“Copies of which are lately come over here”

On 20 Jan 1769, William Bollan, the Massachusetts Council’s agent—i.e., lobbyist—in London, sent urgent copies of seven letters to the senior member of the Council, Samuel Danforth.

Six of those letters were from Gov. Francis Bernard (shown here), the seventh from Gen. Thomas Gage. They described the period late in 1768 after British army regiments had arrived in Boston and local authorities were stubbornly refusing to help house them. The legislature had Edes and Gill print those letters for public consumption in April.

As Massachusetts Whigs saw it, that leak revealed how Bernard had held them up to the ministry as disloyal troublemakers even as he was promising that he spoke up for their interests. None of the Whigs were really shocked; back in May 1768 a Boston Gazette writer had said that Bernard “writes double Letters, pro and con, to be used as Occasion serves.” Nevertheless, the Whigs acted like this was a huge betrayal.

The governor's stretched credibility was torn to bits. He was already wishing for an easier, more lucrative post than Massachusetts, so he asked to be recalled to Britain for consultations. Bernard sailed away at the start of August.

Meanwhile, on 21 and 23 June, Bollan sent more documents from London. This batch included earlier letters from Gov. Bernard and dispatches from the Commissioners of Customs about all the opposition they faced in Boston, including the Liberty riot of July 1768. There were even a few anonymous letters describing Boston town meetings. Those arrived in mid-August.

That leak was what prompted James Otis, Jr., to seek out some of the Customs Commissioners. When Otis finally sat down with Commissioner John Robinson over a private “dish of coffee” on Saturday, 2 September, he explained he was responding to “the Board’s memorials to the Treasury, copies of which are lately come over here.”

According to Robinson, Otis demanded to know if he or the other Commissioners had represented him “as a rebel and a traitor” in their reports. Robinson said he couldn’t recall mentioning Otis by name at all.

The men then went back and forth over protocol. After Otis said that Commissioner William Burch had just declined to answer any questions at all, Robinson chided him for approaching the officials separately. “Why did you not apply to us as a Board, as your business is altogether official?”

Otis answered: “We might have had some altercation, which might have been construed an insult upon you as a Board, which I was determined to avoid.” What sort of “altercation” he imagined is unclear. Otis then went on to criticize things Bernard had written about him years before.

“That is your own business,” Robinson recalled saying. “I have nothing to do with it,--you and I have always been in different Boxes,---and though we might disagree in politics it is no reason that we should think ill of one another as Men,-----and I never had a bad opinion of you and a Man.”

Otis insisted, “I annually take the oath of allegeance to my King, and am resolved to clear my character.”

“If you think that I have done you any injury,” Robinson said, "I am ready to give you the satisfaction you have a right to expect from a Gentleman.”

Otis asked about remarks by “The old fellow [Joseph] Harrison the Collector,” which Robinson declined to answer. Then Otis declared, “I have been used very ill, and I am determined to have justice.”

Robinson closed the conversation, as he recalled it, by repeating his promise “to give you the satisfaction you have a right to expect from a Gentleman.” That was the language of honor. Was it also the language of dueling?

COMING UP: James Otis in a mood.

What Was Really Wrong about the “Hutchinson Letters”

I enjoyed tracking the Massachusetts Whigs’ logical dance as they justified sharing and then publishing the “Hutchinson letters” that arrived from Benjamin Franklin in 1773 along with restrictions on, well, sharing and publishing them. Boston politicians recognized the political power of those documents.

Focusing on that shady side of the story, however, obscures the far more darker claim in that dispute: that everyone should have kept those letters secret. By modern democratic standards, those documents should never have been secret to begin with.

British governments of the period demanded control over information about their workings, with only halting steps toward openness. Before 1770, for example, it was unclear whether it was legal to report in detail about debates in Parliament. Governors, generals, and other public appointees took their correspondence files home with them when they retired. Legislative or public oversight of government officials was weak.

In 1769, William Bollan leaked the official correspondence between Gov. Francis Bernard and the Secretary of State in London, Lord Hillsborough. Those pages described Bernard’s meetings with the Massachusetts Council and dealings with the Massachusetts house, as well as other public events. They made recommendations for Crown policy toward the province, from one unelected official to another. Today we expect such discussions to be conducted with as much openness as possible.

In 1773, Franklin followed Bollan’s example by sending over letters collected by Member of Parliament Thomas Whately, known for his political attachment to George Grenville and his interest in American policy. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson kept repeating that those documents were “private letters,” written before he became governor. But in 1768-1769 he was Lieutenant Governor and Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Hutchinson and Whately had never met and weren’t business partners. Their only reason to write to each other was to share information and views on Massachusetts government.

Whately’s correspondence with Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, then provincial Secretary, included discussion of how the Massachusetts constitution should be changed. Oliver’s goal was to insulate the Council from popular pressure—a major concern among eighteenth-century aristocrats (or aristocrats of any period). That goal obviously depended on keeping the people ignorant of such discussions.

