With the letter below Speaker Cushing enclosed another, from the two houses of the General Court to Lord Dartmouth. On June 28 the houses, as their last act of the session, appointed a drafting committee; the letter was composed the following day and dispatched the day after.9 Its purpose seems to have been to shake Dartmouth’s conclusion, which Franklin had reported in his letter of May 6, that the houses had declared their independence of British authority. The trouble between the colony and mother country began, the letter asserted, after Bernard’s appointment as governor: he and his coterie used their influence to secure Parliamentary taxation and prevent remonstrances against it from being heard; the working of this influence had just come to light in Hutchinson’s and Oliver’s letters. When Parliament seemed to be moving toward repeal of the Townshend Acts under Dartmouth’s guidance, furthermore, Hutchinson challenged the House and Council on fundamentals of the constitution. Ignoring his challenge would have meant tacitly accepting a status akin to slavery; hence he left them no choice but to contradict him, sorry as they were to do it. The people of the province were loyal subjects, the letter continued, who would rejoice to see harmony reign again. But that could not happen until their charter rights, particularly that of paying royal officials, were respected again as they had been at the end of the last war. The houses pinned their faith on Dartmouth to work for this end, and to frustrate the machinations of Bernard “and other known enemies of the peace of Great Britain and her colonies.”1

The point underlying these arguments, if we read them correctly, was that Whitehall’s view of the situation was the reverse of the truth. Controversy in Massachusetts was due not to a small group of radicals, as Hutchinson and other officials had persuaded the government, but to those very officials and their henchmen, who out of self-interest were hoodwinking the King and his ministers to turn them against a loyal province. Hutchinson had first labored surreptitiously for this end and then, when repeal of the Townshend Acts seemed imminent, had made repeal politically impossible by forcing a confrontation with the houses. Here was a hint that exposing his letters offered, as Franklin contended, the means of bringing peace.2 The Governor and his coterie were trying to destroy peace, which could be restored only by undoing their evil work and returning to the traditional status quo. This hope of curing the ills of the present by resurrecting the past was not new. Abandon Parliamentary taxation and revert to the old ways, Franklin had said over and over again, and all would be well.3 The two houses concurred, and the hope proved to be long-lasting. It survived the Coercive Acts and came to the fore in the first two Continental Congresses; it underlay Burke’s and Chatham’s and North’s eleventh-hour efforts to avoid conflict. Until 1776 many men, in England and America, believed that the only way to save the empire was to put back the clock.