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Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution

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Mark Puls' Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution is a quick read. It provides a useful sketch of one of the Revolution's major figures--Samuel Adams.

The book takes a chronological perspective, beginning with Adams' childhood and the experiences with his father, a well regarded local businessman (including owning a malt shop) and community leader (becoming a deacon in his church and a member of the legislature).

The story continues with his education and efforts to make a life for himself. He was not overly ambitious for economic success and, after his father's death, essentially saw the family brewery go bankrupt. Nonetheless, he hustled and was able to make ends meet, although times were often tough for him and his family.

Early on, Sam Adams became discontented with aspects of the Massachusetts colony's relationship with England, the King, and Parliament. He was one of the leading agitators in the 1760s and 1770s. He was developer of several innovations, such as the Committees of Correspondence throughout the colonies, a mechanism to enhance communication across boundaries. He was involved in many of the key activities leading to the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War, including urging a Continental Congress, fighting against English taxes, seeking the naming of George Washington as the general officer to lead the colonial forces in the siege of Boston. The biography continues with his role in development of the first constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation, as well as his part in the ratification of the Constitution itself.

This is a serviceable biography. However, it does have a couple problematic aspects. For one, the author tries to "get inside his head," making assumptions about what Adams was actually thinking. Biographies that minimize this tend to flow more smoothly, without imposing authorial assumptions onto the historical figure. For another, the biography has little critical cast on Adams. He is essentially treated so positively that one wonders if he had any peculiarities or annoying habits or made important errors. It is clear that some distrusted him mightily from other volumes; however, this does not really get discussed in any detail in this volume (although his falling out with John Hancock is addressed). The book also glosses over some important events, such as his complete turnabout on the Constitution. It portrays him as opposed to the document in the Massachusetts ratifying convention, only to turn around and support it. The author provides little discussion to explain this volte face.

In the final analysis, though, this is a useful biography of one of the colonial leaders who worked hard to move the colonies toward independence.

When you read about most revolutionary war figures - Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson or Madison - their stories more or less start with the American Revolution. Even Ben Franklin, a member of an earlier generation, did not jump on the Independence wagon very early or very easily. Samuel Adams, however, was the most important figure in the early Independence movement and quite rightfully deserves the title Father of the American Revolution.

Mark Puls brief (less than 250 pages of text) biography shows how important Adams was. From an early age, Adams started thinking of independence from England. In 1764, he unsuccessfully opposed the Sugar Act, but laid the foundation for his battle against the 1765 Stamp Act. Showing both good organizational ability and political savvy, he was able to successfully organize a boycott that forced Parliament to repeal the measure. Although it would take a decade to take root, this was really the first blow for independence; it began harder and harder for the British to deal with colonial unrest.

Eventually, after acts like the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party, the rift widened and reconciliation, though attempted, was clearly impossible. During the Revolutionary War, Adams played key roles behind the scenes. Although not an author of the Declaration of Independence, his ideas permeated the document; he also helped construct the Articles of Confederation. After the war, however, other figures moved into the spotlight, a role he was fine with giving up.

In ways Samuel Adams was an idealist, willing to sacrifice his health and financial well-being to accomplish his objectives. He was also, however, a pragmatist, able to work behind the scenes to meet his goals. Reading his biography, however, is also a lesson on how we determine who are our "heroes." In certain ways, Adams is little different from John Calhoun, who also felt he was opposing an oppressive government. Adams, however, is generally looked on favorably, while Calhoun - a major proponent of slavery and one who helped start the secession movement - has, at best, a mixed reputation.

Puls biography is a positive one that never really discusses his subject's flaws, but doesn't descend into the cloying sweetness of hagiography. Well-written, this book is readable and informative, providing insight into one of the lesser-known figures of the era. For those who enjoy learning about this period, or who seem to only know Samuel Adams from the beer that bears his name, this book will be a good read.

