Samuel Adams
Samuel Adams was born in Boston in 1722, and spent most of his life in the city and its environs. His family was religious, and Samuel was raised in the hope that he would enter the ministry after completing his education. While modern history often depicts him as a somewhat coarse firebrand, he was well educated, graduating from Harvard College in 1740, and completing a master’s degree three years later. By then his interest in politics outweighed his interest in the pulpit, and he left Harvard to enter into business. John Adams was a cousin, and the two men became well acquainted with each other.
Contrary to modern myth, Samuel Adams was not a brewer, but a maltster. He operated for a time a family owned business which adjoined their home, where he produced the malt which was sold to Boston’s brewers. While working as a maltster, which drew from his enemies the derisive title “Sam the Maltster”, Samuel first became irate with British high-handedness when press gangs roamed through Boston’s waterfront in the late 1740s, scooping up seamen and landsmen alike for service in His Majesty’s Navy. He began a process which continued for the rest of his life, writing essays about his grievances for publication.
Samuel Adams’s involvement in the pre-revolutionary war activities in Boston were largely the catalyst for the formation of the Sons of Liberty, the Committees of Correspondence, and the system of couriers established to communicate with the other English colonies of North America. Adams opposed each British encroachment, as he saw them, on American liberty with reasoned arguments on paper and vocal calls for resistance. Following the Boston Massacre in 1770, it was Samuel Adams who asked his cousin John and his associate James Otis to defend the soldiers charged with murder, in part to forestall the deployment of more British troops.
Once the British were out of Boston and while the Revolutionary War was being fought elsewhere, Samuel argued for the government of Massachusetts to be dedicated to public virtue. He argued for the free education of children in Boston and throughout the Commonwealth at government expense, including for girls, which was a revolutionary position in his day. He won, at least in Boston, though his position remained highly controversial. Samuel at first opposed the Constitution as it was prepared by the delegates in Philadelphia, but later voted for its ratification as a member of Massachusetts’ ratifying convention.
Samuel Adams only son, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, died in 1788, a blow from which he never fully recovered. He served as first lieutenant governor, and then governor of Massachusetts in the 1790s. By the final decade of his life his hands shook so badly that he could no longer write. He was already a controversial figure at the time of his death in 1803, and the passage of time has added to the controversy, largely because his outspoken nature and uncompromising stands led him to create many enemies during his career. Nonetheless he was another member of Boston’s Adams family which did more than most to create the United States.