I had been curious about Samuel Adams’ story for a while, but his story is so rarely told in any detail that I also didn’t know why I should care about him. What little I knew, I knew from the history of John Adams, the second US President, and Samuel’s cousin. Each bio I read of John Adams mentioned a detail about his trip to France, during the Revolution, that suggests something huge about Samuel before moving on without explanation. The story usually goes, while John was in France, he kept getting annoyed by people he met who always asked about his much more famous cousin, Samuel. In the context of a book about John, I found it’s surprisingly easy to read that, wonder why Samuel was more famous, and then go back to reading about John as my curiosity fades from memory.
It’s been my experience that Samuel is barely mentioned, if at all, when the revolutionary story is told. It’s easy to know a lot about US history without knowing anything about Samuel. Most people are like this, even historians!
I was at my local bookstore, wondering what to read next, when I saw a new biography of Samuel Adams sitting on the shelf. I thought now’s the time! and picked it up. Samuel’s actual story turned out to be an incredible surprise. The dude was a force of nature. His friends and family saw him as noble, intelligent, generous, and energetic. His foes found him so difficult they called him the Machiavelli of Chaos. WHAT a way of putting it, right?!
Thomas Jefferson puts him at a particular moment in US history by describing him as “truly the man of the Revolution”. Samuel is arguably the person most responsible for starting the revolution. While it’s well known Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, it usually isn’t mentioned that he lifted a lot of ideas, and even some of the text, from Samuel. Samuel even convinced colonists to give up British tea and drink coffee instead because the beeessssst part of waaakiiiing up is cancel cuuulllllture in yooouuuurrrr cup.
On both the first read, but especially the second, I kept coming back to a sense that I know people like Samuel. He is someone that went hard on their principles. A lot of people I knew in the east coast music scene and open source tech scene were / are like that. We all felt it was a duty to live in alignment with our principles and put in the effort to support each other in doing the same. That’s exactly what Samuel does.
My favorite way to consider him is to imagine his crew singing Fugazi lyrics as they toss tea into Boston Harbor. We owe you nothing! You have no control! Many of Fugazi’s lyrics could be things Samuel said. That’s probably why I found it so easy to see myself in his story. I also sang those lyrics, back in 2023, in a basement in Brooklyn when I recorded a cover of that Fugazi song (Merchandise).
If Samuel Adams were alive today, I believe he’d wear a black hoodie and he’d listen to Fugazi or Propagandhi. There is an undeniable punk rock vibe throughout his story. By the time I was done with the book the second time, I felt I had to share Sam’s story with all my musical friends and my hacker friends. I wondered if perhaps they’d see themselves in his story. Maybe my creative friends, who are used to feeling the difficulty of living creative lives, would feel encouraged by how much they have in common with the people who created the US. They were the outliers, the artists, and the misfits. The ones who try to live humbly for their ideals with the certainty that comes from believing the ideas themselves are unfuckwithable. Maybe his story will inspire us to resist when necessary too, in case that comes up for any reason.
First, A Quiet Man
“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.”
– Samuel Adams
The first 41 years of Samuel’s life are amusingly uneventful. His life is a riches to rags story. He was born in 1722 into one of those New England Puritan families that believed the Church of England hadn’t reformed enough. The only thing he really cared about was living virtuously and God. Money wasn’t a priority for him at all. He later becomes proud of that and says to a friend that “poverty is not as disagreeable as wealthy folks would have you believe.”
He went to Harvard at age 14. His peers at Harvard pulled all kinds of stunts, but Samuel didn’t. He was late to something just once and then never again. Samuel didn’t respond to flattery and he was distrustful of anyone who did. There were almost no signs of who he’d become. Well… except for the topic of his Master’s thesis: Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?
Every now and then you see a glimpse of his potential. It’s hard to notice because it’s surrounded by his hilarious stories of failure. For example, he inherits his father’s malted barley business and then he ran it into the ground. He’d say he had no mind for all the bookkeeping, but the truth is that he just didn’t care. He loved politics too much to do anything else, yet he hadn’t figured that out yet. Instead, he would express himself politically by rebelling for causes he believed in with almost no regard for the effect it would have on his life.
Over time, he inevitably accumulates debt. It eventually becomes overwhelming and he gets sentenced to become a tax collector for the King. He hated the whole idea of kings, let alone taxes, so he did that job badly on purpose. He wasn’t trying to start a movement, but he was definitely testing what he, as an individual, could get away with. He went out of his way to ensure he had the moral high ground whenever he rebelled. At this point in his life, it’s quite difficult to resist a king, but he’s figuring it out. He just needs to convince everyone else to do it too.
A Wild Man Appears
George Washington gets all kinds of credit in US mythology. It’s rarely mentioned that he was a cocky youth who accidentally started the real first world war. George Washington was an ambitious youth. He was just 22 in May 1754 when he commanded a Virginia militia to ambush a French patrol. A
