Samuel Adams: A Life

Stoll, Ira

3.9

2,176 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 1400109787 ISBN 13: 9781400109784

Publisher: Tantor Audio, 2008

"I pity Mr. Sam Adams," his cousin John Adams wrote to his wife, "for he was born a Rebel." At virtually every juncture of the American Revolution, from the Boston Massacre and Tea Party to Lexington and Concord and the ratification of the Constitution, Samuel Adams played a forceful role. With his fiery rhetoric and religious fervor, he was in many respects the moral conscience of the new nation. "The love of liberty," he thundered, "is interwoven in the soul of man, and can never be totally extinguished."

And yet history has neglected him; today Samuel Adams is best known as a brand of beer. As relations with Great Britain healed in the nineteenth century, historians were all too willing to dismiss him as a zealot; Adams's distrust of secularism (he envisioned America as a "Christian Sparta") has not endeared him to many contemporary scholars, either. Ira Stoll's fascinating biography not only restores this figure to his rightful place in history but portrays him as a man of God whose skepticism of a powerful central government, uncompromising support for freedom of the press, concern about the influence of money on elections, voluble love of liberty, and selfless endurance in a war for freedom has enormous relevance to Americans today.

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About the Author:

Ira Stoll is vice president and managing editor of the New York Sun, which he helped to found.

Prelude

"Pillar of Fire by Night"

1777

"Let us awaken then, and evince a different spirit, -- a spirit that shall inspire the people with confidence in themselves and in us, -- a spirit that will encourage them to persevere in this glorious struggle, until their rights and liberties shall be established on a rock."

-- Samuel Adams, 1777

Of all the difficult moments in the American Revolution, one of the most desperate for the revolutionaries was late September 1777. British troops controlled New York City. The Americans had lost the strategic stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, to the British in July. In Delaware, on September 11, troops led by General George Washington had lost the Battle of Brandywine, in which two hundred Americans were killed, five hundred wounded, and four hundred captured. In Pennsylvania, early in the morning of September 21, another three hundred American soldiers were killed or wounded and one hundred captured in a British surprise attack that became known as the Paoli Massacre.

Washington's troops were suffering from what one delegate to Congress called "fatigue occasioned by the bad rainy weather & long night marches." The rain had soaked the American army's ammunition, making it useless. The American troops would spend the coming winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, subsisting on firecakes made of flour and water, and leaving bloody footprints in the snow for lack of shoes; already one thousand of Washington's roughly nine thousand troops were barefoot. The delegates to Congress doubted their own generals. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, wrote to General Washington, "I am sorry to observe that two officers in high command in our army are said to be much addicted to liquor: what trust, what confidence can be reposed in such men?"

The diplomatic situation was similarly unpromising for the revolutionaries. France had not yet agreed to an alliance with America. Some individual French officers volunteered on their own, but even they were suffering, or worse. The Journals of Congress for September 17 record that one "Mons. du Coudray, colonel brigadier in the service of his most Christian Majesty, the king of France, and commander in chief of the artillery in the French colonies of America, gallantly offered to join the American army as a volunteer, but, in his way thither, was most unfortunately drowned in attempting to pass the Schuylkill." The Congress resolved that the corpse of the man John Adams said had a reputation as "the most learned and promising officer in France" be buried "at the expence of the United States, and with the honors of war."

Burial with the honors of war was about the best that American political leaders could hope for. The enemy was closing in. Pennsylvanians lowered the 2,080-pound bronze bell from the spire of their State House, with its inscription from Leviticus, "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," and carted it to the basement of the Zion Reformed Church in Allentown for safekeeping. And just in time -- the British captured Pennsylvania's capital, Philadelphia, America's largest city, on September 26. Congress, which had been meeting there, fled briefly to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then to York, a hundred miles west of Philadelphia. The departure from Philadelphia was frantic, prompted by an alarm from Washington's aide, Alexander Hamilton, who said the enemy soldiers were so close that one had shot his horse. One delegate to Congress was wakened by a servant at two in the morning and advised to abandon the city. A delegate from Virginia, Richard Henry Lee, evacuated Philadelphia in such a hurry that he left his extra clothes behind.

Another delegate to Congress, John Adams of Massachusetts, wrote in his diary, "The prospect is chilling, on every Side: Gloomy, dark, melancholly, and dispiriting."

The number of delegates present at Congress had dwindled to a mere twenty from the fifty-six members who had signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Those remaining gathered for a private meeting in York to question whether there was any hope of success.

