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The Father of the American Revolution - Part Three

© Brian Tubbs

Twenty years after graduating from Harvard College, Samuel Adams, though a widower and nearly bankrupt from his failed professional career, was on the verge of becoming one of the most pivotal figures in western history.

With his mother filling in for his deceased wife as the main provider for his children, Adams focused on defending what was left of his family’s estate.

On August 4, 1758, the sheriff of Boston announced that the Adams house on Purchase Street, the brewery, and several other family properties would be auctioned the following day. The purpose of seizing Adams’s property and placing it on the auction block was to remedy the enormous losses the elder Adams had suffered in the Land Bank fiasco and that the younger Adams had compounded in his failed efforts to manage the family brewery. Displaying the zeal that would catapult him to national prominence, Adams struck back. The Boston News-Letter published on August 5 an open letter from Samuel Adams to the sheriff. Adams’s letter blasted the proposed auction as “illegal and unwarrantable,” and threatened legal action against the sheriff and anyone who assisted him in carrying out the proceeding. The sheriff backed down, postponing the auction until later in the year. It would eventually be dropped altogether.

Adams’s defiance of the local sheriff proved his effectiveness at public protest, but did not change the essential fact that he was a man in serious trouble. The Adams brewery continued its steady decline, and Adams was hopeless as a Boston tax collector. As biographer Paul Lewis writes: “By Sam Adams’s fortieth birthday in 1762, he had no financial standing, had accomplished nothing of note in any field and, judged by any standards, was a failure in life.”

His regular editorializing in The Advertiser, however, kept him in the public realm. While his passionate theorizing of Lockean principles had not galvanized public opinion yet, that was about to change as the Seven Years’ War came to an end. By 1761, British forces had driven the French largely from North America, and, by 1763, the world was ready for peace. With the ascension of King George III to the throne in England, a major power shift occurred in London, one that eased the war effort away from the popular Prime Minister William Pitt, and forced the war to a diplomatic conclusion in 1763. Burdened with a huge post-war debt and having made the strategic decision to keep troops in North America, England decided to tax the colonies - and, in so doing, rescue Sam Adams from a life of mediocrity and disappointment.