“Friends! Fellow Countrymen! We have petitioned. We have remonstrated. We have supplicated. We have prostrated ourselves before the throne of British majesty, and it avails us nothing! This meeting can do nothing more to save the country! Let every man now turn his face toward Griffin’s Wharf.”
I heard these words from Samuel Adams at the Old South Meeting House in Boston. I immediately leaped to my feet and joined the throng marching to Griffin’s Wharf. The destination of the rowdy mob was a cargo of tea owned by the British East India Company. We tossed the tea into the harbor in protest of taxation without representation.
My participation was not on December 16, 1773, the famed night of the Boston Tea Party. It was December 16, 2005. Although a reenactment, it remained a stirring call to arms. Adams’s meaning was clear: the time for talk was over. Samuel Adams’ famous words, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!” forced the protesters out of their pews and into the street.
Every revolution needs a rabble-rouser, and Adams was the pervasive firebrand of the American Revolution. He was of normal height for the time, with sharp, angular features. One observer described him as “lean as a greyhound.” John Adams, his second cousin, said, that when riled, his eyes “sparkled like diamonds.” His roots were Puritan, and he disdained finery. A British officer sneered that he looked like a “threadbare clergyman.” Despite appearing average in stature, Adams possessed a larger-than-life personality.
Samuel Adams formed the Boston Committee of Correspondence (1772) to share information, coordinate protests, and expose British tyranny. Within two years, there were 300 similar committees throughout the colonies, converting Boston activism into a colony-wide fight. He amplified a small riot until it became the infamous “Boston Massacre.” He helped found the clandestine Sons of Liberty, which added street muscle to the resistance. He popularized James Otis Jr.’s slogan, “no taxation without representation,” orchestrated the Boston Tea Party, and helped organize Paul Revere’s Ride. Samuel Adams was omnipresent. No wonder he is called the “Father of the American Revolution.”
Adams was a revolutionary, but of a different nature than most. British officials scoffed that Adams’ followers were a “tippling, nasty, vicious crew” from seedy taverns. The truth of the matter is that he recruited Sons of Liberty partisans from church choirs. Adams blended faith and rebellion to build a grassroots army that toppled an empire.
Today, we hear “no taxation without representation” and think the hullabaloo was about taxes. Our Revolution was primarily about the lack of representation, rather than taxes. Prominent men of the era, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were angry that they did not have the privileges of British citizenship. They were subjects of the empire. If the colonists could not be British, then they would become Americans.
Adams signed the Declaration of Independence immediately after John Hancock’s oversized signature. He did not serve as a soldier in the war, stating that his weapon was “the pen, not the sword.” Adams refused to attend the Constitutional Convention because he feared giving more power to the government and fought for a Bill of Rights before supporting ratification. Revolutionaries often fade away in disillusionment or take control of the government they helped foment. Adams chose the second course and served three terms as governor of Massachusetts. Ironically, as governor, he crushed Shays’ Rebellion.
Revolutions require more than rabble-rousers; otherwise, they go awry. Successful revolutions require a clear and workable philosophical underpinning. The Enlightenment provided the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution. The Founding of the United States of America is the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment.
Samuel Adams studied Enlightenment ideas at Harvard and referenced Locke in his short and forceful “Rights of the Colonists” (1772). He did not write intellectual treatises. He was a man of the street. He turned Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau into slogans, riots, and policy.
Samuel Adams had a knack for exciting people to act. He envisioned a new nation where “The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.”
His genius was getting others to share this vision … and
make it happen.
This article was first published in Constitution America.