One of those present was John Adams's cousin, the patriot leader Samuel Adams, who had already suffered losses that would have shattered an ordinary man. His first wife and four of their children died of natural causes before the war began. At the Battle of Bunker Hill, British officers decapitated Samuel Adams's close friend Joseph Warren and presented his head as a trophy to the British commanding general. Samuel Adams had spent the better part of three years at the Congress in Philadelphia separated from his two surviving children and his second wife. "Matters seem to be drawing to a crisis," he had written her recently. Back in Boston, the British soldiers ripped out the pews of Old South Church, where Samuel Adams's father had once worshipped, covered the floor with dirt, and used the church as a riding academy. Samuel Adams's own house in Boston was vandalized by British troops so badly that it was uninhabitable. If the Revolution failed, Samuel Adams could expect to meet the same fate at the hands of the British as Warren.

Yet on that day in York in late September 1777, Samuel Adams, a slightly heavy, gray-haired fifty-five-year-old with large dark blue eyes, a prominent nose, and a high forehead, gave his fellow members of Congress a talk of encouragement.

"If we despond, public confidence is destroyed, the people will no longer yield their support to a hopeless contest, and American liberty is no more," Samuel Adams said in the voice John Adams described as clear and harmonious. "Through the darkness which shrouds our prospects the ark of safety is visible. Despondency becomes not the dignity of our cause, nor the character of those who are its supporters."

He went on, comparing the American revolutionaries to the Israelites who had left the slavery of Egypt. According to Exodus, chapter 13, God had guided them in the wilderness with a "pillar of cloud by day" and a "pillar of fire by night." Samuel Adams addressed the delegates:

Let us awaken then, and evince a different spirit, -- a spirit that shall inspire the people with confidence in themselves and in us, -- a spirit that will encourage them to persevere in this glorious struggle, until their rights and liberties shall be established on a rock. We have proclaimed to the world our determination "to die freemen, rather than to live slaves." We have appealed to Heaven for the justice of our cause, and in Heaven we have placed our trust. Numerous have been the manifestations of God's providence in sustaining us. In the gloomy period of adversity, we have had "our cloud by day and pillar of fire by night." We have been reduced to distress, and the arm of Omnipotence has raised us up. Let us still rely in humble confidence on Him who is mighty to save. Good tidings will soon arrive. We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.

When Samuel Adams said that the "ark of safety" was visible "through the darkness," he turned out to be prescient. On October 17, at Saratoga, north of Albany, New York, the American general Horatio Gates accepted the surrender of 5,800 British soldiers led by General John Burgoyne. The American troops seized from the British twenty-seven pieces of artillery and thousands of pieces of small arms and ammunition.

Detailed news of the victory at the Battle of Saratoga did not reach Congress at York until October 31, but when it did it was greeted with exuberance. "We had almost began to despair, but at length our joy was full," wrote a congressman from Connecticut, Eliphalet Dyer. The president of the Congress, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, wrote, "the glorious intelligence is now extending from City to City diffusing Joy in the heart of every Loyal American." The victory at Saratoga turned the tide of the war. News of it was decisive in bringing France into a full alliance with America against the British. Samuel Adams joked that Gates's messenger, who had dawdled for a day between Saratoga and York courting a young woman he later married, should be presented with spurs and a horsewhip.

On November 1, just after receiving news of the victory at Saratoga, Congress adopted a report drafted by Samuel Adams, declaring Thursday, December 18, as "a day of thanksgiving" to God, "particularly in that he hath been pleased in so great a measure to prosper the means used for the support of our troops and to crown our arms with most signal success." The resolution went on to say that the day would be set aside so that:

with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor; and that together with their sincere acknowledgments and offerings, they may join the penitent confession of their manifold sins, whereby they had forfeited every favour, and their humble and earnest supplication that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance; that it may please him graciously to afford his blessing on the governments of these states respectively, and prosper the public council of the whole; to inspire our commanders both by land and sea, and all under them, with that wisdom and fortitude which may render them fit instruments, under the providence of Almighty God, to secure for these United States the greatest of all human blessings, independence and peace; that it may please him to prosper the trade and manufactures of the people and the labour of the husbandman, that our land may yet yield its increase; to take schools and seminaries of education, so necessary for cultivating the principles of true liberty, virtue and piety, under his nurturing hand, and to prosper the means of religion for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth "in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost."

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