In de pen dence and Nation Building 35fi fth-generation American, but a devoted loyalist who had served in
the assembly and later became chief justice of the highest Massachu-
setts court. Because Hutchinson hated and sought to quell public dem-
onstrations and mob action as a way of getting across their demands,
Bostonians regarded him as the figurehead of everything they detested
about British rule. And although he deplored the stupidity of the
Stamp Act, he defended the right of Parliament to tax the colonies.
The rage against him grew to such an extent that his house had been
ransacked in 1765 , when he was the chief justice.
Hutchinson had also defended the use of search warrants, called
writs of assistance, in an effort to curb smuggling in the colonies dur-
ing wartime. James Otis gave a crowd-pleasing tirade against the writs,
a speech so powerful that John Adams hailed it as the beginning of the
American Revolution. “Then and there,” Adams later wrote, “the child
Inde pendence was born.”
Then, on March 5 , 1770 , the mounting antagonism between the
British authority and the citizenry of Boston erupted in violence. Brit-
ish soldiers guarding the customhouse, commanded by Captain
Thomas Preston, were jeered at and heckled by agitators who threw
stones and snowballs at them. The soldiers reacted by firing into the
crowd, killing five men and wounding six others. A general melee was
avoided when Hutchinson, at the insistence of Sam Adams, agreed
to withdraw the troops from Boston. Preston and eight of his soldiers
were arrested and charged with murder. John Adams and Josiah
Quincy accepted the request that they defend the soldiers. Preston and
six of his men were acquitted, but two soldiers were found guilty of
manslaughter and were released after being branded on the hand. This
“Boston Massacre,” as it was called, was regularly remembered each
year in Massachusetts, and a print of the bloody scene was circulated
throughout the colonies.
But it was the tea tax that really set off a series of events that played
into the hands of the most radical colonial agitators. The East India
Tea Company verged on bankruptcy and turned to the government for
help. It had a monopoly on the importation of tea into England and
held a surplus of 17 million pounds of tea. But it could not pay the duty
required by law, and therefore could not sell the tea in Britain. Parlia-
ment responded in May 1773 by passing a Tea Act allowing the company