Word: hutchinsons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...radicals--their belief that only constant, militant vigilance and strict adherence to governmental forms limited by internal balances could check the corruption power inevitably causes among its possessors. Ideological Origins is a book remarkable for its wit and its style, as well as its persuasiveness. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson is only slightly less well written, but it approaches the Revolution from the other side--from the point of view of someone whom the Revolutionaries saw only as a traitor to his country and would-be murderer of its liberties...
From his own point of view, Hutchinson was neither of these and his exile from a hostile Massachusetts caused him deep sorrow. "Nothing can be more polite than my entertainment," he wrote of life at an English country estate...
...Hutchinson never stopped complaining that the private letters Benjamin Franklin obtained and circulated in Boston, setting off an outburst of hatred for Hutchinson, were distorted. He never stopped insisting that by the words, "there must be an abridgement of English liberties," he had not meant that there should be an abridgement of English liberties, but that Parliamentary representation for the colonies was so unfeasible that there had to be an abridgement, that there already was an abridgement, and that people should therefore try to minimize rather than overcome...
...useless, naturally. To people convicted that English liberties should not be abridged, even the best explanation of why they were was simply irrelevant--and when it was coupled with measures to strengthen and cement the government doing the abridging, treasonable as well. In the same way, the complexity of Hutchinson's position on the Stamp Act--that thought it was an ill-conceived tax which people should petition Parliament to repeal, rejecting Parliament's authority to pass it struck at the foundations of the English government that protected all American freedoms--meant little to his opponents. They were engaged...
ULTIMATELY, the Revolutionaries even accepted the absurdity to which Hutchinson tried to reduce their arguments. If he was right in saying that sovereignty was indivisible, that the only alternative to an absolute power was absolute independence, then they would pick absolute independence--and he, still trying to induce the sovereign to act intelligently, would be as much an enemy as the sovereign himself. Two centuries later, people would hear that leaving briefcases on the floor to hold an illegal antiwar march presaged the end of education and government as they had known it, and decide that maybe that would...