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Overview
In this stirring biography, Samuel Adams joins the first tier of founding fathers, a rank he has long deserved. With eloquence equal to that of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, and with a passionate love of God, Adams helped ignite the flame of liberty and made sure it glowed even during the Revolution's darkest hours. He was, as Jefferson later observed, "truly the man of the Revolution."
In a role that many Americans have not fully appreciated until now, Adams played a pivotal role in the events leading up to the bloody confrontation with the British. Believing that God had willed a free American nation, he was among the first patriot leaders to call for independence from England. He was ever the man of action: He saw the opportunity to stir things up after the Boston Massacre and helped plan and instigate the Boston Tea Party, though he did not actually participate in it. A fiery newspaper editor, he railed ceaselessly against "taxation without representation."
In a relentless blizzard of articles and speeches, Adams, a man of New England, argued the urgency of revolution. When the top British general in America, Thomas Gage, offered a general amnesty in June 1775 to all revolutionaries who would lay down their arms, he excepted only two men, John Hancock and Samuel Adams: These two were destined for the gallows. It was this pair, author Ira Stoll argues, whom the British were pursuing in their fateful march on Lexington and Concord.
In the tradition of David McCullough's John Adams, Joseph Ellis's The Founding Brothers, and Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin, Ira Stoll's Samuel Adams vividly re-creates a world of ideas and action,reminding us that none of these men of courage knew what we know today: that they would prevail and make history anew.
The idea that especially inspired Adams was religious in nature: He believed that God had intervened on behalf of the United States and would do so as long asits citizens maintained civic virtue. "We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection," Adams insisted. A central thesis of this biography is that religion in large part motivated the founding of America.
A gifted young historian and newspaperman, Ira Stoll has written a gripping story about the man who was the revolution's moral conscience. Sure to be discussed widely, this book reminds us who Samuel Adams was, why he has been slighted by history, and why he must be remembered.
Synopsis
The rousing story of Samuel Adams, the Founding Father who has been undeservedly overlooked by history but who, in Thomas Jefferson's words, was "truly the Man of the Revolution."
The Barnes & Noble Review
The crucial question addressed by Ira Stoll's new biography of revolutionary firebrand Sam Adams isn't put directly until the final pages: "If Adams was so instrumental in achieving American independence and so influential even afterward, why then has his fame faded so badly with time?" The answer has to do with a stark contradiction: Sam Adams was a conservative revolutionary, an activist whose radical approach to politics was based upon his indefatigable commitment to protecting the ancient rights of Englishmen. In helping to make America independent from England, Adams ceaselessly harked back to England's own history.
Editorials
Library Journal
No surprise here: a biographer thinks his subject unjustly forgotten and underrated. Samuel Adams, better known now as a beer brand than as the American revolutionary leader he was, is not in the first tier of Founding Fathers. Stoll (managing editor, New York Sun) argues for Adams's key role. He's not wrong. Massachusetts, the hothouse of the Revolution, was the site of the best-remembered moments of rebellion: the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, Paul Revere's Ride, "the shots heard round the world." Adams had a hand in all, then helped declare independence from England and managed the war that followed. In Massachusetts, he helped write the commonwealth's constitution, which was a model for the U.S. Constitution, then topped his career by succeeding John Hancock as governor in 1793. It's a good story. Stoll has mined primary sources, but his excessive fondness for quoting makes the narrative sag in places, and overall he doesn't convey deep expertise with the 18th century. There are lots of Samuel Adams bios-three others since 1997-and this one is worthy, but optional, for public libraries that don't own one of the others.
—Michael O. Eshleman
From the Publisher
"[Stoll] gives us something close to how [Adams] wanted to be remembered." —-The Boston GlobeThe Barnes & Noble Review
The crucial question addressed by Ira Stoll's new biography of revolutionary firebrand Sam Adams isn't put directly until the final pages: "If Adams was so instrumental in achieving American independence and so influential even afterward, why then has his fame faded so badly with time?" The answer has to do with a stark contradiction: Sam Adams was a conservative revolutionary, an activist whose radical approach to politics was based upon his indefatigable commitment to protecting the ancient rights of Englishmen. In helping to make America independent from England, Adams ceaselessly harked back to England's own history.Whereas American founders such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison were steeped in the rationalist political philosophy of the European Enlightenment -- an 18th-century phenomenon -- Sam Adams took his political inclinations from the 17th-century struggles between England's Puritans and the English Crown. If Jefferson's inspirations were Enlightenment philosophers like Montesquieu and David Hume, Sam Adams absorbed his worldview from Puritan militant Oliver Cromwell (Adams also shared Cromwell's knee-jerk anti-Catholicism).
