“Would it not be best to destroy this”

I already quoted the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew’s letter to Thomas Hutchinson after a mob ransacked the lieutenant governor‘s house.

At the end, after insisting he didn’t countenance violence, Mayhew asked Hutchinson “not to divulge what I now write, so that it may come to the knowledge of those enraged people.” The minister feared that knowing he’d disavowed the crowd’s action “might probably bring their heavy vengeance upon myself.”

Mayhew wasn’t the only Bostonian nervous about being known to support Lt. Gov. Hutchinson at this moment. On 28 Aug 1765, the elderly merchant, longtime Council member, and Old South deacon John Osborne (1688-1768) wrote to Hutchinson:

My heart is distres’d and bleeds for you on account of the abominable wicked treatment you & yours have meet with. I know not well what to say, how to begin nor where to Leav of . . .

When I consider one of the best, honest, most usefull members of the House Vilely abused—& that without the Least provocation & this done among a Proffesing people Heaven Looks down with abhorance & I fear this people with its Resentment as well from above & from home. Surely the Government there canot Set Still and overlook, some hereby allready speak with concern what could be the concequence—& concern for our Charter privilidges &c. For my part shall nothing only cut a better Life. Tis no matter & truley I dont know whether these things wont finally finish.

But Osborne finished his own letter with this postscript:

P.S. I trust my Letter will not be so expos’d as to bring me & the old under the Rabels Resentment &c.

Would it not be best to destroy this.

It’s striking that Osborne worried about being seen as the lieutenant governor’s ally given that he had married Hutchinson’s widowed mother in 1745. Though Sarah (Foster Hutchinson) Osborne was no longer alive, Osborne was still the lieutenant governor’s stepfather. I think people would have assumed there might be some sympathy between them.

Another striking detail about Osborne’s worry is that Hutchinson didn’t act on it. He kept that letter, which is how it could be part of the collection being published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Even at a low point, Hutchinson had the instincts of a historian to preserve documents.