Sam adams biography british

The ensuing Battles of Lexington and Concord were the opening armed confrontations that sparked the Revolutionary War. As a delegate to the Continental Congress, Adams signed the Declaration of Independence and continued his inflammatory rhetoric. In a speech in Philadelphia, he castigated Americans who sided with the Crown. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you.

As a member of the Continental Congress, Adams also helped draft the Articles of Confederation , the predecessor to the U. After leaving the Continental Congress in , Adams went back to Boston and eventually got back into state politics. He served for a time as president of the Massachusetts Senate and as Lieutenant Governor under Governor John Hancock, his former fellow radical.

When Hancock died in office, Adams took over for him and subsequently was elected to three one-year terms before retiring. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature. But apprehend this would be a fatal delusion. Rights of the Colonists , by Samuel Adams.

The Writings of Samuel Adams, Vol. He studied at Harvard College and received his degree in Following college he began the study of law, but soon gave in to family pressures and took a position as a clerk in the counting house of Thomas Cushing, one of the colony's leading merchants. Adams was not a success in business and worked for Cushing only a short time before beginning his own short-lived venture.

In spite of his lack of success at business failing as a brewer and tax collector and wasting an inheritance , Adams displayed true genius in politics. In , Adams was elected to the General Court legislature of Massachusetts, representing the town of Boston. His abilities were recognized by his fellow legislators and he soon rose to a leadership position.

Adams was offered positions by royal officials that would have enriched him, but he refused and remained chronically in debt. Adams was prominent in organizing protests over the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act He worked at Thomas Cushing 's counting house , but the job only lasted a few months because Cushing felt that Adams was too preoccupied with politics to become a good merchant.

Adams always remained, in the words of historian Pauline Maier , "a man utterly uninterested in either making or possessing money". After Adams had lost his money, his father made him a partner in the family's malthouse , which was next to the family home on Purchase Street. Several generations of Adamses were maltsters, who produced the malt necessary for brewing beer.

In January , Adams and some friends were inflamed by British impressment and launched The Independent Advertiser , a weekly newspaper that printed many political essays written by Adams. When Deacon Adams died in , Adams was given the responsibility of managing the family's affairs. Like his father, Adams embarked on a political career with the support of the Boston Caucus.

He was elected to his first political office in , serving as one of the clerks of the Boston market. In , the Boston Town Meeting elected him to the post of tax collector, which provided a small income. The town meeting was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Adams was compelled to file suit against delinquent taxpayers, but many taxes went uncollected.

Adams's friends paid off some of the deficit, and the town meeting wrote off the remainder. By then, he had emerged as a leader of the popular party, and the embarrassing situation did not lessen his influence. Samuel Adams emerged as an important public figure in Boston soon after the British Empire 's victory in the French and Indian War — The British Parliament found itself deep in debt and looking for new sources of revenue, and they sought to directly tax the colonies of British America for the first time.

In the years leading up to and into the revolution Adams made frequent use of colonial newspapers and began openly criticizing British colonial policy and by was advocating independence from Britain. Historian Ralph Harlow maintains that there is no doubt of the influence these men had in arousing public feeling. Adams earnestly endeavored to awaken his fellow citizens over the perceived attacks on their Constitutional rights, with emphasis aimed at Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson.

Hutchinson stressed that no one matched Adams' efforts in promoting the radical Whig position and the revolutionary cause, which Adams accordingly demonstrated with his numerous published and pointedly written essays and letters. The first step in the new program was the Sugar Act , which Adams saw as an infringement of longstanding colonial rights.

Colonists were not represented in Parliament, he argued, and therefore they could not be taxed by that body; the colonists were represented by the colonial assemblies, and only they could levy taxes upon them. As was customary, the town meeting provided the representatives with a set of written instructions, which Adams was selected to write.

Adams highlighted what he perceived to be the dangers of taxation without representation :. For if our Trade may be taxed, why not our Lands? It strikes at our British privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain. If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?

Alexander, "it became the first political body in America to go on record stating Parliament could not constitutionally tax the colonists. The directives also contained the first official recommendation that the colonies present a unified defense of their rights". In , Parliament passed the Stamp Act which required colonists to pay a new tax on most printed materials.

He supported calls for a boycott of British goods to put pressure on Parliament to repeal the tax. Adams was friendly with the Loyal Nine but was not a member. On August 26, lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson's home was destroyed by an angry crowd. Officials such as Governor Francis Bernard believed that common people acted only under the direction of agitators and blamed the violence on Adams.

Miller wrote in in what became the standard biography of Adams [ 90 ] that Adams "controlled" Boston with his "trained mob". In September , Adams was once again appointed by the Boston Town Meeting to write the instructions for Boston's delegation to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. As it turned out, he wrote his own instructions; on September 27, the town meeting selected him to replace the recently deceased Oxenbridge Thacher as one of Boston's four representatives in the assembly.

Adams was one of the first colonial leaders to argue that mankind possessed certain natural rights that governments could not violate. The Stamp Act was scheduled to go into effect on November 1, , but it was not enforced because protestors throughout the colonies had compelled stamp distributors to resign. There was celebration throughout the city, and Adams made a public statement of thanks to British merchants for helping their cause.

