The recent biography “The Revolutionary Samuel Adams” by Stacy Schiff changed my understanding of the American Revolution, a topic I had considered myself pretty well-versed in. It also exposed today’s general ignorance (and my own) of the role in the revolution played by Samuel Adams. Everybody, certainly in Boston, knows the name, and in recent decades everybody everywhere knows the name of the beer company. But I suspect even among residents of the city where the revolution began, few who walk past Samuel Adams’ grave in a tiny cemetery in the city’s center have little appreciation for the starring role Adams played in a drama that changed Western civilization.
I’d have to include myself in that number — before reading this book.
Over the years I’ve have read a number of books about the American Revolution. I’ve read about the America’s War of Revolution. I’ve read books about the ‘the causes of’ the American Revolution.’ However, I suspect, that my mental picture of the events leading to Lexington and Concord in 1775 has been influenced by media depictions of our country’s beginning, going all the way back to a childhood exposure to Disney’s “Johnny Tremain.” When doughty youngster Johnny is quizzed on the need for a revolution, he replies “to protect the rights of Englishmen.” No, the lad is gently corrected by a savvy American patriot in a tricornered hat, “the rights of all men.” But that film starts way too late in the story and focuses on a few headline events: the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord.
Years later, after the dispiriting conflation of “patriotism” with support for the Vietnam War, I found my love for my country’s origins reignited by a film version of the stage musical “1776.” This version of America’s foundation story gave starring roles to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. But after reading Schiff’s book, I see that “1776” also comes way too late to address a deeper issue, the transformation of English-speaking colonials into a new body politic dedicated to civic values such as self-determination and natural rights, including a right to self-government. What the awakening national sensibility in the post-Stamp Act decade called “Liberty.”
And it was the other Adams — not John, the hero of 1776 — but Samuel Adams who got us there. At best, all I knew about Samuel Adams was he the guy who was able (as per the Disney movie) to mobilize the proletariat, the rougher element in town, to dress up like Indians and throw the tea into the harbor. A provocateur with a blue-collar sensibility. So, so wrong. So limited.
While the declaration produced by the Continental Congress, and the war that followed, are essential, foundational events, “The Revolutionary Samuel Adams” takes readers us to the nation’s true, on-the-ground beginnings: the discovery by an underemployed Harvard graduate who’d tried his hand in varied fields, whose beer-making was not a success, that what his city was truly in need of was something we today call a ‘politician.’
“The Revolutionary Samuel Adams” makes a convincing case that Samuel Adams was in fact the essential figure in a generation-long movement that eventually led to nationhood and independence. Schiff notes that Adams’s contemporaries all believed this. Adams, perhaps by way of becoming the essential revolutionary, was also a hell of a tactician, rabble-rouser, political theory thinker and analyst, practical scholar, and excellent writer. Two other firsts, at least in the American vein, are laid to his account: he created the country’s first important local-issues newspaper, and served as its first political journalist.
I will confess to finding, at first glance, the appearance of Schiff’s biography formidable. Its pages present nothing but a blunt series of long third-person passages. The book is almost dialogue free because 18th century records do not preserve spoken speech. How do you build a scene or depict a dramatic moment without verbal clashes? In fact, “The Revolutionary Samuel Adams” is built on perfectly chosen, exacting, ear-perfect snippets of quotation taken from written sources such Adams’s published newspaper essays, dismissive comments in the letters of Colonial or British officials, and the observations of Adams’s American contemporaries. Although not all his papers were preserved, Adams wrote a lot, at time filling columns in Boston’s five newspapers. If someone had proposed building a book this way, I would have said, ‘Nah, it will never fly.’ But this one not only flies, it soars.
After I put down “The Revolutionary Samuel Adams,” I wanted to pick it up and read it over again from the beginning, if only from the pleasure of the prose. Needless to say, the quality and variety of primary source research is staggering. Schiff shows us, step by step, local controversy by local controversy, months turning to years of small-ball maneuvering and careful weighing of positions. And then as controversy yields to crisis, and crisis builds to deeper crisis — as, that is, Britain sends in the taxmen, then sends in the troops — the practical philosopher Adams shepherds his hometown, then his colony — and then extends Boston’s reach to one or two, and finally to all the other colonies — to a clear, principled stand on the need for the protection of liberty achieved by self-government.
