Adams, Samuel (1722-1803)

Samuel Adams (1722-1803)

Source

Revolutionary leader

The Famous Adams. When John Adams arrived in France in 1778, he was greeted with a persistent question: was he “le fameaux Adams?” John Adams often bristled at the attention paid to others in the Patriot cause, such as James Otis, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. But in 1778 he acknowledged that he was not the famous Adams; that was his cousin, Samuel, leader of the Massachusetts Patriots, and the only American whom King George III exempted from a promise of amnesty. “If the American Revolution was a blessing, and not a curse,” John Adams wrote later, “the name and character of Samuel Adams ought to be preserved. It will bear a strict and critical examination even by the inveterate malice of his enemies.... His merits and services and sacrifices and suffering are beyond all calculation.”

Education. Samuel Adams was born in Boston on 27 September 1722. His father, Samuel, a successful brewer, had served as a deacon of both the Old South Church and New South Church and as a Boston selectman and representative to the assembly. Samuel’s mother, Mary, was deeply religious, influenced by the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. Only three of their twelve children survived infancy. Samuel and his sister and brother were kept away from the influence of other children, instead instilled with deep feelings of personal responsiblity and isolation. At the age of fourteen Samuel entered Harvard. With class rank determined by a family’s social position, he was ranked fifth in a class of twenty-two. At graduation (1740) he won the class debate on the subject of liberty, and in 1743 he was awarded a master’s degree for his thesis “Whether It Be Lawful To Resist The Supreme Magistrate, If The Commonwealth Cannot Be Otherwise Preserved.”

Entrance to Public Life. Adams studied for the bar briefly and then went into business. He was not a good businessman, and he quickly went bankrupt. His father paid off his debts and established Samuel as the manager of the brewery, which had grown so successful it needed little management. Father and son now had more time to devote to politics. In 1746 Governor Shirley vetoed the senior Adams’s appointment to the Governor’s Council, elevating Andrew Oliver instead. Young Samuel regarded this as an insult, and on 4 June 1746 he was elected by a special town meeting to fill Oliver’s seat in the assembly. In his annual report Shirley reported to the king that the elder Adams, whom he said was a gentleman of great ability, was disgruntled by the veto of his appointment, but the younger Adams’s “indefatigable zeal” made him more dangerous.

Political Career. In January 1748 Adams launched a newspaper, the Independent Advertiser, which he would publish until British authorities shut it down in 1775. The Advertiser was devoted entirely to politics, and Samuel Adams wrote most of the material, including the letters to the editor. His political position from the 1740s to the 1770s remained consistent: Massachusetts, or any political society, should be free to govern itself. These political essays attracted few readers, and the Advertiser never had a wide circulation. His father’s sudden death in March 1748 left Samuel Adams responsible for the family brewery and other interests, and his brother and brother-in-law, better businessmen, handled most of the financial affairs. Political activity paid little, and Samuel Adams was not attentive to the businesses his father had left him. Adams spent most of his time talking, either with members of the Caucus Club, the leaders of Boston’s business and political communities, or with the sailors and longshoremen who spent long hours in waterfront taverns. Adams would forget everything when he had a chance to talk politics, but if the conversation veered in another direction, Adams would leave in disgust. In 1749 he married Mary Checkley, the daughter of the New South pastor, with whom he had five children, two of whom survived infancy. Politics consumed Samuel Adams, and neither family nor business could distract him. The children especially suffered when Mary Checkley Adams died from a fever in 1757.

Political Passion. When his father died, Adams had been elected to the Caucus Club, a political group whose members were able to dominate the Boston town meeting. Because few men had the time to pay close attention to civic affairs, and few were willing to devote the hours necessary to attending such meetings, a handful of organized men were able to control the town meeting. In 1753 the town meeting elected Samuel an assessor, and in 1756 he was a Boston tax collector; but Adams was so lax in collecting taxes that in 1758 the sheriff gave notice that on 5 August his property, including his house and gardens, the brewery, a wharf, and several apartment buildings, would be auctioned off to pay Adams’s outstanding debts. The day of the auction Adams responded with a public letter to the sheriff, threatening to sue anyone who took his property. He and the sheriff conducted a newspaper argument over the auction, which never took place. By 1765, when he was finally removed as tax collector, he had failed to collect more than £8,000 that was owed by his fellow citizens.

Breach with England. Though Adams devoted himself almost completely to politics, his career by 1764 had taken him nowhere. He was in debt; the house and businesses his father had left him were in ruins; and he seemed not the least concerned. In 1764 he married Elizabeth Wells, who was twenty years his junior. They would have no children, but Elizabeth would become responsible for the care of his son and daughter. Along with James Otis and John Hancock, Adams was one of the leaders of the group opposed to Thomas Hutchinson, but Hutchinson continued to rise in power while Adams, Otis, and Hancock were shut out. The Sugar Act, though, changed this. Hutchinson opposed the Sugar Act, but merely because it was unwise. For Adams the Sugar Act raised the same issue he had been writing about for twenty years: the right of the people of Massachusetts to govern themselves. Adams’s long days and nights in political gatherings had also given him a new outlook on politics. Most opponents of the Sugar Act, wealthy merchants, expressed opposition in letters to men of influence in England. For Adams political action meant something more dramatic than writing letters. He would use mass protests against the political establishment, using public opinion, rather than private intrigue, to make policy. Parliament repealed the Sugar Act before Adams could completely bring his political theories into practice, and even his allies believed he had tried to carry things too far.

