Before Washington

We’ve forgot, but ”for many years it was possible to assert that Samuel Adams ranked with, if not above, George Washington," as a hero of the American Revolution. About Washington every American knows some myth, at least the story of the cherry tree, and that he won the war; all they "know" about Samuel Adams, I'd guess, is that he made beer. But indeed re-elevating Adams to Washingtonian stature, at least in the story of American independence, produces a needed balance. From 1775 to Yorktown, it’s the story of Washington creating and keeping alive an army, whose survival was coeval with the survival of the new nation. But how was the ground prepared, where Washington’s drama would unfold? A widespread spirit of independency, and a willingness to fight and die for it, did not materialize from nothing. That was largely the work of Samuel Adams. Many say he was the first Patriot to advocate independence. Historian Edmund Morgan wrote, “Probably no American did more than Adams to bring on the revolutionary crisis.” When the “British were coming” to seize gunpowder in Concord, they were also coming to arrest Samuel Adams.

Stacy Schiff, in The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, writes that, in the first half of the struggle for independence—roughly, from the Stamp Act Crisis in 1765, to Washington taking command in 1775—Adams was the paradigm Patriot, on whom others were modeled:

Various patriots made their mark as the Samuel Adams of North Carolina, the Samuel Adams of Rhode Island, or the Samuel Adams of Georgia.

Indeed it was Adams who made the “Patriot” label stick to radicals whose anti-British activities were, technically, acts of treason.

Adams’ fame was international, eclipsing that of his now-more famous cousin John, who

met with a hero's welcome when he arrived in France [in 1778] to solicit funds for the war,

and had to clarify that he was "not the renowned Mr. [Samuel] Adams."

As Britain tightened its control over some colonial government institutions, and disbanded others, coordinated resistance required (illegal) “shadow” governments; their existence would later smooth the way to self-government, once independence was declared. Adams did much to build these new institutions, which he gave the harmless-sounding name “committees of correspondence.” These “furnaces of propaganda”—in Schiff’s description, “a news service, an alarm system, to some a proto-terrorist cell”—were the real beginning of colonial unity, the “join” of Franklin’s “join or die.” In creating them Adams “wired a continent for rebellion.”

But if Samuel Adams was the Washington of American Independence Part 1, he was also the anti-Washington: their virtues were almost perfect contrasts. Washington was noble, aristocratic, Roman. You see it in his cold, formal, Latinate writing. From his Farewell Address:

The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the Executive Government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.

Adams' form of eloquence is miles away from this is, an Old Testament Puritanism: