The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams (2023) by Stacy Schiff

Today, most Americans think of Samuel Adams (1722-1803) mostly as one of the original best selling craft beers, which first hit American grocery shelves in 1984. Even as an avid reader of early American history, I must confess that my understanding of Adams’s specific role in the American Revolution was limited to his clandestine agitation in Boston as a leading member of the Sons of Liberty. After that, Adams just seemed to fade from the historical stage, eclipsed by his far more accomplished younger cousin, John. Stacy Schiff, one of my all-time favorite popular historians, brings this largely forgotten American hero back to life in “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams” (2023).

Schiff argues that Samuel Adams was the indispensable agitator-in-chief in colonial Boston during the tumultuous decade from the Stamp Act in 1765 to the events at Lexington and Concord in 1775. He inflamed the passions of the public from his editorial perch at the Boston Gazette, the most widely read and most politically radical of Boston’s five newspapers. Many contemporaries, patriot and loyalist alike, felt that Adams was the person most responsible for igniting the American Revolution, although Schiff says there is little evidence that independence was ever Adams’s long range plan.

What makes Adams so special is that he was a humble man of limited abilities, which he freely acknowledged. Schiff calls Adams “The patron saint of late bloomers.” He was, she says, “a perfect failure until middle age.” Alone among America’s founding fathers, Adams was downwardly mobile, a poor man who did not grow up a poor boy. “Never in his life would he make a wise financial decision,” she says. Yet he was the driving force behind the revolutionary movement in Boston, and eventually most of British America. The first to call for full independence from Great Britain, at the end of the war Adams ranked alongside George Washington as father of his country, Schiff says. Yet today he is hardly remembered at all. “Most of America’s founders became giants after independence,” Schiff writes. “Adams began to shrink.”

Adams was known for his simplicity and austerity, but he grew up privileged and educated at the best schools in colonial Massachusetts (Boston Latin and Harvard, both undergraduate and graduate degrees). He translated Erasmus and read all of the Roman classics and French Enlightenment thinkers. He seemed to be on a path leading directly to the same prosperity and social respect his father Samuel Sr. commanded. And then the family went bankrupt.

In the mid-eighteenth century, colonial Massachusetts was starved of currency, which hampered the local economy, particularly farmers. In 1740, despite opposition from wealthy merchants and creditors who feared inflation and loss of control over the currency, the colonial government endeavored to establish a Land Bank that would issue paper currency secured by mortgages on colonial real estate. The Massachusetts House of Representatives immediately imposed legal restrictions on the use of Land Bank currency and declared it illegal tender for the payment of debts. In 1741, the colonial government moved to suppress the Land Bank, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of its leaders, including Samuel Adams Sr. Schiff argues that this now long forgotten episode in American colonial history foreshadowed the larger conflicts and tensions that would eventually lead to the American Revolution, with Samuel Adams Jr. in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement. When Samuel Sr. died in 1748 he left his son a malt business, a pile of debt, and a lifelong political grievance. Harvard-educated Adams stooped to the role of Boston tax collector (he was jokingly called “Sam the Publican”) for eight years to make ends meet. A group of benefactors, led by John Hancock, eventually raised 1,100 pounds to retire Adams’s debt. “He was all loose ends and blighted promise,” Schiff says.

For some unknown reason, Schiff fails to explain the colonial government of Massachusetts, which combined a strong democratic legislative element in the House of Representatives and an unelected and sometimes authoritarian executive role embodied by the Royal Governor. The Massachusetts General Court had an upper and lower house. The lower house was the 95-seat House of Representatives, which were elected annually by property-owning males in the colony, and played a critical role in making local laws, approving local budgets, and representing the interests of the colonists. It was the primary legislative body responsible for enacting laws and regulations governing Massachusetts. The upper house was the Governor’s Council, which included 28 prominent members of the local community appointed by the governor to act as his formal advisory body and participate in the legislative process by reviewing and amending bills passed by the lower house. The Royal Governor was appointed by the Crown and served at the pleasure of the sovereign. The governor possessed significant powers, such as the authority to veto legislation passed by the House or Representatives, appoint certain colonial officials, command the colonial militia, and administer justice. This is the critical political context to the story of Samuel Adams.