Like Cromwell a century before, Adams jealously guarded the rights of Englishmen against royal infringement. And, like Cromwell, Adams found a source for both fiery rhetoric and steely determination in a strict reading of the Bible. For both men, liberty and public virtue were inextricably linked. During a dark period of the Revolutionary War, Adams wrote to a friend that "[a] general Dissolution of Principles & Manners will more surely overthrow the Liberties of America than the whole Force of the Common Enemy. While the People are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their Virtue they will be ready to surrender their Liberties to the first external or internal Invader."
Yet the devout Adams was a political activist in the modern sense, brilliantly using the media to move the American public toward his goals. Among the first colonists to seriously envision national independence, Adams's brand of consciously provocative activism so infuriated British authorities, both in the colonies and in England, that it triggered a clumsy overreaction, which directly advanced the agenda for American independence.
Stoll describes in detail British outrage after the 1773 Boston Tea Party, when an Adams-inspired mob tossed British tea into Boston Harbor. Instead of arresting and imprisoning Adams, as Edmund Burke recommended before Parliament in London ("You have these men who are delinquent. Punish them. Do not punish the town"), King George III and Parliament sought to starve Boston by closing its port. Adams used this British overreaction as God-given propaganda to unify the American colonies against royal authority.
At last understanding how formidable Adams was as an opponent, the British made what Stoll calls "a last-ditch effort" to buy him off with money or a lucrative government position. Although financially strapped due to his tireless work as a political activist, Adams (typically) chose principle over riches. "I have been wont to converse with poverty," wrote Adams, "I can live happily with her the remainder of my days, if I can thereby contribute to the redemption of my Country."
Inaugurating what would become almost an American institution, Adams found a particular focus for hostility in the taxes that Parliament began demanding from the colonies beginning in the 1760s. He believed that these taxes, starting with the Stamp Act, undermined the sacred right of personal property, allowing Crown and Parliament to confiscate the wealth of America on a whim. "[W]hat property can the colonists be conceived to have," he asked in 1768, "if their money may be granted away by others, without their consent?" But the Harvard-educated Adams was no mere political theorist, and he used his prodigious skills as a journalist and political organizer to move the colonies to action. It was Adams who established the committees of correspondence to spread news that would lay the groundwork for independence. It was Adams who used the first Continental Congress to tirelessly demand independence. And it was the Crown's intention to arrest Adams (among others), that triggered the first battle of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.
Throughout his book, Stoll works to establish Adams's central role in the struggle for independence. Crucial to this revisionary perspective are the details of Adams's work as a member of the Continental Congress, where he served on dozens of important committees and wrote countless letters urging national independence to wavering colonial leaders. Unfortunately for Stoll, Adams refused to save the documents and letters that would have cemented his reputation as a key figure. Indeed, the absence itself supplies some drama: Stoll describes one scene in which cousin John Adams walked into a room where Sam was cutting up documents with scissors and throwing them out a nearby window. Noticeably hampered by the inadequacy of archival material that would bolster his case, Stoll repeatedly resorts to conjecture or simply inserts caveats such as "Sam Adams' position on [this] has been lost to history."
In the end, Adams the man remains as enigmatic as he's always been. His few remaining letters, shrouded in biblical language, reveal little about the man except his unyielding passion for righteousness and American independence. After the struggle for independence had been won, Adams humbly returned to state government, eschewing any national role in favor of a successful bid for the governorship of Massachusetts. His views were mixed on the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, but he agreed to support it if amendments protecting civil liberties (i.e., what would become the Bill of Rights) were inserted later.
Near the end of his life (Adams died in 1803), President Thomas Jefferson paid him the highest compliment in a personal letter: "[Your letter] recalls to my mind the anxious days we then passed in struggling for the cause of mankind," wrote Jefferson, "Your principles have been tested in the crucible of time, & have come out pure."
In explaining the woeful historical neglect of Sam Adams, Stoll attempts to invoke "a feeling that the country has changed so thoroughly since his time that he has little to say to modern Americans." Alas, he is never quite able to paint more than a two-dimensional portrait of his subject. This volume lets us see Adams soldiering on through the darkest hours but never sheds much light into his Puritan soul. While Adams himself might have preferred this humble legacy, readers are left to hope that future studies will render the man in full. --Chuck Leddy
Chuck Leddy is a member of the National Book Critics Circle who writes frequently about American history. He reviews books regularly for The Boston Globe, as well as Civil War Times and American History magazines. He is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine.