Samuel Adams
present,” he rose. He stretched forth a trembling arm. The town had voted. No redcoat could consider himself safe in Boston, nor could any inhabitant. “If you have power to remove one regiment,” Adams enjoined Hutchinson, “you have power to remove both.” Three thousand people awaited his decision. “They are become,” added Adams, his voice sonorous, “very impatient. A thousand men are already arrived from the neighborhood, and the country is in general motion.” It was nearly dusk. An immediate answer was expected. Any bloodshed would be on the hands of Hutchinson, who should consider his life in danger.
The language was potent, stronger than Hutchinson cared to repeat or so much as recall. It made for a spellbinding moment. Adams’ ultimatum set every pulse in the room racing. Even Dalrymple reported that Adams made him quake; he seemed more impressed by him than by the acting governor. Adams focused only on Hutchinson, “weak as water,” as unsteady as he had ever seen him. “I observed his knees to tremble,” Adams later revealed. “I thought I saw his face grow pale (and I enjoyed the sight).” He had personal reason to savor the moment but deferred to something loftier. Adams thrilled to the display of “determined citizens peremptorily demanding the redress of grievances.”
While Hutchinson seriously doubted that a mob could drive off 600 well-trained regulars, he did not care to approach that Rubicon. He recanvassed the four Crown officers in the room. They remained of the same mind. Hutchinson alone resisted a concession. It would be difficult to explain to London. He looked to Dalrymple; he preferred an officer make the decision. The previous night had been the worst Hutchinson had known in 59 years, including that on which his home had been pillaged. No one else in the room, he was reminded, believed he could deny the will of the people. Finally, Hutchinson informed Adams that he would demand Dalrymple remove both regiments. Adams’ admirers would deem the confrontation pivotal. Hutchinson emphasized its import as well, though for a different reason: Samuel Adams’ triumph, he cringed, “gave greater assurances than ever that, by firmness, the great object, exemption from all exterior power, civil or military, would finally be obtained.” In his many miserable accounts of the afternoon he rarely mentioned Adams by name, as if preferring not to put a face to his humiliation.
The streets were nearly dark when Adams returned to the Old South meeting house. A hush fell as John Hancock rose to announce his news. The room then erupted, echoing for some time with shouts and applause. The meeting also voted a night watch for the town until the troops had evacuated. For the next weeks, with muskets and cartridge boxes, a group that included John and Samuel Adams patrolled the Boston streets until dawn.
John Adams deemed his cousin’s showdown with Hutchinson worthy of Livy or Thucydides. It struck him as deserving of portraiture. The great painter John Singleton Copley caught some of its flavor when Adams sat for him later. Copley depicted Adams with the intensity on display throughout the duel. He quite literally takes a stand, ramrod straight, militant in his bearing. He is a man fortified by words. With his left index finger, he directs us to the Massachusetts charter. With his right hand he clenches the town instructions in a manner that suggests that ideas, too, deliver lethal blows. The result is a battle cry of a painting, much copied through the 1770s. Adams defends the charter like “Moses with his tablets, Luther with the Epistles,” as one historian has put it. The picture hinted that an occasional check might intrude, but that—as Hutchinson feared—“the progress of liberty would recommence.”
A week later troops still stomped about Boston. Adams prodded. Forty-eight hours had been required to land the men. Why was it taking so long to remove them? In the end, an Adams associate accompanied the redcoats to the wharf—“to protect them,” it was explained, “from the indignation of the people.” By the end of March, Boston was at last free of all redcoats save for the nine behind prison bars. Hutchinson’s brother-in-law groaned, “Thus, has an unarmed multitude in their own opinion gained a complete victory over two regiments of His Majesty’s regular troops.”
