Books: A Loyalist’s Tragedy

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson By Bernard Bailyn

Harvard, 423 pp., $ 12.50 Thomas Hutchinson, Loyalist chief justice, lieutenant governor, and, briefly, governor of Massachusetts during the critical years before the Revolution, whose house was destroyed by a mob during the Stamp Act riots and whose career was ruined by the publication of a batch of his private letters in 1773, seemed one of those figures who had become the acquaintance of all the historians but the intimate of none. To students of the Revolution, his career is as important as that of Sam Adams or James Otis. A recent survey of Loyalism calls him “the essential Tory.” As a conservative constitutionalist in a time of revolutionary constitutionalism, Hutchinson struggled against the tide and was, inevitably, swept

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Jack Chatfield

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The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson By Bernard Bailyn

Harvard, 423 pp., $ 12.50 Thomas Hutchinson, Loyalist chief justice, lieutenant governor, and, briefly, governor of Massachusetts during the critical years before the Revolution, whose house was destroyed by a mob during the Stamp Act riots and whose career was ruined by the publication of a batch of his private letters in 1773, seemed one of those figures who had become the acquaintance of all the historians but the intimate of none. To students of the Revolution, his career is as important as that of Sam Adams or James Otis. A recent survey of Loyalism calls him “the essential Tory.” As a conservative constitutionalist in a time of revolutionary constitutionalism, Hutchinson struggled against the tide and was, inevitably, swept