Summary
Samuel Adams along with his cousin John were leaders of the radical faction that opposed reconciliation with Britain and supported independence. Adams focused much of his later career on state politics.
Samuel Adams | Signer of the Declaration
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Biography
Adams was born on September 16, 1722 to Samuel Adams, Sr. and Mary Fifield Adams. Adams Sr. was a successful producer of malt, used for brewing, and thus his son and namesake grew up in a comfortable home. Samuel Sr. passed on to his son a firm commitment to his colony’s institutions of self-government, especially the town meeting. He also passed down a devotion to Congregationalist worship and reverence for the Massachusetts Charter and Body of Liberties. His stress on both personal and civic virtue became central to his son’s ideology.
Samuel attended the Boston Latin School and then went on to Harvard, just as many of the sons of prosperous Massachusetts families would do. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1740, Adams went on to gain a graduate degree three years later. For his graduate thesis, he posed the question, “Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved?” Here, years before the Declaration of Independence was written, was the very question the Continental Congress delegates would grapple with, and would answer “yes.”
Samuel Adams would prove to be many things—a brilliant propagandist, a devoted lover of liberty, a fearless fighter against tyranny—but he was not a capable businessman. As his first employer noted, Samuel was too preoccupied with politics to ever succeed as a merchant. He soon wound up working for his father in the malthouse.
By 1747, Adams’s political sentiments led him to join the “popular party,” a group dedicated to serving as a watchdog against Parliamentary infringements on their liberties. In 1748, he founded a political newspaper, The Independent Advertiser, which aimed to “defend the rights and liberties of mankind.” But like many of his enterprises, this paper soon failed.
In 1749, Samuel Adams married Elizabeth Checkley. In 1756, Samuel accepted the Boston Town Meeting’s offer of a job as tax collector to help support his growing family. But Adams proved a poor choice for the position. He often did not collect the taxes, especially when his fellow townsmen could not meet their bill.
Dedicated to Politics
In 1757, Elizabeth died in childbirth, and Samuel responded to this tragedy by throwing himself into politics. The 1760s gave him a host of issues to focus his energies on. By 1763 Parliament began to impose new regulations and novel taxes on the colonies. Protests followed and Samuel Adams took a leading role in Boston resistance, first to the Sugar Act designed to end New England smuggling and then to the 1765 Stamp Act that imposed a novel direct tax on colonists. It was Adams who issued the strongest condemnation of these new laws. “For if our Trade may be taxed, why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & everything we possess or make use of?....If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having and legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?” By 1776, this insistence on “no taxation without representation” would become the rallying cry of the Revolution.
In 1765 Adams was elected to the Massachusetts General Court, or House of Representatives. He sat down at once to pen a series of resolutions defending the rights and liberties of his colony’s citizens. In 1766, he was elected Clerk [secretary] of the General Court and this position carried a much needed salary.
In 1766, he played a major role in urging nonimportation of British goods. In 1768, British troops arrived in Boston to quell the protest against Parliament’s policies, and Adams took up his pen to condemn this move by the Mother Country. He urged resistance, writing “Will the spirits of the people as yet unsubdued by tyranny, unawed by the menace of arbitrary power, submit to be governed by military force? No.”
A Voice for Independence
Samuel Adams had become a master of propaganda, skilled in the use of the written word, but his quavering voice and shaky hand made him a poor orator. He wisely left the speech making to men like James Otis and Joseph Warren while he wrote persuasive articles. Between 1768 and 1769 he produced over twenty articles under the pseudonyms Vindex and Candidus. Then, in 1770, a series of accidents and mishaps led to what Americans called The Boston Massacre. It was Adams who organized a funeral for the slain colonists that was attended by over two thousand people.
Protest grew. In December 1773, colonist activists dumped English tea into the Boston Harbor rather than pay the tax on this tea. Adams praised this act of defiance, writing “You cannot imagine the height of joy that sparkles in the eyes and animates the countenances as well as the hearts of all we meet on this occasion.”
Adams was elected a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, along with John Adams, John Hancock, and Robert Treat Paine, all of whom signed the Declaration of Independence. In 1779, he joined John Adams and James Bowdoin in drafting a constitution for the state of Massachusetts. Although he remained in the Continental Congress until 1781, and helped draft the Articles of Confederation, he focused much of his remaining career on state politics. He served as President of the Massachusetts Senate and as Lt-Governor under John Hancock. When Hancock died, Adams took on the governorship. He was reelected to one-year terms three times.
Samuel Adams died at the age of 81 in October of 1803. He was praised in eulogy for “the greatness of his mind, and the magnanimity of his disposition…when he spoke, they were the words of truth; and when he advocated a principle, he promulgated the sentiments of his heart.”
