Samuel Adams probably never experienced a greater mortification than when, as a member of a committee, he waited, by command of the House, upon Hutchinson to present an address acknowledging the right of the Governor to remove the General Court "to Housantonic in the western part of the Province," if he desired, nor, on the other hand, did the Governor ever enjoy a greater triumph. Hutchinson must have felt that he was even with his chief adversary for the humiliation of the preceding year, the driving out of the regiments. Adams felt his defeat keenly, but gave no sign of it, he saw his influence apparently on the wane, but was as unremitting as ever in his attempts to retrieve lost ground. But for him the revolutionary cause at this time must have gone by the board.
The revulsion was not long in coming. Before Hutchinson had time to restore the repentant legislature to the town house in Boston, the hearts of the members became hardened against him. When it became known that the decision of the king had been made for the support of the Massachusetts town officials from the revenue of the Colony by warrants drawn on the Commission of Custom, the wrath of the people became heavy, and the voice of Samuel Adams led the discontented. The Governor was paid £1500 sterling, instead of £1000, annually, which he was paid when dependent on the people. Hutchinson now plainly announced that he should now receive his salary from the King. The House protested in its usual temper, the set of the opposition being so powerful that several of the Loyalists withdrew disheartened. But in the midst of the fault-finding "Sons of Liberty", he received a mark of confidence from the General Court at which he was greatly pleased, as he had a right to be. We have already seen him as the principal figure in settling the boundary lines on the sides of New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The boundary line on the side of New York, not settled in 1767, and still in dispute, were equally in need of adjustment, and although his principles were popularly denounced, and the scheme was already in progress which was to drive him from his native land and deprive him of all his possessions in it, yet none but he could be trusted to undertake the delicate negotiations upon which the welfare of the Province depended.[126]
The journal of the proceedings in the handwriting of the Governor, is still extant. With William Brattle, Joseph Hawley, and John Hancock, Hutchinson journeyed to Hartford, where on May 18, 1773, they discussed the matter with Governor Tyron, John Watts, William Smith, R. R. Livingston, and William Nicoll, Commissioners from New York. The New York men, although more compliant than the negotiators of seven years ago, were still disposed to exact hard concessions, to which all the commissioners but Hutchinson were about prepared to agree. Hutchinson, however, while diplomatic, was unyielding, insisting upon what had been substantially the demand of 1767. At last it was conceded, establishing for all time as a part of the Bay State the beautiful county of Berkshire. This alone should entitle him to a monument by the State of Massachusetts. He alone, it is said, prevented the giving up by Massachusetts of her claim to western lands; these were retained and afterwards sold for a large sum.[127]
It was a great victory for the Governor, the Massachusetts Commissioners had been left free to do what seemed to them best, but they cordially acknowledged that success belonged to him.
On the return to Boston, the legislature was in session and the assembly authorized him to transmit the settlement to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State, at once, without formally laying it before them. They trusted him entirely. Hutchinson with some pride declared that "no previous instance of a like confidence of our Assembly in a Governor can be found in Massachusetts history."[128] This transient favor, and trust, aggravated for him the force of the blow he was so soon to receive. How bitter the home coming of Hutchinson was, the following extract from a letter to Sir Francis Bernard, the late Governor will show:
June 29, 1773. "After every other attempt to distress me they have at last engaged in a conspiracy which has been managed with infinite art, and succeeded beyond their own expectation. They have buzzed about for three or four months a story of something that would amaze everybody as soon as the elections were over, it was said in the House something would appear in eight and forty hours, which, if improved aright, the Province might be as happy, as it was fourteen or fifteen years ago. These things were spread through all the towns of the Province, and everybody's expectations were raised. At length upon motion the gallery was ordered to be cleared and the doors shut. Mr. Samuel Adams informed the House that seventeen original letters had been put in his hands, written to a gentleman in England by several persons from New England, with an intention to subvert the constitution. They were delivered to him on condition that they should be returned, not printed, and no copies taken. If the House would receive them on these terms, he would read them. They broke through the pretended agreement, printed the resolves, and then the letters, which effrontery was never known before. The letters are mere narratives which you well know to be true, as respects remarks upon the Colonies, and such proposals as naturally follow from the principles which I have openly avowed; but by every malversation, which the talents of the party in each House, could produce they have raised the prejudices of the people against me, and it is generally supposed all the writers were concerned in one plan, though I suppose no one of them ever saw or knew the contents of the letters of any others unless by accident."
After three weeks spent, the House resolved to address the King, to remove the Governor and Lieutenant Governor.[129] The name of the person to whom the letters were written was erased from all of them, but they appear to be all Mr. Thomas Whatley's six from the Governor, four from the Lieutenant-Governor, one from Rogers, and one from Auchmuty and the remainder from Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The affair of the Hutchinson Letter created great excitement both in America and England, an affair in which the best men of Massachusetts Bay were concerned, including Franklin, then the agent of his native Province, although a citizen then of Pennsylvania; a shade has rested therefrom upon the character of Franklin, which cannot yet be said to have been explained away. Is it creditable that those wary, able men, Franklin, Samuel Adams, Bowdoin, John Adams, Samuel Cooper, and others, really thought the very quiet statements contained "in the letters in which there was no sentiment which the Governor had not openly expressed in his addresses to the Legislature, was a danger and menace to the welfare of the colony?"[130] The only explanation is that they had persuaded themselves that Hutchinson was so dangerous that if conduct thoroughly above board would not answer, he must be cast out by questionable means. Mr. Winthrop justifies their conduct by believing that it may be classed among what Burke calls "irregular things done in the confusion of mighty troubles, not to be justified on principle."[130] When the printed copies of the letter arrived in England they excited great astonishment. Thomas Whatley was dead. William Whatley, his brother, and executor was filled with a very natural consternation, at a theft which was likely to have such important consequences, and for which public opinion was inclined to make him responsible. He in turn suspected a certain Mr. Temple, who had been allowed to look through the papers of his deceased brother, for the purpose of perusing one relating to the colonies, and a duel ensued in which Whatley was severely wounded. Mr. Temple continued to be suspected. A letter of Jan. 4, 1774, says: "Although when they first came abroad his own brother said: Whoever sent them was a d——d villian."[131]
Franklin then for the first time, in a letter to a newspaper, disclosed the part he had taken. He stated that "he, and he alone, had obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question, that they had never passed into the hands of William Whatley, and that, therefore, it was impossible, either that Whatley could have communicated them, or that Temple could have taken them, from his papers." There is some reason to believe that the original owner had left them carelessly in a public office, whence they had been stolen, but the mystery was never decisively solved.
"In England Franklin's conduct was regarded with the utmost severity. For the purpose of ruining honorable officials it was said, their most confidential letters, written years before to a private member of Parliament, who had at that time no connection with Government, had been deliberately stolen; although the original thief was undiscovered, the full weight of the guilt and dishonor rested upon Franklin. He was perfectly aware that the letters had been written in the strictest confidence, that they had been dishonestly obtained without the knowledge of the person who received them, or the person who wrote them, and that their exposure would be a deadly injury to the writers. Under these circumstances he sent them to a small group of politicians whom he knew to be the bitterest enemies of the Governor, and one result was a duel in which the brother of the man whose private papers had been stolen, was nearly killed. Any man of high and sensitive honor, it was said, would sooner have put his hand into the fire than have been concerned in such a transaction."[132]