Founding Myths Read online

  When Otis’s insanity rendered him ineffectual, the role of puppeteer was supposedly assumed by Samuel Adams, who was also motivated by family loyalty: his father had been defeated in the progressive Land Bank scheme many years before, and Samuel vowed to seek justice by deposing the regime that terminated his father’s dreams. Early on, according to Oliver and Hutchinson, Adams decided to foster a revolution that would lead to independence. The Stamp Act riots in 1765, the Liberty riot in 1768, the resistance to occupying soldiers, the Boston Massacre in 1770, the Tea Party in 1773, and various lesser-known demonstrations were all orchestrated by Samuel Adams, master Revolutionary strategist.

  “His Power over weak Minds was truly surprising,” wrote Oliver. Some of the “weak Minds” manipulated by Adams were those of lower-class Bostonians:

  [H]e understood human Nature, in low life, so well, that he could turn the Minds of the great Vulgar as well as the small into any Course that he might chuse . . . & he never failed of employing his Abilities to the vilest Purposes.

  But the puppets whose strings he pulled also included Boston’s most illustrious patriots, people like John Hancock:

  Mr. Hancock . . . was as closely attached to the hindermost Part of Mr. Adams as the Rattles are affixed to the Tail of the Rattle Snake. . . . His mind was a meer Tabula Rasa, & had he met with a good Artist he would have enstamped upon it such Character as would have made him a most useful Member of Society. But Mr. Adams who was restless in endeavors to disturb ye Peace of Society, & who was ever going about seeking whom he might devour, seized upon him as his Prey, & stamped such Lessons upon his Mind, as have not as yet been erased.9

  By attributing all rebellious events first to Otis and then to Adams, disgruntled Tories like Oliver and Hutchinson exhibited the classic conservative denial of social protest: the people, if left to their own devices, will never rise up on their own. Without ringleaders, organizers, rabble-rousers, troublemakers, or outside agitators, the status quo will not be challenged because nothing is basically wrong. All protests and rebellions can be dismissed; demands and grievances need never be taken seriously.

  It’s easy to see why his Tory adversaries cast Samuel Adams in the leading role. Adams was a marvelous politician in every respect, equally at home in political chambers and on the Boston waterfront. An accomplished writer, he demonstrated his mastery of the art of political polemic in a steady stream of articles published in the local newspapers. He could also wheel and deal behind the scenes. As an influential member of the Boston caucus, he exerted considerable influence on the selection of local officers and the direction of the town meeting; as clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, he figured prominently in that body’s continuing resistance to the dictates of Crown-appointed governors. He was, in sum, an extremely effective partisan of the “popular party,” and this caused his opponents in the “court party” (also called the “government party”) great consternation. In the words of a contemporary Bostonian, John Andrews: “The ultimate wish and desire of the high Government party is to get Samuel Adams out of the way when they think they may accomplish every of their plans.”10

  To get Adams “out of the way,” his adversaries called him a traitor. On January 25, 1769, a Tory informer named Richard Sylvester swore in an affidavit that seven months earlier, the day after a large crowd had protested the seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty, he had overheard Adams say to a group of seven men on the street, “If you are men, behave like men. Let us take up arms immediately and be free and seize all the King’s officers.” Later, Sylvester claimed, Adams had said during one of his many visits to his home, “We will destroy every soldier that dare put foot on shore. His majesty has no right to send troops here to invade the country. I look upon them as foreign enemies.”11

  Sylvester’s trumped-up allegations were sent to London, but the evidence appeared questionable, and the charge of treason was not upheld.12 Sylvester’s testimony was then archived; many years later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the preeminent historian George Bancroft uncovered the affidavit, accepted it as fact, and repeated it word for word, no questions asked: “[Adams] reasoned that it would be just to destroy every soldier whose foot should touch the shore. ‘The king,’ he would say, ‘has no right to send troops here to invade the country; if they come, they will come as foreign enemies.’ ”13 Historians ever since have taken Bancroft at face value, just as Bancroft accepted Sylvester, and those snippets from Sylvester are repeated verbatim, as if they came from Adams himself, in textbooks, popular histories, and on the Internet today.14 This discredited accusation continues to provide the basic “documentation” that Adams was a hellfire revolutionary, “Godfather” to the “mob,” inciting riots at every available opportunity.

  SAM ADAMS’S REVOLUTION

  Based on the word of his Tory foes, we have granted Samuel Adams superhuman powers. This one man, we say, set Boston all ablaze—but the historical record tells a different story. Consider the various Sam Adams tales that have emerged over the years.

