The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff
As I write this, it is March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre (or an “Unhappy Disturbance” if you were British) on a cold night in 1770. It started as an argument between a British soldier and several Boston residents and soon escalated as a crowd gathered, chasing the soldier back to the Customs House, where a sentry stood guard. Other British soldiers came out to defend the soldier as the crowd taunted, throwing snowballs and pieces of ice (and perhaps objects) at the soldiers, daring them to fire. Then, in the confusion, shots were fired, and when the smoke cleared, five people lay dead, while three more were injured.
Famously, John Adams became the man chosen to defend the British soldiers, though he was by no means a supporter of the British soldiers in Boston. The soldiers–two thousand strong–had arrived in 1768 to quell riots and to enforce the Townsend Duties, which taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea; set up courts to prosecute smugglers; and allowed British officials to search colonists’ homes.
You can imagine how popular all that was. For many years Boston had been the center of colonial discontent. Tensions were already high, and the arrival of the soldiers, 1 for every 8 Bostonians, was destined to create and exacerbate the friction.
It was no accident that the deaths quickly became the center of an ongoing war of words in the press, the Committees of Correspondence throughout the American Colonies, and the efforts of the Sons of Liberty. And while there were many men in the midst of these efforts one man sticks out as the chief rabble-rouser, a man that King George called the “most dangerous man in the colonies”: Samuel Adams.
Who was this man? To me, my experience with Samuel was as the older cousin of John Adams, the man who saved the Revolution by securing financing for it from Europe, who wrote the Massachusetts constitution, helped write the Declaration of Independence, and became our second president. Sam barely gets a supporting role in that story. And yet, if you were to poll Americans and British of the day, Samuel Adams was among the leading voices, if not the leading voice, in the years up to and during the Revolution.
So on this anniversary of the Boston Massacre, a seminal event in the years before the American Revolution, I read Stacy Schiff’s biography of Samuel Adams, appropriately titled The Revolutionary. In these pages, we see Samuel as a gifted orator and writer, the man of a hundred pseudonyms, a planner and connecter, an “everyman” who is anything but that. Unique among the Founding Fathers, he never had money, never had resources, and yet was at one point the most wanted man in America.
Even as the Revolution passed into the Founding of the nation and he began to fade, he remained forefront in the minds of those who did not. On the eve of the anniversary of the Boston Massacre in 1801, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged his role in bringing about the break with England, calling him the “patriarch of liberty” and asking himself if Samuel would approve of his speech. Having read Samuel’s rise in spite of failure, I am convinced that it was no amount of hyperbole to see him as more than just a rabble-rouser, but a gifted politician and leader who predicted almost every aspect of the fight for independence and was seen as almost as important as George Washington by his contemporaries.
And there’s this: it’s a really good piece of history and a great addition to the modern understanding of the Founding Generation.
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff
non-fiction
Little, Brown and Company
October 25, 2022
432
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