Over the next harried weeks Adams focused not on how he would be portrayed, but on how the events of March 5 would be; there is no better instance of him bracing for and improving upon events. A tragedy had relieved the town of troops. But how would the rest of the province, the other colonies, and the British Ministry react? There was much to do, in little time and for immeasurably high stakes. For starters, the
evening of Monday, March 5, needed a name. Adams appears to have been the first to refer to the skirmish as a “horrid massacre,” a name that stuck. It was imperative as well to dredge from the murk a coherent narrative. Nothing about the 20 chaotic minutes had been clear, least of all to anyone in the thick of them. Soldiers had fired on and killed civilians. But had Preston—a cool-headed, popular officer with a reputation for benevolence—ever issued a command? Some distinctly heard him order his men to fire. Others swore he had not. Who had attacked whom? Had snowballs flown through the air, or had those been bricks, clubs and sticks? Were thousands of people, or 50, on hand? Witnesses reported that the first victim carried a stick. Others saw him empty-handed. There was disagreement even on the position of the moon. A sentry had been assaulted. Minutes later, three or four men lay dead. What had happened? All agreed the snow was a foot deep, the evening bright. On all other counts it was cloaked in shadow, an obscurity that Adams rushed to illuminate, both before and after the soldiers stood trial. To his dismay, all but two were exonerated. Did he really mean to suggest that—after four judges and 24 jurors had devoted weeks to the case—they were fools, and he alone could discern the truth, an antagonist challenged Adams?
It seemed he did.
ADAMS WOULD GO ON TO make nearly as much trouble for historians as he did for the British. Biographers have turned him into a neurotic, a Socialist, a mobster. One profile consists solely of blistering contempt. Another whitewashes him to the point of anemia. Even when historians acknowledge his influence he disappears between the lines. “Probably no American did more than Samuel Adams to bring on the revolutionary crisis,” contended Edmund Morgan. “No one took republican values as seriously as Adams did,” writes Gordon Wood. He was “the premier leader of the revolutionary movement,” “as astute a politician as ever America has produced.” All echo Hutchinson in their claims—“the whole continent is ensnared by that Machiavelli of chaos,” Hutchinson complained— but the superlatives then slink off, headlines without articles, as if fearing the envy of John, the disapproval of Samuel, or the need to dislodge a man from behind more than 30 pseudonyms. When he does not get enough credit, he gets too much. He single-handedly directed the Stamp Act riots and the Boston Tea Party in some accounts, the Battle of Lexington in others.
Before his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson asked himself: “Is this exactly in the spirit of the patriarch of liberty, Samuel Adams?” Would he approve of it? To understand why the new president hoped to channel Adams’ spirit is to discover not only where a daring revolutionary came from but where a revolution did. His curious career explains how the American colonies lurched from “spotlessly loyal” to “stark, staring mad” in 15 dizzying years, how a group of drenched, pipe-smoking Massachusetts farmers, 40 miles from Boston and thousands from London, might reason that they should act sooner rather than later if they did not care to be “finessed out of their liberties.” Adams introduced them into the political system, persuading them their liberties were worth the risk of their lives. To lose sight of him is to lose sight of a man who calculated what would be required to upend an empire and who—radicalizing men, women and children, with boycotts and pickets, street theater, invented traditions, a news service, a bit of character assassination and any number of innovative, extralegal institutions—led American history’s seminal campaign of civil resistance.
Adams banked on the sage deliberations of a band of ambitious farmers reasoning their way toward rebellion. That was how democracy worked. He dreaded disunity. “Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and amidst the noise and violence of faction,” he warned. He refused to believe that prejudice and private interest would ultimately trample knowledge and benevolence. Self-government was in his view inseparable from governing the self; it demanded a certain asceticism. He wrote anthem after anthem to the qualities he believed essential to a republic—austerity, integrity, selfless public service—qualities that would become more military than civilian. The contest was never for Adams less than a spiritual struggle. It is impossible with him to determine where piety ended and politics began; the watermark of Puritanism shines through everything he wrote. Faith was there from the start, as was the scrappy, iconoclastic spirit, as were the daring, disruptive excursions beyond the law.
Much of the maneuvering Adams kept out of sight while practicing it in plain view. He bobs and weaves, vanishing around corners and behind his peers. At times he amounts to little more than a flicker and dash. Even in his letters he seems to have one foot out the door. The clock strikes midnight; he cannot linger; he hates to leave us hanging—or so he says. He will tell us more, he promises, the next time.
To lose sight of Samuel Adams is to lose sight of am an who calculated what would be required to upend an empire.