| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Andrew Stephen Walmsley. Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution. (The American Social Experience Series, number 38.) New York: New York University Press. 1999. Pp. xvii, 207. $37.50.

The figure of Bernard Bailyn casts a long shadow over Andrew Stephen Walmsley's new biography of Thomas Hutchinson, the last civilian governor of colonial Massachusetts. In The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974), Bailyn conveyed a certain sympathy for Hutchinson's personality while disdaining his political choices. Responding directly to Bailyn, Walmsley sets out to provide "a more complete contextual examination of the life and career of this vital colonial figure" (p. xiv). This reexamination amounts to a neat reversal of Bailyn's portrait. To Walmsley, Hutchinson is a "staid, unimaginative, and fastidious" man but a skilled public servant whose "flexibility and political maturity" have been long underrated (pp. 133, 122). Hutchinson's ability to see through the ideological blather to the true power politics of Massachusetts made him doubly dangerous to the radicals: he was both a political obstacle to their selfish ambitions and a rhetorical foe to be reckoned with. . . .

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