The subversive genius who helped win our independence

“Raise a cold Sam Adams to a cold Sam Adams,” a Boston pub encourages guests who face the revolutionary patriot’s tomb across the street.

Independence Day is the day to raise a glass to one of the greatest, and one of the least appreciated, leaders of the American revolution: Samuel Adams, the clever and principled political genius of Boston. Thomas Jefferson called him “the patriarch of liberty” in America.

There would be no Independence Day without a radical populist mostly remembered as a beer: Samuel Adams, who never, ever went by Sam.

Adams set the tone for courage against huge odds, a do-or-die attitude that required action. He once warned that “the hour of destruction, of manly opposition to the machinations of Tyranny, stares you in the face.”

So what, he would have challenged, are you going to do about it?

Spirit of Independence Day

The military heroes and future presidents of the revolution get the most recognition. Samuel Adams never put his recognition before the cause. A relentless public speaker, he raised up others while writing deep into the night to churn out articles and arguments, using as many as 19 pseudonyms.

Why do we remember him on Independence Day? The first half of the Declaration of Independence, from the preamble to the indictment of the king, can be found in Adams’ writings dating back to the 1760s.

Jefferson is credited with writing the declaration but the energetic Adams provided many of the actual concepts and words. Benjamin Franklin humorously changed Adams’ “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The chief incendiary

In the years leading up to the revolution, the political theorist and organizer developed a technique to “improve events” – to exploit circumstances in order to create the conditions to foment the revolution.

Shaping the narrative of the 1770 Boston Massacre, the sole imagery an engraving popularized by his co-conspirator Paul Revere, Adams fomented outrage not only in the colonies but in England. He wrote the town of Boston’s official report on the massacre and sent it to London on the first ship, to be first to market to set the narrative of the sadistic cruelty of His Majesty’s troops.

He set many of the philosophical foundations for the new American republic, serving first in the Continental Congress to persuade reluctant delegates for independence, and then to sit on the committees to run the war and build the country.

The subversive’s subversive

The fiery Samuel outshone his younger second cousin John Adams, the future president, as the most “dangerous engine” against the crown. Not only did he come to the personal attention of King George III, but he and his political ally and funder John Hancock were the first revolutionaries, in the spring of 1775, to be exempted from a royal pardon. Anyone who had opposed the king would be amnestied John Hancock could be slapped in irons and shipped to England to be hanged.

To the crown, Samuel Adams was the #1 Most Wanted as the dangerous demagogue, the subversive evil genius who riled up a generally indifferent people to overthrow the rule of their benevolent king.

He lacked the imposing grace and commanding presence of the aristocratic George Washington. Sometimes described as lean and wiry, often as athletic with endless stamina, Adams had an unassuming, plain appearance. His simplicity of dress clashed with the flamboyant, trendy, ever fashionable Hancock.

He employed wit, political organization, conspiracy, and ungentlemanly subversion not just to cut into imperial rule, but to provoke a generally indifferent public into fighting for their freedom.

He secretly orchestrated the 1773 Boston Tea Party and a constellation of other provocations in the seaport city that provoked Britain’s Coercive Acts of 1765, a set of repressive laws to bring Boston to heel. Parliament handed Adams a gift: Hard evidence of London’s malign intent. If the British could do it to Boston, he argued, they could do it to all of New England and thus, to all the 13 colonies.

Even before that, set up the Boston Sons of Liberty, and joined it with local committees across the colonies, networked together in a parallel communications system called the Committees of Correspondence to organize or magnify conspiracies from present-day Maine to South Carolina. That network became the overt Continental Congress in 1774, where Adams, as a delegate, popularized the idea of American independence.

Had he been alive today, he would have been one of the most powerful voices on social media, speaking in different voices under different accounts.

All politics was local

For Samuel Adams, all politics, even against British imperial rule across the ocean, was local. To him it was Boston, then Massachusetts, defending their colonial or state interests, and working with the other twelve in common purposes as they governed themselves.

Central government of any kind, he believed, threatened the public welfare.

He orchestrated his arguments and themes under multiple aliases in different newspapers in his native Boston, created echo chambers across the colonies to amplify effect, and authored, introduced, and passed resolutions in the local government – the Town Meeting – and in the Massachusetts colonial legislature, and ultimately in the Continental Congress.

Rousing the rabble

Adams economized with what we could call low-cost, high-impact political and psychological warfare operations. He agitated relentlessly. He formulated simple arguments from facts and philosophy. When he received insufficient support from a tired public too busy with their own affairs, he “improved events,” in his words, to rile up the people to action.

He was the ultimate rabble rouser. Living between the docks of Boston’s very rough waterfront and the homes of wealthy merchants like John Hancock, Adams organized the sailors, shipwrights, caulkers, stevedores, and others who lived under constant threat of British kidnapping on the high seas – a form of naval conscription that the British called “impressment” – and joined those societal misfits with the artisans, carpenters, and laborers for mob action against the Crown.

All these things cost money, something that Adams cared little about, which is where aggrieved wealthy patrons like Hancock came in.

Character counted

All his life, character counted most. Adams found no shortage of poseurs and their pretended patriotism. “We must not conclude merely upon a man’s haranguing upon liberty, and using the charming sound, that he is fit to be trusted with the liberties of his country,” he wrote as a 25 year-old in 1748.

That was long before he had thought of independence. “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt,” he wrote at age 26.

Defense of freedom rested in his heart. “The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought,” he argued in 1771.

Human nature would destroy liberty without checks and balances and people of character.

“It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, – to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves,” Adams wrote early in his career.

Liberty required constant and selfless defense. Four years before the outbreak of hot war, Years later, he wrote in the Boston Gazette, “The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.”

“If we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom, Adams argued. Not just for his generation, but for the future: “It is a very serious consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.”

The Bostonian had always argued for universal education, and was one of the first to push for the education of girls and women. Less than six months after the Battle of Bunker Hill 250 years ago, Adams argued that poor education and trashy morals would destroy the country yet to be formed: “when people are universally ignorant, and debauched in their manners, they will sink under their own weight without the aid of foreign invaders.”

To the weaklings: ‘Crouch down and lick the hands that feed you’

Then, as now, America faced a crossroads between prosperity and destruction. “Courage, then, my countrymen, our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty,” he told the Continental Congress on August 1, 1776. The congress had issued the Declaration of Independence less then a month earlier, but the present delegates would not sign it until the following day.

Adams warned of cowards and sellouts as the representatives prepared to affix their signatures:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace.

“We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains rest lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Is it the right thing to do?

Adams destroyed most of his personal papers, wrote no memoir, and sought no written legacy. His influence peaked in the summer of 1776, then gradually declined, despite his membership on more congressional committees than anyone else. Politically, he faded from the national scene,

For the rest of his life, Jefferson revered Adams. Years later, in 1801, President Jefferson wrote the elderly Adams that in making decisions, “I often asked myself, is this exactly in the spirit of the patriarch of liberty, Samuel Adams? Is it as he would express it? Will he approve of it?”

Would he approve of what we are doing today?