The great American patriot Samuel Adams was many things; Harvard undergraduate at age fourteen, scion of Boston's first landed gentry, struggling brewmaster of the family's brewery business, failed divinity student and, ultimately, the first true American patriot to call for separation from America's "royal mother," Great Britain.
Although Mark Puls' Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) sometimes reads like the typical biography of a colonial hero, what often sets it apart is the very great difference between Adams and his contemporaries. Indeed, the career of Adams as a "national" figure was essentially finished with the end of the cause he had fought so dearly for, the American Revolution. Today he is unfortunately largely remembered as a firebrand and his name lent to the purveying of beer.
However, this first forgotten but perhaps greatest of the founding fathers almost single-handedly argued for independence from England when peers like Washington, Jefferson and his own cousin John Adams were still timidly looking for rapprochement with the mother country.
The Making of a Radical
One of the underlying aims of the book is to show how personal experience sets Adams apart from other revolutionary leaders. By Puls' account, Adams' political radicalization at an early age was quite unique among the patriot leaders. While Adams was still a boy, his father, Samuel Adams Sr. (or Deacon Adams), attempted to found a Land Bank that would create a ready cash flow for farmers, shop owners, dockworkers and the like.
In response to this "threat" from the common man, the powerful Tory ( or "Loyalist") faction in Boston, fully supported by the Royal Governor, set up their own bank backed by silver specie, browbeat investors into leaving the Land Bank and dismissed the elder Adams from his military and legal posts within their own ranks.
The Tories then managed to get Parliament to dissolve the Land Bank and hold its directors personally responsible for the financial loss that ensued. Deacon Adams and his son would spend decades fighting to keep their own personal property and private wealth out of the hands of the colonial government.
The effect upon young Samuel Adams' political consciousness was profound. Years before his fellow rebels, Adams was fully invested in bringing about sweeping change in the way England ruled its American colony. By making the fight personal, the Tory opponents of Adams Sr. created their own greatest enemy. As Puls illustrates, the bloody and violent overthrow of England had at least some of its roots in a private, financial tug-of-war.
The Mislabeling of a Radical
Adams is often portrayed as a demagogue, which he may very well have been, and an almost Leninist "guerilla" leader who justified violence to overthrow the system, which he almost certainly was not, at least not for many years. Indeed, many portrayals of Adams in popular literature paint him as the mastermind behind Boston's "mob rule" in events during the pre-revolutionary years.
As Puls makes abundantly clear, however, Adams worked within the system for many years to find a solution to the strained relations between Massachusetts and Great Britain. In fact Adams was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, part of the royal government,as far back as 1765. His insistence upon justified civil disobedience was for years more in line with that of Gandhi and MLK than that of Malcolm X and Lenin. He was also an author without peer during the early years of unrest, as evinced by his newspaper articles, circular letters and masterpiece The True Sentiments of America, a treatise on colonial rights published in 1768
The Boston Massacre is often thought to have been "fixed" by Adams. While undoubtedly a public relations windfall for Adams and Paul Revere, there is no evidence that Adams initiated events that fateful night. Instead he worked swiftly and forcefully as a member of the government (he was an elected Boston Selectman as well) to demand justice along legal lines.
What is striking about this revisionist history is how very differently the real Adams viewed his political activity. Adams may have been the first patriot to call for independence, but he insisted upon using the existing governmental institutions to do so rather than calling for destruction of the system he worked within.
Only with the final insult of the Tea Tax in 1774 did Adams endorse violence against England, and that was violence against property (the Boston Tea Party) rather than people. By this late date, Adams was far from alone in calling for active rebellion
The Obscurity of a Founding Father
Samuel Adams' life work was civil disobedience and, ultimately, revolution. With the successful end of the revolution, he, unlike so many of his peers, was content to return to his beloved Massachusetts and immerse himself in state (no longer colony) politics once again. He served in the Constitutional Assembly, the state senate, and as Governor. He never looked for nor desired national office. It is perhaps unfair that Adams no longer receives the recognition he deserves as the architect of revolution, but Mark Puls has done an excellent job of revealing the true man obscured by his own legend.
Sources
- Mark Puls, Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
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