Core Beliefs
The passage I excerpt below is from Paul Revere And The World He Lived In by Esther Forbes. The book was published in 1942 and won a Pulitzer prize. I can’t recommend it enough. It makes you feel as if you are living in Colonial Boston.
What I found of note in the passage is the fleeting luck-of-the-draw nature of what must have seemed core beliefs to the man in question. The subject, Governor Thomas Hutchinson (above), was forced out of a Colonial Massachusetts he has lost control over not long before the American Revolution. As the author notes in Revere, in many respects Hutchinson just came around at the wrong time.
From the book—
“No man ever loved Massachusetts with a greater intensity than did Thomas Hutchinson. He had written her history, fought for her boundaries, re-established her currency, seen to it that her courts and judicial system were kept to a high standard. He had honestly believed in the centralization of power, and that the centre should be in London. The side which one did not, and yet their grandchildren ( two of Paul Revere’s were to be dying within the century for the centralization of power in the Federal Government. Hutchinson lost everything by backing the wrong system at the wrong time. His houses, wharves, horses, coaches, great estates, even the tomb of his wife on Copp’s Hill, were confiscated. His name became an anathema. Hutchinson street would be renamed Pearl….and yet if the other side had won, Thomas Hutchinson would undoubtedly be regarded as one of you greatest patriots.”
Belief in British control of the colonies, and in a model of government that placed that control in London, meant nothing after the Revolution. Most of the talk and agitation meant to either keep the colonies under British governance, or, for that matter to free them, had little bearing on the final outcome of the struggle.
