Should we celebrate Samuel Adams, or condemn him?

Samuel Adams defies biographers. Now the name and face of a beer, Adams once was Boston’s leading revolutionary, rallying that seaport to resist Parliament’s taxes and reject British rule. Many scholars have tried to know and explain Adams, but in vain, for he kept his many secrets, burning most of his letters lest they implicate friends in treason. Unlike his cousin John Adams, Samuel cared more about swaying men behind the scenes than about taking credit for posterity. Slipping in and out of backrooms, he seemed to manage every protest, riot, election and newspaper diatribe. His many friends recalled Adams as a selfless hero utterly devoted to liberty. His many enemies defined him as a reckless and deceitful incendiary. Adams left us too sparse a paper trail to find a deeper character between the polarized accounts.

Stacy Schiff is the latest biographer to probe the vacuum that Adams so thoroughly cultivated. Above all, in “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” Schiff seeks to solve a mystery: How did an underachiever belatedly emerge as “a political genius ... intensely disciplined, an indomitable master of public opinion”? Then, after making a revolution, why did he struggle to govern in the new republic?

Born into a prosperous family in 1722, Adams could afford to attend and graduate from Harvard, but he squandered his inheritance before becoming Boston’s most inept tax collector. Elite education developed his mastery of words while downward mobility cultivated his empathy for working people - and his rage against men of fortunes, privileges and luck. He especially hated a fellow Bostonian, Thomas Hutchinson, who grew ever richer and more powerful by acquiring multiple offices, including chief justice of the superior court and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts - until Adams ruined his popularity with insidious rumors. Both sides crafted conspiracy theories. While Adams claimed that British leaders plotted to ruin colonial prosperity and freedom, Loyalists depicted Boston’s radicals as conspiring to dupe common people into wreaking anarchy.

Lacking new documents from Adams, Schiff settles for recounting the famous events of colonial resistance in Boston: the Stamp Act Riots of 1765, the seizure of John Hancock’s sloop by customs officers, the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Tea Party of 1773 and resistance to the redcoat occupation in 1774-1775. In every episode, she finds Adams lurking behind the scenes, coordinating diverse radicals: “He seemed to exert an uncanny influence on men’s minds. He knew when to alarm, when to soothe, flatter, intim- idate.” In newspaper essays and legislative resolves, Adams kept the political pot boiling: “Words came easily to Adams, who could churn a small grievance into an unpardonable insult before others had arrived at the end of a sentence.” The absence of evidence becomes Schiff ’s proof that Adams was at work: “The very lack of fingerprints points to his unruffled, rigorous brand of stage management.”