"The Revolutionary"

I have finally finished reading another of my Christmas gifts, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams (Little, Brown & Co. 2022), a biography of Samuel Adams, Jr. by Stacy Schiff. Except for Schiff's account of the early and later years of her subject, my evaluation of the man became increasingly negative. The sobriquet "revolutionary" aptly characterizes Sam Adams. A financial failure (due, in part, to actions of the British government* but moreso his own temperament), inveterate publisher of lies and intentional mischaracterizations, and backroom political operative par excellence, I am thankful that Adams grew to adulthood before the age of ideology. 

Adams's revolutionary spirit can hardly be attributed to his early classical education at Boston Latin School or his subsequent matriculation at Harvard College. His was an education steeped in the classics and Scripture. However, he also received a strong dose of early liberal thinkers including Locke. As Schiff writes, 

Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding essentially served as a textbook in ethics; Adams seemed to swallow the work whole. [Nonetheless], for the eighteenth-century American the heroes were classical ones; there was a reason why it would be said that Adams made his way to the Whigs and Tories by way of the Greeks and Romans. (28)

Work by Algernon Sidney and Thomas Hobbes also played a role in young Adams's education.

Unlike, say, the Founders profiled in Tom Ricks's First Principles (my comments here), who drew much of their high-level political understanding from Greek and Roman sources, Adams was more contemporary, dare I say social contractarian with libertarian impulses. This is not all there is to say about Adams's worldview, Schiff makes several references to his Christian faith (e.g., 29-30). She does not, however, make much of it so I'm left uncertain about whether the religion of Sam Adams was shallow, irrelevant to Adam's political views, or simply that Schiff left it aside. The third seems possible given Schiff's quote of Jefferson's canard that, "Northerners were sober, industrious, designing, self-interested, and hypocrites in their religion; Southerners fiery, indolent, candid, generous, and free of religious convictions." (279) The second reason strikes me as most likely. Or, if his faith was part of his political frame of reference, it was one that had descended by degrees from the Puritan ideal of a holy commonwealth to a more individualized version. This too is plausible.

Adams functioned at his Machiavellian best during the decade leading up to the Declaration of Independence. Successive royal governors of Massachusetts marveled in anger at how Adams could manipulate events in Boston without leaving a prosecutable fingerprint on any of them. His work to create inter-colony lines of communication and a prototype of a news service proved crucial to the success of a seaboard-wide movement toward independence.

Schiff portrays the high point of Adams's political life at the First and Second Continental Congresses. No longer the first among equals as he had been in Boston, Adams nonetheless remained important as one of many who worked to gradually move the whole toward independence. She notes some successful behind-the-scenes politicking by Adams in Philadelphia but the balance of her account of the final three decades of his life is one of increasing political irrelevance (engineered in large part by John Hancock) followed by modest service as a living prop for the Revolutionary era. Adams, it seems, had gifts suitable for instigating and inspiring a revolution but not for governing a fissiparous and increasingly commercialized populace. Many revolutionaries--like many entrepreneurs--do not make good ongoing leaders of polities. And Adams, like a surprising number of others mentioned by Gordon Wood in his Radicalism of the American Revolution (366-369), had lost faith in what the Revolution had done and, more importantly, failed to do.

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* Schiff's account of the failed Land Bank in which Samuel Adams, Sr. was an investor was entirely new to me. Colonial Massachusetts suffered a severe lack of currency. In 1740 Adams, Sr. and many others formed a Land Bank that would issue notes to be used as currency and secured by the land of its investors. Even though the Massachusetts legislature issued a charter with the initial assent of the Royal Governor, at the behest of merchants who traded with London (who surely would not take these notes in payment), Governor Belcher changed his mind and convinced Parliament to force the bank into liquidation. By that time, however, a great many notes were in circulation and thus rendered worthless. In turn, this lead to actions against the investors, foreclosures on their property, and years of continuing litigation. The wealth of Adams, Sr. disappeared overnight putting Sam, Jr. into a state of penury from which he never recovered. Although, to be fair to the Brits at this point, Sam, Jr. never tried very hard to earn a living.