HUTCHINSON, THOMAS (1711-1780), the last royal governor of the province of Massachusetts, son of a wealthy mer chant of Boston, Mass., was born there on Sept. 9, 1711. He graduated at Harvard in 1727 and for several years thereafter devoted himself to business. In 1737 he began his public career as a member of the Boston board of selectmen, and a few weeks later he was elected to the general court of Massachusetts Bay, of which he was a member until 1740 and again from serving as speaker in 1748 and 1749. He consistently con tended for a sound financial system, and vigorously opposed the operations of the "Land Bank" and the issue of pernicious bills of credit. His first trip to England was in 1740 when he repre sented his Colony in a boundary dispute with New Hampshire. He was a member of the Massachusetts council from was chief justice of the superior court of the province from 1761-69, was lieutenant governor from 1758-71, acting as gov ernor in the latter two years, and from 1771-74 was governor. In 1754 he was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Albany con vention, and, with Franklin, was a member of the committee ap pointed to draw up a plan of union. Though he recognized the legality of the Stamp Act of 1765, he considered the measure inexpedient and impolitic and urged its repeal, but his attitude was misunderstood; he was considered by many to have instigated the passage of the act, and in Aug. 1765 a mob sacked his Boston residence and destroyed many valuable manuscripts and docu ments. He was acting governor at the time of the "Boston Massacre" in 177o, and it was his orders that removed the British troops from the town. Throughout the pre-revolutionary dis turbances in Massachusetts he was the representative of the British ministry, and though he disapproved of some of the min isterial measures he felt impelled to enforce them and necessarily incurred the hostility of the Whig or patriot element. In upon the appointment of 'Gen. Thomas Gage as military governor, he went to England, and acted as an adviser to George III. and the British ministry on American affairs, uniformly counselling moderation. He died at Brompton, now part of London, on June 3, 1780.
See J. K. Hosmer's Life of Thomas Hutchinson (Boston, 1896), and a biographical chapter in John Fiske's Essays Historical and Literary (1902). For an estimate of Hutchinson as an historian, see M. C. Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution (1897).