I had been curious about Samuel Adams’ story for a while, but his story is so rarely told in any detail that I also didn’t know why I should care about him. What little I knew, I knew from the history of John Adams, the second US President, and Samuel’s cousin. Each bio I read of John Adams mentioned a detail about his trip to France, during the Revolution, that suggests something huge about Samuel before moving on without explanation. The story usually goes, while John was in France, he kept getting annoyed by people he met who always asked about his much more famous cousin, Samuel. In the context of a book about John, I found it’s surprisingly easy to read that, wonder why Samuel was more famous, and then go back to reading about John as my curiosity fades from memory.
It’s been my experience that Samuel is barely mentioned, if at all, when the revolutionary story is told. It’s easy to know a lot about US history without knowing anything about Samuel. Most people are like this, even historians!
I was at my local bookstore, wondering what to read next, when I saw a new biography of Samuel Adams sitting on the shelf. I thought now’s the time! and picked it up. Samuel’s actual story turned out to be an incredible surprise. The dude was a force of nature. His friends and family saw him as noble, intelligent, generous, and energetic. His foes found him so difficult they called him the Machiavelli of Chaos. WHAT a way of putting it, right?!
Thomas Jefferson puts him at a particular moment in US history by describing him as “truly the man of the Revolution”. Samuel is arguably the person most responsible for starting the revolution. While it’s well known Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, it usually isn’t mentioned that he lifted a lot of ideas, and even some of the text, from Samuel. Samuel even convinced colonists to give up British tea and drink coffee instead because the beeessssst part of waaakiiiing up is cancel cuuulllllture in yooouuuurrrr cup.
On both the first read, but especially the second, I kept coming back to a sense that I know people like Samuel. He is someone that went hard on their principles. A lot of people I knew in the east coast music scene and open source tech scene were / are like that. We all felt it was a duty to live in alignment with our principles and put in the effort to support each other in doing the same. That’s exactly what Samuel does.
My favorite way to consider him is to imagine his crew singing Fugazi lyrics as they toss tea into Boston Harbor. We owe you nothing! You have no control! Many of Fugazi’s lyrics could be things Samuel said. That’s probably why I found it so easy to see myself in his story. I also sang those lyrics, back in 2023, in a basement in Brooklyn when I recorded a cover of that Fugazi song (Merchandise).
If Samuel Adams were alive today, I believe he’d wear a black hoodie and he’d listen to Fugazi or Propagandhi. There is an undeniable punk rock vibe throughout his story. By the time I was done with the book the second time, I felt I had to share Sam’s story with all my musical friends and my hacker friends. I wondered if perhaps they’d see themselves in his story. Maybe my creative friends, who are used to feeling the difficulty of living creative lives, would feel encouraged by how much they have in common with the people who created the US. They were the outliers, the artists, and the misfits. The ones who try to live humbly for their ideals with the certainty that comes from believing the ideas themselves are unfuckwithable. Maybe his story will inspire us to resist when necessary too, in case that comes up for any reason.
First, A Quiet Man
“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.” – Samuel Adams
The first 41 years of Samuel’s life are amusingly uneventful. His life is a riches to rags story. He was born in 1722 into one of those New England Puritan families that believed the Church of England hadn’t reformed enough. The only thing he really cared about was living virtuously and God. Money wasn’t a priority for him at all. He later becomes proud of that and says to a friend that “poverty is not as disagreeable as wealthy folks would have you believe.”
He went to Harvard at age 14. His peers at Harvard pulled all kinds of stunts, but Samuel didn’t. He was late to something just once and then never again. Samuel didn’t respond to flattery and he was distrustful of anyone who did. There were almost no signs of who he’d become. Well… except for the topic of his Master’s thesis: Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?
Every now and then you see a glimpse of his potential. It’s hard to notice because it’s surrounded by his hilarious stories of failure. For example, he inherits his father’s malted barley business and then he ran it into the ground. He’d say he had no mind for all the bookkeeping, but the truth is that he just didn’t care. He loved politics too much to do anything else, yet he hadn’t figured that out yet. Instead, he would express himself politically by rebelling for causes he believed in with almost no regard for the effect it would have on his life.
Over time, he inevitably accumulates debt. It eventually becomes overwhelming and he gets sentenced to become a tax collector for the King. He hated the whole idea of kings, let alone taxes, so he did that job badly on purpose. He wasn’t trying to start a movement, but he was definitely testing what he, as an individual, could get away with. He went out of his way to ensure he had the moral high ground whenever he rebelled. At this point in his life, it’s quite difficult to resist a king, but he’s figuring it out. He just needs to convince everyone else to do it too.
A Wild Man Appears
George Washington gets all kinds of credit in US mythology. It’s rarely mentioned that he was a cocky youth who accidentally started the real first world war. George Washington was an ambitious youth. He was just 22 in May 1754 when he commanded a Virginia militia to ambush a French patrol. After killing the patrol, he discovered they were actually a diplomatic mission. England and France were not at war, but this event starts the French & Indian War, which soon escalates into the Seven Years’ War, which some historians say is the first real world war. Oops!
