Samuel Adams

American politician

• Born: September 27, 1722
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: October 2, 1803
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Strategically placed in Boston, the center of resistance to English colonial policies, Adams was one of the most significant organizers of the American Revolution.

Early Life

Samuel Adams’s American ancestry began with Henry Adams, who emigrated from Devonshire, England, to Quincy, Massachusetts, in the early seventeenth century. One branch of the family included John Adams, who became second president of the United States. Samuel Adams’s grandfather was a sailor, Captain John Adams. His father, Samuel Adams, Sr., lived his entire life in Boston, operating a malt house, or brewery, and was an active member of the old South Church. He was also active in local politics, establishing the first of the Boston Caucus Clubs, which played a vital role in the early upheavals of the revolutionary period.

Samuel Adams, then, was born into an active and influential civic-minded Boston family. He grew up familiar with and keenly interested in local politics and knew most Boston political leaders through their friendship with his father. Many of those leaders were prominent in Massachusetts colonial politics as well. Samuel absorbed the traditional independent-mindedness of Boston and thought of Massachusetts as autonomous and largely self-governing within the broader parameters of the British Empire.

Educated in the small wooden schoolhouse in the rear of King’s Chapel, Samuel received a traditional grounding in Latin and Greek grammar, preparatory to entering Harvard College. When he received the A.B. degree in 1740 and the master of arts in 1743, his interest in politics was already clear. He titled his thesis, “Whether It Be Lawful to Resist the Supreme Magistrate, If the Commonwealth Cannot Otherwise Be Preserved.”

Life’s Work

Samuel Adams thus embarked upon his life’s work in colonial politics, but he also had to make a living for his family. To that end, his father gave him œ1,000 to help him get started in business. He promptly lent œ500 to a friend (who never repaid the loan) and lost the other œ500 through poor management. His father then took him into partnership in his malt house, from which the family made a modest living.

Adams lived an austere, simple life and throughout his life had little interest in making money. At a time of crisis just before the war, General Thomas Gage governed Massachusetts under martial law and offered Adams an annuity of œ2,000 for life. Adams promptly rejected the offer; “a guinea never glistened in my eyes,” he said. A man of integrity, he would not be bribed to refrain from doing what he believed to be right. His threadbare clothing was his trademark, reflecting his austerity and lack of interest in material things.

In 1748 his father died, leaving him one-third of his modest estate. Adams gradually sold most of it during the busy years of his life and was rescued from abject poverty in his retirement years only by a small inheritance from his son. During most of his life, his only income was a small salary as a clerk of the Massachusetts General Assembly.

Adams married Elizabeth Checkley, the daughter of the minister of New South Congregational Church, in 1749. She died eight years later, survived by only two of their five children, a boy and a girl. Adams reared the children and managed alone for seven years but remarried in 1764 to Elizabeth Wells. He was then forty-two years old, and she was twenty-four.

Adams was of average height and muscular build. He carried himself straight in spite of an involuntary palsied movement of his hands and had light blue eyes and a serious, dignified manner. He was very fond of sacred music and sang in the choir of New South Church. Personable, he maintained a close relationship with his neighbors and was constantly chatting with those he met along the street. He had a gift for smoothing over disputes among his friends and acquaintances and was often asked to mediate a disagreement. Adams was a hard worker, and through the years his candle burned late at night as he kept up his extensive correspondence, much of which does not survive today. His second cousin, John Adams, likened him to John Calvin, partly because of his deep piety but also because of his personality: He was “cool . . . polished, and refined,” somewhat inflexible, but consistent, a man of “steadfast integrity, exquisite humanity, genteel erudition, obliging, engaging manners, real as well as professed piety, and a universal good character. . . .”

Samuel Adams was very interested in political philosophy and believed strongly in liberty and Christian virtue and frugality. He helped organize discussion clubs and the Public Advertiser, a newspaper to promote understanding of political philosophy. He served in political offices large and small, as fire ward, as moderator, and as tax collector. An orthodox Christian, he warned of the political implications of the “fallen” nature of humans, susceptible as most individuals were to self-aggrandizement, if not corruption. Colonial Americans believed that power had the tendency to corrupt, and Adams was no exception. Speaking for the Boston town meeting, Adams said,

[Such is] the depravity of mankind that ambition and lust of power above the law are . . . predominant passions in the breasts of most men. [Power] converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office.

Despite mythology to the contrary, Adams was not a mob leader, though he was popular with the common workers of Boston. He was opposed to violence and sought to achieve his aims by political means. No evidence has ever been found placing Adams at any of the scenes in Boston involving mob violence such as the Boston Massacre, the wrecking of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s house, or the physical harassment of merchants. He has often been charged with “masterminding” these events, but only by conjecture, not on the basis of historical evidence.

