member ofHarvard’s Class of 1740, he was remembered for having “spent rather lavishly” and once was fined for “drinking prohibited Liquors”) may have made him a hit among Boston’s common folk. Early in his career he formed deep friendships with citizens below his station, and neighbors often tapped him to resolve civil differences. As the biographerJohn K. Alexander notes, “No other caucus leader rubbed shoulders with ordinary and poor Bostonians to the extent that Samuel did.” Some of his popularity owes to his casual tax collecting, which he slyly attributed in 1765 to the “difficulties” and “Confusion” created by theStamp Act. The captious Justice Oliver called Adams “a Master of Vocal Musick” and claimed he used this pernicious talent to befriend the working class: “This genius he improved, by instituting singing Societys of Mechanicks, where he presided; & embraced such Opportunities to ye inculcating Sedition, ’till it had ripened into Rebellion.”Song may have been the rum in Samuel Adams’s punch—indeed, his andJames Otis’s political festivities typically featured dozens of toasts and rousing liberty ballads—but his best social investment was the tankards he raised in the politically neglected waterfront bars. As Adams was remembered in
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
dockworkers “had for years been complimented to have a man with a ‘public education’ spend his hours drinking, however abstemiously, with them.”
It’s uncertain how much time he spent drinking in the pubs, which, with or without his help, were becoming the Revolution’s staging areas.Boston’s public houses—alehouses, coffeehouses, grogshops, andtaverns—had come a long way since 1681, that
annus horribilis
when the Puritan-dominated General Court shut nearly half of them down. As if invigorated by this act of proto-Prohibition, pubs had come back with a vengeance: by 1696 they had already tripled in number, by 1719 they had opened their doors to “slaves and servants,” and by 1760, the year John Adams enteredThayer’s tavern, they were turning into his dreaded “nurseries of our legislators.” For, as gathering places of lower-class communities with booming dockside populations, pubs fast became the sites of a feisty, engaged, combative, informed, and unusually open publicdiscourse. Throughout the northeastern cities in the mid-eighteenth century, “many Americans,” asCarl Bridenbaugh puts it in his classic history, “were determined to play and play hard”—gambling, drinking, dancing, cavorting, and engaging inblood sports like cockfighting and bull-baiting, transatlantic diversions that until recent decades had been severely regulated in these colonies. In Philadelphia in particular, whatEric Foner calls a “distinct lower-class subculture” defied local regulations and crossed racial lines for all kinds of fun, including “revels, masques, street-fighting and the celebration of the May Day—on which parties of young men and women spent the day feasting and dancing in the woods outside the city and fishermen danced aroundmaypoles.” The standing institution for such sporting citizens (when they weren’t lighting out for makeshift Ma-Re Mounts) was the lively tavern culture.
In Boston’s taverns of the 1760s, as David W. Conroy demonstrates, the “republic of letters” reached well beyond its intended bourgeois readership, and in distinction from the eighteenth-century European public sphere famously theorized byJürgen Habermas—a bourgeois political climate defined by print circulation—in Boston the consumption ofnewspapers and pamphlets mingled with “the traditional oral culture of taverns.” Radical patriots like Samuel Adams andJames Otis knew this environment was ripe for political action. Just as many Tory and conservative Whig politicians feared, the often raucous, nicotinean, and dipsomaniacal taverns “were where republican concepts gripped men’s imaginations
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
dockworkers “had for years been complimented to have a man with a ‘public education’ spend his hours drinking, however abstemiously, with them.”
It’s uncertain how much time he spent drinking in the pubs, which, with or without his help, were becoming the Revolution’s staging areas.Boston’s public houses—alehouses, coffeehouses, grogshops, andtaverns—had come a long way since 1681, that
annus horribilis
when the Puritan-dominated General Court shut nearly half of them down. As if invigorated by this act of proto-Prohibition, pubs had come back with a vengeance: by 1696 they had already tripled in number, by 1719 they had opened their doors to “slaves and servants,” and by 1760, the year John Adams enteredThayer’s tavern, they were turning into his dreaded “nurseries of our legislators.” For, as gathering places of lower-class communities with booming dockside populations, pubs fast became the sites of a feisty, engaged, combative, informed, and unusually open publicdiscourse. Throughout the northeastern cities in the mid-eighteenth century, “many Americans,” asCarl Bridenbaugh puts it in his classic history, “were determined to play and play hard”—gambling, drinking, dancing, cavorting, and engaging inblood sports like cockfighting and bull-baiting, transatlantic diversions that until recent decades had been severely regulated in these colonies. In Philadelphia in particular, whatEric Foner calls a “distinct lower-class subculture” defied local regulations and crossed racial lines for all kinds of fun, including “revels, masques, street-fighting and the celebration of the May Day—on which parties of young men and women spent the day feasting and dancing in the woods outside the city and fishermen danced aroundmaypoles.” The standing institution for such sporting citizens (when they weren’t lighting out for makeshift Ma-Re Mounts) was the lively tavern culture.
In Boston’s taverns of the 1760s, as David W. Conroy demonstrates, the “republic of letters” reached well beyond its intended bourgeois readership, and in distinction from the eighteenth-century European public sphere famously theorized byJürgen Habermas—a bourgeois political climate defined by print circulation—in Boston the consumption ofnewspapers and pamphlets mingled with “the traditional oral culture of taverns.” Radical patriots like Samuel Adams andJames Otis knew this environment was ripe for political action. Just as many Tory and conservative Whig politicians feared, the often raucous, nicotinean, and dipsomaniacal taverns “were where republican concepts gripped men’s imaginations
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