The Hutchinson Letters Affair was an incident that increased tensions between the American colonies and the British government prior to the American Revolution. In June 1773 letters written several years earlier by Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, governor and lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay at the time of their publication, were published in a Boston newspaper. The highly inflammatory content of the letters called for, among other things, the abridgement of colonial rights.
The affair served to inflame tensions in Massachusetts, where implementation of the 1773 Tea Act was met with resistance that culminated in the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. The response of the British government to the publication of the letters served to turn Benjamin Franklin, one of the principal figures in the affair, into a committed Patriot.
Contents |
By December 1772, the relationship between Great Britain and the American colonies was strained following the Sugar, Stamp, Quartering, Declaratory and Townshend Acts. At that time, Benjamin Franklin, who was living in England as a representative of several colonies including Massachusetts, received a packet of thirteen letters, authored by Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver. At the time the letters were written, Hutchinson was the lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and Oliver was its secretary; when Franklin received the letters Hutchinson had been commissioned as governor and Oliver as lieutenant governor. Franklin never told who gave him the letters; Thomas Pownall and John Temple were among those suggested as possible sources.
In these private letters, written between 1767 and 1769 to Thomas Whately, a leading member of the British government in the 1760s, Hutchinson and Oliver made some damning comments about colonial rights. Hutchinson recommended that popular government be taken away from the people "by degrees", and that there should be "abridgement of what are called English liberties", and Oliver argued that all colonial government posts should be made independent of the provincial assemblies. The latter was notably not the case in Massachusetts, where the governor and lieutenant governor, although appointed by the crown, were dependent on the assembly for a salary and reimbursement of their costs of governance. Hutchinson, when he was commissioned governor in 1771, also received a salary grant of £1,500 from the Board of Trade. When this was publicized in 1772 it caused a great deal of negative comment from Hutchinson's opposition, notably Samuel Adams.
Franklin sent the letters to Thomas Cushing, the speaker of the Massachusetts assembly, in Boston, on the condition that they not be published or widely circulated. He specifically wrote that they should be seen only be a few people, and that he was not "at liberty to make the letters public."[1] However, the letters were published in the Boston Gazette in June 1773, causing a political firestorm in both Massachusetts and England.
In England, speculation ran rampant over the source of the leak. Thomas Whately's brother William fought a duel with Temple after accusing him of leaking the documents. Whately was wounded in the duel, but neither participant was satisfied, and a second duel was planned. In order to prevent it, Franklin admitted that he sent the letters to Cushing. Bostonians were outraged, and the Governor's Council petitioned the Board of Trade for Hutchinson's removal. In the hearing concerning Hutchinson's fate, in which the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party was also discussed, Franklin stood silently while he was lambasted for his role in the affair. He was accused of thievery and dishonor, called the "prime mover" in England on behalf of Boston's Committee of Correspondence. The Board of Trade dismissed Franklin from his post as colonial postmaster general, and dismissed the petition for Hutchinson's removal as "groundless" and "vexatious". Parliament then passed the so-called "Coercive Acts", a package of measures designed to punish Massachusetts for the tea party. Hutchinson was recalled, and the Massachusetts governorship was given to the commander of British forces in North America, General Thomas Gage. Hutchinson left Massachusetts in May 1774, never to return. Andrew Oliver suffered a stroke and died in March 1774.
Gage's implementation of the Coercive Acts further raised tensions that led to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in April 1775. Franklin returned to America in early 1775, where he went on to serve in the Second Continental Congress and help lead the American Revolution.