’t pay well. In the words of one New Englander, “a clear Estate and Independency of Fortune is no unnecessary Qualification, as it frees a Man from those Temptations which attend a State of Poverty.”

And it was thought that poor men would not be able to command enough respect to rule, if they somehow got elected to high office. How could you expect anyone to be respectful towards a poor guy? After all, it was the rich who were clearly blessed by God.

Not every small town was filled to the brim with rich people, but it was still the relatively well-off who got elected. For instance, in New Hampshire, less than a third of the representatives elected were farmers. Most were merchants, lawyers, doctors, etc. Two thirds had estates worth at least 2000 pounds, and a third had estates worth 5000 pounds, which was considerable, for back then. In the three largest Connecticut towns, three quarters of the offices were held by men belonging to the richest 10%. Even for minor offices like highway surveyor, you were expected to be of the appropriate social class.

But it wasn’t just money that counted when determining which families or individuals belonged to the social elite. Education also mattered, although of course only the wealthy could afford to give their children a college education like Hutchinson had. You were also expected to be religiously devout and a generally upstanding citizen. The idea wasn’t just to vote for the rich guy, it was to vote for the guy who was outstanding in numerous ways, only one of which was directly about money.

But even if this attitude wasn’t per se oligarchical, it still meant that power was restricted to a small group. According to John Adams, “Go to every village of New England, and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most.”

So although New Englanders supported popular government, that meant something very different to them than it did to us. Social elites were expected to be in charge and they were expected to be above the need to campaign or to directly appeal to voters. In fact, open ambition to run for office was itself seen as a sign that you were untrustworthy. Of course, in practice there was plenty of maneuvering and politicking, but candidates often tried to keep up the appearance of disinterest, saying stuff like, “Oh I have no interest whatsoever in holding office, but if called upon by my fellow citizens to do so, then I guess I have no choice in the matter.”

Related to this was the idea that you shouldn’t vote for someone because they agreed with you on policy, you should vote for the man with the highest character. The idea that voters should have a say in policy was objectionable, not desirable. It was assumed that popular opinion was too fickle for men to govern themselves directly. Rulers had to be willing to push back against public opinion and do the Right Thing when necessary for the greater good.

In fact, you might not even know what policies your representative supported. Sessions of the General Court were closed to the public, and no minutes were taken. They didn’t even record vote tallies until 1740. Before then they just said which bills passed and which didn’t. And after 1740, they still only recorded the votes on particularly important or contentious bills, like for the land bank, say. So it was almost impossible to even figure out how your representative was voting, which meant that there was no way to hold them accountable for their policy views, if they even had any clear views in the first place.

And politicians were expected to remain above factions and parties as well. You were instead supposed to exercise independent judgment in all things. That was also more of an ideal than something that could always be practiced, but it was still an important standard for the New Englanders. Basically, they wanted to vote for a patrician statesman rather than a grubby politician. And that was a pretty standard attitude in the other colonies as well, though of course the specifics varied from place to place.

Sometimes this deference could be taken to ridiculous lengths. For instance, the election sermon given in Connecticut in 1713 basically argued that elected governors had a divine right to rule. “In Elective States, where persons are Advanc'd by the Suffrage of others to Places of Rule, and Vested with Civil Power, the Persons Chusing give not the Power, but GOD. They are but the Instruments of Conveyance.” In the words of another Connecticut minister, to resist the will of the leadership was “as it were to wage War against GOD himself.” Even if they were elected, officials got their power from God and not the voters. Supposedly.

Hutchinson himself wasn’t quite that melodramatic. He was more of a pragmatist. What mattered in government was not the principles you adhered to, but whether or not you got good results. For example, even as he disapproved of much of old-school Puritanism, he admired the society which they had built in New England. But he was certainly happy to keep the people out of politics. If the people became too involved, then, in his words, “the interest of party prevails over all other considerations, virtue, religion, private friendship, and public good are all sacrificed to it.”

