His Majesty did not remove Mr. Hutchinson; but the Governor’s usefulness, from every point of view, was at an end. When the notorious letters were finally printed, it appeared that there were seventeen in all, of which six were written by Mr. Hutchinson in the years 1768 and 1769. These latter documents did not in fact add anything to the world’s stock of knowledge; but they had been so heralded, ushered in with so much portentous explication that they scarcely needed to be read to be understood. “Had they been Chevy Chase,” the Governor said, the people would have believed them “full of evil and treason.” It was indeed the perfect fruit of Samuel Adams’s labors that the significance of Mr. Hutchinson’s letters had in some manner become independent of their contents. So awake were the people to the danger of being deceived, that whatever the Governor now said or ever had written was taken to be but the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Meanwhile, the attention of all patriots was diverted from the letters to a far more serious matter; and when, on December 16, 1773, a cargo of the East India Company’s tea, consigned among others to Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson, was thrown into Boston harbor, the great crisis, which Samuel Adams had done so much to make inevitable by virtue of thinking it so, was at last a reality. It was a limitation of Thomas Hutchinson’s excellent administrative mind that he was wholly unaware of this crisis. In February of the next year, finding that “a little discreet conduct,” or indeed any conduct on his part, was altogether without good effect, the Governor announced that he had “obtained leave from the King to go to England.” On the 1st of June, driving from his home to the foot of Dorchester Heights, he embarked on the Minerva and arrived in London one month later. It was his expectation that after a brief absence, when General Gage by a show of military force should have brought the province to a reasonable frame of mind, he would return and assume again the responsibilities of his office. He never returned, but died in England on June 3, 1780, an unhappy and a homesick exile from the country which he loved.
[CHAPTER VI]
TESTING THE ISSUE
The die is now cast; the colonies must either submit or triumph.—George III.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—Thomas Jefferson.
Two months and ten days after Mr. Hutchinson embarked for England, John Adams, the Hon. Thomas Cushing, Mr. Samuel Adams, and Robert Treat Paine set out “from Boston, from Mr. Cushing’s house, and rode to Coolidge’s, where they dined … with a large company of gentlemen, who went out and prepared an entertainment for them at that place. A most kindly and affectionate meeting we had, and about four in the afternoon we took leave of them, amidst the kindest wishes and fervent prayers of every man in the company for our health and success. The scene was truly affecting, beyond all description affecting.” The four men who in this manner left Boston on the 10th of August, 1774, were bound for Philadelphia to attend the first Continental Congress. Even Samuel Adams, in excellent spirits, a little resplendent and doubtless a little uncomfortable in his new suit and new silk hose, could scarcely have known that they were about to share in one of the decisive events in the history of the modern world.
The calling of the Continental Congress had followed hard upon those recent measures of the British Government which no reasonable man could doubt were designed to reduce the colonies to a state of slavery. In May, 1773, the East India Company, whose privileges in India had just been greatly restricted, was given permission to export tea from its English warehouses directly to America, free of all English customs and excise duties. The threepenny duty in America was indeed retained; but this small tax would not prevent the Company from selling its teas in America at a lower price than other importers, either smugglers or legitimate traders, could afford. It was true the Americans were opposed to the threepenny tax, and they had bound themselves not to import any dutied tea; yet neither the opposition to the tax nor the non-importation agreements entered into had prevented American merchants from importing, during the last three years, about 580,831 pounds of English tea, upon which the duty had been paid without occasioning much comment.
With these facts in mind, hard-headed American merchants, to whom the Company applied for information about the state of the tea trade in the colonies, assured the directors that the Americans drank a great deal of tea, which hitherto had been largely smuggled from Holland; and that, although they were in principle much opposed to the tax, “mankind in general are bound by interest,” and “the Company can afford their teas cheaper than the Americans can smuggle them from foreigners, which puts the success of the design beyond a doubt.”