Free Patriots by A. J. Langguth

own lay trampled in the street, affected everyone in the court. Even Josiah Quincy, a twenty-one-year-old who was reading law with Oxenbridge Thacher and who had recently joined Samuel Adams’ Sons of Liberty, pitied the lieutenant governor. “Such a man in such a station,” Quincy described Hutchinson in his diary, “thus habited, with tears starting from his eyes and a countenance which strongly told the inwardanguish of his soul.”
    Rising to speak, Hutchinson rejected any suggestion that he was appealing for sympathy. He had come to court, he said, only because there wouldn’t have been a quorum without him. But Hutchinson went on to demonstrate that the patriot leaders had no monopoly on eloquence.
    “Some apology is necessary for my dress,” he said. “Indeed, I had no other. Destitute of everything: no other shirt, no other garment but what I have on, and not one in my family in a better situation than myself.”
    He wanted to absolve himself, but with no suggestion that his spirit had been crushed. “I am not obliged to give an answer to all the questions that may be put to me by every lawless person, yet I call on God as my witness—and I would not, for a thousand worlds, call my Maker to witness a falsehood—I say I call my Maker to witness that I never, in New England or Old, in Great Britain or America, neither directly nor indirectly, was aiding, assisting or supporting—in the least promoting or encouraging—what is commonly called the Stamp Act but, on the contrary, did all in my power, and strove as much as in me lay, to prevent it.
    “This is not declared through timidity, for I have nothing to fear. They can only take away my life, which is of but little value when deprived of all its comforts, all that was dear to me . . .”
    Hutchinson said he hoped the people would see how easy it was to spread false reports against the innocent. But violence was wrong, even against the guilty. “I hope all will see how easily the people may be deluded, inflamed and carried away with madness against an innocent man.
    “I pray God give us better hearts!”
    —
    The sacking of Hutchinson’s house had filled Jonathan Mayhew with remorse. He wrote at once to assure Hutchinson that he abhorred violence from his very soul, and he told friends that he would rather lose a hand than encourage such an outrage. But, like many Bostonians, Mayhew saw nothing improper about the demonstration two weeks earlier. His error had been in preaching liberty when his audience was so apprehensive about the threat to their freedoms. In the future, Mayhew said, he would try to calm his sensitive congregation rather than excite it.
    Samuel Adams and his cohorts might not be feeling that same guilt, but they recognized a grievous tactical error. As Hutchinson was addressing the court, Adams at a Town Meeting heard Bostonians condemn the latest rioting, and he voted with them to help the sheriff keep order during the coming nights. When Hutchinsonwas told about the vote, he noted that the loudest lamentations were coming from the very men who had destroyed his house.
    Many Bostonians knew that Samuel Adams gathered his circle together every Saturday afternoon to edit Monday’s edition of the Boston Gazette , and they took the newspaper’s account of the second demonstration as a change in strategy. The report could have been dictated by Thomas Hutchinson: “Such horrid scenes of villainy as were perpetrated last Monday night it is certain were never seen before in this town, and it is hoped never will again.” The participants were“rude fellows” who went about “heating themselves with liquor” before they vented their “hellish fury” on the lieutenant governor’s house. But the article also drew the same distinction that Mayhew had made. “Most people seem disposed to discriminate between the assembly on the 14th of the month and their transactions, and the unbridled licentiousness of this mob.” To underscore that