Division
Robert Blake
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, Loyalism and the Destruction of the First British Empire Bernard Bailyn (Allen Lane £7.50)
Thomas Hutchinson was the last royal appointed civilian Governor of Massachusetts.
When America's independence was proclaimed on 4 July, 1776 he was an exile in England and, by a symbolic coincidence he received an honorary degree from Oxford University that very day. To the Americans, Professor Bailyn writes, "he was one of the most hated men on earth — more hated than Lord North, more hated than George III (both of whom, it was believed, he had secretly influenced), and more feared than the sinister Earl of Bute". Hutchinson was a fifth generation New Englander. He was a merchant, a scholar and an historian, and he was both emotionally and intellectually a profound conservative, in an age of ideological revolution. "My temper," he wrote, "does not incline to enthusiasm" — an observation which Professor Bailyn describes as "a characteristic under-statement." And elsewhere Hutchinson describes himself as "a quietist being convinced that what is, is best," thus unconsciously foreshadowing the 'Warwickshire Peer' in Disraeli's Sybil who said "Pretending that the people can be better off than they are is Radicalism and nothing else."
It is hard at first to see why such a mild, civilised, urbane and colourless figure should have become the object of such detestation. The trouble was that by 1774 when Hutchinson after three disastrous years ceased to be Governor a large number of people in Massachusetts — and in most of the other colonies — were convinced that they actually could be better off than they were; and the solution seemed clear, the abolition of the whole syStem of government for which Hutchinson stood. He thus became an archetypal figure of evil and tyranny to those who supported the American revolution. He ought, perhaps, to have become a hero to those who opposed it, but he did not. The American loyalists were the only real losers in the tragedy of that conflict. I use 'tragedy' in the sense that Professor Bailyn. does: "the inescapable boundaries of action; the blindness of the actors — in a word, the tragedy of the event."
England did not in the end lose much, although it seemed a disaster at the time. A second empire, only recently extinguished, soon came into being. The nineteenth century was to see the climax of England's prosperity and grandeur. There had always been a party which supported the revolt of the American colonies. Its success seemed to vindicate them. As for the 'conservatives', they preferred to forget about it. No harm came to them. As Professor Bailyn puts it.
The real losers — those whose lives were disrupted, who suffered violence and vilification, who were driven out of the land and forced to settle elsewhere in middle life and died grieving for the homes they had lost — these were not the English but the Americans who clung to them, who remained loyal to England and what had been assumed to be the principles of legitimacy and law and order which the British government embodied. They were the American loyalists and it is their history that allows us to see the Revolutionary movement from the other side around, and to grasp t,he wholeness of the struggle and hence in the end to understand more fully . . . why a revolution took place and why it succeeded.
Professor Bailyn goes on to say that "this is a
peculiarly difficult thing to do, and likely to be misinterpreted". He is quite right, and I have little doubt that it will be. But the sort of people who will misinterpret it ar just the sort to whom one should pay least regard — those who see history not as past but as present politics. With the bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence close upon us, any American is bold, who tries, as Professor Bailyn does, -to put two hundred years of history aside and refuse for purposes of historical understanding to choose among the contenders of that distant struggle and to see it just as it was — an event full of accident, uncertain in outcome, with good and bad, sense and nonsense, distributed on both sides." No doubt his book will infuriate the historians of the New Left. I suspect that the author will not be unduly disturbed.
In his preface and in an Appendix entitled 'The Losers: Notes on the Historiography of Loyalism' he discusses fascinatingly both the general problem of writing about a great controversial episode in the past and the particular problem of the American Revolution. He points out that a whole area of the Revolution has been "almost completely submerged", although it is fundamental and the story is incomprehensible without it. This is the gap which he is trying to fill, and he has done it brilliantly.
Professor Bailyn who is Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard has produced a most important and valuable biography. He 11.A* mastered an immense mass of correspondence,' for, although all the papers accumulated by Hutchinson up to 1765 were destroyed when a mob gutted his house in Boston during the Stamp Act riot of 26 August, he continued to amass documents for the rest of his life which did not end till 1780. The sheer quantity of manuscript material which Professor Bailyn has had to examine either in the Massachusetts Archives or the British Museum must have been enormous. Yet the biography is very far from appearing laboured or bearing the signs of all the work which has gone into it. Professor Bailyn writes with admirable clarity and lucidity. He is very easy to read, unlike Hutchinson himself whose History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay is about as flat a production as one could encounter, despite the author's belief that he was modelling it on Bishop Burnet's History of my own Time. (It is hard to believe that he was a contemporary of Gibbon whom he came to know in exile, and of Horace Walpole).
The book is not only an admirable biography and not only a major contribution to the political and ideological history of the Revolution. It raises some wide questions about the writing of history and the selectivity of historians. Hutchinson was the greatest figure among the American loyalists, but because loyalism lost and because even the pro-monarchial English historians had no interest in rehabilitating him — in fact they ran him down for failure to win the day — he became, not indeed a forgotten, but an absurdly traduced and misunderstood figure.
There are parallels in English historiography. Who has written sympathetically -about — or even tried to understand — Ramsay MacDonald? The late Reginald Bassett made the attempt but his admirable book fell flat. The Labour Party regarded MacDonald as a traitor, the Conservatives regarded him as a stop gap who became a liability. No one had an interest in examining what he did or why he did it — "the tragedy of the event." For many years Peel was in a similar limbo until Dr Kitson Clark and, later, Professor Norman Gash put him 'nto the perspective of history. This is what Professor Bailyn has triumtihantly achieved with Thomas Hutchinson in one of the outstanding political biographies of modern times.
Lord Blake is Provost of Queen's College, Oxford
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