In many books on the American Revolution, Samuel Adams appears in the years and months leading up to independence, has a major impact on activities in and around Boston such as the Boston Tea Party, participates in the first Continental Congress, then vanishes from the pages.
Samuel Adams cuts the figure of the “bomb-throwing” revolutionary who is essential in breaking away from the established order but is non-existent when it comes time to establish a new order.
He’s better known to most modern Americans, not so much as a founding father, but as a mascot for a beer company.
“The Revolutionary Samuel Adams,” Stacy Schiff’s marvelous biography, places Adams squarely among the pantheon of Founders and, despite the book’s title, paints him as being more than just a firebrand in the early days of the Revolution.
Adams was an outspoken critic of British rule without representation in the colonies, a passionate opponent of British taxation on Boston and Massachusetts. He had the courage to be outspoken but the wiles to work behind the scenes.
Boston residents knew of his deep involvement in revolutionary plots but they kept mostly quiet. British authorities knew of Adams’ involvement but they seemed unable to pin anything on him.
But Samuel Adams was not only a firebrand. He was a strategist. He spearheaded newspaper writing campaigns, penned in eloquent, thoughtful prose, written in various styles using a multitude of anonymous voices. He formed the ideas of and reasons for independence.
He wasn’t a mere “bomb-thrower” or simply a philosopher. He developed systems that established lines of communication between colonial representatives, creating an infrastructure for revolution and independence.
Still, as he does in other books, even in Schiff’s biography, once independence is established, the war engaged, the new nation established, Adams plays a diminished and soon non-existent role.
But here we see what happens behind the scenes.
In many books, his absence is so sudden and so complete that readers could assume Adams died. He didn’t. He lived until October 1803, three years after his cousin, John Adams, served as the second American president, more than a decade after the penning of the Constitution, about 20 years since America won the war for independence.
Yet, the last quarter century of his life rates less than two dozen pages even in Schiff’s book.
His popularity ebbed. His influence collapsed. He opposed many aspects of the new American government.
Though he created the structure for revolution, he had no ambition for creating a new system for governing.
He was, indeed, the revolutionary essential to topple the established order but unwilling and likely unwanted in establishing the new one.