In the aftermath of the French and Indian War, Great Britain was deeply in debt. London collected about 2,000 pounds a year from the colonies and spent some eight times that amount to collect it. In 1764, Prime Minister George Grenville proposed to cut the duty on molasses by 50 percent, but then ramped up enforcement. It was called the Sugar Act and it kicked off the American Revolution. The leaders of resistance in Boston were Samuel Adams and James Otis, Jr., a fiery and mentally unstable lawyer. A year later Parliament rescinded the Sugar Act and replaced it with the Stamp Act, a direct tax on printed materials that was on the books for less than five months and never enforced, yet its legacy was enormous. Colonial resistance was immediate, steadfast, and universal. Schiff says that Adams viewed the Stamp Act as a blessing in disguise as it awakened millions to the fragility of their rights and privileges. Meanwhile, the author says, “Great Britain knew painfully little about her colonies and seemed to care even less … imperial ignorance shaded in condescension.” On August 26, 1765, a Boston mob destroyed the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, whose son was also named a stamp tax collector.

Governor Francis Bernand importuned the British administration to apply sterner measures against the recalcitrant colonists, like some sort of “nanny attempting to rouse the distracted, martini-mixing parents,” Schiff says. From his seat in the House of Representatives and his anonymous contributing writer role at the Boston Gazette, Adams ensured that the Sugar and Stamp Acts were the beginning rather than the end of the story. Great Britain and the colonies had radically divergent ideas about their relationship and Adams worked to ensure that the breach steadily widened.

Schiff says that the opposition movement in Boston was “loose-limbed and organic” with Adams everywhere all at once. He played a role, central or peripheral, in just about every political resistance organization in Boston: the Sons of Liberty, the Loyal Nine, the Long Room Club, the Monday Night Club, the North End Club, etc. Adams was “a born committee man,” Schiff says, “he thrived on collaboration.” Crown officials in both America and Great Britain were not impressed by Adams and his chronically discontented compatriots. Governor Bernard wrote that Boston’s troubles were caused by a handful of men, “bankrupt in reputation as well as in fortune, and equally void of credit in character and in property.” In other words, a bunch of losers. How these losers held influence and power over men of significant fortunes and reputations utterly mystified the British both in Boston and London.

The next stage in the colonial drama came in 1767 with the Townshend Acts, a tax on a wide variety of goods imported into the colonies. It was estimated that the taxes would bring in over 40,000 pounds a year, enough to pay all the American governors and justices. A new five-man board of inspectors based in Boston would administer the program. Adams responded with the Circular Letter, a formal message from the Massachusetts House of Representatives to the other colonial assemblies encouraging them to resist the Townshend Acts by enforcing a policy of nonimportation. The Crown responded by landing four regiments of British redcoats in Boston in October 1768 – one soldier for every three adult males in the city. Soon enough the soldiers were profaning pious Boston by cursing and horse racing and whoring on the Sabbath. Tensions only grew worse. The received wisdom is that this is when Samuel Adams embraced independence as the ultimate goal in the contest with Great Britain.

A major theme of “Samuel Adams” is the critical role played by newspapers in fomenting colonial unrest through the publication of misinformation, distortion, and flat-out lies. Adams, writing under thirty different pseudonyms, set the temper of the town via his contributions to the Boston Gazette, which Schiff says was read by 90 percent of the Boston population, and for one year (1768-1769) the Journal of Occurrences reported on nothing but British misbehavior in Boston. “Wholly comfortable at the intersection of allegation and surmise,” Schiff writes, Adams fed the Boston populace a steady stream of outrage, some it true, most of it not. Today, people complain about “alternative facts” and “fake news.” In 1768, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson bemoaned the “pretended facts” and “false reports” found in Boston newspapers, such as soldiers threatening to blow the brains out of colonial women or deliberately setting fire to the city. An exasperated Hutchinson exclaimed, Adams has “talents beyond any other persons on the globe at misrepresentation.”

As the year 1770 dawned, Boston was a hive of unrest. The Townshend Acts, colonial nonimportation, and two thousand redcoats proved to be a combustible mix. James Otis’s mental deterioration left Samuel Adams as the primary leader of resistance in Boston. On February 22, 1770, a young boy named Christopher Seider was shot and killed by Ebenezer Richardson, a minor customs official Seider and his friends had been harrassing. Two weeks later came the Boston Massacre. Three weeks after that all British troops were removed from Boston. News of the Townshend repeal came in mid-April; only a tax on tea remained. Adams had won a major victory over his nemesis, Thomas Hutchinson. Schiff says the lieutenant governor was utterly marooned in Boston – “beleaguered, outfoxed, alone.” The colony seemed as unhinged as it had been during the days of witchcraft – or even the Land Bank. Adams worked tirelessly to ensure that it stayed unhinged. “The Devil himself is not capable of more malevolence,” sighed Hutchinson, who was finally made governor of Massachusetts (with annual salary of 2,000 pounds) in August 1771.

