Samuel Adams

Samuel Adams (Boston, 1722–1803) was an American politician, political thinker and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He led the movement in Massachusetts that became the American Revolution and helped shape the principles of American republicanism. He was a second cousin of John Adams, the fellow Founding Father who later became president.

He was one of twelve children in a family of devout Puritans, at a time when infant mortality was high. His father, a merchant and church deacon, was a leading figure in the Boston Caucus, a group that backed candidates favorable to popular causes. Samuel studied at Harvard, where his thesis argued that it was lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the commonwealth could not otherwise be preserved. His attempts at business failed, and he turned fully to politics.

From 1765 to 1774 he sat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he led the most radical faction, which called for boycotts of British goods and refusal to pay taxes imposed without colonial consent. With John Hancock he founded the Boston chapter of the Sons of Liberty. His core conviction was that the British Parliament had no right to legislate for the colonies. As a cautious politician, he did not make this position public until he had won over most of the population, since it amounted to a first step toward independence. His 1768 Massachusetts Circular Letter urged colonial non-cooperation, and in 1772 committees of correspondence linked patriots across the Thirteen Colonies. He was also a tireless propagandist in the press, and he is associated with the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

He attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, helped steer it toward independence in 1776, and helped draft the Articles of Confederation and the Massachusetts Constitution. After the war he served in the state senate and was eventually elected governor.

His reputation has shifted over time. Nineteenth-century writers praised him as an early guide to independence; in the first half of the twentieth century he was portrayed as a propagandist who incited mob violence, a view that biographers such as Mark Puls have challenged by reading his own writings. His legacy lies in the idea that political authority must answer to the rights of citizens.