Samuel Adams: The Revolutionary Who Lit the Fuse and Then Was Forgotten

Before Washington crossed the Delaware, Jefferson picked up his pen, or Franklin put on his fur cap, there was a man in Boston who had been building a revolution for over a decade. Samuel Adams could be the most important Founding Father that most Americans could not pick out of a lineup, and the story of why he faded from memory is a lesson in how history is written.

Adams was a professional agitator at a time when that was the most dangerous occupation on the continent. He organized the Sons of Liberty, a network of working class tradesmen and artisans who formed the local colonial resistance. He wrote under dozens of pen names for Boston newspapers, hammering British policy in language the general population could understand and feel. He orchestrated the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, but did not participate. Instead, he planned, organized the participants, and managed the aftermath with the precision of a stage director.

British officials despised him more than most other colonists. When General Gage received secret instructions from London in 1775, they named two men to be arrested on sight and sent to England for trial. They were Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Those were the men Paul Revere was riding to warn.

Adams had one political weakness, he had moral fortitude. In an era when men built fortunes through public office, Adams remained poor his entire life. He couldn't be bribed, which made him uniquely dangerous to authority, and which also meant he could never accumulate the kind of wealth and social standing that translated into lasting historical recognition.

Unfortunately by the 1780’s, he was out of touch with the revolution he had created. The urban, property-owning class that took control of the new republic after independence was not what Adams had built. He was suspicious of the Constitution, commerce, and concentrated wealth. He believed in a “republic of virtuous citizens, not a commercial empire”. The America that emerged was not quite the America Adams had imagined.

He served as Governor of Massachusetts in his final years, was reelected twice, and watched his revolution become something more complicated than his vision. He died in 1803, largely forgotten even then, his papers scattered and incomplete.

John Adams, his cousin, once wrote that if credit were properly assigned, Samuel Adams's “'share in the great events which obtained our independence cannot be disputed.” It was, John Adams who insisted that Samuel struck the spark from which the fire of revolution spread.

The man who lit the fire is often the last one remembered once the building is rebuilt.

Sources

Stoll, Ira. Samuel Adams: A Life. New York: Free Press, 2008.

Alexander, John K. Samuel Adams: America's Revolutionary Politician. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

Miller, John C. Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1936.

Adams, John. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1967.