official papers.
If Mackintosh had only been obliging a few merchants by destroying the evidence against them, the night’s rampage might have ended there. Instead, the mob’s two flanks joined forces and set out to wreak thegreatest civil violence North America had ever experienced.
Only that morning, Thomas Hutchinson had returned to Boston from his Milton country estate. By afternoon, he was hearing rumors that a mob was being raised again. He even knew it would attack officers from the Custom House and the Admiralty office. Hutchinson’s friends assured him that he would be spared. They said his courage the last time in standing up to rocks and insults had won the mob’s respect. For some reason, Hutchinson believed them.
Now he was at supper. Since the night was warm, he had dressed informally in a woolen jacket over his waistcoat. Around him at the table were his sister-in-law, Grizell Sanford, who had raised his children since his wife’s death; his sons Thomas Junior and Elisha, graduates of Harvard who were training to become merchants; Sarah, a daughter who was reaching marriageable age; Billy, Hutchinson’s youngest son; and Peggy, her father’s favorite, eleven years old and already acting as his secretary.
As the family ate, a friend burst in to warn them that the mob was heading their way. Hutchinson sent the children from the house and bolted the doors and shutters as he had done before. He was determined to wait out the assault alone. But Sarah came running back to say that she wouldn’t leave unless he came away with her. Hutchinson couldn’t resist, and they hurried together to a neighbor’s house. Stories circulating in town had Hutchinson not only encouraging Parliament to pass the Stamp Act but actually drawing up the law here in his mansion on Garden Court Street. A few minutes after he escaped, the mob fell upon the Hutchinson house in a fever of hatred.
One of Hutchinson’s sons was near enough to the axes splitting the front door to hear a cry on the night air: “Damn him! He is upstairs! We’ll have him!”
Some men ran at once to the top of the house, others swarmed into the graceful drawing room. Still more headed for the stores of liquor in the cellar. This time, merely tearing off wainscoting and breaking windows would not be enough to satisfy the mob. Instead,men shattered the inner doors and beat down the walls between the rooms. Standing at the upper windows, they slit open mattresses and buried the lawn beneath a summer blizzard of feathers. They climbed the roof to swarm over a cupola, and even though the job took two hours, they finally sent it crashing down.
Word reached Hutchinson in his hiding place that the crowd had picked up his scent, and he wound his way through neighboring yards and gardens to a house even farther away. He stayed there until 4 A.M. By then, the mansion he had inherited, one of the finest in Massachusetts, was a splintered shell. Near dawn, men were still crouched on the roof, prying up slate and boards. Only daylight stopped them from razing the house’s outer walls to the ground. Around the battered frame, every fruit tree had been broken to a stump and every shrub crushed back to the earth.
Out of the ruins came a trail of dinner plates and family portraits, books and children’s clothes. A strongbox had been broken open and nine hundred pounds taken. The manuscript pages of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts had been strewn in the mud, along with the rare documents he had spent a lifetime collecting.
—
The next morning, Hutchinson’s fellow justices in their red robes had already taken their places when he appeared in court. He was wearing what he had fled in and, because overnight the weather had turned abruptly cold, a few borrowed bits of clothing. Whether he had calculated the effect or not, the sight of this patrician man in his middle fifties, pale after his sleepless night and fitted out in other men’s clothes because his
If Mackintosh had only been obliging a few merchants by destroying the evidence against them, the night’s rampage might have ended there. Instead, the mob’s two flanks joined forces and set out to wreak thegreatest civil violence North America had ever experienced.
Only that morning, Thomas Hutchinson had returned to Boston from his Milton country estate. By afternoon, he was hearing rumors that a mob was being raised again. He even knew it would attack officers from the Custom House and the Admiralty office. Hutchinson’s friends assured him that he would be spared. They said his courage the last time in standing up to rocks and insults had won the mob’s respect. For some reason, Hutchinson believed them.
Now he was at supper. Since the night was warm, he had dressed informally in a woolen jacket over his waistcoat. Around him at the table were his sister-in-law, Grizell Sanford, who had raised his children since his wife’s death; his sons Thomas Junior and Elisha, graduates of Harvard who were training to become merchants; Sarah, a daughter who was reaching marriageable age; Billy, Hutchinson’s youngest son; and Peggy, her father’s favorite, eleven years old and already acting as his secretary.
As the family ate, a friend burst in to warn them that the mob was heading their way. Hutchinson sent the children from the house and bolted the doors and shutters as he had done before. He was determined to wait out the assault alone. But Sarah came running back to say that she wouldn’t leave unless he came away with her. Hutchinson couldn’t resist, and they hurried together to a neighbor’s house. Stories circulating in town had Hutchinson not only encouraging Parliament to pass the Stamp Act but actually drawing up the law here in his mansion on Garden Court Street. A few minutes after he escaped, the mob fell upon the Hutchinson house in a fever of hatred.
One of Hutchinson’s sons was near enough to the axes splitting the front door to hear a cry on the night air: “Damn him! He is upstairs! We’ll have him!”
Some men ran at once to the top of the house, others swarmed into the graceful drawing room. Still more headed for the stores of liquor in the cellar. This time, merely tearing off wainscoting and breaking windows would not be enough to satisfy the mob. Instead,men shattered the inner doors and beat down the walls between the rooms. Standing at the upper windows, they slit open mattresses and buried the lawn beneath a summer blizzard of feathers. They climbed the roof to swarm over a cupola, and even though the job took two hours, they finally sent it crashing down.
Word reached Hutchinson in his hiding place that the crowd had picked up his scent, and he wound his way through neighboring yards and gardens to a house even farther away. He stayed there until 4 A.M. By then, the mansion he had inherited, one of the finest in Massachusetts, was a splintered shell. Near dawn, men were still crouched on the roof, prying up slate and boards. Only daylight stopped them from razing the house’s outer walls to the ground. Around the battered frame, every fruit tree had been broken to a stump and every shrub crushed back to the earth.
Out of the ruins came a trail of dinner plates and family portraits, books and children’s clothes. A strongbox had been broken open and nine hundred pounds taken. The manuscript pages of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts had been strewn in the mud, along with the rare documents he had spent a lifetime collecting.
—
The next morning, Hutchinson’s fellow justices in their red robes had already taken their places when he appeared in court. He was wearing what he had fled in and, because overnight the weather had turned abruptly cold, a few borrowed bits of clothing. Whether he had calculated the effect or not, the sight of this patrician man in his middle fifties, pale after his sleepless night and fitted out in other men’s clothes because his
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