Observations on the Real Rights of Women and Other Writings

Notes

193 Notes Introduction 1. Hutchinson further aroused public sentiment against him by not taking swift action to expel all British troops from Boston after the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. As Bernard Bailyn notes in The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), acting governor “Hutchinson believed that a decisive turning point had been reached. What was a stake in retaining these troops was nothing less than the British government maintaining its authority in America” (160). Although Hutchinson eventually allowed the troops to be removed, his extreme reluctance to do so unleashed a torrent of criticism. John Adams, adopting the persona of Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American ancestry believed to be the first person killed in the massacre, wrote, “Hutchinson was chargeable before God and man with our blood” (quoted in Bailyn, 163). The final straw came three years later. Hutchinson’s role in events that provoked the Boston Tea Party in 1773 led to his removal from office as governor of Massachusetts Bay. In 1774 he was replaced by a military governor, Gen. Thomas Gage, and banished to England, where he served as an advisor to King George III. Hutchinson died in 1780. 2. Hannah Mather Crocker, “Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston , Being an Account of the Original Proprietors of That Town, the Manners and Customs of Its People,” ca. 1829, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Department, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, 157 (hereafter referred to as “Reminiscences”). Instead of August 26, Crocker dates the destruction of Hutchinson’s home as August 14, apparently confusing it with the destruction of Oliver’s home, which did take place on that date. 3. For a discussion of the incidents of August 14–15 and August 26, see Bailyn, The Ordeal, 35–38; Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: 194 The American Revolution, – (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 89–93. 4. Crocker, “Reminiscences,” 166–67. Hutchinson lost far more than his bagwig and his papers; returning later to his home to assess the damage he found that it had been stripped down to the brick-work and that the cost of repairs would be about 2,500 pounds. The wine-soaked manuscripts and other papers he rescued as best he could (Thomas Hutchinson, History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay [New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970], 124). 5. Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643) was excommunicated by a church synod in Boston for holding the Antinomian view that Christians are under grace and therefore not bound by the legal system of the Old Testament . Although Hutchinson drew support from Governor Henry Vane and her brother-in-law John Wheelwright (as well as her minister John Cotton initially), the ire she provoked among the ministers by charging that almost all of them were preaching a covenant of works and not a covenant of grace, a hallmark of Reformation theology embraced by Puritans, sealed her fate. The Hutchinson family moved to Rhode Island in 1638 and five years later to New York, where all were killed by Indians except for one daughter. 6. Of ten children born to Hannah and Joseph Crocker, three died in infancy: Joseph Allen, their fourth child; Maria Stevens, their sixth; and James Bowdoin, their ninth. Two children died before the age of seven: William Shaw, their seventh child, and another, Maria Stevens, their eighth. Five lived to adulthood: Hannah Mather, Samuel Mather, and Rebecca Allen, their first three children; another, Joseph Allen, their fifth; and Eliza Clark, their last. See Francis S. Drake, Memorials of the Society of the Cincinnati of Massachusetts (Boston, 1873), 231. 7. [H. Mather Crocker], Observations on the Real Rights of Women, with Their Appropriate Duties, Agreeable to Scripture, Reason and Common Sense (Boston, 1818), 86. 8. A commonplace book (from the Latin phrase locus commenis, a common place or passage, as in a book) may be a collection of quotations on a given topic, a collection in a given genre (e.g., aphorisms or poetry), or a collection in mixed genres (aphorisms, poetry, prose passages, recipes, notes to pages xiv–x vi 195 letters). Although Crocker’s “Reminiscences” appears to qualify as a commonplace book, whether Observations on the Real Rights of Women ought to be so regarded is a matter of debate. 9. The term is used by Susan Phinney Conrad in Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, – (New...