Stacy Schiff’s biography sheds light on shadowy Boston brewer who fanned the flames of revolution
Stacy Schiff’s compelling biography reveals Boston Tea Party mastermind Samuel Adams fanned the flames of revolution long before a shot was fired.
An imposing bronze and granite statue of Samuel Adams stands in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston, cradle of the American Revolution, as a testament to his role in the founding of the great republic.
But Adams has been overshadowed by patriots such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.
Yet Adams was likely the first person to call for total independence from Britain at a public meeting. He played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in fermenting opposition to the Sugar and Stamp acts, the response to the Boston Massacre and engineering the Boston Tea Party, which took place 250 years ago this month. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence.
Stacy Schiff’s masterly biography, The Revolutionary, now published in paperback, provides a compelling insight into Adams’s private life and public passions, describing how he shrewdly fused colonial cunning with the grandest ideals and moral purpose in pursuit of political and economic freedom for America.
In an interview with Inquirer, the Pulitzer prize-winning biographer and historian explains why Adams has been somewhat outshone by his second cousin, John Adams, and other revolutionaries in popular memory in the US and abroad.
“He was a diffident man who preferred the wings to centre stage, and who was happy to work through those who took more naturally to the spotlight,” Schiff says. “Secondly, he hailed from the no-fingerprints school of resistance; he erased himself from the story in large part – burning some letters, cutting others to shreds – so as to protect his confederates.”
Samuel Adams preferred to remain largely in the shadows of history. His surviving papers offer little insight into his clandestine activities. Yet his second cousin said the revolution could not be understood without Adams’s writings and Jefferson said there was no more important leader in their cause than Adams.
While American students learn about the battlefield heroism of Washington, study the constitution written by Madison and recite the lyrical words of Jefferson, Adams’s role in the revolution has been “swept under the floorboards”. Indeed, Schiff writes that Adams “left a great deal of himself in smoky backrooms” despite never being far from the action, shaping opinion and forcing events.
“Those who knew him best spoke of his sunny serenity,” Schiff says of Adams’s character, values and principles. “He was a man of great faith who believed always he was on the side of the angels; from the start he felt that government existed to serve the people rather than the other way around.”
Samuel Adams – never Sam – was born in September 1722. He studied at Harvard and worked in the family malting business and likely brewed beer. He wrote essays and letters criticising the heavy hand of the British in the colony, served as a town clerk and tax collector, and in 1766 was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He urged those of “odious, hereditary distinction” to make way for the “genius and industry” of everyday Bostonians.
“Among his first acts on being elected to Massachusetts office was to see that a gallery was built in the House of Representatives so that the people of Boston could observe their elected officials in action,” Schiff notes. “Crown officers were appalled; Adams had essentially turned the house into a theatre.”
The taxing of the colonies in the 1760s lit the flame of resistance but it burned slowly. British troops occupying Boston in 1768 and the Boston Massacre in 1770 – when soldiers fired upon and killed five citizens – were exploited by Adams to change hearts and minds. He was a brilliant propagandist and worked with engraver Paul Revere to stoke public anger.
In 1773, the Crown granted the East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies so the company could dump surplus stock, undercutting local merchants. In an event known as the Boston Tea Party, men disguised as Native Americans boarded ships and tipped the tea into the harbour. Schiff finds that Adams played a more significant role in the Boston Tea Party than other accounts suggest.
Most colonists, even as late as 1775, were content to seek concessions or some form of redress rather than revolution. But these events sowed the seeds of republican fervour. Schiff writes: “With singular lucidity, Adams plucked ideas from the air and pinned them to the page, layering in the moral dimensions, whipping up emotions, seizing and shaping the popular imagination.”
This contribution, Schiff acknowledges, was “the real revolution” that took place in colonists’ minds before the exchange of gunfire. “Adams is unusual for being at once an idealist and a man of action; somehow he managed to intuit, working behind the scenes and around a slew of highly capable Crown officers, what today seems the essentials of civil resistance theory,” Schiff says.
“Thomas Hutchinson, the Massachusetts royal governor, would tell King George that Adams had been the first to advocate for independence, but – even if true – it’s unclear when precisely he did so. For all of these years the colonies were convinced that the Crown was plotting to exploit them, and the Crown was convinced that the colonies were plotting a rupture.”
