Founding Myths (7 page)

       
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In 1786 and 1787 Adams advocated the suppression of a popular uprising of farmers and debtors, labeled by its enemies “Shays' Rebellion” after one of its many leaders. As president of the state senate, he pushed to suspend writs of habeas corpus. Afterward, when many of his contemporaries advocated leniency, Adams wanted to hang the rebels. Again in 1794, Adams endorsed the quashing of a popular insurrection in western Pennsylvania and neighboring states, tagged by Alexander Hamilton the “Whiskey Rebellion” to denigrate the rebels. In a republican government, he proclaimed, people should never break the laws, but work to change them by legal means—again, hardly a revolutionary position.

       
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In the 1790s Samuel Adams served three terms as governor of Massachusetts. He made no great waves during his tenure in office; instead, he continued to proclaim, as he always had, that piety and virtue were the essential ingredients of public life. Biographies, textbooks, and popular histories routinely ignore the later years of Adams's political life, which they cannot bend to fit the profile of a revolutionary.

Samuel Adams never advocated “revolution” in the modern sense, a complete overthrow of the government and a radical restructuring of the social order. He was indeed a “revolutionary” in the parlance of the times—a firm believer in the values promoted by England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, which rooted sovereignty in the people rather than in a monarch—but we read history backward when we superimpose later meanings onto earlier times.
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FROM SAMUEL TO SAM

Except in the minds of Tories, Samuel Adams was not perceived at the time as a one-man revolution, directing the entire affair. People did
see him as a hard-hitting political force, an effective member of the radical caucus both in Boston and at the Continental Congress, but he was one among several. David Ramsay, in his two-volume history of the Revolution written in 1789, mentioned Adams three times: first, with Hancock, as one of the two men excluded by a British offer of pardon; next in a list of fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence; and finally as one of the twenty-two “most distinguished writers in favour of the rights of America.” The cast was large, although it certainly included Adams.
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School texts and popular histories in the first half of the nineteenth century did not include Samuel Adams on their rosters of Revolutionary leaders; insofar as they used any radical figure to drive the story forward, they called on Patrick Henry instead. In his multivolume American history published in midcentury, however, George Bancroft placed Adams front and center, as of course did William Wells in his popular 1865 Adams biography. Drawing on Bancroft and Wells, textbook writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depicted Adams as the prime mover of the Revolution.
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He labored “for twelve years” to achieve independence,” one said, and after that “his great work was done.”
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In this view, independence marked the end of Samuel Adams's tumultuous political career: “Although he could destroy, he did not know how to build up a state, and after 1776 he lived the most part in private, except for a brief period as governor of Massachusetts.”
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In fact, after independence Adams served until 1781 in the Continental Congress, helped draft the Articles of Confederation and the Massachusetts constitution, and then served four years as president of the Massachusetts state senate, three as lieutenant governor, and another three as governor—but in the popular imagination, he would be defined exclusively as a flamboyant revolutionary who could only tear things down.

The misreading reached its zenith with John Miller, who used the diminutive for Samuel in the title to his influential biography
Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda
. Writing in the 1930s, Miller based his portrait on a conception of revolution current at the time. Since “Sam”
was allegedly a rabble-rouser, he was “by nature . . . passionate, excitable, and violent.” This “notorious riot lover . . . continually drenched the country with propaganda.” He “summoned” the town meeting “for whatever purpose he chose.” Citing Sylvester's charges as fact, Miller wrote that Adams was active in the streets, haranguing listeners “to make a bold attack upon the royal government.” (According to other American statesmen at the time, Samuel Adams was not much for public speaking and would have made a poor soapbox orator; although he could certainly write and politick, he was “not very eloquent or Talkative,” “neither an eloquent nor easy speaker,” and “not a Demosthenes in oratory.”
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) In Miller's view, Adams's command over the people was absolute: “Boston was controlled by a trained mob and . . . Sam Adams was its keeper.” By this reading, one man alone was responsible for all the unrest; the others were “brought into the revolutionary movement against their own . . . wishes.”
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Miller's distortion of the historical Samuel Adams, like Longfellow's misrepresentation of Paul Revere, had long-lasting consequences. From the mid–twentieth century onward, meshing neatly with Cold War conceptions of revolution, it influenced not only biographical treatments of a key political figure in Boston but also the very nature and meaning of the American Revolution. Thomas A. Bailey, in his popular textbook
American Pageant
, first published in 1956, portrayed Adams as a “master propagandist and engineer of rebellion” who “appealed effectively to what was called his ‘trained mob.' ” (The passive voice, “was called,” concealed too much: it was John Miller, echoing Adams's Tory adversaries at the time, who painted the image of Adams training his mob.) The index listing for this mastermind of revolution was “Adams, Samuel, agitator.” Adams's “singular contribution,” Bailey wrote, was to form local committees of correspondence in Massachusetts:

