Samuel Adams, called by his contemporaries, "the Father of the
American Revolution," drew up in 1764 the instructions of the people
of Boston to their representatives in the Massachusetts general
assembly, containing what is said to be the first official denial of
the right of the British Parliament to tax the Colonists.
Deeply religious by nature, having what Everett calls "a most
angelic voice," studying sacred music as an avocation, and
exhibiting through life the fineness of nerve and sensitiveness of
temperament which gave him his early disposition to escape the
storms of life by a career in the pulpit, circumstances, or rather
his sense of fitness, dominating his physical weakness, imposed on
him the work of leading in what results have shown to be the
greatest revolution of history. So sensitive, physically, that he
had "a tremulous motion of the head when speaking," his intellectual
force was such that he easily became a leader of popular opposition
to royal authority in New England. Unlike Jefferson in being a
fluent public speaker, he resembled him in being the intellectual
heir of Sidney and Locke. He showed very early in life the bent
which afterwards forced him, as it did the naturally timid and
retiring Jefferson, to take the leadership of the uneducated masses
of the people against the wealth, the culture, and the conservatism
of the colonial aristocracy.
After passing through the Lovell School he graduated at Harvard
College, and on proposing a thesis for his second degree, as college
custom required, he defended the proposition that "it is lawful to
resist the supreme authority, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise
be preserved." Like questions had been debated during the Middle
Ages from the time returning Crusaders brought back with them copies
of Aristotle and other great Greek philosophers whose authority was
still reverenced at Byzantium and Bagdad when London and Paris knew
nothing of them. Out of the denial of one set of schoolmen that a
divine right to rule, greater than that derived from the people,
could exist in kings, grew the political controversy which preceded
the English revolution against the Stuarts. Our revolution grew out
of the English as the French grew out of ours, and in putting on his
seal Cromwell's motto, "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,"
Jefferson, the Virginian, illustrated the same intellectual
heredity which Samuel Adams, the New Englander, showed in asserting
the right of the people composing the Commonwealth to resist the
supreme authority when in their judgment its exercise had become
prejudicial to their rights or their interests.
From 1764 when he was chosen to present the denial made by the
people of Boston of the English Parliament's right to tax them,
until he joined Jefferson in forcing on the then unprepared mind of
the public the idea of a complete and final separation from the
"Mother Country," his aggressive denunciations of the English
government's attempts at absolutism made him so hated by the English
administration and its colonial representatives that, with John
Hancock, he was specially exempted from General Gage's amnesty
proclamation of June 1775, as "having committed offenses of too
flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than that of
condign punishment."
Joining with John Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson in forcing issues
for complete separation from England and for the formal Declaration
of Independence, Samuel Adams was himself the author of the
celebrated circular letter addressed by the assembly of
Massachusetts to the speakers of the several assemblies in other
colonies. In 1774 he was chosen a member of the Continental
Congress, where he took a prominent part in preventing the
possibility of compromise with England. In 1794 he succeeded Hancock
as governor of Massachusetts, retiring in 1797 because of "the
increasing infirmities of age."
Like many other statesmen of his time he lived the greater part of
his life in poverty, but his only son, dying before him, left him a
property which supported him in his old age.
It is said that his great oration on American Independence,
delivered at Philadelphia in August 1776, and published here, is the
only complete address of his which has come down to us. It was
translated into French and published in Paris, and it is believed
that Napoleon borrowed from it the phrase, "A Nation of
Shopkeepers," to characterize the English.