had worthy representatives in more than one of the colonial governors, especially in Hutchinson, of Massachusetts, who in 1770 had succeeded Sir Francis Bernard.[1]
During the administration of his predecessor, Hutchinson had obtained credit for liberal views, but he was hardly installed in power before he proceeded to prove to the inhabitants of Massachusetts that if Bernard had scourged them with whips he intended to scourge them with scorpions. He convoked the General Assembly at Cambridge instead of at Boston; he handed over the fortress on Castle Island, which had usually been garrisoned by troops in the pay of the province, to an English force; he refused his consent to a Bill which the Assembly had passed for the improvement of the local Militia; he objected to the General Tax Bill because the officers of the Crown were not exempted from its provisions; he perpetually laid himself open to charges of duplicity, and was never weary of exciting the suspicions of the King and his advisers in England, and of painting the conduct of the colonial statesmen in the darkest colours. He finally engaged himself in a discussion with the House of Assembly on the relative rights of the Crown, the English Parliament, and the Colonies; till the Assembly, weary of perpetual altercations, and fearing that the salaries of the judges as well as those of the Governor were soon to be paid from England, petitioned the King in council to remove him. What Hutchinson was in Massachusetts, Governor Wright was in Georgia, and Lord Charles Montagu in South Carolina. "If you want to lose your Colonies," said Shelburne, many years after these events, "you should begin with the Governors";[2] and it can hardly be doubted that he spoke with special reference to Bernard and Hutchinson. "Lord Shelburne," says Josiah
- ↑ The earlier historians of the American Revolution have not sufficiently recognized that the less responsible sections of opinion in America represented by Samuel Adams desired a rupture with the mother country, and were not anxious that a conciliatory policy should succeed. It was these same persons who were mainly responsible after the war was over for the cruel and vindictive treatment of the Loyalists, and the practical disregard of Articles IV., V., and VI. of the Treaty of 1783. (See Belcher, The First American Civil War, and Fisher, True History of the American Revolution, clix.)
- ↑ Shelburne to James Oswald of Dunnikier (undated), communicated to the present author by Sir James Colvile of Culross.