When we think of our founding fathers the names of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison come to mind. However, prior to these men becoming household names we had Samuel Adams, rabblerouser and trailblazer. Sam Adams is often overlooked because he neglected to document his place in history regarding our break with England. He was not a material person, and while others wrote autobiograhies he made no effort to see that his place in history would be secure. At brewing beer he was a failure, but at starting a revolution he rated A+. He did possess the gift of leadership and organization which led other members of The Sons of Liberty to follow him, and to assure that the other colonies became united against the abuses of England towards the American colonies. Adams suffered several personal losses throughout his life. Among them the death of his first wife, several children including his physician son Dr. Sam Adams, who served as a battlefield surgeon during the Revolutionary War, and a physical affliction of palsy which made it difficult for him to write. In regard to the Constitution he saw the need for a check and balance of powers among the three branches of government. The book is only 237 pages long, but it's about time we had a biography of this neglected founding father, because he saw independence as a goal for America before it entered the mind of anyone else.

No one has articulated it any better than Mark Puls when he states in his concluding remarks that " Americans of his generation came to view Samuel Adams as the spirit of liberty and the patriarch of liberty". Jefferson may have written about the ideals of independence more eloquently; Washington may have acted upon those ideals more directly; and, Franklin may have translated those ideals more concretely abroad to our French allies; however, no one of our founding fathers wrote more frequently, acted more fervently, or lived more fully and focused on the prize of separation and independence than Samuel Adams.

Maybe it's because Adams shunned the spotlight and the attention that others of his era sought so impassionately to grasp, or perhaps, he was content to simply see from the background the ultimate fruits of his prodigious labors. Whatever the reason, Adams emerged as the leading patriot strategist,politician as well as most influential writer in America. The author has truly captured the essence of the man who deservedly is called the Father of the American Revolution. It is a well-witten, if not long overdue, tribute to the mastermind behind the War of independence.

I recently read that, "The purpose of a biography is to report on a person's life in an informative and entertaining manner." Mark Puls does this extremely well with this book. Samuel Adams is the most under reported and under appreciated Founder, but Puls book does a terrific job of adding context to his life and his amazing singular focus on achieving liberty for the colonies. Most biographies of the other Founders and historical works of those times don't fully flesh out for the reader the period of the early 1760s until 1775 and Lexington and Concord. Puls' tells this part of the American founding in a way I have never read before. He conveys the crucial role Sam Adams played in a way I had never heard in depth before. I found it a fun, easy ready, full of great information and revealed a Founding Father that we should all come to know better. This book is a great place to begin, and I recommend it highly.

One of the seeming paradoxes of the American Revolution is that, unlike later revolutions, the issues in dispute, centrally the question of taxation without representation, appear from this distance to have been resolvable by essentially parliamentary means until very late in the conflict. This is reflected in the attitudes and political maneuverings of the members of the various colonial leaderships, Samuel Adams included. Unlike the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution there were apparently few conscious revolutionaries ready to take drastic action to gain independence until events forced their hands. Moreover, unlike those revolutions which were more or less predicted by substantial numbers of the people involved based on a whole series of social, political and economic factors the situation in America did not on the surface cry out for such a resolution. However, like those governments the various pre-revolutionary British governments and particularly the person of George III clung to their prerogatives beyond all reason. That is the unifying factor between all three revolutions.

That said, Samuel Adams, by hook or by crook, stands heads above the other colonial leaders in pressing the fight against the Crown to the end. He, unlike others in the various colonial leaderships, did not waiver when it became clear that nothing short of independence would resolve the conflict. From the time of the fight against the Stamp Act through the fight over the quartering of British troops in Boston to the ramifications of the Boston Massacre, the Townsend Acts, the Tea Party, the creation of the committees of correspondence to the call for the Continental Congress his name, thought and pen are linked to the struggles, particularly the struggles in Massachusetts, a pivotal locale of the colonial struggles. Moreover, again unlike other leaders, he was throughout the controversies connected with the plebian masses through the Sons of Liberty. Thus, without exaggeration he can truly be called a tribune of the people. That he has been placed on a lesser level in the pantheon of revolutionary heroes has more to do with how and who writes history than in the measure of the importance of his role in the Revolution.

