Books: Heroic Revolutionist

SAM ADAMS—John C. Miller—Little, Brown ($4).

In the decade before the Revolutionary War, a group of well-born Massachusetts men, known as “the brace of Adamses,” caused as much mischief to royal governors as any rebellious family in the provinces. Chief among them was a grey, palsied, austere, middle-aged man named Sam Adams, who was considered in his day the greatest fomenter of revolution in the world, the most hated, praised and feared leader of the colonists, and who has since been supplanted in historic significance by men famed chiefly as his tools at the height of his own career. Last week this neglected U. S. hero was made the central figure of a biography that pictured him as a forerunner of the true type of modern revolutionist, an able, unscrupulous, single-minded man, skilled in intrigue and a master of the modern art of political propaganda.

Sam Adams is a lively, ironic book, brightened with choice quotations from the great days of political invective, when opponents called each other “tippling, nasty, vicious crews.” “plucked gawkys,” cowardly “herds of scalded hogs,” “Cockatrice Eggs, which breed Serpents to poison the People.” Subtitled Pioneer in Propaganda, it is the first book of a Junior Fellow of Harvard College, marks the appearance of an engaging, readable talent in the field of political biography where such qualities are usually lacking.

Indirectly casting doubt on the purity of Adams’ motives, sophisticated Author Miller shows him as tenacious, wily, audacious, gives only a dim suggestion of the forces that inspired him in both his persistence and his cleverness. Born in 1722, Sam Adams was the son of a prosperous Boston brewer and merchant, studied at the Boston Latin School and Harvard. He was drawn into politics after quick failures in a counting house and in his father’s business, did his first political writing anonymously at the age of 26. Caught up in the great religious revival of the 1740’s, he became an ardent Puritan and remained one until his death, living simply, denouncing all vices impartially, demanding a return to the sober ways of the founding fathers. He served as city scavenger and tax collector (acquiring a shortage on his books of £7,000), married, fathered two children, was widowed and married again at the age of 42. Not until the Sons of Liberty grew strong in the 1760’s did he find an outlet for his talents. Democratic, at ease with commoners, he was at home in the turbulent groups of shipyard workers, mechanics, laborers, that were viewed with distrust by most men of his class.

Since these elements appear in Author Miller’s account to have regularly rioted at any excuse, Sam Adams’ great achievement lay in turning their riots against royal governors and Tories, calling them off when their actions frightened prosperous allies in the struggle for U. S. independence, timing their “frolicks” with skill. To keep his followers in line, he sometimes exaggerated. When British troops were quartered in Boston, before the Boston Massacre, Adams whipped up the countryside with lurid accounts of atrocities, particularly raping. Stung, the soldiers swore that there were so many women of easy virtue in the capital of the Puritans that there was not a soldier “down to a drummer, that cannot have his bedfellow for the winter; so that the Yankey war, contrary to all others, will produce more births than burials.” If that attitude moved patriotic, virtuous Sam Adams to honest indignattion, Author Miller does not mention it, presents him rather as driven by personal enmity and cold calculation as he served at the Continental Congress, prevented a showdown between New England and Virginia, became Governor of his native State, occasionally letting the mobs “frolick” in his old age to frighten his fellow-rebels, now conservative Federalists.