Education of a Public Man.

Thomas Hutchinson could have been the most successful American political figure of the eighteenth century. The fifth generation of his family in Massachusetts, great-grandson of Anne Hutchinson, Thomas was an accomplished historian, businessman, and politician, cultivating the right connections in London to secure for himself a series of offices: chief justice, lieutenant governor, and in 1771 an appointment as governor of his native colony. But the skills that Hutchinson used to rise to the top were useless in the changing political climate of the 1770s, and as governor Hutchinson was unable to balance his prime political responsibility, representing the interests of the British crown in Massachusetts, and the growing unwillingness of his fellow colonials to obey British authority. In 1765, when Bostonians accused Hutchinson of supporting the Stamp Tax, they demolished his home; in 1773, when Hutchinson tried to articulate the...