Hutchinson Letters Affair - Background

Background

During the 1760s, relations between Great Britain and some of its North American colonies became strained by a series of Parliamentary laws (including the 1765 Stamp Act and the 1767 Townshend Acts), intended to raise revenue for the crown, and to assert Parliament's authority to pass such legislation despite a lack of colonial representation. These laws had sparked strong protests in the Thirteen Colonies; the Province of Massachusetts Bay in particular saw significant unrest and direct action against crown officials. The introduction of British Army troops into Boston in 1768 further raised tensions that escalated to the Boston Massacre in 1770.

In the years after the enactment of the Townshend Acts, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his colonial secretary (and brother-in-law) Andrew Oliver wrote a series of letters concerning the acts, the protests against them, and containing suggestions on how to respond, to Thomas Whately, an assistant to Prime Minister George Grenville. Whateley died in 1772, and his papers were turned over to his brother William. Whateley at one point gave access to his brother's papers to John Temple, another colonial official who sought to recover letters of his own from those papers.

Hutchinson was appointed governor of Massachusetts in 1770, following the critical publication by opposition politicians of letters written by his predecessor, Francis Bernard. Over the next two years Hutchinson engaged in an extended and rancorous written debate with the provincial assembly and the governor's council, both of which were dominated by radical leadership hostile to Parliamentary authority. The debate centered on the arbitrariness of executive prerogative and the role of Parliament in colonial governance, and greatly deepened divisions in the province.

The Massachusetts debate reached a pitch in England when the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, insisted that Benjamin Franklin, then acting as agent for Massachusetts in London, demand that the Massachusetts assembly retract its response to a speech the governor gave early in 1772 as part of this ongoing debate. Franklin had acquired a packet of about twenty letters that had been written to Whately. Upon reading them, Franklin concluded that Hutchinson and Oliver had mischaracterized the situation in the colonies, and thus misled Parliament. He felt that wider knowledge of these letters would then focus colonial anger away from Parliament and at those who had written the misleading letters. Franklin sent the letters to Thomas Cushing, the speaker of the Massachusetts assembly, in December 1772. He insisted to Cushing that they not be published or widely circulated. He specifically wrote that they should be seen only by a few people, and that he was not "at liberty to make the letters public."

The letters arrived in Massachusetts in March 1773, and came into the hands of Samuel Adams, then serving as the clerk of the Massachusetts assembly. By Franklin's instructions, only a select few people, including the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence, were to see the letters. Alarmed at what they read, Cushing wrote Franklin, asking if the restrictions on their circulation could be eased. In a response received by Cushing in early June, Franklin reiterated that they were not to be copied or published, but could be shown to anyone.