Minutes later, the mob attacked Hutchinson's house with unbridled fury. Outraged that he had slipped away from their grasp, they literally destroyed his home. Doors throughout the house were chopped to pieces, walls separating the various rooms were demolished, mattresses were ripped apart, windows were smashed, and virtually all the family's household belongings were either destroyed or stolen. The mob worked on the house for hours, not leaving until just before dawn.
The morning light revealed what was left of Hutchinson's proud estate. Author A. J. Langguth paints the following picture:
"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."
Having endured a sleepless and humiliating night on the run, Hutchinson made his way to court the next morning. His fellow justices, dressed in robes, awaited him. He entered wearing only what he had fled in, and what neighbors and friends had loaned him. Everyone took pity on Thomas Hutchinson that day. Josiah Quincy, a young attorney and supporter of Sam Adams, described the exhausted and broken Hutchinson in his diary as a man whose teary eyes "strongly told the inward anguish of his soul."
Regardless of how Bostonians felt about the Stamp Act and the justness of protests against it, few could defend the atrocious and inhumane acts that had been committed against one of the most decent and respected citizens of Massachusetts as well as his family.
No matter his willingness to sympathize with the colonists on the Stamp Act, Thomas Hutchinson's destiny was now sealed. As he presided over court that day, reflecting on the events of the preceding night, Hutchinson knew, from that day forward, he would stand for order, and behind the law and his King. He would forever be a Loyalist.
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Sources for this article:
Brands, H. W., The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, Doubleday, 2000
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