I very much enjoyed this biography of Samuel Adams, who was born into a prosperous family in 1722 in the city state of Boston. Adams could afford to attend and graduate from Harvard, but he squandered his inheritance before becoming Boston’s most inept tax collector. Elite education developed his mastery of words while downward mobility cultivated his empathy for working people — and his rage against men of fortunes, privileges and luck. He especially hated a fellow Bostonian, Thomas Hutchinson, who grew ever richer and more powerful by acquiring multiple offices, including chief justice of the superior court and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts — until Adams ruined his popularity with insidious rumors. Both sides crafted conspiracy theories. A lot of time is spent of Adams explaining why he felt unfairly dealt with. While Adams claimed that British leaders plotted to ruin colonial prosperity and freedom, Loyalists depicted Boston’s radicals as conspiring to dupe common people into wreaking anarchy.
Adams became Boston’s leading revolutionary, rallying that seaport to resist Parliament’s taxes and reject British rule. Unlike his cousin John Adams, Samuel cared more about swaying men behind the scenes than about taking credit for posterity. Slipping in and out of backrooms, he seemed to manage every protest, riot, election and newspaper diatribe. His many friends recalled Adams as a selfless hero utterly devoted to liberty. His many enemies defined him as a reckless and deceitful incendiary. Adams left us too sparse a paper trail to find a deeper character between the polarized accounts, burning most of his letters lest they implicate friends in treason. Ironically, as the financially strapped Adams, he inherited the lowest rung on the family business ladder, and it is why he is widely known today.
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