Founding Myths Read online

  Samuel Adams never advocated “revolution” in the modern sense, a complete overthrow of the government and a radical restructuring of the social order. He was indeed a “revolutionary” in the parlance of the times—a firm believer in the values promoted by England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, which rooted sovereignty in the people rather than in a monarch—but we read history backward when we superimpose later meanings onto earlier times.41

  FROM SAMUEL TO SAM

  Except in the minds of Tories, Samuel Adams was not perceived at the time as a one-man revolution, directing the entire affair. People did see him as a hard-hitting political force, an effective member of the radical caucus both in Boston and at the Continental Congress, but he was one among several. David Ramsay, in his two-volume history of the Revolution written in 1789, mentioned Adams three times: first, with Hancock, as one of the two men excluded by a British offer of pardon; next in a list of fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence; and finally as one of the twenty-two “most distinguished writers in favour of the rights of America.” The cast was large, although it certainly included Adams.42

  School texts and popular histories in the first half of the nineteenth century did not include Samuel Adams on their rosters of Revolutionary leaders; insofar as they used any radical figure to drive the story forward, they called on Patrick Henry instead. In his multivolume American history published in midcentury, however, George Bancroft placed Adams front and center, as of course did William Wells in his popular 1865 Adams biography. Drawing on Bancroft and Wells, textbook writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depicted Adams as the prime mover of the Revolution.43 He labored “for twelve years” to achieve independence,” one said, and after that “his great work was done.”44 In this view, independence marked the end of Samuel Adams’s tumultuous political career: “Although he could destroy, he did not know how to build up a state, and after 1776 he lived the most part in private, except for a brief period as governor of Massachusetts.”45 In fact, after independence Adams served until 1781 in the Continental Congress, helped draft the Articles of Confederation and the Massachusetts constitution, and then served four years as president of the Massachusetts state senate, three as lieutenant governor, and another three as governor—but in the popular imagination, he would be defined exclusively as a flamboyant revolutionary who could only tear things down.

  The misreading reached its zenith with John Miller, who used the diminutive for Samuel in the title to his influential biography Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda. Writing in the 1930s, Miller based his portrait on a conception of revolution current at the time. Since “Sam” was allegedly a rabble-rouser, he was “by nature . . . passionate, excitable, and violent.” This “notorious riot lover . . . continually drenched the country with propaganda.” He “summoned” the town meeting “for whatever purpose he chose.” Citing Sylvester’s charges as fact, Miller wrote that Adams was active in the streets, haranguing listeners “to make a bold attack upon the royal government.” (According to other American statesmen at the time, Samuel Adams was not much for public speaking and would have made a poor soapbox orator; although he could certainly write and politick, he was “not very eloquent or Talkative,” “neither an eloquent nor easy speaker,” and “not a Demosthenes in oratory.”46) In Miller’s view, Adams’s command over the people was absolute: “Boston was controlled by a trained mob and . . . Sam Adams was its keeper.” By this reading, one man alone was responsible for all the unrest; the others were “brought into the revolutionary movement against their own . . . wishes.”47

  Miller’s distortion of the historical Samuel Adams, like Longfellow’s misrepresentation of Paul Revere, had long-lasting consequences. From the mid–twentieth century onward, meshing neatly with Cold War conceptions of revolution, it influenced not only biographical treatments of a key political figure in Boston but also the very nature and meaning of the American Revolution. Thomas A. Bailey, in his popular textbook American Pageant, first published in 1956, portrayed Adams as a “master propagandist and engineer of rebellion” who “appealed effectively to what was called his ‘trained mob.’ ” (The passive voice, “was called,” concealed too much: it was John Miller, echoing Adams’s Tory adversaries at the time, who painted the image of Adams training his mob.) The index listing for this mastermind of revolution was “Adams, Samuel, agitator.” Adams’s “singular contribution,” Bailey wrote, was to form local committees of correspondence in Massachusetts:

  Their chief function was to spread propaganda and information. . . . One critic referred to the committees as “the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of sedition.” No more effective device for stimulating resistance could have been contrived, and later revolutionists have adopted some of its underground techniques in establishing “cells.”48

  Here Bailey turned history on its head. The Massachusetts committees of correspondence, organized in 1772 not by Samuel Adams alone but by a cadre of patriot activists, were hardly underground groups, prototypes of Communist cells. Quite the reverse. Earlier attempts to organize committees of correspondence had withered because they were merely private clubs, with no standing and no lasting organizational structure. This time, Adams and others cleverly piggybacked them onto existing town meetings, the local governing bodies of Massachusetts. Each town meeting appointed its committee of correspondence, which would communicate with other such committees and report back to the town. As public bodies, they could (and did) broaden the base of activists and serve as an infrastructure first for resistance and then for revolution. Finally, once British authority had vanished, these public committees, with members duly appointed by their town meetings, gathered to form a de facto government, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. This was the dynamic of revolution in Massachusetts, not one man manipulating his trained mob and creating “underground” cells.49

  Bailey’s distortion of history was not limited to Massachusetts. The American Revolution, in fact a complex alliance of commercial interests (both South and North) and popular movements (both urban and rural), was in his view “engineered” by just “a militant minority of American radicals,” with Sam Adams and a handful of other rabble-rousers calling all the shots. While denigrating revolution, he projected a simplistic view of how history works: even popular movements are said to be the work of just a few special individuals.50

  That was in 1956. Today, in its fifteenth edition (2014), American Pageant offers much the same message. For the first time, Bailey’s name no longer appears on the cover or the title page, but the words are his, verbatim: “master propagandist,” “engineer of rebellion,” “trained mob,” “most venomous serpent,” and so on. Only the one line about underground cells has been dropped, due perhaps to the demise of the Cold War and Communist “cells.” Further, despite a half century of scholarship demonstrating otherwise, the book still states point-blank that the Revolution was “engineered” by “a militant minority of American radicals.”51

  Such distortions, which persist to this day, go back to the days preceding independence, when Adams’s Tory adversaries were trying to discredit him. “Without Boston’s Sam Adams, there might never have been an American Revolution,” the Tories once said, and today we are saying it again.52 This is not a good sign. The reason we can pass off Tory tales as truth is that we have unconsciously adopted their way of looking at political processes. The Tory way of thinking, which still holds sway, sees common people as “perfect Machines” who need someone with greater intelligence and drive to tell them what to do. One man leads and the rest follow adoringly.53 A comic book sold
in gift shops along Boston’s Freedom Trail portrays Adams speaking to a crowd on two different occasions, and each time the crowd responds: “Adams is right!” This is the face of popular protest fostered by Sam Adams mythologies.54

  A COLLECTIVE AFFAIR

  Bostonians had all sorts of reasons to oppose British policies, and they did not need Samuel Adams to set them in motion.

  Merchant-smugglers like John Rowe, William Molineaux, Solomon Davis, Melatiah Bourne, Edward Payne, and William Cooper had much to gain by opposing British mercantile policies that restricted free trade. These men, articulate and politically effective, were certainly capable of acting on their own behalf—in fact, they had been doing so for several years before Samuel Adams ascended to a position of influence in 1765. Five years earlier, they had organized themselves into the Boston Society for Encouraging Trade and Commerce, which sent numerous petitions to Parliament. During the nonimportation movement of 1768, a resurgent group called Merchants and Traders emerged to promote the collective interests of its members. “We feel for the Mother Country as well as our selves,” wrote Cooper, “but charity begins at home.”55 In 1770 this proactive organization evolved into a third group, the Body of the Trade, which reached out to include all those in town with a stake in trade issues, but Samuel Adams was not an acknowledged leader.56

  During the Stamp Act riots, Boston’s lower classes had their own motivations for ransacking the home of Thomas Hutchinson, who justified poverty because it produced “industry and frugality.” According to William Gordon, “Gentlemen of the army, who have seen towns sacked by an enemy, declare they never before saw an instance of such fury.”57 This fury was their own, not Adams’s.