When the 13 colonies established the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, Adams was a delegate from Massachusetts. Following the battles at Lexington and Concord, and then at Bunker Hill, Adams was one of 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence during the Second Continental Congress in July 1776.
Schiff describes how Adams played “a significant role” in the deliberations of the congresses, revelled in the detailed committee work, drawing on law and philosophy, and contributing to debates with persuasive arguments. While his imprint is on many decisions, he let others front the cause to which he was so dedicated.
“The New England men were perceived as radicals as they were much more advanced in their thinking than were some of the other colonies,” Schiff says. “They, to a large extent, let the Virginians, more moderate men with whom they aligned politically, take the lead. John Adams would say that this was the reason the Declaration of Independence was proposed by a Virginian, why it was written by a Virginian, and why the army was commanded by a Virginian. That arrangement obviously suited someone like Samuel Adams, who preferred the offstage role, perfectly.”
After Washington led the Continental Army to victory and independence from Britain was won, Adams served in several home state positions, including governor of Massachusetts (1793-97). But he did not seek the presidency or a national cabinet position, leaving others to formulate and consolidate the new nation.
“He’s significantly older than the other founders – old enough to have been the father of Alexander Hamilton,” Schiff says. “He’s in his 60s already by the time the peace is signed in 1785. His health has already begun to deteriorate.
“Adams’s loyalty even after the war remains to New England; he is focused to some extent on the Puritan past rather than the opulent, commercial future toward which the new country is barrelling. He’s not a Federalist, which left him intellectually homeless.”
In her acclaimed biographies of diverse subjects, including author Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1994) and Egyptian queen Cleopatra (2010), and an account of Benjamin Franklin in France (2005), Schiff wrestled with understanding and explaining people who lived long ago.
Schiff would love to have been able to ask Adams and Franklin questions for which their answers we can only speculate about. “The trick, as a great biographer once put it, is to report on what one can and to speculate intelligently about the rest,” she says. “I try to keep the speculation to a minimum; all the same, we can connect more than a few dots from eyewitness accounts of, for example, the Boston Tea Party. No one knows how many men actually destroyed the tea, but Adams would yelp, months afterward, that the entire colony was being punished for the misdeeds of some 30 to 40 individuals. Which, to my mind, would seem to answer the question.”
Boston is living history. It is thrilling to walk the cobblestoned streets of the Freedom Trail, just as Adams did 300 years ago, and visit the same places he frequented during the revolution such as the Old State House, the Old South Meeting House, the Old North Church and Faneuil Hall.
In researching the biography, Schiff says history can be illuminated by walking through these doors and absorbing the atmosphere. “Boston has done a magnificent job of preserving history,” Schiff agrees. “You can stand today in the Old South Meeting House and get a spine-tingling feel for the tenor of the times (and) in the Old Granary Burial Ground you can meet the entire cast of characters.”
On the eve of a presidential election year, Adams would not be surprised by the partisanship or division that plagues the US today but he would be conscious of how fragile republican democracy is.
Leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Franklin was asked by a woman what had been going on behind closed doors. He responded: “We have given you a republic – if you can keep it.”
The quarrelling revolutionaries imprinted “warring strains in the national character”, suggests Schiff. For example, Hancock and Adams collaborated, colluded and conspired together for decades but were not often on speaking terms. They were once the two most wanted men in America and learnt of their imminent arrest by British soldiers while hiding in a Lexington bedroom. Yet they fought for most of their lives.
So what would Adams make of US politics today? “Adams was of the conviction that democracy rested on two pillars: virtue and education,” Schiff responds. “Without them it crumbled. A moral people, he held, would elect moral leaders. To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune; to elect him yourself was a disgrace. Partisanship, I think, would have surprised none of the founders.”
While statues of the founders dotted the landscape in the years after the revolution, it was not until a century later that one of Adams went up. Americans today nevertheless know his name and image, not because of what he achieved but courtesy of a beer brand. Indeed, the Samuel Adams Taproom is located just a few feet away from his statue outside Faneuil Hall. While it underplays his legacy, it is still kind of cool to have a beer named after you.
“Jim Koch, the founder of the Boston Beer Company, knew of Adams from a grade school teacher who was vaguely obsessed with him, which I like to think would have pleased the man himself,” Schiff says.
Stacy Schiff’s The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams is published in Australia by Hachette
