[October 7th
marks the 250th anniversary of the convening of the
Stamp Act Congress, one of the most significant moments in
pre-Revolutionary American history. So this week I’ll highlight and
AmericanStudy three such pre-Revolution moments, including the Congress itself
on Wednesday. Leading up to a weekend post on some of the best scholars of this
period, past and present!]
On two complex
and crucial ways to analyze a tragic pre-Revolutionary figure.
One of the
AmericanStudies books that most altered and expanded my vision of the field as
I began my college work was Bernard
Bailyn’s seminal The Ordeal of Thomas
Hutchinson (1976). Hutchinson was the last civilian royal governor of
Massachusetts, serving during the tumultuous pre-Revolutionary years of 1769 to
1774. Even before his gubernatorial term, Hutchinson had come to represent the
worst excesses of English leadership to many colonists, as reflected by the ransacking
of his home during the 1765 Stamp Act protests (when Hutchinson was the
colony’s Lieutenant Governor). As the governor in power during such crucial
events as the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre, and one who argued in
writing during these years that the colonists could never have the same rights
as English citizens in the home country, Hutchinson became even more fully tied
to images and narratives of the worst of English rule. By the time of his 1774 replacement by
General Thomas Gage and his subsequent forced exile to England, those links
had become complete and permanent.
Bailyn’s Ordeal doesn’t necessarily challenge
those narratives, although it adds a great deal of individual and communal history
to the picture. Yet there’s another way to frame Hutchinson’s identity, and it’s
the same one for which I argued in this
post on Revolutionary-era Loyalists: that he represents another side to the
American experience and community in this period. There’s a reason why I called
Hutchinson’s removal to England an exile, and it’s that his entire life to that
point had been spent in the Boston area: from his 1711 birth in the North End
to his time at Harvard College, his service as a Boston selectman to his election
to the state assembly (known then as the General Court), and up through those
controversial terms as Lieutenant Governor and Governor. It’s far simpler to
view the incipient Revolution through images of Massachusetts Minutemen
standing their ground against advancing
English Redcoats, soldiers (like Governor Gage) freshly arrived from
England to oppose these locals. But Hutchinson was both a representative of
English rule and as local as they come, forcing a far more nuanced engagement
with Massachusetts and America in the Revolutionary era.
He was also, of course,
a person. That might seem like the most banal of observations, but it’s far
from easy to remember the humanity beneath historical figures and events. One
American text that asks us to do just that when it comes to the
pre-Revolutionary protests and conflicts is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s darkly
ambiguous short story “My
Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1831). Hawthorne’s story follows Robin, a young
country lad on his first journey to the big city of Boston, as he experiences
one long and uncertain night that happens to coincide with an impending riot
quite similar to the Stamp Act protests. In the story’s culminating moment
(SPOILER alert), Robin finally finds the titular elderly kinsman for whom he
has been looking throughout the tale, but in a particularly ironic way: Robin
is seeking a position from his formerly powerful relative, but discovers that
it is upon Major Molineux that the angry mob has focused its rage. Hawthorne
dedicates a long paragraph to describing the tarred and feathered old man, “in
those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation,” and concludes the passage
thusly: “On they went, in counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied
merriment, trampling all on an old man’s heart.” Whether Hawthorne intends to
indict the entire Revolution in this passage is as uncertain as the rest of his
ambiguous story—but at the very least, he reminds us that the targets of
Revolutionary wrath were often individual men, as human and American as the
rest of us.
Next
pre-Revolutionary post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Pre-Revolution moments you’d highlight?
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