  Stamp Act Riots: “Adams’s Waterfront Gang”

  In 1765 Boston crowds gathered on two different occasions to protest the new stamp tax. On August 14, a crowd of approximately three thousand colonists burned an effigy of the tax collector, Andrew Oliver, and destroyed his office. Twelve nights later, a more violent crowd demolished the home of the wealthy Tory official Thomas Hutchinson. Following the lead of Hutchinson and other contemporary Tories, modern writers attribute these mob actions to “Adams’s waterfront gang.” According to William Hallahan in The Day the American Revolution Began, Sam Adams “had his revenge on Hutchinson for humiliating his father.”15 In fact, Adams had nothing to do with either event. He approved of the August 14 demonstration after the fact, but he did not organize it—that was the work of the Loyal Nine, a group of Boston activists that did not include Adams. He was appalled by the riot of August 26 because of its “truly mobbish Nature,” and he acted swiftly “to assist the Majistrate to their utmost in preventing or suppressing any further Disorder.”16

  Boston Massacre: “An Adams-Inspired Mob”

  In Red Dawn at Lexington, author Louis Birnbaum states that the confrontation that resulted in the Boston Massacre was the work of “an Adams-inspired mob.”17 A 2012 college textbook takes this one step further: the city’s entire population, “some 15,000 Bostonians,” was “under the sway of Samuel Adams,” making a confrontation with soldiers “nearly inevitable.”18

  There is nothing in the historical record, however, that suggests Adams had anything to do with the seamen, laborers, and apprentices who threw snowballs at British soldiers and taunted them to shoot. Adams did become involved in the aftermath of the massacre. The Boston town meeting demanded that royal officials remove two regiments from the city to an island in Boston Harbor, and it appointed Adams to serve as one of its spokesmen. When the military commander offered to remove one regiment, Adams responded: “If he could remove the 29th regiment, he could remove the 14th also, and it was at his peril to refuse.” According to Thomas Hutchinson, acting as governor at the time, Adams said that if the troops were not removed, “the rage of the people would vent itself”—not just against the soldiers, but against Hutchinson “in particular.”19 Later writers and historians have used this incident, as reported by Hutchinson, to prove the immense powers of Samuel Adams, for the troops did leave, and they labeled the departing Redcoats “Samuel Adams’s Regiments,” a term coined for political purposes back in London.20 In truth, as Adams himself would be the first to observe, Hutchinson relented not because of one man’s words, but because he feared “the rage of the people” who awaited his response.


  Boston Tea Party: “The Signal”

  On December 16, 1773, as three ships sat in the harbor laden with tea, several thousand angry patriots gathered in Boston’s Old South Meeting House to figure out what to do. Late in the day, Francis Rotch, beleaguered owner of one of the tea-laden ships in the harbor, announced that Governor Hutchinson remained firm and would not allow his vessel to return to Britain with its cargo still on board. At that moment, Sam Adams climbed on top of a bench and announced to the crowd: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” According to the mythic story, everybody knew what he meant: that was the “signal” for the “Tea Party” to begin. “Instant pandemonium broke out amid cheers, yells, and war whoops,” one recent narrative declares. “The crowd poured out of the Old South Meeting [House] and headed for Griffin’s Wharf.”21

  This story, now included in virtually every narrative of the Boston Tea Party (including my own People’s History of the American Revolution, published in 2001), was fabricated ninety-two years later to promote the image of an all-powerful Sam Adams, in firm control of the Boston crowd. According to several eyewitness accounts, Adams did in fact state “that he could think of nothing further to be done,” but this was not some “signal,” for the timing was way off. According to several eyewitness accounts, not until ten or fifteen minutes later did Indian yells trigger an exodus, and even at that point Adams and others tried to stem the tide, quiet the crowd, and continue the meeting.22

  George Bancroft, writing in 1854, condensed the timeline of the source information, leaving out those ten or fifteen minutes: “Samuel Adams rose and gave the word: ‘This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.’ On the instant, a cry was heard at the porch; the war-whoop resounded; a body of men, forty or fifty in number, disguised and clad in blankets as Indians, each holding a hatchet, passed by the door; and encouraged by Samuel Adams, Hancock, and others, and increased on the way to near two hundred, marched two by two to Griffin’s Wharf.”23 The foreshortened narrative both heightened the drama and hinted at an element of causality.

  A few years later, in 1865, William V. Wells, Adams’s first biographer, took Bancroft’s hint and created what would ever after be accepted as dogma: Adams’s statement was “the signal for the Boston Tea Party,” he pronounced definitively. “Instantly a shout was heard at a door of the church from those who had been intently listening for the voice of Adams. The war whoop resounded. Forty or fifty men disguised as Indians, who must have been concealed near by, appeared and passed by the church entrance, and, encouraged by Adams, Hancock, and others, hurried along to Griffin’s, now Liverpool Wharf.” This is the ultimate Sam Adams story—the people of Boston had been trained to follow a secret, coded message issued by their master—and Americans have been telling it ever since.24

  The Architect of Independence

  Some say 1765, others 1768, but nearly all popular renditions of the Sam Adams story state categorically that he favored independence several years before it was declared in 1776 and long before any other patriot entertained such a notion.25 This is what supposedly made him such an effective leader—he had a vision and stuck to it. This is also why we promote him as our hero: he gives force and direction to the saga that terminates with the birth of a new nation. According to his own writings, however, Samuel Adams did not advocate independence until the winter of 1775–1776, the same time many others started favoring it. Following the lead of historian Pauline Maier, we can trace Adams’s record on the issue of independence:26

  •In 1765 Adams argued that the colonists were and always had been “good Subjects” who had “brought with them all the Rights & Laws of the Mother State”; they had never made any “Claim of Independency,” he boasted, despite their geographic isolation.27 At that time, there was no reason that Adams and his fellow colonists would even consider abandoning the country they deemed to be the freest in the world.

