The Founding Father Who Started It All

Stacy Schiff is the best-selling author of several biographies, including Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), her Pulitzer Prize winning "portrait of a marriage" and biography of Vera Nabokov. In her 2022 book The Revolutionary she turns her attention to Samuel Adams, the second cousin of our second president John Adams, and someone who most of us today know only as a brand of beer.

Consider these points:

So why is it that most of us only know the name Samuel Adams because of the beer named after him?

It's actually Adams' own fault. Or perhaps better said, it's by design and the designer was Adams himself.

Samuel Adams came from a prominent Boston family that made its living as "malsters" who dried and prepared barley for fermentation by brewers. But Samuel himself by middle age was a failure, in part due to his own lack of business sense, and in part due to the failure of the "Land Bank", a scheme designed to bring liquidity to the Massachusetts economy that his father had invested in and served as Director of, and that was upended by the British Parliament.

Samuel’s hard luck led to his stint as a tax collector, the first governmental role he played in pre-Revolutionary Boston. He would go on to become a member of the Massachusetts House and a firmly principled advocate for the rights of the colonists in America.

Adams saw that, as full British citizens, the colonist’s rights were under attack by the British Parliament, which, through a series of Acts, was taxing Americans who had no representative in that legislative body. Adams worked both inside the system, as a member of the Massachusetts House, and outside of it - writing and publishing under multiple pseudonyms - to lead resistance to these Acts.

Because he himself was a member of the government Adams had to be careful to not be seen as going too far or he risked arrest. He tended to work behind the scenes and left few notes behind. Even after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War he was reticent to go into detail about his role. And his personality lent itself better to resistance than to governing, which meant he did not play much of a role in the government of the new country once its freedom was won. Thus he has slowly faded into the background of our collective national memory.

Schiff’s book is a combination of well-known events and lesser known actions, mostly behind the scenes, showing Adams drumming up support, and driving resistance to the actions of the British Parliament. These events all led to the conclusion by the colonies that they had been left with no other choice but to separate from the mother country.

What Schiff’s book shows is that, without the work of Adams that conclusion may not have been seen as inevitable. Without the impetus of the behind the scenes work of Samuel Adams our American Revolution likely would not have unfolded as it did. Adams may not be recognized as such in the history books, but he was indeed The Revolutionary.

RATING: Four and a Half Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌠

RATING COMMENTS: An excellent biography of Samuel Adams. The book drags just a bit in the middle but is nevertheless a compelling read for what it reveals about how the American Revolution was birthed.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I got my ebook from my local library by way of the Libby app.