Their chief function was to spread propaganda and information. . . . One critic referred to the committees as “the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from
the egg of sedition.” No more effective device for stimulating resistance could have been contrived, and later revolutionists have adopted some of its underground techniques in establishing “cells.”
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Here Bailey turned history on its head. The Massachusetts committees of correspondence, organized in 1772 not by Samuel Adams alone but by a cadre of patriot activists, were hardly underground groups, prototypes of Communist cells. Quite the reverse. Earlier attempts to organize committees of correspondence had withered because they were merely private clubs, with no standing and no lasting organizational structure. This time, Adams and others cleverly piggybacked them onto existing town meetings, the local governing bodies of Massachusetts. Each town meeting appointed its committee of correspondence, which would communicate with other such committees and report back to the town. As public bodies, they could (and did) broaden the base of activists and serve as an infrastructure first for resistance and then for revolution. Finally, once British authority had vanished, these public committees, with members duly appointed by their town meetings, gathered to form a de facto government, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. This was the dynamic of revolution in Massachusetts, not one man manipulating his trained mob and creating “underground” cells.
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Bailey's distortion of history was not limited to Massachusetts. The American Revolution, in fact a complex alliance of commercial interests (both South and North) and popular movements (both urban and rural), was in his view “engineered” by just “a militant minority of American radicals,” with Sam Adams and a handful of other rabble-rousers calling all the shots. While denigrating revolution, he projected a simplistic view of how history works: even popular movements are said to be the work of just a few special individuals.
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That was in 1956. Today, in its fifteenth edition (2014),
American Pageant
offers much the same message. For the first time, Bailey's name no longer appears on the cover or the title page, but the words
are his, verbatim: “master propagandist,” “engineer of rebellion,” “trained mob,” “most venomous serpent,” and so on. Only the one line about underground cells has been dropped, due perhaps to the demise of the Cold War and Communist “cells.” Further, despite a half century of scholarship demonstrating otherwise, the book still states point-blank that the Revolution was “engineered” by “a militant minority of American radicals.”
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Such distortions, which persist to this day, go back to the days preceding independence, when Adams's Tory adversaries were trying to discredit him. “Without Boston's Sam Adams, there might never have been an American Revolution,” the Tories once said, and today we are saying it again.
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This is not a good sign. The reason we can pass off Tory tales as truth is that we have unconsciously adopted their way of looking at political processes. The Tory way of thinking, which still holds sway, sees common people as “perfect Machines” who need someone with greater intelligence and drive to tell them what to do. One man leads and the rest follow adoringly.
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A comic book sold in gift shops along Boston's Freedom Trail portrays Adams speaking to a crowd on two different occasions, and each time the crowd responds: “Adams is right!” This is the face of popular protest fostered by Sam Adams mythologies.
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A COLLECTIVE AFFAIR

Bostonians had all sorts of reasons to oppose British policies, and they did not need Samuel Adams to set them in motion.

Merchant-smugglers like John Rowe, William Molineaux, Solomon Davis, Melatiah Bourne, Edward Payne, and William Cooper had much to gain by opposing British mercantile policies that restricted free trade. These men, articulate and politically effective, were certainly capable of acting on their own behalf—in fact, they had been doing so for several years before Samuel Adams ascended to a position of influence in 1765. Five years earlier, they had organized themselves into the Boston Society for Encouraging Trade and
Commerce, which sent numerous petitions to Parliament. During the nonimportation movement of 1768, a resurgent group called Merchants and Traders emerged to promote the collective interests of its members. “We feel for the Mother Country as well as our selves,” wrote Cooper, “but charity begins at home.”
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In 1770 this proactive organization evolved into a third group, the Body of the Trade, which reached out to include all those in town with a stake in trade issues, but Samuel Adams was not an acknowledged leader.
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During the Stamp Act riots, Boston's lower classes had their own motivations for ransacking the home of Thomas Hutchinson, who justified poverty because it produced “industry and frugality.” According to William Gordon, “Gentlemen of the army, who have seen towns sacked by an enemy, declare they never before saw an instance of such fury.”
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This fury was their own, not Adams's.

Starting in 1768, laborers and seamen had personal reasons for resenting the presence of British Regulars in their midst. Troops routinely stopped them in the streets, roughing them up or demanding swigs of rum. Off-duty privates competed with local workers for employment on the docks. Little wonder that these people jeered the Redcoats whenever they could.

Longshoremen and sailors had good reasons for opposing British restrictions of trade. Shipping was the backbone of Boston's economy; if the ships didn't sail, “Jack Tar” would have no work. Little wonder that ordinary men who wanted jobs responded to the confiscation of the
Liberty
or the monopolization of the tea trade by British interests.

These people did not take orders from a single authoritarian leader. Patriots worked with each other in a wide array of activist groups and political organizations, and every one of these groups engaged in collaborative processes. The Boston Caucus had been meeting since the 1720s to promote candidates who were sympathetic with popular issues, such an increased availability of hard currency; by the 1770s scores of citizens were active in three caucuses, one each for North, Middle, and South Boston. In 1765 the Loyal Nine, a group of artisans
and shopkeepers who met in Speakman's distillery, expanded into a group calling itself the Sons of Liberty, which met in John Marston's tavern; together with similar groups in other colonies, this group formed a fledgling infrastructure for coordinated resistance.
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Throughout the 1760s and 1770s, the St. Andrews Lodge of Freemasons met in the Green Dragon Tavern to discuss politics and plan political actions. Like the Sons of Liberty, the community of Masons helped give some sense of cohesion and purpose to colonial unrest.

Although Samuel Adams is not known to have been a member of the groups meeting in Marston's tavern or the Green Dragon Tavern, he did belong to the Long Room Club, a group of seventeen patriots, mostly professionals, who met above the printing press of John Gill and Benjamin Edes, publishers of the patriotic
Boston Gazette
. He was also one of the founders of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, which joined with similar groups in other Massachusetts towns and other colonies to carry the torch of resistance in the 1770s. Garry Wills, one of the most respected minds of recent times, calls the committees of correspondence Adams's “own wire service,”
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but this organization, like all the others, brought together many dedicated and talented patriots in common cause: James Warren, among the first to suggest the idea; Joseph Warren, a doctor from Harvard with great rhetorical flair; Josiah Quincy, a talented young lawyer; Joseph Greenleaf, a printer who had called the presence of British troops in Boston “an open declaration of war” against liberty; and Thomas Young, a flamboyant political activist who urged resistance at every turn.
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