We now base our governments on the consent of the governed and the choice of the people, not filtered through a hereditary monarchy and nobility and the excuses people invent to justify such a system. Public knowledge and full access to government information for the public’s representatives are key to making our system work.

It should come as no surprise that I got interested in the “Hutchinson letters” this month because of the current U.S. administration’s attempts to conceal significant public documents. These include the uncensored Mueller report, the Trump Organization tax filings, orders overriding denials of security clearances, the paper trail of Supreme Court candidates, the President’s interference in building a new F.B.I. Headquarters, visitor logs at the White House, and much more.

Some of those attempts to conceal our government’s workings go against legal and legislative precedent. Others violate stated law. In all cases, they undercut our ability as a people to govern ourselves—an ability Americans first won after men working in the imperial capital slipped the Massachusetts legislature documents that royal appointees wanted to conceal.

“Why does not this Man make his Letters publick?”

Thomas Hutchinson wasn’t the first royal governor of Massachusetts to see his letters to officials in London published and pilloried back home. In fact, I think that precedent was a big part of the problem.

One of my big ideas about the American Revolution is that the Townshend Act of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773 wouldn’t have provoked such widespread opposition in North America if the Stamp Act of 1765 hadn’t gone further than either and set the terms for the debate.

The Stamp Act impinged on many aspects of daily life, from getting married to reading a newspaper to suing a neighbor for debt. It was designed to spread out the cost of enjoying the benefits of living in the British Empire. But that also meant a lot of British colonists suddenly felt that they were being taxed by a distant legislature.

The Townshend Act and Tea Act focused on particular commodities as they were shipped from Britain. Sure, most households used tea, glass, and paper, but only the importers were actually taxed. By 1767, however, the troubling idea that Parliament was imposing taxation without representation and that would lead to political slavery had been established in Americans’ minds.

Likewise, the trouble for Hutchinson started when William Bollan (d. 1776), once agent for the Massachusetts Council in London, sent home copies of the correspondence of Gov. Francis Bernard to Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State. The 8 Apr 1769 Boston town meeting, 250 years ago this month, laid out the implications of those documents:

It has been long apprehended that the publick transactions & general State of the Town as well as the Behavior of particular persons have been greatly misrepresented to his Majestys Ministers by some of the principal Servants of the Crown & others here. . . .

These Apprehensions are greatly strengthend by the unexpected favor of a Gentleman of Character in London who has been so kind as to procure & transmit to his Majestys Council of the province certain Letters from Governor Bernard to the Earl of Hillsborough together with one from General [Thomas] Gage to the same noble Lord.

In October 1769 Boston issued An Appeal to the World, largely written by Samuel Adams, analyzing those letters in detail. A footnote stated:

It is remarkable that Governor Bernard, not long before these Letters were made public, expressed to a certain Gentleman, his earnest Wish, that the People of this Province could have a Sight of all his Letters to the Ministry, being assured that they would thereby be fully convinced that he was a Friend to the Province—Indeed he made a Declaration to the same Purpose, in one of his public Speeches to the House of Representatives.

Upon the Arrival of the Letters however, he discovered, as some say, a certain Paleness, and complained of as an Hardship that his Letters, wrote in Confidence, should be expos'd to the View of the Public.—A striking Proof of the Baseness, as well as the Perfidy of his Heart!

It is, of course, very suspicious when an official claims to want to share documents with the public but then does everything in his power to keep them under wraps. Bernard’s letters turned out to be far from complimentary about the people and government of Massachusetts.

That 1769 leak led to Bernard’s departure, so the Massachusetts Whigs and their allies viewed that tactic as a success. On 18 Sept 1770 Stephen Sayre (1736-1818, shown above) made his case to be one of the Massachusetts house’s agents by writing to Adams:

My worthy friend, Mr. Richard Cary, advises me that he has reason to believe that you would not be displeased with such intelligence as I might sometimes give you relative to public affairs. . . . if you wish to know the most secret transactions of your enemies here, I shall be proud of the opportunity to inform you in every particular as soon as matters transpire.

Specifically, Sayre hinted of letters that Hutchinson “wrote before Bernard embarkd for England” which were “oppugnant to the Form of your Govt.”

Adams replied on 23 November and criticized how Hutchinson, newly promoted to governor, was curtailing the legislature:

Could it possibly be imagind that a man who is bone of our Bone, & flesh of our flesh—who boasts that his Ancestors were of the first Rank & figure in the Country, who has had all the Honors lavishly heapd upon him which his Fellow Citizens had it in their power to bestow, who with all the Arts of personal Address professes the strongest Attachmt. to his native Country & the most tender feeling for its Rights. 

In 1773 John Adams criticized Hutchinson in the same terms, as I quoted back here: “Bone of our Bone, born and educated among us!”

Samuel Adams’s 1770 letter to Sayre asked of Gov. Hutchinson, “Why does not this Man make his Letters publick?” Hutchinson was keeping secrets, Adams implied, only because he had a lot to hide. Massachusetts colonists were already primed to hear another story of a royal governor claiming he’d been advocating for the province only to be exposed as denigrating it.