The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson

The most psychologically nuanced study of a political leader that I have ever read. -- Jack Rakove * Stanford Report * A work of art: exquisitely written, delicate in insight, and imbued with a wisdom about men and affairs that is the true hallmark of a great historian. * Times Literary Supplement * A sympathetic and penetrating study of the most important, and perhaps the most hated, loyalist of all, Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts. And it is presented by a historian who has already written with similar penetration and sympathy on the ideas that moved the other side. Indeed it grows out of and in a sense completes the author’s previous work. * New York Review of Books * As political biography, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson is without equal in the voluminous literature on the Revolution. No other public figure of the Revolution has found such skillful and sensitive attention. * History * Writing this kind of history requires discipline, imagination, and sensitivity, and it presupposes that there is an inner world of intellect and of moral and emotional sensibility which is intimately responsive to external events… [Bailyn’s] probing, taut yet luminous prose weaves together into a single fabric finished explanations, analyses of evidence, flashes of insight, and intuitive understandings. A triumph of historical and literary artistry… The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson is that rare achievement which is at once original and nearly definitive, masterful and provocative. * Reviews in American History * The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson offers neither defense nor condemnation. Bailyn’s portrayal is sympathetic, in that he does not justify the caricature of the governor that was propagated by the American founders. He seeks, rather, to understand not only why Hutchinson would be burned in effigy by the revolutionaries, but also how Hutchinson’s conservatism and patriotism failed to calm the growing revolutionary cause. * New Criterion * Bailyn’s narrative illustrates how an individual’s political decisions are informed by experience. Hutchinson was no less intelligent than Franklin. He was well acquainted with colonial concerns and shared his countrymen’s most basic hopes for Parliamentary restraint and no taxation. But in the end, he was unable to accept the revolutionaries’ deep moral commitments as anything other than political irrationality. * Claremont Review of Books * A brilliant and poignant biography of the last royal governor of Massachusetts—a high-minded, New England Tory who resisted the revolutionary ferment and died in lonely exile. * Law & Liberty *