Samuel Adams

September 27, 1722 – October 2, 1803

Boston organizer of the Sons of Liberty and the committees of correspondence, the man the British most wanted to arrest.

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Samuel Adams was born on September 27, 1722, in Boston, the son of a prosperous brewer and church deacon who was active in local politics. He graduated from Harvard, where his master's thesis argued that it was lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the commonwealth could not otherwise be preserved, and then failed at nearly everything else. He lost money in business, let the family malt house decline, and as Boston's tax collector fell thousands of pounds behind because he could not bring himself to press his neighbors. What he could do was write, organize, and persuade. When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, Adams found his calling. He drafted the Boston town meeting's protests, helped organize the Sons of Liberty, and filled the newspapers with essays under a dozen pen names. As clerk of the Massachusetts House he wrote the 1768 circular letter that urged the other colonies to resist the Townshend duties, which brought British troops to Boston. After the Boston Massacre he demanded their removal and organized the yearly commemorations. In 1772 he created the committees of correspondence that linked Patriot leaders across the colonies, the first American political network. On December 16, 1773, he presided over the meeting at Old South Meeting House that ended with the Boston Tea Party. The British considered him the most dangerous man in America. In April 1775 the troops that marched on Lexington and Concord hoped to arrest him and John Hancock along the way, and after the fighting began the king offered pardons to every rebel except the two of them. Adams served in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1781, pushed hard for independence, and signed the Declaration of Independence. He later helped write the Massachusetts constitution, supported the federal Constitution once a bill of rights was promised, and served as governor of Massachusetts from 1794 to 1797. He died in Boston on October 2, 1803. His younger cousin John Adams became president; Samuel remained what he had always been, the organizer who turned a town's grievances into a revolution. Follow his work in the American Revolution journey.

Samuel Adams

Further reading

Samuel Adams

Further reading