"The Revolutionary Samuel Adams," Stacy Schiff

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“The Revolutionary Samuel Adams,” Stacy Schiff

December 28, 2022

 

“He set more store in ideas than institutions; he

encouraged an allegiance to principles over individuals.”

                                                                                                                Stacy Schiff (1961-)

                                                                                                                The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, 2022

 

Like a nova, Samuel Adams rose from obscurity, shone brightly in late colonial Boston, and then faded as the nation he helped create took form. Yet, as much as anyone, he was responsible for the revolution that begat the United States. In the early 1770s, he was Britain’s public enemy number one. In Ms. Schiff’s words: “From the imperial description, Adams can sound like Marx, Lenin, and Robespierre rolled into one…He distinguished himself as the most wanted man in the colonies…”

 

Yet, he is not well known. I knew he was from Boston and that he was a cousin of John Adams; and, like others, I have drunk the beer that bears his name. But until I read Stacy Schiff’s book, I could not have explained why George III considered Samuel Adams the most dangerous man in colonial America.

 

He was born in 1722 and graduated from Harvard in 1743. His father was a prosperous brewer. As to his young adulthood, Stacy Schiff quotes an earlier chronicler on Adams: “He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds.” He was, we are told, “…a well-connected son of the establishment…loitering his way toward his future.”   

 

Neither fame nor prosperity interested Samuel Adams, but freedom did. It is the period from the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that concerns Ms. Schiff – a period that includes the Boston Massacre (March 5, 1770), the Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773), Paul Revere’s ride (April 18, 1775), and the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775). It was the cost of the French and Indian War, a war fought successfully by the British and their native American allies against France and their native American allies. The taxes imposed on colonists to pay for that war prompted resentment and gave rise to Samuel Adams’ fame. As Ms. Schiff tells us, most colonists considered themselves British subjects with the rights of free men. Parliament, though, imposed economic control. The colonies produced raw materials, but manufacturing was largely done in Britain; finished goods were then shipped back with duties imposed. 

 

It was as a polemicist that Samuel Adams found his calling. He was a master of fomenting dissent through the written word, inspiring his fellow colonists to rise up against royal governors and Parliament. He railed against the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765. Ms. Schiff writes: “He seemed to exert an uncanny influence on men’s minds.” As well, Adams understood the need to involve the other colonies in any dispute Massachusetts might have: “No one understood better than Adams that for Massachusetts to take up arms without the support of her sister colonies was folly.”

 

In 327 pages, Stacy Schiff sets the stage and provides a portrait of this little-known revolutionary. Samuel Adams believed that men fight more ardently for liberty than anything else – something we are seeing now in Ukraine. After the surrender of Cornwallis in October 1781, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Adams: “Your principles have been tested in the crucible of time and have come out pure.”