One can make a strong argument that Adams's organizational skills were critical to the successful union of the colonies into a unitary fighting force against the Crown. His committees of correspondence which he initiated in Massachusetts as a means for dispensing information, producing propaganda and cohering a collective leadership for that colony and which he was instrumental in expanding to the other colonies led to the Continental Congress and thereafter to its call for a Declaration of Independence. No, he did not have a big role in the Declaration itself nor did he play a national role in the revolutionary struggle but one can clearly see his imprint on the thinking (and doing) of the times. The American Revolution was carried out by big men doing a big job. Sam Adams was a big man. If a closet Tory like his cousin John Adams has, due to recent biographical publicity, emerged as a bigger icon in the revolutionary galaxy then Sam Adams's certainly needs to be reevaluated. Read more.

Give the author an "A" for producing a very interesting and informative look at an Adams family member who has not received the attention from history he deserves. Give the publisher "F" for not being interested enough to have a proofreader correct the numerous grammatical errors before printing it.

Sam Adams was one of the principal architects of the American Revolution. Mark Puls, in this fine biography, helps to illuminate Adams's place in the founding of the American republic. More than anyone else of his era, Sam Adams understood how to organize direct resistance to the powers that be and to ensure its sustainment over long periods of time. Scratch the surface of virtually every confrontation between the British and American colonists in Massachusetts Bay colony and one would find the handwork of Samuel Adams. Sometimes he might be behind the scenes but as often as not he was leading men in the streets taking direct action. He was also a pamphleteer and rabble rouser par excellence, organizing the "Sons of Liberty" as a semi-military force to resist British actions and a voice of independence throughout all of the British colonies in the 1760s and 1770s.

"Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution" is a useful addition to the literature on the "Founding Fathers." While most reverence for members of this group is reserved for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and others associated with the formation of a new government, Sam Adams role was equally important. He organized resistance groups and could turn out protestors, and later trained soldiers, virtually instantaneously in Massachusetts. An economic "ne'er do well," Sam Adams possessed none of the economic acumen of his second cousin John Adams. He preferred to carouse in bars, argue about politics, and manipulate the colonial system. Over time, he adopted a stark revolutionary perspective and he used his pen to whip others into a frenzy. He was equally good at propaganda with crowds--or were they mobs--as he organized for revolution first in Boston and then beyond. When the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775, and when the Declaration of Independence was passed by the Continental Congress in 1776 Sam Adams was there to persuade all in earshot and publication range of the virtues of revolution.

This is a generally acceptable biography of Samuel Adams. The author undertook basic but not in-depth research, and as a journalist with the "Detroit News" he crafts the story well. Puls draws memorable portraits of the actors and sets scenes well. No doubt about it, he tells a good story. But this narrative also leaves many questions unanswered that might have been explored by a specialist in the history of the revolutionary era. As only one example, a major source of controversy for many years has been the nature of the Sons of Liberty, Sam Adams's enforcers--was this a class issue of poor attacking the rich--and historians have been debating this subject for years. Carl Becker said it best a century ago: "The war was not about home rule, but about who would rule at home" (Carl Becker, "The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776," Wisconsin, 1909). Was Sam Adams mobilizing the poor to take over, was he manipulating them for other purposes, was something else at work in the violence and vigilantism of the Sons of Liberty? While Mark Puls discusses the most well-known of the activities of the Sons of Liberty, he does not subsume the action of his narrative to investigate seriously the nature of the violence it wrought.

Puls does somewhat better when considering such things as the Samuel Adams-organized Committee of Correspondence in Massachusetts, formed in November 1772 to disseminate pro-revolutionary propaganda and to rally opposition to British rule. But here too there are many areas deserving of exploration that one will have to look to professional historians for illumination.

Even so, this is a generally good book that offers a modern gloss on the career of the leading propagandist of the American Revolution.

In this biography of one of the most neglected of the Founding Fathers, Mark Puls seeks to remind Americans of the role that Samuel Adams played in bringing an independent United States of America into existence. And he does so brilliantly.