  Starting in 1768, laborers and seamen had personal reasons for resenting the presence of British Regulars in their midst. Troops routinely stopped them in the streets, roughing them up or demanding swigs of rum. Off-duty privates competed with local workers for employment on the docks. Little wonder that these people jeered the Redcoats whenever they could.

  Longshoremen and sailors had good reasons for opposing British restrictions of trade. Shipping was the backbone of Boston’s economy; if the ships didn’t sail, “Jack Tar” would have no work. Little wonder that ordinary men who wanted jobs responded to the confiscation of the Liberty or the monopolization of the tea trade by British interests.

  These people did not take orders from a single authoritarian leader. Patriots worked with each other in a wide array of activist groups and political organizations, and every one of these groups engaged in collaborative processes. The Boston Caucus had been meeting since the 1720s to promote candidates who were sympathetic with popular issues, such an increased availability of hard currency; by the 1770s scores of citizens were active in three caucuses, one each for North, Middle, and South Boston. In 1765 the Loyal Nine, a group of artisans and shopkeepers who met in Speakman’s distillery, expanded into a group calling itself the Sons of Liberty, which met in John Marston’s tavern; together with similar groups in other colonies, this group formed a fledgling infrastructure for coordinated resistance.58 Throughout the 1760s and 1770s, the St. Andrews Lodge of Freemasons met in the Green Dragon Tavern to discuss politics and plan political actions. Like the Sons of Liberty, the community of Masons helped give some sense of cohesion and purpose to colonial unrest.

  Although Samuel Adams is not known to have been a member of the groups meeting in Marston’s tavern or the Green Dragon Tavern, he did belong to the Long Room Club, a group of seventeen patriots, mostly professionals, who met above the printing press of John Gill and Benjamin Edes, publishers of the patriotic Boston Gazette. He was also one of the founders of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, which joined with similar groups in other Massachusetts towns and other colonies to carry the torch of resistance in the 1770s. Garry Wills, one of the most respected minds of recent times, calls the committees of correspondence Adams’s “own wire service,”59 but this organization, like all the others, brought together many dedicated and talented patriots in common cause: James Warren, among the first to suggest the idea; Joseph Warren, a doctor from Harvard with great rhetorical flair; Josiah Quincy, a talented young lawyer; Joseph Greenleaf, a printer who had called the presence of British troops in Boston “an open declaration of war” against liberty; and Thomas Young, a flamboyant political activist who urged resistance at every turn.60

  Many other tradesmen, artisans, and laborers met in the taverns of Boston to engage in collective action. Butchers, bakers, and leatherworkers sent petitions to the General Court and Boston’s selectmen. Daily, during their 11:00 a.m. break, shipyard workers gathered in taverns and in the streets to talk over the state of affairs. These people, working in concert, had become political actors.61

  All these people, and many more, came together for the Boston town meeting, the local governing organization that invited the participation of “the whole body of the people”; during the height of Revolutionary fervor, this came to include apprentices and others who were not granted the formal right to vote. Each year, the town meeting elected representatives to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and each year these men were handed specific instructions, approved by the town meeting, as to how they should respond to the key issues of the day.62

  The entire edifice was heavily weighted at the bottom. This was a politicized population, and that was part of the problem: British officials and local Tories found it difficult to accept, or even comprehend, the degree of popular participation in politics in Revolutionary Boston.63

  Samuel Adams functioned within this framework. He was one of the leaders of the Boston Caucus, the Long Room Club, and the committees of correspondence. He sometimes served as moderator for the town meeting. From his position as clerk of the House of Representatives he wielded considerable power at the provincial level. More a polemicist than a street leader, he drafted many letters and resolutions, giving sentiments that were shared by many a concrete expression. He was intelligent, dedicated, persuasive, and savvy—an effective activist and master politician.64 But Adams did not run the show, because nobody could. Revolutionary Boston did not function that way—and no self-respecting patriot, certainly not Samuel Adams, wanted it to function that way.