In his early forties, Adams was well known in Boston politics when the Stamp Act crisis occurred in 1765-1766, the beginning of the revolutionary period. Along with his friend James Otis, Adams spoke out strongly and wrote much against the dangers of the Stamp Act. Before the Boston town meeting, Adams denied the right of the British parliament to tax the colonists. The Massachusetts charter gave Americans the right “to govern and tax ourselves.” If Parliament could tax the colonies, then the English living in America would become “tributary slaves” without representation. Adams called for a unified resistance to this “tyranny” throughout the colonies. The Boston town meeting then elected Adams to a seat in the Massachusetts General Assembly, where he was soon elected to the position of clerk, a position he held for ten years.

This principle of opposing taxation without representation became one of the most significant rallying points for resisting British control of the colonies. Adams nevertheless stressed that he had no desire for colonial representation in the British parliament. Since the colonists would be considerably outnumbered and since travel to England was so slow, it would be “impracticable for the subjects in America” to have a tiny voice in Parliament. Instead, Adams and most of his fellow American strategists wanted to be able to make their own laws in their own American “parliaments.” “All acts,” wrote Adams,

made by any power whatever other than the General Assembly of this province, imposing taxes on the inhabitants, are infringements of our inherent and unalienable rights as men and British subjects.…

On November 1, 1765, the day the Stamp Act was to go into effect, Boston buildings were draped in mourning black and the church bells tolled slowly. Governor Francis Bernard ordered the Boston militia to muster as a precautionary peacekeeping measure. Yet the men would not respond; one drummer sounded the call only to have his drum promptly broken. The rest of the drummers preserved their instruments by not using them. In direct violation of the Stamp Act, the Massachusetts General Assembly voted 81 to 5 to open the law courts of the province without using stamped papers, as required by the act.

In 1772, Adams sought and received the authorization of the Boston town meeting to create a Committee of Correspondence to inform and consult with other towns in the province, with a view to concerted and coordinated action. This was not a new idea. It had been customary for many years in Europe and in America for legislative bodies to use committees to handle official correspondence with other such governing authorities. As early as 1768, Richard Henry Lee had suggested to the Virginia House of Burgesses the formation of an intercolonial system of correspondence among the provincial assemblies. It was in Boston, however, that the idea was finally implemented.

As clerk of the Massachusetts General Assembly, Adams expanded the circular-letter type of correspondence to include all the colonies. In time, those letters contributed significantly to the unified action of the colonies. Realizing the potential strength in such an arrangement, the British secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Hillsborough, instructed the governor of Massachusetts to order the General Assembly to rescind a circular letter sent to other colonies. Instead, the General Assembly, in a heated debate, voted 92 to 17 to refuse to rescind the letter. The governor dissolved the legislature, but Adams—a pioneer in realizing the enormous importance of communication and information in sustaining any cause—published the names of the seventeen who had voted against the measure, impairing their political future. Britain now sought to obtain evidence to arrest and deport to England for prosecution those who resisted British law. Adams also published that letter, and the effect was electrifying, because it showed the clear intention of the British government to bypass the cherished English right of trial by jury of one’s peers.

The political year of 1773 began with now-governor Hutchinson’s opening speech to the Massachusetts General Assembly on the issue of parliamentary supremacy. Did the British parliament have authority over the elected assembly of Massachusetts, and, if so, to what extent? Adams headed the committee of the assembly designated to reply to the governor. He simply and cleverly took Hutchinson’s own famous book, History of Massachusetts Bay (1760), and compared what he had written earlier with the current message. Adams found many inconsistencies and contradictions. The governor’s book, for example, acknowledged that the founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony had been assured by the Crown that “they were to be governed by laws made by themselves” and not by Parliament.

Adams also had a hand in the Boston Tea Party later that same year. The British East India Company was partially owned by the British government but, because of mismanagement, had stockpiled a great quantity of tea that needed to be sold before it spoiled. The Tea Act of spring, 1773, gave the company a monopoly on tea sales in America but sharply cut the price of tea. The controversial tea tax (set by the Townshend Acts of 1767) would continue to be levied, but the actual price, including the tax, paid in America for tea would only be about one-half that paid by a Londoner.

This monopoly on the tea trade was potentially seriously damaging to American free enterprise. Without competition, merchant trade could not prosper, and the Americans would eventually pay unnecessarily high prices for imports. Moreover, a precedent would be set regulating trade excessively instead of following more of a free market system. Adams, however, chose to focus on the taxation issue rather than the monopoly issue, because the former could be defended more emotionally and symbolically. When American patriots refused to allow the tea to be landed, the governor refused to allow the merchant ships to return with their cargoes of tea. The standoff ended when colonists destroyed thousands of pounds of tea by dumping it into the bay.