Nothing in Adams’s early adulthood suggests he will play this role. A Harvard graduate, Samuel failed to find a successful career. In his early manhood he lost family money investing in the “Land Bank,” a fledging sort of credit union scheme to help create a desperately needed small business credit system for Boston’s small merchants and households. The city’s “merchant elite,” Schiff writes, considered the bank a threat to its own interests and got English officials to the scheme out of business, impoverishing many local families. As economic issues became political issues, setting large elements of the city against the wealthy, crown-oriented figures — especially the colony’s appointed governors Francis Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson — class enemies became political enemies, and ordinary colonists began to question the right of the British Empire, Parliament in particular, to make laws that violated their natural ‘rights’ as citizens.
Adams begins to play the role of breadbasket politician, the book tells us, after being elected tax collector — the kind of job you get when everybody else moves to the other side of the room. The aftermath of the shutting down of the Land Bank meant those who had invested stood to lose their property. Saving his own property acquainted Adams with tactics he will use in other causes. He appeals to the court of public opinion. He discovers legal technicalities to slow the case against him, finds obscure precedents, plays the delay game.
It’s the kind of small-ball game he plays in the years ahead, turning ‘politics’ into a daily, full-time unpaid occupation to build support for the principles that he and collaborators such as James Otis believed in. A tactician playing the long game, the goal of “revolution,” or armed resistance, was not on the table until very late in the game. Instead, “The Revolutionary Sam Adams” shows us retail politician willing to address, tussle, engage, debate and oppose any step taken by Parliament, or by the English government’s appointees and Colonial allies, that he believes infringes on the goal of “the preservation of liberty.”
The conflict over what Boston ‘Americans’ regarded as their rights and what Parliament regarded as its authority intensified when Britain attempted to tax the colonists directly to help offset the cost of the empire’s Seven Years War, that ended in 1763 with the expulsion of France from North America. Parliament saw it as a war to protect the colonies; Americans saw it as an imperial war against a European rival that had gained the empire further territories.
Taxation measures such as the Stamp Act led to American resistance. A later tea tax provoked the famous (or infamous) Boston Tea Party. London responded by sending troops to impose its will on stubborn Colonials. Tensions led to Lexington and Concord, prompting the Continental Congress (which grew from Adams’s invention of “Committees of Correspondence”) to give Thomas Jefferson’s his moment in the sun.
But long before any of that happened, this book tells us how the road to independence and nationhood began in Boston.
In a chapter titled “Nothing Could Have Given Greater Disgust” — Schiff is a connoisseur of the 18th century prose style’s characteristic combinations of ‘correctness’ and blunt content — the author begins: “Here comes Samuel Adams then, a graying widower, inexpensively and unremarkably dressed, familiar with nearly everyone who crosses his path. He is all loose ends and blighted promise. He has held off his father’s creditors, but his house is in disrepair. He has run his malt business into the ground. Charges of financial impropriety cling to him… He could be embarrassed by his brushes with bailiffs, but, cheery and congenial, has elected not to be. He has time to talk.”
And talk did. Also write… The author then notes, “His fortunes will not improve but events are about to meet him halfway… Adams’s improbably ascendancy begins now, in 1764. Soon he will preside over Boston…”
Samuel Adams was always controversial. He always had enemies. He was always busy, turning every issue into a lesson, every development to advantage.
He was a man for the hour. And the hour lasted a dozen years. After which the united colonies declared independence.
Read this book if you wish to know how, historically speaking, thirteen English colonies became the United States.
This book review essay first appeared on Medium.com
To find it there go to Medium.com
https://medium.com/@rcknox2/americas-revolution-samuel-adams-brought-more-than-the-beer-b063d9d3d759
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