Word: hutchinsons
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...rebel came with agonizing difficulty to most patriots. Torn between a traditional love for the monarch and a growing conviction that his surrogates were abusing the royal prerogative, many like Quincy felt a crushing ambivalence toward their colonial rulers. Indeed, despite his vehement rhetoric, Quincy had once actually defended Hutchinson from the "Rage-intoxicated Rabble" who attacked his home years earlier upon passage of the Stamp Act of 1765. This kind of contradictory behavior characterized the actions of many men of conscience in the late colonial says; it did not come from political opportunism, but from heart-felt confusion about...
...leaders saw the king as a father figure, for whom they had the usual combination of filial love and resentment. Yet because it was unthinkable to show any disrespect for King George III in the early Stamp Act days, the patriots instead identified a surrogate father to hate--Thomas Hutchinson. Against him they launched a torrent of abuse and terror to relieve their overloaded its. This is no psychobabble. As Bernard Bailyn has pointed out in his sympathetic portrait of Hutchinson, the patriots' anger toward the royal governor surpassed all bounds of fairness, or even common sense. Hutchinson...
...identify the roots of rebellion, they are not a surprising group: inevitably, they all had problems with their fathers, or father-figures, early in life--the sure trigger to a Pavlovian response from a Freud-fancier. But Shaw pursues the issue with considerable sophistication. The patriots. Shaw believes, saw Hutchinson as the perverter of the king's wishes. By attributing the onus for contested British actions--particularly the Stamp Act. Townshend Duties and Tea Act--to Hutchinson and not the king, the patriots convinced themselves (incorrectly, as it turned out) that Hutchinson was acting...
...making Hutchinson the scapegoat and identifying him as a parricide, the patriots transferred to him the most frightening implication of their political resistance. As a result, they were able to regard themselves as continuingly loyal to the king, even as their readiness for separation matured...
...Thus Hutchinson was indeed the crucial intermediary, the man against whom the patriots could excise their lingering anger against their fathers, yet all the while avoiding any confrontation with the ultimate patriarch, George...