The response of the British government inflamed the angry Americans. The Boston Port Act closed the port of Boston and threatened to ruin the city as a commercial center. Salem and Marblehead merchants responded by inviting the merchants of Boston to use their docks and warehouses free of charge. Contributions of food and supplies came from many colonies. Adams asked the people of Massachusetts to support a “Solemn League and Covenant” not to buy British goods. (The wording of the boycott was significant, reminiscent to American colonists of the English Civil War and of the heroism of the later Scottish Covenanters.)

General Gage in effect established martial law in Boston and even dissolved the General Assembly. The assembly, however, was in the process of selecting delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. When General Gage’s messenger arrived to order the assembly to disband, Adams, who was the clerk, locked the doors to keep the messenger out until the delegation process was completed. The elected delegates included both Samuel Adams and John Adams. General Gage considered arresting Samuel Adams but did not want to provoke a violent reaction, which such a measure would assuredly incite.

The 300-mile trip to Philadelphia was the longest of Adams’s life. Even there, however, he found himself influential politically, becoming the key member of the newly organized Committee of Safety, a coordinating group. Adams was also the chairman of the Donation Committee, which distributed gifts of food and supplies collected along the Atlantic seaboard for the aid of the unfortunate people of the Boston area. The Committee of Safety began collecting weapons and supplies, and it even stored cannon at Concord.

An active member of the Continental Congress, Adams played a significant political role throughout the Revolutionary War. After the war, he approved of the new U.S. Constitution, but only after assurances were given him that a bill of rights was to be added. Adams became lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1789 and governor in 1793, retiring from that office in 1797. He died on October 2, 1803, at the age of eighty-one, having devoted his life to the cause of liberty and independence in a new nation, the United States of America.

Significance

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Samuel Adams to the American Revolution. Along with Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts led the way to independence. There was no center of power quite so volatile, however, as Massachusetts. It was there that the events that sparked the revolution occurred, events that included resistance to the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Liberty incident, and organized boycotts, as well as letters of protest.

Adams was involved in all these events. His importance, moreover, was recognized in the very highest echelons of the British government. When King George III ordered Governor Hutchinson to London for consultation, one of the questions he asked him was what accounted for the importance of Adams in the colonies. Hutchinson’s reply reflected his frustration with Adams: “A great pretended zeal for liberty and a most inflexible natural temper. He was the first that publicly asserted the independency of the colonies upon the kingdom.”

It is true that Adams was a principal advocate of complete independence from the British, but not until 1775. All that he had advocated for years following the Stamp Act crisis was self-government within the British system. He did not push for independence until it became obvious to him that the king was a “tyrant [with] an unalterable determination to compel the colonies to absolute obedience.”

Bibliography

Adams, Samuel. The Writings of Samuel Adams. Edited by H. A. Cushing. 4 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904-1908. Indispensable primary material, including letters, newspaper articles, and official correspondence of the Massachusetts General Assembly.

Alexander, John K. Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. In this biography, Alexander argues that Adams was America’s first professional, modern politician, who fought to protect constitutional liberties.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1967. Not much on Adams directly, but essential for understanding his ideological milieu. Bailyn finds, as did Adams, that the war was fought over constitutional issues.

Chidsey, Donald Barr. The Great Separation: The Story of the Boston Tea Party and the Beginning of the American Revolution. New York: Crown, 1965. Written in a popular novelist’s style, this book brings to life the issues and actions surrounding the Boston Tea Party, including Adams’s role.

Fowler, William M., Jr. Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan. Edited by Oscar Handlin. New York: Longman, 1997. A brief biography that places Adams’s life within the context of Boston politics. Fowler argues that Adams was the revolutionary leader most concerned with upholding the Puritan values of Massachusetts.

Galvin, John R. Three Men of Boston. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976. Recounts the events leading up to the revolution in Boston by focusing on Samuel Adams, Thomas Hutchinson, and James Otis. Galvin captures the complexity of the period and shows how the issues and events were interrelated.

Hosmer, James K. Samuel Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. A standard nineteenth century biography of Adams.

Maier, Pauline. The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. The chapter “A New Englander as Revolutionary: Samuel Adams” brilliantly analyzes Adams’s historical significance. Maier analyzes the interpretive data on Adams and introduces many fresh insights.

Montross, Lynn. The Reluctant Rebels: The Story of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950. This work examines the critical role of the Continental Congress in the American Revolution, discussing Adams’s contributions to the Congress.