Samuel Adams

Samuel Adams was born on September 27, 1722 (September 16, Old Style), in the family home on Purchase Street in Boston’s South End, to Samuel Adams Sr. and Mary (Fifield) Adams. His father, a maltster, was active in Boston politics as a colonial legislator and member of the Boston caucus and served as a deacon of the South Meeting House, where the family worshiped. He was a second cousin of John AdamsJohn AdamsJohn Adams (1735–1826) was the first vice president (1789–1797) and the second president (1797–1801) of the United States. Earlier he served in the Continental Congress, was a signer of the Treaty of Paris and became the first American minister to Great Britain.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2]

Adams attended the Boston Latin School and entered Harvard College in 1736, earning his undergraduate degree in 1740 and a graduate degree in 1743. His thesis asked “Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved?” He was influenced by Algernon Sydney and John Locke and briefly studied law.⁠[2][3][1]

He worked briefly in the counting house of the merchant Thomas Cushing, lost a loan from his father in a failed business venture and then worked in his father’s malthouse. In 1747 he became Clerk of the Boston Market, and in 1748 he helped establish The Independent Advertiser, which lasted less than a year.⁠[2]

In 1756 the Boston Town Meeting elected Adams tax collector; he was often lenient and left many taxes uncollected. In 1764 he opposed the Sugar Act, a tax on molasses, and wrote Boston’s instructions to its representatives.⁠[2][1]

After Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March 1765, Adams led Boston’s opposition and was associated with the Loyal Nine, a precursor of the Sons of Liberty, drafting Boston’s instructions at Faneuil Hall. In September 1765 he was elected to the Massachusetts General Court’s House of Representatives, holding the seat for nine years; in 1766, when the Stamp Act was repealed, he was chosen Clerk of the House, with Thomas Cushing as Speaker.⁠[2]

After Parliament passed the Townshend Acts in 1767, Adams organized protests and boycotts through the Boston Town Meeting. He was a principal author of the Massachusetts Circular Letter; when Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State for the Colonies, ordered it rescinded, the House refused by a vote of 92 to 17, and Governor Francis Bernard dissolved the legislature.⁠[2]

British troops arrived in Boston on October 1, 1768. In 1768 and 1769 Adams wrote more than twenty newspaper articles under the pseudonym “Vindex” and later “Candidus,” at least thirteen of them on the standing army, and promoted a one-year non-importation agreement among Boston merchants, a movement that collapsed by early 1770. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison described Adams as a skilled propagandist rather than an orator.⁠[2]

On February 22, 1770, the customs official Ebenezer Richardson shot and killed 11-year-old Christopher Seider, and Adams organized a funeral attended by more than two thousand people. On March 5 nine soldiers fired into a crowd on King Street, killing five civilians and wounding six, in what became the Boston Massacre. On March 6 Adams led a committee to Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson and won a unanimous demand at an emergency meeting in Faneuil Hall for the troops’ removal; the troops were then moved to Castle Island.⁠[2]

Adams wanted a fair trial to protect Boston’s credibility. The defense attorneys Josiah Quincy and John Adams argued self-defense, and two privates were convicted of manslaughter.⁠[2]

In 1771, writing as “Cotton Mather” in the Boston Gazette, Adams argued against the Crown paying the governor’s salary from tea-tax revenue. When the Crown began paying the Superior Court judges in autumn 1772, a special town meeting on October 28 formed a committee led by Adams, and on November 2 he proposed Committees of Correspondence and a Declaration of Rights.⁠[2]

Parliament passed the Tea Act on May 10, 1773, to aid the East India Company, and the tea ship Dartmouth reached Boston on November 28. On December 16 Adams chaired a final mass meeting after Governor Hutchinson refused to act; that evening the Sons of Liberty went from the Old South Meeting House to Griffin’s Wharf and destroyed 342 chests of tea. There is no evidence that Adams took part, but he praised the action.⁠[2][3]

After Parliament passed the Coercive Acts in early 1774, Adams drafted the resolves of the Massachusetts House of Representatives on June 17 seeking aid and advice from other colonies, and that month he was chosen a delegate to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, which went on to endorse the Suffolk Resolves written by Joseph Warren. He also joined the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which first met in October 1774.⁠[2][3]

On April 14, 1775, General Thomas Gage received orders to disarm the militias and arrest rebel leaders. That month Adams and John HancockJohn HancockJohn Hancock (1737–1793) was a Boston merchant and a statesman of the American Revolution who presided over the Continental Congress from 1775 to 1777, was the first signer of the Declaration of Independence and later served repeatedly as governor of Massachusetts.Open the full entry were staying at the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s home in Lexington, where Paul ReverePaul ReverePaul Revere (1734–1818) was a Boston silversmith, engraver and messenger of the American Revolution who rode to Lexington on the night of April 18, 1775, to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams, and who after the war ran a foundry and a copper rolling mill.Open the full entry and William Dawes warned them; the Battles of Lexington and Concord followed on April 19, 1775.⁠[2]

Adams served in the Second Continental Congress as a Massachusetts delegate with John Adams, John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine. After Richard Henry Lee proposed independence on June 7, 1776, Congress adopted the resolution on July 2, and on July 4 Adams voted to approve the Declaration of Independence, which he signed.⁠[2][3]

In Congress he served on committees and the Board of War and helped draft the Articles of Confederation. In 1779 he, John Adams and James Bowdoin drafted the Massachusetts Constitution, which the people ratified in 1780. He left Congress and returned to Massachusetts in 1781.⁠[2]

In the 1780s Adams was president of the Massachusetts Senate. During Shays’ Rebellion he favored executing the rebellion’s leaders. In 1788 John Hancock chose him as his running mate, and he served as lieutenant governor under Hancock from 1789 to 1793.⁠[2][4][5]

When Hancock died in office in 1793, Adams became governor; he was then elected to three successive one-year terms and retired in 1797.⁠[2][3]

Adams died in Boston on October 2, 1803, at the age of 81, and was buried in the Granary Burying Ground. His stone, matching one commemorating James Otis, stands in a front corner of the burying ground next to the grave marker of the Boston Massacre victims.⁠[2][3][6]

In 1749 Adams married Elizabeth Checkley, three years his junior, the daughter of Samuel Checkley, pastor of the Old South Meeting House. They had six children, two of whom reached adulthood; Elizabeth died in 1757 of complications of childbirth.⁠[2]

In 1764 he married Elizabeth Wells, daughter of the Boston merchant Francis Wells; they had no children together, and she cared for her stepchildren and supported his career.⁠[2]

John Singleton Copley’s oil portrait of Adams from about 1772, by tradition commissioned by John Hancock, shows Adams confronting Governor Thomas Hutchinson the day after the Boston Massacre to demand the removal of British troops. The painting was later bought by Adams’s grandson Samuel Adams Wells, given to the City of Boston by Adam W. Thaxter, Jr. in 1841 and deposited by the city at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1876. The museum’s text notes that it was reproduced in oil and in several prints and became a propaganda image of the Revolution.⁠[7]

A bronze statue of Adams stands in front of Faneuil Hall. Thomas JeffersonThomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, serving from 1801 to 1809. He had earlier been governor of Virginia, minister to France, secretary of state and vice president.Open the full entry praised him in a letter to Samuel Adams Wells dated May 12, 1819. The Granary Burying Ground also holds fellow Declaration signers John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine, Paul Revere and others.⁠[2][8]

Granary Burying Ground (City of Boston): Official website: https://boston.gov/node/3266 (opens in a new window).⁠[8]