From the colonial perspective, the British administration was trying to deprive them of their natural rights as Englishmen. From the perspective of the Crown, the colonies were not paying their fair share of government revenues. It was estimated that smuggling alone stripped Crown coffers of 75,000 pounds a year. Moreover, by the summer of 1772 the colonies were as quiescent and disunited as ever. James Otis had been declared legally insane and John Hancock had openly turned against Adams in the House elections of 1772. Hutchinson felt as though he had finally defeated Samuel Adams and his small faction of disaffected loudmouths and ne’er-do-wells. The fact that Adams earned less than 100 pounds a year and teetered on the edge of poverty told Hutchinson and his cultured allies all they needed to know about the American firebrand. Local Tories sniggered about “the very honest Samuel Adams, Clerk, psalm-singer, purloiner [a reference to his role in the stolen and damning letters of Thomas Hutchinson], and curer of bacon.”

Just when it looked like the British had the situation well in hand, they over-reached. Not only would they be raising a new tax on tea (Tea Act of 1773) that promised to raise desperately needed revenue and rescue the financially imperiled East India Tea Company, but the proceeds would go to pay the salaries of royal governors and, perhaps even more ominous, colonial justices. The executive and judicial branches of colonial government would be completely beholden to the Crown. The colonial response, again led by Adams, were the committees of correspondence, which Schiff says were “a daringly original institution, a news service, an alarm system, to some a proto-terrorist cell.” Later the committees were credited with being the “engine of revolution” and a “furnace of propaganda.” The colonies stood firm and united in resistance to the Tea Act. On December 16, 1773 about forty disguised patriots tossed 342 chests of East India Tea into Boston harbor. It was worth 10,000 pounds, roughly eight times more than the destroyed contents of Hutchinson’s home in 1765. The hated governor was “thunderstruck” and “indignant,” Schiff says. “Adams was never in greater glory,” Hutchinson fumed.

The Crown responded with a harsh crackdown on the impertinent Bostonians. Many, including the King, felt that British lenience and accommodation since the original Stamp Act in 1765 had done nothing but embolden the colonists. The Boston Port Act of 1774 closed the harbor until the town reimbursed the East India Company and brought General Gage back to Massachusetts as both commander in chief and governor. The king had finally lost patience; he ordered Gage to apprehend and prosecute the leading rabble-rousers, Samuel Adams foremost among them. From Adams’s perspective, Boston had been accused, tried, and convicted without a hearing, but the Boston Port Act did succeed in once again welding the colonies together in united resistance. For their part, the British administration was stunned that a man of such ordinary birth and desperate fortune was capable of leading public sentiment against the Crown. Many refused to believe that Adams’s zeal for the cause of liberty was anything more than a smokescreen to improve his pitiful lot in life.

Adams was a key member of the First Continental Congress in 1774 that was called after the passage of Suffolk Resolves. He was back in Massachusetts by April 1775. When the clash came at Lexington and Concord the king’s agents put the blame squarely on Adams’s shoulders. According to one high ranking British officer: “[the battle] originated in the disappointed ambition of one man, or great influence and no principle of public or private virtue.” As the events hurdled toward independence, Schiff says that Adams played an outsized role at both of the first two continental congresses, where the northern and southern colonies had to cajole the five middle colonies to join the march to unified independence. He headed the board of war (despite having no military experience), the medical committee (despite not knowing anything about that either), and the committee on foreign alliances (an area he must have found more congenial). In the end, Schiff says that Adams’s natural abilities were more attuned to fomenting rebellion than statesmanship. “No longer the indomitable mastermind,” Schiff writes, “[Adams] seemed to shrink back to the shapeless everyman.” He left Congress for the last time in April 1781 and, according to Schiff, “drifted further into irrelevance” with each passing year. “Nothing invigorated him like dissent,” she says, “he seemed to crumple if he failed to head into the wind.”

Schiff says little about Adams’s politics after the war, although everything about him, especially his distrust of federalism, suggests that he was an anti-Federalist. Schiff says nothing about Adams’s view on Hamilton’s vision for the country nor his thoughts on the increasingly divisive revolution in France. Adams was elected to the Massachusetts delegation to ratify the new proposed constitution. He famously commented: “I confess, as I enter the building I stumble at the threshold [i.e. “We the People”]. I meet with a national government instead of a federal union of sovereign states.” In the first ever election for the new US House of Representatives, Adams lost in a landslide. He was later elected governor of Massachusetts in October 1793 and was re-elected three times, serving honorably, if not notably, until 1797. When he retired, Schiff says, “No one was sorry to see him go. He could do nothing right.” The once vibrant incendiary – the “King of the Rabble” to his enemies – had simply outlived himself. According to the son of artist John Singleton Copley, Adams in the late 1790s was “superannuated, unpopular, and fast decaying,” Adams died in October 1803 at age 81 and “was promptly forgotten,” according to Schiff.