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:

I am no friend to “Riots, Tumult, and unlawful Assemblies,” I take upon me to say, any more than his Excellency is: But when the People are oppressed, when their Rights are infringed, when their property is invaded, when taskmasters are set over them, when unconstitutional acts are executed by a naval force before their eyes, and they are daily threatened with military troops, when their legislature is dissolved...when placemen and their underlings swarm about them, and pensioners begin to make an insolent appearance—in such circumstances the people will be discontented, and they are not to be blamed.

Or again, writing about loyalists who thought the Colonies would accept the Townshend Duties:

They now see the contrary with grief and despair, and they may ere long see it with terror and amazement. The colonies are more than ever united in a determined opposition to these acts, and I hope in God they will continue their opposition to them, till they are all repealed—till the locusts and the caterpillars which now swarm among us, are driven off like chaff.

Washington, in his career before the revolution as a planter, was the model of competence and worldly success. Meanwhile up in Boston, Adams was constantly in debt, constantly in court staving off collection, and a consistent failure in his enterprises:

He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds.

Washington believed early on he would make his dent in the universe, and saved every scrap he touched, for the future historians he knew would drool over them. Adams by his own admission never thought about the future, or saved for posterity; and he burned his papers.

If Washington was the hero America needed in Part 2—whatever the Americans’ disagreements, they could agree on him—what America needed in Part 1 was not some “living Schelling Point,” but someone working behind the scenes, constantly nudging and prodding the colonists towards resistance, and poking the British in the eye with his pen:

Adams coordinate the town meetings, the House, and the merchant committees. He cajoled grand jurors, finessed House votes, manipulated electoral slates, and massaged the word on the street.

Adams was that "covert operative" whose work by its nature cannot be credited. He published under fake names; he “laundered” Boston news through other city’s newspapers. Everyone knows he coordinated the Boston Tea Party; no evidence exists to tie him to the event. If Washington was famously honest, Adams succeeded by treating the truth as a tool not always fit for the occasion. After Britain sent troops to occupy Boston in 1768, Adams helped write a series of (unsigned) newspaper stories (the Journal of Occurrences) chronicling the solders’ abuses of the inhabitants. Large chunks of it, including some veiled and some overt accusations of rape, are complete fabrications, and what’s not made-up is exaggerated:

Over and over Adams reduced a vandalized garden to a boys’ frolic, a household raid to a few broken panes of glass.

If this can be justified, it’s as a necessary counterweight to the royal governor’s reports, which were (Adams thought) equally exaggerated in the opposite direction. Adams named the Boston Massacre, more than a stretch when only five men died; and engaged in a months-long propaganda campaign against the perpetrators, re-litigating the case in the papers after the juries (righty, historians believe) declined to return murder verdicts. One cannot imagine Washington engaging in or even approving of any of this. One also reads of Adams staying up late helping the Boston Gazette publishers typeset his pieces; one cannot imagine Washington doing that either.

And finally: both were serious men, but how many lighthearted moments like these are in Washington’s biography? Adams’ ten year old daughter came upon his working on a petition to the king:

Flush with pride, she exclaimed that her father’s work would be touched by the royal hand. “It will, my dear,” he shrugged, “more likely be spurned by the royal foot.”

Adams also had a “formidable dog,”

a highly intelligent Newfoundland named Queue. Adams trained him to bite any redcoat that crossed his path.

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See also: Let Those Flatter Who Fear: American Independence in Verse.