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The Sam Adams Tri-Centennial
The above caption is more of a Columbus routine, but I couldn’t help it, the pointing finger and the limp, rolled up documents remind me of Chico Marx in The Cocoanuts (1929) and that’s about as close to the usual themes of this blog as I’m going to get.
Today is the 300th birthday of Samuel Adams (1722-1803) — not the beer, but the Patriot. Expect many more posts of this kind in a couple of years, as we are approaching the 250th anniversary of American independence, and there’s no way I’m letting that go unobserved, whatever the political climate is. I was here for the Bicentennial, which had its good points, but I want the upcoming benchmark to be better. And I have a dog in this fight; my great-great-great grandmother was an Adams of the selfsame Massachusetts family.
Sam Adams can use some props these days. Most Americans know the name, I’m sure, but have only a vague idea about who he was. In Adams’ day, many or most people considered him THE most important player in the American Revolution. That reputation has slid over the centuries, mostly, I think because, unlike most of the so-called Founding Fathers, he took no part in the Federal Government, neither by serving in it nor helping to create it. Thus, while people generally have a pretty firm idea of the roles played by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams (Sam’s second cousin), Alexander Hamilton, et al., on the subject of Sam Adams, they are a bit more fuzzy.
There are several reasons Adams took a different path, and we’ll enumerate them, but first, some words on who he was and what his role was. He was not a brewer, though his father (also named Samuel Adams) was. And at one time he did participate in running his father’s malt business, which of course is related to brewing, but makes him a maltster, not a brewer. But I’m not one of these nit-picking historians. A maltster is good enough for me — go ahead and slap him on your beer label!
There is an unfortunate tendency to regard Adams as a kind of ne’er-do-well, as compared with his cousin John and others, though I assure you that none of his contemporaries would have looked at it that way. Samuel Adams had a Masters Degree from Harvard in an age when most human beings possessed no education at all. He considered getting a law degree and practicing at the bar, and he absolutely should have done that, because he had no head for business, which is what he decided to pursue instead. And it would have been useful in his political career.
Ostensibly, Adams was a sort of an entrepreneur, but politics was his real genius. And that is what he spent nearly all of his time on. The problem is, in Adams’ day, positions in government paid very little, which is why most of the leaders of that time, even among the Rebels, were men of property. Sam Adams was probably the poorest member of his generation of American politicians. He worked as a local tax collector (and was popular in the job because he was far too lenient), and also served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Boston Town Meeting (the Colonial equivalent of a city council). So he wasn’t just some renegade ringleader. He was a legit man of local affairs, an important guy in Boston. But that in and of itself would not merit a place in the history books.
Adams was basically the Prophet of the American Revolution. Nearly 30 years before the Declaration of Independence he was penning opposition letters to British policies. His primary role starting in about 1748 was in giving voice to Colonial grievances against the Crown in the form of pamphlets, speeches, and anonymous letters to newspapers, in addition to his official duties in the local legislative bodies. He was relentless in criticism of each new outrage committed by the British government, such as onerous duties and taxes and other outrages, finally culminating in an armed military presence that eventually led to war. Adams was one of the organizers of the Sons of Liberty, the secret society devoted to thwarting the Brits. he also helped establish the local Committees of Correspondence that sprang up throughout the country to unite like-minded regional leaders into a single movement. He organized boycotts, orchestrated leaks to the press about British shenanigans, and surely had a hand in sabotage. He was a genius of propaganda, and best of all, he couched all of his writings in the language of the English themselves, having studied great political thinkers like John Locke. It was this bold M.O. that laid the tone for the entire p.r. campaign that followed. Men like Jefferson and John Adams took their cues from Sam, as did nearly everyone who took up the cause. One could argue that Adams could be deceptive and manipulative in some of his machinations, but ultimately it was for the best of causes.
Adams was also an instigator of the creation of the Continental Congress. He served in both the First and Second Continental Congresses, and was a Signer of the Declaration of Independence. And thus ends his role at the national level. How come? Why didn’t he also attend the Constitutional Convention and participate in the new government it created in 1789? One reason that most people overlook is that he was getting long in the tooth by then. He was one of the older Founding Fathers. He was 54 in 1776 and 67 in ’89. Those were considered advanced years two centuries ago. Franklin was even older but he had mostly snoozed through the Constitutional Convention.
More importantly, however, Adams was a radical. Before Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, it’s hard to think of an American Founding Father who was more radical. Thus when Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and others were arguing for a stronger central government in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere, Adams was with an opposing faction known as Anti-Federalists, which included Patrick Henry, Elbridge Gerry, John Hancock, George Mason, Edmund Randolph, and others. These men were looking for an improved federation of independent states as already existed under the Articles of Confederation, not an entire new centralized and powerful Federal Government. It is largely thanks to the Anti-Federalists that the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution as Amendments. So Adams was still playing a national role in his way. And he did vote to approve the Constitution when it came to the Massachusetts legislature for ratification.
Adams actually sought to play a role in the Federal Government by running for U.S. Congress. But he lost! Unthinkable? Well he had made a few political errors by that time, including voting against a measure to thank Hancock for his service in presiding at the Continental Congress, and criticizing George Washington and the Society of the Cincinnati for the militaristic tone they set. So Adams spent his last years in the same local government in which he had started out, as President of the Massachusetts Senate (1782-88, roughly); Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts (1789-1794), and finally Governor (1794-1797). By that point, he was 75 years old and largely infirm. Anyway, Governor of Massachusetts, that’s as big a job as running many entire countries.
As for Samuel Adams Beer, it was introduced by the Boston Beer Company in 1984. It has no relation to the actual Adams family, but I’ve always thought it was a genius brand, and kind of a game-changer in the nation’s drinking habits as part of the microbrew (ahem) revolution.
I’ve just got done reading Stacy Schiff’s The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, and enjoyed it, as I enjoyed her earlier book on the Salem Witch Trials. Its insights certainly inform this take on the Revolutionary rabble-rouser. The author herself hails from Adams, Massachusetts, which was named after Samuel.
Okay, now time for a beer.
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