The Seven Years’ War is over by 1763 and Britain wants to protect their property, the colonies, so they send troops. They also want the colonies to pay for that protection through taxes. They had wondered if the colonies would revolt, but Britain assumed that would not work because Ben Franklin’s prior attempt at forming a Union of colonies had failed in 1754. Britain would levy a tax on stamps, increasing the cost of communication for the colonists. That tax was the Stamp Act of 1765.
Samuel was having none of it and he was already getting in front of them. As far as I’m aware, this is the moment that he becomes a leader of radicals. In May of 1764 he wrote:
For if our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves – It strikes our British Privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain: If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves
Samuel came from an anti-slavery family. He never owned slaves and he was anti-slavery his whole life.
Patrick Henry took up the cause in Virginia. The Pennsylvania Journal printed skulls n crossbones with thick black borders to protest the tax. The New Hampshire Gazette did the same. Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Rhode Island, and New York all had protesters in the streets chanting “no taxation without representation”. The protest was huge and effective. Britain cancelled the Stamp Act and went back to the drawing board.
Sons of Liberty
The name Sons of Liberty has taken on a life of its own in popular culture, but it was a loose organization of folks who wanted to dump the British government. Samuel founded it as a reaction to Stamp Act of 1765. They’re there with Samuel every step of the way from this point forward. Many important figures were members. Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Benedict Arnold, John Hancock, and Samuel Chase, to name a few.
Britain passed the Townshend Acts in 1767. These were a series of laws that gave Britain the right to both tax and fully administer the colonies. For them, this would remove any ambiguity about who controlled the colonies and it would force the colonists to pay for Britain’s activities there. This was exactly the kind of moment the Sons were created for.
Samuel was a masterful propagandist. Some of his best work was on display when he and James Otis Jr wrote the Massachusetts Circular Letter, calling for colonial non-cooperation with Britain. This was the Sons of Liberty’s first act. They called for everyone to cancel Britain.
State governments up and down the coast loved it, especially New Jersey, Connecticut, and Virginia. Thomas Jefferson even used it as a template for the Declaration of Independence. Britain was livid. They responded with a military occupation of Boston. Believe it or not, that did not have the calming effect Britain was hoping for.
Paraphrasing Propagandhi, the sons weren’t swayed by brass rings or by penalties. They made a promise to each other to never sell out to the crown, who they saw as murderers and thieves.
An Incident & The Massacre
On March 5, 1770, a crowd of ~400 got rowdy and cornered 9 British soldiers. They harassed the soldiers for several blocks while throwing things at them until a soldier finally fired a shot into the crowd, beginning a brawl that ends with five killed.
England called this the Incident on King Street, but Samuel and Paul Revere called it The Boston Massacre. They were going to milk this for all the propaganda value it had. Britain could not believe the way it was being spun in the colonies. From the British perspective, it was an act of self-defense by 9 cornered troops against a mob of 400 angry colonists. From Samuel’s perspective, it was an opportunity to agitate the resistance.
Paul Revere created this engraving to capture the moment. He joined the Sons of Liberty right away and contributed engravings like this one starting in 1765. It’s a phenomenal example of art’s power to influence politics.
Samuel was very good at turning people against the king. His cousin, John, wanted to make a different point about kings. He would demonstrate that the colonies were a civilized place, ruled by law, to show that king’s were not necessary for justice to take place. The people could do it themselves.
To everyone’s amazement, the colonial courts found almost all of the soldiers not guilty. John had made his point and Britain was astonished. They respond in 1774 by passing the Administration of Justice Act, which said the colonies are not allowed to conduct their own trials. John recognized it as an admission that his point landed and scared them, exactly the win he wanted, as it made the king’s corruption plain for everyone to see. The king was oppressing them with a system designed to keep them oppressed.
Fugazi’s Waiting Room is also about being oppressed by a system designed to keep people oppressed, though it is expressed through the context of the US during the 1980s.
Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe
Adams had become a big nuisance. He had caused Britain to take action in the wrong direction time and time again and no matter what they tried they were not able to stop him. They were becoming increasingly paranoid as they seemed completely unable to find Samuel, yet he was coordinating resistance at increasing scale.
By 1772, he had created an information sharing network called the Committees of Correspondence. They shared uncensored accounts of what Britain was up to. They also connected isolated colonial resistance groups. They turned individual complaints into organized resistance movements. All of which essentially acted to bypass all attempts at control by the crown. Adams was part of a remarkably large number of church choirs, because he’d share information with them. Revere was member of a remarkably large number of lodges (clubs), because he’d share information with them. In doing so, Samuel and The Sons created solidarity amongst the rebels in the colonies, uniting them against the crown, making him one of the driving forces behind the revolution itself.
He had organized the resistance into a fast moving, energetic machine of resistance. The decentralized nature of the network he built is what made it impossible to shut down. The Internet is designed in roughly the same way because it was also meant to be impossible to shut down.