  •In 1768, when British troops started occupying Boston, Adams wrote forcefully that colonists should be “restored to the rights, privileges and immunities of free subjects.”28 Boston’s problems, he asserted, were caused “by the Vile insinuations of wicked men in America”—not by any structural irregularities of the British Constitution.29

  •In 1771 Adams argued, “By our compact with our King, wherein is contain’d the rule of his government and the measure of our submission, we have all the liberties and immunities of Englishmen. . . . It is our duty therefore to contend for them whenever attempts are made to violate them.”30

  •In 1773 Adams still clung to the notion that problems with the British government stemmed from “a few men born & educated amongst us, & governd by Avarice & a Lust of power.” If these men—people like Thomas Hutchinson and Peter Oliver—could be “removed from his Majesty’s Service and Confidence here,” peace might be restored.31

  •In 1774, writing from the First Continental Congress, Adams urged Joseph Warren, his associate in Boston, to oppose country radicals who were moving “to set up another form of government.” Even at this late date, and while writing to his closest compatriot, he dismissed as “groundless” the charges that Adams, Warren, and other Boston patriots were aiming at “a total independency.”32

  Not until patriots and Redcoats had engaged in pitched battles for the better part of a year did Samuel Adams publicly advocate a total break from Britain.33 By this time, as Adams himself stated, declaring independence was something of a moot point. We have no way of ascertaining when he privately started wishing for independence. Even if it was sooner than his public pronouncements indicate, his increasing radicalization probably stemmed from his frustration with British obstinacy, not from a grand vision he possessed at the outset of resistance to imperial authority.

  The Man Who Made a Revolution

  Sam Adams gives our Revolution some punch. The rest of the famous patriots, Patrick Henry and Tom Paine excepted, come across as cautious, rational men. Most were also very rich. These dignitaries make honorable founders but poor revolutionaries—and so we turn to Sam Adams, an allegedly true incendiary.

  The real Samuel Adams does not live up to the image of a flaming revolutionary. Throughout a political career that spanned four decades, he opposed violent acts that threatened a well-ordered society:

  •In 1765 Adams forcefully condemned the riots on the night of August 26, which destroyed private property. At the town meeting that followed, he agreed with the “universal Consternation” and “Detestation” of the event.34

  •In 1768, in response to crowd action induced by the seizure of John Hancock’s vessel, Liberty, Adams wrote in the Boston Gazette: “I am no friend to ‘Riots, Tumults and unlawful Assemblies.’ ”35 Further, he argued that most colonists were “orderly and peaceable inhabitants” whose only aim was to enjoy the rights of Englishmen. Had Adams abandoned this stance in 1768, he would have confirmed Sylvester’s claims and lost his political effectiveness.36

  •In 1773 Adams told a compatriot, “I have long feard that this unhappy Contest between Britain & America will end in Rivers of Blood. . . . [I]t is the highest prudence to prevent if possible so dreadful a Calamity.” This was a private correspondence that likely reflected his true feelings, not a public pronouncement in which he would have to be circumspect. A deeply religious Christian, Adams did not see “Rivers of Blood” as an optimum solution to the escalating conflict.37

  •In 1774 Adams counseled his friend James Warren “to avoid Blood and Tumult” and to oppose “Rash Spirits” who would “by their Impetuosity involve us in unsurmountable Difficulties.”38

  •In 1776 Adams pronounced wit
h great pleasure that independence had been achieved “without great internal Tumults & violent Convulsions.”39

  •In 1780 Adams served on a three-man committee that drafted a constitution for Massachusetts. While the House of Representatives, elected by the people with a minimal property requirement for the franchise, was and should be “purely democratic,” he said, representatives were prone to excessive “passions and whims.” The house must therefore be held in check by the “moderating power” of the senate, the governor, and his council, and that is why he supported an executive veto. This was not the stance of a revolutionary populist.40

  •In 1786 and 1787 Adams advocated the suppression of a popular uprising of farmers and debtors, labeled by its enemies “Shays’ Rebellion” after one of its many leaders. As president of the state senate, he pushed to suspend writs of habeas corpus. Afterward, when many of his contemporaries advocated leniency, Adams wanted to hang the rebels. Again in 1794, Adams endorsed the quashing of a popular insurrection in western Pennsylvania and neighboring states, tagged by Alexander Hamilton the “Whiskey Rebellion” to denigrate the rebels. In a republican government, he proclaimed, people should never break the laws, but work to change them by legal means—again, hardly a revolutionary position.

  •In the 1790s Samuel Adams served three terms as governor of Massachusetts. He made no great waves during his tenure in office; instead, he continued to proclaim, as he always had, that piety and virtue were the essential ingredients of public life. Biographies, textbooks, and popular histories routinely ignore the later years of Adams’s political life, which they cannot bend to fit the profile of a revolutionary.