As Puls demonstrates, Adams had come to the conclusion that the liberties of the colonists in his native Massachusetts and elsewhere in British America would never truly be safe until those colonies had broken free from British rule. He reached that conclusion in 1765, a full decade before the idea would even seem to become thinkable, and 16 years before it would become a reality with the defeat of General Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Slowly but surely, Adams embarked on a two-pronged strategy of confronting the British and communicating his ideas to his fellow colonists and uniting them in the ongoing struggle for Colonial liberty. On the first ground, Adams achieved remarkable success in organizing the effort to resist British rules and twice forced Parliament and the Crown to withdraw tariffs meant to extract money from the Colonies to help repay Britain's war debt. On the second, he initiated contact, and eventually Committees of Correspondence, between Massachusetts and all of the colonies. Adams lived to see his dream come true, not only with independence itself, but with the formation of a truly remarkable system of government.

Puls does an excellent job of bringing the work, ideas, and influence of this forgotten Father of the American Revolution back into the light of day where they belong. If you want to truly understand how the American Revolution came about, you need to know about Samuel Adams. And, Puls's biography is an excellent resource.

This is an informative book and I learned quite a bit about Samuel Adams, but it does not provide an in-depth or comprehensive analysis of the subject matter.

First let me go into what I liked about the book and what I learned from it. Almost all books on the American war for independence include information concerning the contributions of Samuel Adams, however, this book brought his contributions into sharper focus, at least for me. The book strives to counter the negative view of Adams that developed during the early 20th century, which characterized him as a failure in business who became a pamphleteer and agitator with somewhat ulterior motives. While his activities as a pamphleteer and agitator are amply discussed in the book, they are not given this negative interpretation. In fact, the impression one gets from this book is of a man with high principles, who strove to prevent violence, but was one of the first to believe that complete separation from Britain was necessary. In addition to his work to turn public opinion in favor of separation, he also worked to set up the mechanisms for self-government. I did not realize that he served on the committee to write the Articles of Confederation and was involved with the writing of the Massachusetts state constitution. The book acquainted me with Adams' role as an elected Massachusetts politician - as president of the Massachusetts state senate, as lieutenant governor and finally as governor. I knew of his association with John Hancock, but I was unaware of the animosity that developed between the two, but that eventually they were reconciled.

The book contains a timeline of Adams' life and a list of Who is Who in the Revolutionary War. There are notes, an index, and ten pages of black and white photographs. However, these photographs are printed on the same coarse paper as the text, so they are a bit murky.

While I found the preceding and many other features of the book quite informative (except for the poor quality pictures), there were things that I did not like about the book - things that prevented me from giving the book a five star rating. I was hoping for more of an analysis of Adam's actions, beyond the fact that the failure of his father's land bank and the attempts to take his property created a great hostility towards the British and colonial governments.

Of more concern was what I see as a generally superficial treatment of the history of the factors that led to the American war for independence. For instance:
- The Sugar Act is mentioned, but not the fact that it was repealed, nor is the fact that the act actually reduced the import tax on sugar. A reader is not told that the critical feature was the fact that the British now attempted to actually collect it and that this attempt at enforcement was the real source of friction.
- Committees of correspondence are discussed, but not how they worked. What exactly did they do and why, as stated in the text, did they act as a shadow government?
- To what extent was Adams involved with the Boston Tea party? There is an insinuation that his speech delivered before the event somehow contained a coded message, but no elaboration is given. What was his relationship to the Sons of Liberty? Did he plan the Tea Party, did he know it was to take place, was he one of the "Indians" who threw the tea overboard?

The book lacks very much critical analysis, so serious students of American History will likely be somewhat disappointed in it. However, the book may meet the needs of those who only desire a general treatment of Adams' life and his impact on the Revolutionary War. I feel that the book is more appropriate for this audience, but would only rate four-stars because the writing, while straightforward, is somewhat dry. It lacks the sort of drama and interesting writing that are provided by the books on American history written by David McCullough or Ron Chernow, which I think define five-star histories.