Sam of the Adams Family
There are few families in American history that have had quite an impact on the country's future as the Adams family. By September 27, 1722, when Samuel Adams was born in Boston, the Adams family already had a long and distinguished history in the new colonies. Adams's father, also named Samuel, was a successful businessman in the Massachusetts capital, who ran a brewery and served as deacon of the Congregational Church.
Even then, long before the revolution, before John Adams would serve as President, and even longer before America had ever heard of John Quincy Adams, Abigail Adams or Henry Adams, the Adamses were already involved in politics. Samuel Adams, Sr. was a justice of the peace, selectman, and representative to the General Court, the colony's governing body. His mother supported the increasingly narrow Calvinist faith movement, and the pious woman influenced her son enough that he would later be called "the last of the Puritans."
Emotional Adams
From his earliest days of schooling, Adams was known for his impassioned emotions–emotions which would sometimes keep him from seeing an issue clearly. His emotions sprang from the interplay of theology and political science, where political theory met dogmatic theory. Thus Adams often found himself influenced in his arguments by theology, and he was normally known as a religious man.
Little is known of Adams's boyhood, and what little is known comes from the comprehensive three-volume biography his great-grandson William V. Wells later wrote. Little other information on Adams's early years has been found. He studied at the Boston Latin School for eight years, learning Latin and Greek. Adams, like most of the sons from Boston's elite, entered Harvard College in 1736 at the age of fourteen. Although his father had expected him to pursue the ministry, it quickly became obvious that Adams had little interest in following his father to the pulpit. Adams progressed through college without distinguishing himself in any way.
He was disciplined once by Harvard for sleeping through morning prayers, and he was ranked fifth in the class of twenty-two when ranked by the social standing of his parents. He studied arithmetic, metaphysics, Latin, Greek, rhetoric and other subjects–but he remained surprisingly weak in literature throughout his life. During his junior year, Adams's father lost most of the family's money in a bad business deal, and Adams was forced to work the rest of his way through school by serving as a waiter in the college dining hall. The city fined him five shillings during his senior year when he was caught drinking in public.
Great Awakening
While Adams attended college, the Great Awakening swept over New England. The evangelist George Whitefield arrived in Massachusetts, and he deeply affected many of Harvard's men. He worked to convert many of the students to the gospel, and when he left in 1740 it was said that little but "voices of prayer and praise" could be heard on campus. In fact, Whitefield was able to reverse the growing trend throughout Boston of indulging in drink and fine clothes.
Colonial politics also began to heat up as Adams graduated from Harvard in 1740. Samuel Adams, Sr. had helped to run the opposition to the crown's demand for a fixed salary for the governor and was quickly becoming known as one of the colony's leaders. A failed attempt to establish a Land Bank in Massachusetts had forced the colony into an economic depression. Massachusetts's farmers had suffered from the lack of a stable currency, and a movement had begun to establish a bank where the money would be backed with land.
Helped lead the fight
Again, Samuel Adams had helped lead the fight, serving as one of the bank's directors, and the effort appeared likely to upend the political world of the state. By 1741, rebellion looked possible. The colony's governor acted quickly, arresting the ringleaders and vetoing the election of Adams and other Land Bankers to the colony's governing council–the highest governmental body. Soon, the Land Bank movement lay in tatters as Parliament outlawed such banks.
The movement had a profound impact on the younger Samuel Adams, and after graduating from the College in 1740, he continued on to pursue a Master's degree. In an ominous sign of things to come, he chose as his question of study, "Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved?" Adams decided on the affirmative, and left little question in his response exactly where his sympathies lay.
Out in the World
After receiving his Master's degree, Samuel Adams began the search for a job. He halfheartedly began studying law but found that his mother's strong opposition prevented any serious study. He joined the counting house of Thomas Cushing, hoping to succeed in business. He quickly proved that he severely lacked business abilities. After a few months, Cushing broke the news to Adams and his parents that Adams would never be a merchant. Cushing remarked that he trained men to be merchants, not politicians. Adams's father thought that there might be hope for the young man to become a financier and thus loaned him a thousand pounds with which to begin business. Adams lost almost every penny in a single transaction. Samuel Adams then joined his father in the family brewery.
Although he proved himself more successful at brewing than at financing, Adams's first love remained politics. In 1748, he joined with some radical friends to begin a newspaper called the Independent Advertiser, and he made his first foray into political writing. Adams's writings came as the situation in the colony began to heat up again–a truce between the governor and his opponents had been called during the prosecution of King George's War from 1741–1748.
Failed jump-start the revolution
While Adams failed in his attempt to jump-start the revolution, these early political writings gave insight into the man he would become. He used his Harvard schooling to show that if Boston did not reform to more Puritan ways, it might fall just as Rome once did. He held the governor responsible for the lack of morals in the society and argued that the politician had chosen the materialistic ways of the merchants rather than the noble virtues upon which the colony had been founded a century before.
He argued for the Country Party, the opposition party that his father helped start, and condemned the governor's political machine. Most stunning, though, was Adams's demands that the General Court be given the same status as Parliament and that it be the final word on matters in the colony–not the crown or Parliament. The Independent Advertiser folded after a year of publication, and Adams failed to make a name for himself in the colony since the paper's writers were anonymous. However, it left one lasting impression: since much of Adams's thoughts and arguments were based on the theory of John Locke, Adams's writings exposed New Englanders to John Locke's ideas of liberty.
Adams's father died in 1748, and Adams began some of most impoverished years of his life. And although he had been elected to his first public office in 1746, that of thr clerk of the Boston Market, he found himself shut out of office until 1753 when he was elected town scavenger–not quite the high-profile jumping-off point for which the aspiring politician had hoped. Finally, in 1756, he rose to the post of Boston tax collector, a post he would hold for almost a decade.
Unpopular time
During this period, the colony was engaged in all-but constant war. As the French and Indian War raged on, Adams and other radical politicians found themselves unpopular. Adams and his friends waited quietly as the colony massed troops for an attack on French Canada and while border settlements were burned by Indian attacks. Adams found a ready opponent, though, in the Land Bank commissioners trying to foreclose on his father's estate. He turned his vitriolic writings toward them and summed up his approach toward battles of the pen as such: "Put your adversary in the wrong, and keep him there."
When in 1758, the commissioners put what remained of the Adams estate up for a fourth auction–the first three being unsuccessful–Adams set out to defend it with his chosen sword: editorials and broadsides. He threatened to sue the sheriff and anyone who bid on the place, reminding potential buyers that no one had had the nerve to buy the place in the three previous auctions. The sale eventually fell through, and Adams held on to the neglected brewery and the now dilapidated house.
Blocked by politics
Adams badly wanted to help lead Massachusetts, but, being in the opposition, he found his way blocked by the "Shirlean Faction" of Massachusetts politics, so- called after the governor of the same name who led the colony for sixteen years. Thus, Shirley's Court Party, composed of merchants, political appointees, and "High Church" men, faced Adams's Country Party–the mantle of which he had received from the party's founder, Elisha Cooke.
Thomas Hutchinson was a strong opponent for Adams. The stunning Hutchinson had "captivated half the pretty ladies in the colony," the Country Party complained. In 1750, Hutchinson outlawed paper money, thus killing the pet project of the Country Party. In response, crowd of radicals attacked his house and burned it to the ground. Nonetheless, he stood proudly against everything Adams wanted. He would be Adams's great opponent for much of the rest of their lives.