England had no idea what it was getting into with him. It’s hard to know the full extent of what he did because he was so good at hiding his tracks and yet it couldn’t have been easy to keep his 130+ pseudonyms organized. Ben Franklin usually gets credit for being the father of US Intelligence, but Samuel Adams would be more deserving of a statue at CIA headquarters.
Fathers of Cancel Culture
“Tea must be universally renounced."
– John Adams
One of my favorite examples of Samuel’s influence is the way he started a trend of choosing coffee over tea specifically because tea was only available from Britain. Cancelling tea, and anything else British, was so successful that it brought an already strained East India Company’s colonial business to its knees. He would say anything to get people to stop drinking tea. He claimed several times that Britain got the tea from remote parts of China so it had weird bugs in it. He loved telling people a cup of tea is paid for with a gallon of colonial blood, which he could say that because everyone knew about The Boston Massacre, after all.
In 1773, Samuel coordinated a refusal of tea across Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The main event was, of course, the Boston Tea Party. All of the cities were able to force the tea back to England, but Boston was different. Samuel was from Boston and Governor Hutchinson was sooooo sick of his crap. Hutchinson was going to make sure that tea came into Boston and was sold. Soon after the three ships intended for Boston were docked, Samuel & 100 Sons of Liberty sneaked aboard and made a ruckus throwing 340+ chests of tea into the harbor. The East India Company was completely broke at the time, too!
Hutchinson was a principled man. He gave Samuel and the colonists a lot more leeway than anyone else would have. He was English, but he felt like he was part of the colonial community, not some external force. Samuel created a situation where Hutchinson could’ve killed him while he was on those ships, but Hutchinson didn’t do it. Hutchinson lost his job soon after that and went home to Britain.
In 1774, John Adams writes a letter to his wife and tells her about seeing some travellers who refused to drink tea unless it had been properly smuggled, to which the person running the establishment said “we have renounced Tea in this place. I can’t make tea, but He make you Coffee.” John concludes the letter saying he loves coffee and hopes to see Tea universally renounced.
I love this part of his story so much. I love it because the US has been a coffee drinking nation ever since. I think about it every morning when I have a cup of coffee.
I mentioned earlier that I could see Samuel & his crew singing Fugazi lyrics while tossing tea in Boston Harbor. I sang those lyrics a couple years ago, when I recorded a cover of Fugazi’s Merchandise while teaching myself how to record music. I’m on drums, guitar, and you’ll hear me sing We owe you nothing! You have no control!
A Union Is Born
Britain was furious about the Tea Party and responded by sending even more troops. General Thomas Gage replaced Hutchinson in Boston and he was there to govern as an occupying force. He would attempt to force the colonists to submit to their king. Unbeknownst to Gage, the colonists already had networks of militias in place to guard against attacks from natives, and they were already planning to resist Britain.
The Tea Party lead directly to the First Continental Congress, which is when the Continental Association is created and the Union is born. I like to think of the Continental Association as though the colonies came together and said, “hmm maybe we could, i dunno… sorta look out for each other, like if Britain tries to kill some of us?” They still struggled to trust each other, so it didn’t go very far in scope, but it was something, and that mattered.
Some of those militias I mentioned a moment ago become the colonial side in the opening battles of the Revolution, The Battles of Lexington and Concord. The Second Continental Congress happened soon after that, resulting in the second version of the Union, with the signing of the Declaration of Independence soon after that.
The delegates of the first congress were clear that the they were worried about Britain’s response to the successful and growing boycott against British merchants. Samuel started that boycott and he cancelled Britain so hard it created the USA. Think about that next time someone complains about cancel culture.
Above, we see a mural from the first floor of the US Congress building, with Samuel depicted as the main speaker at the First Continental Congress. Adams was also at the Second Continental Congress, which created the Articles Of Confederation, and he was at the signing of the Declaration Of Independence. We can see him in the famous painting below.
His only real flaw in the way events unfolded, in my opinion, is that he was against the Constitution. He was concerned that a powerful federal government would threaten the hard-earned rights and freedoms obtained by the revolution. Even though I see this stance as a flaw, it is an understandable one. They just had a revolution against centralized control. He wasn’t alone in this either. Massachusetts itself boycotted the Constitutional Convention and became a powerful voice for the Anti-Federalist movement.
That rejection of the Constitution pushed James Madison into a compromise that created the first ten amendments to the Constitution, aka The Bill Of Rights. North Carolina and Rhode Island both held out long enough that Madison, Hamilton, & Jay wrote the Federalist Papers, widely regarded as some of the best legal theory ever written. The opposition greatly improved the end result.
Right up to the end, Samuel was doing his best to convince everyone to do the right thing. If you can change people’s behavior, you can change the world. You can’t force them. The whole point, according to Samuel, is to convince them.
The Revolutionary, by Stacy Schiff
Here’s the link again for Schiff’s book. I loved it enough to read it twice (and write this essay) and it only came out in 2022.