Undoubtedly Hutchinson had self-interested reasons for thinking that it was good that men like him should have unquestioned dominance, but it wasn’t just the elite who thought this way. Practically everyone did, at least nominally, though I’m sure you could find a thousand exceptions.

We’ve seen in the last few episodes how this elitism is being eroded, but it’ll linger on for a long time, well after independence. The Federalist party, which was the very first political party in America, and which had its base of support in New England, was the heir to this tradition. The Federalists weren’t believers in the sort of populist democracy that would come to define America. They were more old-school. And in fact that was their downfall, since they were unable to connect with voters the same way their less elitist opponents were, not unlike the Old Lights in Connecticut.

It was hard to keep up the pretence that your elected rulers were divinely ordained when they were so obviously bending over backwards to get your vote, and when the other party was constantly slinging mud at them. And when Americans were given free rein to vote for who they liked, the emphasis in politics naturally shifted from representatives as leaders following their own best judgment to leaders as servants of the people. What previous generations had seen as rightful dominance was seen by their children as burdensome if not tyrannical. As one later election sermon put it, “Societies were not formed for the sake of Rulers, but Rulers were made for the sake of Societies.”

You can still hear rhetorical echoes of the old colonial mindset from time to time, and I’m sure to some of my listeners it sounds rather appealing compared to the endless tumult of modern politics. But I don’t think it was ever more than metastable. It might last for a while, but sooner or later it was going to collapse into a modern democracy.

Anyway, back to Massachusetts in the 1740s. This was a time when the money supply was becoming a big issue again, one of the factors that was slowly eroding elite dominance.

Hutchinson, when writing about this period in his history of the colony, tended to downplay the importance of the currency. In his mind, the populist anger which was aroused by monetary policy was still less important than the petty factionalism within the elite. Other than monetary policy, the elite all still shared the same basic worldview, and as a result any differences between them could be bridged with a bit of diplomacy. The dispute over paper money was a partial exception to this rule, but it was only one issue. The factions disagreed occasionally, but they agreed on a whole lot more.

So most ot the time, politics was more about personality than ideology. How well did the governor get along with the members of the General Court? Was he competent? Was he a good negotiator? That was what mattered, at least in Hutchinson’s eyes. There’s probably something to be said for this view. I’ve naturally been emphasizing the conflicts within New England society, but all told things were pretty calm by world-historical standards and popular agitation was only ever intermittent.

However, “calm most of the time” does not mean “calm all of the time”, as Hutchinson was about to discover.

Now, Hutchinson, who was quite well versed in monetary policy, was a member of the hardline anti-paper money faction. He thought that paper money was necessarily some sort of scam. “Wretched”, he called it. And so he did what he could to block the creation of the land bank and so on, and even as a young man he was drawing up plans for how Massachusetts might go back to a gold and silver standard.

This put him very much at odds with his constituents in Boston. They were all for paper money and they issued instructions to Hutchinson that he should support paper money too. However, Hutchinson flatly refused, calling the instructions “iniquitous”. In his mind, he ought to be free to vote as he thought best. Voters trying to tell delegates how to act was a bad precedent.

But partly as a result, he lost his seat in 1739, though he got it back a few years later. Clearly paper money was an important enough issue that the old rules didn’t always apply. Voters were willing to punish Hutchinson, though only for a little while.

But Hutchinson didn’t learn his lesson. He kept right at it with his opposition to paper money. In fact, he was one of the principal reasons why Massachusetts ended its paper money experiment.

Back in episode 28, I somewhat briefly talked about how that happened. Let me go over it again, with a focus on Hutchinson this time. Basically, in 1749 the British had decided to give the colony some money in order to help pay for the costs of King George’s War, which had just ended. Hutchinson decided to use that money to buy back all the paper money that was in circulation, and return Massachusetts to a hard currency standard.