Stamp Act and Aftermath. But in 1765, when Parliament passed the Stamp Act, Adams was prepared with a campaign of massive public resistance. Able to mobilize both the merchant elite and the men of the lower orders, able to articulate the cause with both passion and eloquence, Adams became the leader of resistance. He was elected to the assembly in September and prepared both the House’s answers to the governor’s speech and resolutions asserting American rights. In 1766 the radical faction that looked to Adams as a leader took control of the assembly, and from 1766 until General Gage dissolved the assembly in 1774, Adams was its clerk. Adams used his position as spokesman for the House to harass every British official sent to the province. The colonial assemblies, Adams insisted, were not subject to Parliament. The colonial assemblies had the exclusive power to guarantee the natural and constitutional rights of Americans. These principals, Adams insisted, rested on the British Constitution, which was not, as English practice made it, subject to Parliamentary whim; instead, according to Adams, the British Constitution embodied the inherent and inalienable natural rights of men, which no legislative body could limit.

Committees of Correspondence. In 1770 the assembly appointed a committee of correspondence, of which Adams was a member, to keep in contact with other colonies. In 1772 Adams, as leader of Boston’s town meeting, moved that the town appoint a committee of correspondence to “state the rights of the Colonists ... as men, as Christians, and as Subjects; and to communicate the same to the several towns and to the world.” Adams drafted its declaration and privately urged other towns to form similar committees. When the British government in Massachusetts collapsed following the Boston Tea Party, these committees became the province’s new government. When the British government closed the port of Boston, Adams called for an intercolonial Congress to unite all the colonies in opposition to British policy. Adams was chosen to the first Continental Congress, and he may have been the only delegate already thinking of independence. Before he left for Philadelphia, friends provided him with new clothes and a wig; while he was gone, other local supporters built a new barn and repaired his dilapidated house. Adams refrained from an active part in Congress’s debates, but he used his influence in small informal meetings, successfully convincing the delegates to adopt the militant Suffolk Resolves and repudiate Joseph Galloway’s plan for a colonial union under Parliamentary rule. Returning to Massachusetts, Adams narrowly escaped arrest when Gage’s forces attacked Lexington and Concord, and in 1776 he returned to Congress publicly advocating independence. He signed the Declaration and continued to serve in Congress until 1781.

Covering his Tracks. His cousin John was the great speaker and public organizer; but Samuel Adams was the influential figure behind the scenes. As such, it is harder to trace all of his influence, but Adams is visible in the results. The committees of correspondence had operated with a large degree of secrecy; the planning for the Boston Tea Party also had to be done with great discretion since destroying the tea would be considered an act of treason. John Adams asked many years later, “The letters he wrote and received, where are they? I have seen him ... in Philadelphia, when he was about to leave Congress, cut up with his scissors whole bundles of letters into atoms that could never be reunited, and throw them out the window, to be scattered by the winds. ... In winter he threw whole handfuls into the fire.... I have joked him, perhaps rudely, upon his anxious caution. His answer was, ‘Whatever becomes of me, my friends shall never suffer by my negligence.’”

Later Years. Adams, more than any other man, was responsible for independence, and more importantly, he was responsible for the particular causes for independence. Franklin believed that the colonies ultimately would be independent because of their demographic and geographic destiny; Adams believed the colonies would need to be independent because all men had the inalienable right to govern themselves. From 1746 until the end of his life he advocated this simple idea; and though his ideas found warm support in Boston after 1764, and in the rest of the United States after 1776, he, as an admirer said, was an austere and distant man, feared by his enemies, but too secret to be loved by his friends. Once independence was declared, leadership passed to other hands, including those of John Hancock, whom Adams did not entirely trust. Adams continued to be active in Boston politics, continuing to lead the town meeting. In 1788 he served in the Massachusetts ratifying convention though his only son died as it met. At first he opposed the new Constitution since it created a distant government that the people would not be able to control. He was defeated for election to the first Congress under the Constitution, but he was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1789, serving in that post until 1794, when he became governor on the death of Gov. John Hancock, serving in that office until 1797. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson wrote to Adams, “I addressed a letter to you, my very dear and ancient friend, on the 4th of March [the day Jefferson became president]; not indeed to you by name, but through the medium of my fellow citizens. ... In meditating the matter of the [Inaugural] address, I often asked myself, Is this exactly in the spirit of the patriarch Samuel Adams? Will he approve of it?” After Adams’s death on 2 October 1803 he was given a state funeral against his wishes, and members of the Massachusetts legislature and of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate all wore mourning bands in his memory for the duration of the year.

Source

Paul Lewis, The Grand Incendiary: A Biography of Samuel Adams (New York: Dial Press, 1973).