Sam Adams

1P Faneuil Hall Market Pl

Note – the original shore line is marked out on the ground in the granite but looks like chicken scratch. They cross the front corner of the statue (Sam's left). See the corner depicted in the photo for a starting point.

Samuel Adams acquired something of a historical reputation—in his own time no less—as a rabble-rouser and propagandist for the independence movement, especially in comparison to his second cousin John, the future president. But those accusations tend to obscure his nature as an astute political thinker and a tireless activist.

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Adams' father, also named Samuel, frequently used his position as preacher to organize large numbers of associates into groups to lobby local Boston politicians and officials on specific issues, with young Sam frequently accompanying him. At the age of fourteen, Adams entered Harvard, ostensibly to study theology and later take up his father's career, but life in college also exposed him to the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, who held that certain rights and liberties were inherent to humanity, and that government should reflect that truth.

Upon graduation, Adams tried his hand at various businesses, from accounting to joining his father's brewing company, but he always drifted close to the political sphere. He took up a public writing career very early on as a public writer, similar to that of a modern political pundit or Op-Ed writer. He and a circle of close friends launched their first publication, The Public Advertiser. Through the Advertiser, Adams warned his fellow Bostonians to be wary of both calls to submission as well as revolution, and to cherish liberty and the laws that grant it above all.

Adams got the chance to put those words into action after the Seven Years War, when Britain decided that the American colonies needed to pay more of a share to help pay for a war the colonists essentially began. Starting in 1764, the British Parliament began levying several taxes on the colonies to rectify the situation, starting with the American Revenue Act or Sugar Act, essentially a tariff on imported sugar. Most colonists grumbled about London harming the North American economy to the benefit of the sugar-producing colonies in the West Indies, but Adams raised broader political concerns, arguing that London had violated the colonist's rights as Englishmen. "The most essential rights of British Subjects," he wrote, "are those of being represented in the same Body which exercises the Power of levying Taxes upon them." He also began reaching out to New England merchants affected by the new law and convinced them to begin boycotting all goods connected with the tax.

When Parliament replaced the Sugar Act with the notoriously unpopular Stamp Act, Adams called out even louder in protest. As further Acts of Parliament, one of which placed Boston under military occupation, further enraged the colonies, Samuel Adams could be found at the center of the protests, not necessarily threatening revolution, and independence, but warning Britain about the possibility.

Many have noted Adams' role in promoting news about the Boston Massacre across the Thirteen Colonies, but in fairness, he highlighted the need for the accused soldiers to receive a fair trial, convincing his cousin John to take up their defense. Though Adams generally believed that reasoned words carried more political weight than aggressive actions, not every disgruntled colonist held this opinion, as tarring and feathering became a common form of violent protest against British customs officials.

He was known as being a proper Puritan, austere, caring nothing for adornments or fortune. Having dissipated a fortune, having run his father’s malt business into the ground, having contracted massive debts, Adams lived on air, or on what closer inspection revealed to be the charity of friends. A rarity in an industrious, hard-driving, aspirational town, he was the only member of his Harvard class to whom no profession could be ascribed. Certainly no one turned up at the Second Continental Congress as ill-dressed as Adams, who for some weeks wore the suit in which he dove into the woods near Lexington, hours before the battle. It was shabby to begin with. Unlike his contemporaries, Adams did not preen for posterity. He wrote no memoir, resisting even calls to assemble his political writings.

Adams was rare for his ability to keep a secret, any number of which he took to the grave, including the backstory of the Boston Tea Party. He freely discussed his limitations, reminding friends that he understood nothing of military matters, commerce, or ceremony, though Congress charged him, at various times, with all three. Most of America’s founders became giants after independence. Adams faded from the stage light.

Still, British Governor Hutchinson refers to Adams as being the first to advocate for American independence and Jefferson called Adams “the earliest, most active and persevering man of the Revolution.” Adams’ legacy is summarized in his own words, “Very few have fortitude enough to tell a tyrant they are determined to be free.”

-Source Links-

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/samuel-adams

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/noble-fury-samuel-adams-180980758/