is family
dragged him away with them in their flight. The mob rushed on, and
beating down his windows, sacked the house (one of the finest in Boston)
and destroyed everything, even a valuable collection of books and
manuscripts.

"This excess shocked the wise friends of liberty, and in a public
meeting the citizens discovered the destruction, and set their faces
against any further demonstrations of the sort. Rewards were offered for
the rioters, and Mackintosh and some others were apprehended, but were
rescued by their friends; and it was found impossible to proceed against
them." (Elliott's New England History, Vol. II., pp. 254, 255.)

"Mayhew sent the next day a special apology and disclaimer to
Hutchinson. The inhabitants of Boston, at a town meeting, unanimously
expressed their abhorrence of these proceedings, and a civil guard was
organized to prevent their repetition. Yet the rioters, though well
known, went unpunished--a sure sign of the secret concurrence of the
mass of the community. Those now committed were revolutionary acts,
designed to intimidate--melancholy forerunners of civil war."
(Hildreth's History of the United States, Vol. II., Chap, xxviii., p.
528.)]

[Footnote 273: _Ib._, p. 527.

1. Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, whose house was thus sacked and his
valuable papers destroyed, was the historian of his native province of
Massachusetts Bay, whom I have quoted so frequently in the present
volume of this history. Of his history, Mr. Bancroft, a bitter enemy of
Hutchinson's, says:

"At the opening of the year 1765, the people of New England were reading
the history of the first sixty years of the Colony of Massachusetts, by
Hutchinson. This work is so ably executed that as yet it remains without
a rival; and his knowledge was so extensive that, with the exception of
a few concealments, it exhausts the subject. Nothing so much revived the
ancestral spirit which a weaving of the gloomy superstitions, mixed with
Puritanism, had for a long time overshadowed." (History of the United
States, Vol. V., Chap, xi., p. 228.)

2. But though mob violence distinguished Boston on this as well as on
other occasions, the opposition was such throughout the colonies, from
New Hampshire to Georgia, that all those who had been appointed to
receive and distribute the stamps were compelled, by the remonstrances
and often threats of their fellow-colonists, to resign the office; and
the stamped paper sent from Engla