Now, this was still a mostly unpopular idea. Possibly opposition to paper money had grown over time, but it was still probably supported by a majority of voters and a majority of elected officials. So, in order to get this passed, Hutchinson had to use some underhanded tactics, and even then it took over a year.

He managed to get his biggest opponent expelled from the house, and then in order to get the bill passed he waited until most of the supporters of paper money had gone home for the winter. (Back then, attendance at the assembly was so low that it was often possible for the leadership to get bills passed simply by waiting until a different set of legislators happened to be in Boston and having them vote again until the leadership got the result it wanted. Yet another way in which New England politics remained unresponsive to popular pressure.)

In any case, even with these sorts of tricks, Hutchinson’s bill only passed by a vote of 40-37. But that was enough, and it soon became clear that paper money was on its way out. Needless to say, Hutchinson’s constituents were furious. He lost his next election very badly, winning only 200 votes out of 684 cast. Many other delegates lost their seats as well.

Surely this humiliation -- and Hutchinson certainly saw it as a humiliation -- would be enough to get him to change his ways, to adapt somewhat to popular pressure. Nope, not at all. He had lost his election, but that next year he was appointed to the council to make up for the loss. He was out of electoral politics, but not out of politics altogether. And of course he promptly became the most important member of the upper house. So for Hutchinson, the loss actually turned out to be another step up.

He had friends in high places, who made sure that his career remained on the right track. He was a favorite of several of the governors, because of his opposition to paper money and his abilities in wrangling the legislature into doing his bidding. He was also an important figure in helping to coordinate the war effort during the French and Indian War in the 1750s. Because of his usefulness, he kept ascending the political ladder, often holding several offices at once. He became lieutenant governor in 1758 and chief justice of the highest court in Massachusetts in 1760.

But even from those new, unelected positions, he couldn’t remain entirely insulated from popular pressure, as we’ll see next time. Change was coming to Massachusetts. A nationalist, ideological fervor was about to sweep across the country, and Thomas Hutchinson was no fan of ideology.

The historian William Pencak compares Hutchinson to Edmund Burke. If you’re not familiar with him, Edmund Burke was one of the founders of modern conservatism. He was a big opponent of the French Revolution, and he wrote a famous attack on how the revolutionaries were attempting to overthrow ancient tradition in the name of their abstract belief in natural rights. Burkean conservatism is above all else about caution towards change and skepticism towards grand theories of society.  

Hutchinson had a similar attitude, although he never expressed it as fully as Burke did. He favored compromise and was against pushing principles to extremes. He favored liberty for the colonists, but not if it threatened British rule. He favored British rule, but he wanted the British to govern the colonies with a light touch that preserved as much liberty as possible. While the other colonists were busy trying to get one principal to prevail over the other, Hutchinson was busy trying to smooth over the differences. To him, principals were important, but it was better to get 75% of what you wanted, rather than risk a war to get everything.

But this attitude was, from the 1760s onwards, increasingly out of step with the times. The colonists wanted to establish firm limits on British authority, while the British wanted to show that their authority was unlimited. In such an environment where theory mattered more than practicality, compromise was becoming impossible. To Hutchinson, this was a disaster, but there was little he could do to stop it, no matter how hard he tried. And in the end, the fires of revolution would destroy him.

Next episode, we’ll continue the story of Thomas Hutchinson, and see the first flames of that revolution rise up around him. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on iTunes. You can also keep track of Early and Often on Twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or read transcripts of every episode at the blog, at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson by Bernard Bailyn

The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth Century America by Richard R. Beeman

From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 by Richard L. Bushman

Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies 1689-1776 by Robert J. Dinkin

Thomas Hutchinson and the Province Currency by Malcolm Freiberg

America’s Burke: The Mind of Thomas Hutchinson by William Pencak

Power, Influence, and Status: Leadership Patterns in the Massachusetts Assembly 1740-1755 by Robert M. Zemsky