Samuel Adams was a Founding Father of the United States and a political theorist who protested British taxation without representation, uniting the American colonies in the fight for independence during the Revolutionary War. He was the second cousin of John Adams and the architect of political ideals about liberty and independence that led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and America’s independence from Great Britain. In his home state of Massachusetts, Adams held a number of political offices, and served as governor from 1793 to 1797.
Who Was Samuel Adams?
Samuel Adams was born into an affluent Puritan family on September 27, 1722, in Boston, the largest city in the Massachusetts colony.
His father, Samuel Adams, Sr., was an accomplished merchant, brewer, deacon and political activist. His mother, Mary, was the daughter of a local merchant. Adams’ parents had 12 children, but he was just one of three who survived to adulthood.
He was raised in their home on Boston’s Purchase Street overlooking the colonial harbor. They had hoped he would pursue a career in the clergy, but it was his father’s political activism that sparked Adams’ curiosity.
After his initial education at Boston Latin School, he progressed to Harvard College where he studied the writings of John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher whose conviction that all individuals were born with certain inalienable rights would form the basis of Adams' political theories about colonial freedoms.
His disdain for British rule over the colonies was also forged by his family’s experience: In 1741, British Parliament dissolved the colonial “land banks,” established to help landowners mortgage their land to gain access to money. Samuel Adams, Sr. had helped create the program and was held liable for outstanding balances.
The British seized much of Adams’ property and finances, gutting the family’s wealth and leading to repeated legal battles that his son later inherited.
Sons of Liberty
Adams was not an instant success after his Harvard graduation. He failed as a brewer when he tried to run his father’s Boston malt business, and was later an unenthusiastic and unsuccessful tax collector.
Politics were his true passion, and in 1748 with his friends he published The Independent Advertiser, a newspaper to promote his opinion pieces, launching a career as a political leader and agitator.
Adams was also building his home life—in 1749 he married his pastor’s daughter, Elizabeth Checkley. They lived in his family home on Purchase Street and had six children before her death less than a decade later. He remarried in 1764 to Elizabeth Wells.
As Adams’ family grew, so did his voice in politics. When Britain imposed the Sugar Act of 1764, he wrote a critical response for the colonists in Massachusetts.
The Sugar Act was repealed, but Britain began a succession of harsher taxes, beginning with the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on all printed documents. Adams joined John Hancock, Paul Revere and James Otis in secret meetings to form the radical group the Sons of Liberty to oppose the taxation without representation.
Violent protests in Boston targeted the homes of British authorities, making it nearly impossible for the British to enforce the Stamp Act.
Townshend Acts
Adams was continuing to publish newspaper articles in opposition to British rule, writing constantly about self-rule and liberty. He was also collaborating and debating politics with his second cousin and future president John Adams.
Britain continued exerting its power over the colonies, and hit back with the Townshend Acts of 1767, taxing a range of British imports. Adams knew a bigger response was needed than just protests in Boston. He drafted the Massachusetts Circular Letter, a direct appeal to King George III, to be shared among the colonies and sparking a united boycott of British goods.
It succeeded, and the Townshend Acts were eventually repealed, but tensions increased as the British sent troops to the streets of Boston. Their presence culminated in the Boston Massacre in 1770, a deadly confrontation in which the British shot five unarmed colonists.
When a tax on tea was added via the passage of the Tea Act, Adams and the Sons of Liberty held more secret meetings around Boston to devise the response—the Boston Tea Party.
On December 16, 1773, in a packed room in Boston’s Old South Meeting House when a peaceful solution seemed impossible, Adams exclaimed, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!”
While the meaning of the quote has been debated, some historians believe it was a coded message alerting rebels to begin aggressively dumping crates of tea into Boston Harbor in a brazen act of defiance.
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