  Royal officials and Tories never did grasp the Revolutionaries’ distinction between “the body of the people” and a mindless mob. Because they knew no other way, they interpreted Boston’s politics as a top-down chain of command. In the process, they transformed Samuel Adams into a detestable demon. Now, we honor the mythological figure his enemies created.

  Mercy Otis Warren—sister of James Otis, wife of James Warren, political colleague and personal friend of Samuel Adams—knew very well that Adams owed much of his renown to the fuss made by his enemies. When General Gage singled out Adams and Hancock for proscription in 1775, she claimed, he revealed his great ignorance of “the temper of the times, the disposition of the people at large, [and] the character of the individuals”:

  His discrimination, rather accidental than judicious, set these two gentlemen in the most conspicuous point of view, and drew the particular attention of the whole continent to their names, distinguished from many of their compeers, more by this single circumstance, than by superior ability or exertion. By this they became at once the favorites of popularity, and the objects of general applause, which at that time would have been the fortune of any one, honored by such a mark of disapprobation of the British commander in chief.65

  Warren seemed amused that Adams’s enemies made him into a hero—but she had no way of foreseeing that people like Gage and Hutchinson would blind later generations of Americans to the importance of democratic political behavior during the Revolutionary era. Passionately committed to the idea that government must be rooted in the people, Mercy Otis Warren, Samuel Adams, an
d the rest of Boston’s patriots would be quite surprised to learn that America’s “patriotic” history would be told centuries later from a Tory perspective.

  3

  MOLLY PITCHER’S CANNON

  How nice it would be to discover a true heroine of the American Revolution. We have tried Betsy Ross, the woman who supposedly made the first American flag, but that story has been thoroughly discredited by serious historians.1 We honor Abigail Adams, who cajoled her husband to “Remember the Ladies,” but Abigail enters the story as the wife of a famous man, and she never went near a battlefield.2 We would like to celebrate Deborah Sampson, who dressed as a man to enlist in the army, but if truth be told, some female soldiers were unjustly drummed out to the “whore’s march” once their identity was uncovered.3

  Our preferred heroine, if we could find her, would have braved enemy fire in a famous battle—dressed as a woman, not a man. This is not too much to imagine. Try to picture, for instance, the Battle of Monmouth, where men are suffering from the heat as well as from enemy fire. A woman passes through the thirsty and wounded troops with a pitcher of nice, cold water. Perhaps, when her husband falls while manning a cannon, our heroine takes his place and continues to fire his weapon. This, of course, inspires the rest of the soldiers to continue fighting in the face of mortal danger. In the end, after the battle is over, George Washington naturally bestows a medal on our lady warrior—perhaps even making her an officer.

  “Her cannon must be fired!”

  Molly Pitcher, Heroine at Monmouth.

  Lithograph by Currier and Ives, 1876.

  This is the heroine we would like to celebrate—and we do. We have not only dreamed up such a tale, but we have convinced ourselves it is true. Although it would have shocked all her contemporaries, a recent middle-school textbook pronounces point-blank that Mary Ludwig Hays, a poor “camp follower” from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was the “best known” woman to serve on Revolutionary War battlefields.4 Another text tells her story: “Mary Ludwig Hays McCauly took her husband’s place at a cannon when he was wounded at the Battle of Monmouth. Known for carrying pitchers of water to the soldiers, McCauley won the nickname ‘Molly Pitcher.’ Afterward, General Washington made her a noncommissioned officer for her brave deeds.”5 A third text shows a picture of two women soldiers, one wearing a long dress and the other clad in modern military fatigues. The captions read, “Past: Molly Pitcher” and “Present: Women marines served in the Gulf War.”6