whipping up the fun-loving crowd.
At twenty-five, the same age John was when he enteredThayer’s tavern, Samuel was already writing radical tracts to legitimize theSons of Neptune. He and his secret society of friends published their views in the
Independent Advertiser,
a pioneering weekly that got behind Boston’s rebels and argued for the legality of the Knowles rioters’ actions. Young Adams’s many essays exclaimed the virtues of “Liberty.” One famous essay decried any citizen “who despises his Neighbor’s Happiness because he wears ‘
a worsted Cap
or a
Leathern Apron
’ ” or who “
struts
immeasurably above the
lower
Size of People, and pretends to adjust the rights of Men by Distinctions of Fortune.” One can’t help but see his cousin strutting in these lines.
Samuel lived like a radical democrat, but he was nobody’s Thomas Morton. To be sure, in the words of the historianPauline Maier, “No man was more aware than he of thelegacy of his Puritan forebears, more proud of their achievements, more determined to perpetuate them into the future.” What he plainly admired in these ancestors, however, was not their elitism and sectarian prejudice, nor their viciousauthoritarianism—habits which he himself eschewed. Samuel Adams’s trimmed-to-fit Puritan was a figure of steely purpose who rejected the aristocrat’sluxurious pleasures—“Folly,” frippery, “Dissipation,” theater—and raised the “Cause of Liberty and Virtue” above the “self.” The austerity Adams modeled for fellow Patriots dried their powder for feistier pleasures, in particular wild thrills of mass resistance conducted with noisy, good-humored civility. The discipline he urged, moreover, a respect for life and property, allowed the people—or a wide swath of them—to celebrate their freedom within generous bounds, often
too
generous for his cousin’s comfort.
John Adams, looking back on the early Revolution, recalled Samuel as being “zealous, ardent and keen in the Cause,” things one could not always say of John himself. But while he appreciated Samuel’s sympathy for colonial freedom and even his ability to penetrate the crowd, he regretted his disregard for “the Law and Constitution” and the fact that he put, at least in John’s mind, the needs of “the Public” above himself and his family. Still, he was cautious on the topic of Samuel. John may have held back out of Adams family loyalty, or Whig affiliation, or deference to the rabble-rouser who did his dirty work, but Samuel’s opponents weren’t nearly so polite. GovernorThomas Hutchinson called him the “Chief Incendiary.” Chief JusticePeter Oliver, a die-hard Tory, fumed that Samuel Adams was “all serpentine cunning” and “could transform his self into an Angel of Light with the weak Religionist”—while even worse yet, among the “abandoned,” like those godless souls on the docks, he would “appear with his cloven Foot & in his native Blackness of Darkness.”
But Samuel Adams’s greatest threat was his virtue, not his vice. He took care to rouse the citizens’ will, not to impose his own private interests. “The true patriot,” he wrote, “will enquire into the causes of the fears and jealousies of his countrymen.” But unlike the cynical politician, who turns such research into campaign promises, the patriot keeps “fellow citizens awake to their grievances” and doesn’t “suffer them to be at rest, till the causes of their just complaints are removed.” Acting thus for the nation, and not for himself, the true patriot will “stir up the people.” Adams’s true patriots wererisk-taking citizens who engaged the people at the level of their passions. They acted a lot, for that matter, like the jiggingZab Hayward. Whether rallying, dancing, joking, or singing,true patriots were citizens whose love of the crowd helped them to sustain its rhythmic power.
Samuel’s bad behavior and even worse reputation (as a
At twenty-five, the same age John was when he enteredThayer’s tavern, Samuel was already writing radical tracts to legitimize theSons of Neptune. He and his secret society of friends published their views in the
Independent Advertiser,
a pioneering weekly that got behind Boston’s rebels and argued for the legality of the Knowles rioters’ actions. Young Adams’s many essays exclaimed the virtues of “Liberty.” One famous essay decried any citizen “who despises his Neighbor’s Happiness because he wears ‘
a worsted Cap
or a
Leathern Apron
’ ” or who “
struts
immeasurably above the
lower
Size of People, and pretends to adjust the rights of Men by Distinctions of Fortune.” One can’t help but see his cousin strutting in these lines.
Samuel lived like a radical democrat, but he was nobody’s Thomas Morton. To be sure, in the words of the historianPauline Maier, “No man was more aware than he of thelegacy of his Puritan forebears, more proud of their achievements, more determined to perpetuate them into the future.” What he plainly admired in these ancestors, however, was not their elitism and sectarian prejudice, nor their viciousauthoritarianism—habits which he himself eschewed. Samuel Adams’s trimmed-to-fit Puritan was a figure of steely purpose who rejected the aristocrat’sluxurious pleasures—“Folly,” frippery, “Dissipation,” theater—and raised the “Cause of Liberty and Virtue” above the “self.” The austerity Adams modeled for fellow Patriots dried their powder for feistier pleasures, in particular wild thrills of mass resistance conducted with noisy, good-humored civility. The discipline he urged, moreover, a respect for life and property, allowed the people—or a wide swath of them—to celebrate their freedom within generous bounds, often
too
generous for his cousin’s comfort.
John Adams, looking back on the early Revolution, recalled Samuel as being “zealous, ardent and keen in the Cause,” things one could not always say of John himself. But while he appreciated Samuel’s sympathy for colonial freedom and even his ability to penetrate the crowd, he regretted his disregard for “the Law and Constitution” and the fact that he put, at least in John’s mind, the needs of “the Public” above himself and his family. Still, he was cautious on the topic of Samuel. John may have held back out of Adams family loyalty, or Whig affiliation, or deference to the rabble-rouser who did his dirty work, but Samuel’s opponents weren’t nearly so polite. GovernorThomas Hutchinson called him the “Chief Incendiary.” Chief JusticePeter Oliver, a die-hard Tory, fumed that Samuel Adams was “all serpentine cunning” and “could transform his self into an Angel of Light with the weak Religionist”—while even worse yet, among the “abandoned,” like those godless souls on the docks, he would “appear with his cloven Foot & in his native Blackness of Darkness.”
But Samuel Adams’s greatest threat was his virtue, not his vice. He took care to rouse the citizens’ will, not to impose his own private interests. “The true patriot,” he wrote, “will enquire into the causes of the fears and jealousies of his countrymen.” But unlike the cynical politician, who turns such research into campaign promises, the patriot keeps “fellow citizens awake to their grievances” and doesn’t “suffer them to be at rest, till the causes of their just complaints are removed.” Acting thus for the nation, and not for himself, the true patriot will “stir up the people.” Adams’s true patriots wererisk-taking citizens who engaged the people at the level of their passions. They acted a lot, for that matter, like the jiggingZab Hayward. Whether rallying, dancing, joking, or singing,true patriots were citizens whose love of the crowd helped them to sustain its rhythmic power.
Samuel’s bad behavior and even worse reputation (as a
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