In this narrative and analytic life of Hutchinson, the first since Bernard Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography a quarter century ago, Andrew Stephen Walmsley traces Hutchinson's decline from well-respected member of Boston's governing class to America's leading object of revolutionary animus. Walmsley argues that Hutchinson, rather than simply a victim of his inability to understand the passions associated with a revolutionary movement, was in fact defeated in a classic political and personal struggle for power.

An entertaining and thought-provoking view of revolutionary events from the perspective of the losing side, Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution tells the story of the American Revolution through the prism of one of its most famous detractors.