Samuel Adams: the failed businessman who organised a revolution

Samuel Adams in bronze outside Faneuil Hall, where his career began.

To his cousin John, Samuel Adams had "the most thorough understanding of liberty" and "steadfast integrity". To the royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, there was no "greater incendiary in the King's dominion". Both were describing the same man: a failed businessman and indifferent tax collector who turned out to be the most effective organiser of resistance in colonial America — and who, having argued in 1743 that it could be lawful to resist a ruler, voted for independence thirty-three years later.

A Puritan and a poor businessman

Adams grew up in the Congregational church of old Puritan stock, and its idea of covenant — government by mutual consent and mutual obligation — shaped everything he did. The Massachusetts Charter was such a covenant; people stayed free only while they had a hand in the government over them. John Locke and Algernon Sidney confirmed him in it. In 1748 he helped found a newspaper, the Independent Advertiser, to "defend the rights and liberties of mankind"; it lasted under a year.

He married Elizabeth Checkley, his pastor's daughter, in 1749; of their six children only two grew up, and she died in childbirth in 1757. In 1756 the town made him tax collector — his first steady income — and he was bad at it, often going easy on neighbours who could not pay. But it introduced him to half of Boston. In 1764 he married Elizabeth Wells, who raised his children and held the family and its thin finances together through years when he was hardly home.

Taxation and the town meeting

Faneuil Hall before it was enlarged in 1805. Library of Congress.

After the Seven Years' War left Britain deep in debt, Parliament turned to the colonies for revenue, and each new act gave Adams a larger stage:

1. The Sugar Act, 1764. Writing Boston's instructions to its representatives, he asked: if trade can be taxed, "why not our Lands?" — and whether taxes laid without representation did not reduce free subjects "to the miserable State of tributary Slaves". He urged the colonies to resist together.
2. The Stamp Act, 1765. He drafted the town's protest, worked with the Loyal Nine, forerunners of the Sons of Liberty, and in September was elected to the Massachusetts House, where he sat for nine years. Parliament repealed the act in 1766 — but asserted, in the Declaratory Act, its power to bind the colonies "in all cases whatsoever".
3. Clerk of the House. The post paid a salary and controlled the House's correspondence with London and the other colonies — ideal for an organiser.
4. The Townshend Acts, 1767. Adams organised boycotts and co-wrote the Massachusetts Circular Letter urging joint resistance. Ordered to withdraw it, the House refused, 92 to 17, and the governor dissolved it. When troops were rumoured, Adams called a convention of towns — 67 came — that was in effect a legislature without the governor.

Troops, a boy, a massacre

Soldiers landed on October 1, 1768. Adams, "no orator", wrote instead — as "Vindex" and a dozen other pen names — and built the boycotts, which merchants kept in public and broke in private.

• February 22, 1770. A customs employee, Ebenezer Richardson, fired into a mob outside his house and killed eleven-year-old Christopher Seider. Adams organised a funeral of more than two thousand people past Faneuil Hall, the Town House and the Liberty Tree.
• March 5, 1770. Soldiers facing a crowd on King Street fired without orders, killing five and wounding six — the Boston Massacre.
• March 6. Adams led the town's demand that the troops leave. The acting governor gave way, and the regiments moved to Castle Island.

Paul Revere's engraving of the Massacre, showing Captain Preston ordering the volley — which he did not. Library of Congress.

Adams wanted Boston seen as the victim, but knew a colony demanding its rights had to give the soldiers a fair trial. His cousin John and Josiah Quincy defended them; only two were convicted, of manslaughter.

Committees and tea

When Parliament arranged to pay the governor (1771) and then the judges (1772) from the tea duty, freeing them from the legislature, Adams saw the charter's checks and balances dissolving. On November 2, 1772, at his motion, Boston created a Committee of Correspondence and a declaration of the colonists' rights; committees soon sprang up across the colonies.

"Destruction of the Tea", an 1846 lithograph. Library of Congress.

The Tea Act of May 1773 gave the East India Company a monopoly through chosen agents. Three tea ships reached Boston; the duty had to be paid on the Dartmouth within twenty days. Mass meetings at Old South demanded the tea go back; Governor Hutchinson refused. After Adams chaired the last meeting, on December 16, men with soot-blackened faces boarded the ships and dumped the tea. Adams was notably not among them.

To independence

Parliament answered with the Coercive Acts of 1774: the port was closed, the charter gutted, the capital moved to Salem, and General Thomas Gage sent with 4,000 troops. Adams went to the First Continental Congress, where, with Joseph Warren's Suffolk Resolves, he won the other colonies' backing for Massachusetts, and helped bring about a Provincial Congress that took over governing the colony outside Boston.

In April 1775 he and John Hancock were staying at the Reverend Jonas Clarke's house in Lexington when Paul Revere and William Dawes rode out to warn them; they left just as the troops arrived. In Congress Adams pressed for independence long before most were ready — "Is not America already independent? Why then not declare it?" — and on July 4, 1776, voted for the Declaration.

Afterwards

He helped draft the Articles of Confederation and, with John Adams and James Bowdoin, the Massachusetts constitution, ratified in 1780. Back home from 1781, he served as president of the state senate, lieutenant governor under Hancock from 1789, and — on Hancock's death and then by election to three one-year terms — governor. Thomas Jefferson, looking back in 1819, called him "truly a great man, wise in council, fertile in resources, immovable in his purposes".

Sources

Written from "Samuel Adams: Boston's Radical Revolutionary", National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park, a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from John Adams's diary (1765), Samuel Adams's instructions of 1764 and letters, and Thomas Jefferson (1819).