The Massachusetts popular party gained ground in the May elections. Adams was re-elected to the House and selected as its clerk, in which position he was responsible for official House papers. In the coming years, Adams used his position as clerk to great effect in promoting his political message. Hancock was a wealthy merchant—perhaps the richest man in Massachusetts—but a relative newcomer to politics.

After the repeal of the Stamp Act, Parliament took a different approach to raising revenue, passing the Townshend Acts in which established new duties on various goods imported into the colonies. These duties were relatively low because the British ministry wanted to establish the precedent that Parliament had the right to impose tariffs on the colonies before raising them.

To enforce compliance with the new laws, the Townshend Acts created a customs agency known as the American Board of Custom Commissioners, which was headquartered in Boston. Resistance to the Townshend Acts grew slowly. The General Court was not in session when news of the acts reached Boston in October Adams therefore used the Boston Town Meeting to organize an economic boycott, and called for other towns to do the same.

Dickinson's argument that the new taxes were unconstitutional had been made before by Adams, but never to such a wide audience. British colonial secretary Lord Hillsborough , hoping to prevent a repeat of the Stamp Act Congress, instructed the colonial governors in America to dissolve the assemblies if they responded to the Massachusetts Circular Letter.

Bernard responded by dissolving the legislature. The commissioners of the Customs Board found that they were unable to enforce trade regulations in Boston, so they requested military assistance. The situation exploded on June 10, when customs officials seized Liberty , a sloop owned by John Hancock—a leading critic of the Customs Board—for alleged customs violations.

Sailors and marines came ashore from Romney to tow away Liberty , and a riot broke out. Things calmed down in the following days, but fearful customs officials packed up their families and fled for protection to Romney and eventually to Castle William , an island fort in the harbor. Governor Bernard wrote to London in response to the Liberty incident and the struggle over the Circular Letter, informing his superiors that troops were needed in Boston to restore order.

The convention issued a letter which insisted that Boston was not a lawless town, using language more moderate than what Adams desired, and that the impending military occupation violated Bostonians' natural, constitutional, and charter rights. According to some accounts, the occupation of Boston was a turning point for Adams, after which he gave up hope of reconciliation and secretly began to work towards American independence.

Historian Pauline Maier challenged the idea that he had in , arguing instead that Adams, like most of his peers, did not embrace independence until after the American Revolutionary War had begun in Adams wrote numerous letters and essays in opposition to the occupation, which he considered a violation of the Bill of Rights. Their articles primary focused on the many grievances held by ordinary Bostonians toward the British occupation, including its subversion of civil authority and misbehavior by occupational troops.

The Journal also criticized the British impressment of colonial sailors into the Royal Navy. Adams continued to work on getting British occupational troops to withdraw from Boston and keeping the boycott going until the Townshend duties were repealed. Two regiments were removed from Boston in , but the other two remained. According to the "propagandist interpretation" [ 89 ] [ ] of Adams popularized by historian John Miller, Adams deliberately provoked the incident to promote his secret agenda of American independence.

After the Boston Massacre, Adams and other town leaders met with Bernard's successor Governor Thomas Hutchinson and with Colonel William Dalrymple , the army commander, to demand the withdrawal of all occupational troops from Boston. After the Boston Massacre, politics in Massachusetts entered what is sometimes known as the "quiet period". Adams urged colonists to keep up the boycott of British goods, arguing that paying even one small tax allowed Parliament to establish the precedent of taxing the colonies, but the boycott faltered.

A struggle over the power of the purse brought Adams back into the political limelight. Traditionally, the Massachusetts House of Representatives paid the salaries of the governor, lieutenant governor, and superior court judges. From the Whig perspective, this arrangement was an important check on executive power , keeping royally appointed officials accountable to democratically elected representatives.

Governor Hutchinson became concerned that the committees of correspondence were growing into an independence movement, so he convened the General Court in January The quiet period in Massachusetts was over. Adams was easily re-elected to the Massachusetts House in May , and was also elected as moderator of the Boston Town Meeting. In one letter, Hutchinson recommended to London that there should be "an abridgement of what are called English liberties" in Massachusetts.

Hutchinson denied that this is what he meant, but his career was effectively over in Massachusetts, and the House sent a petition asking the king to recall him. Adams took a leading role in the events that led up to the famous Boston Tea Party of December 16, , although the precise nature of his involvement has been disputed. Britons could buy smuggled Dutch tea more cheaply than the East India Company's tea because of the heavy taxes imposed on tea imported into Great Britain, and so the company amassed a huge surplus of tea that it could not sell.

The Tea Act permitted the East India Company to export tea directly to the colonies for the first time, bypassing most of the merchants who had previously acted as middlemen. The act also reduced the taxes on tea paid by the company in Britain, but kept the controversial Townshend duty on tea imported in the colonies. A few merchants in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charlestown were selected to receive the company's tea for resale.

Sam adams biography british

News of the Tea Act set off a firestorm of protest in the colonies. Protesters were instead concerned with a variety of other issues. The familiar " no taxation without representation " argument remained prominent, along with the question of the extent of Parliament's authority in the colonies. The tea tax revenues were to be used to pay the salaries of certain royal officials, making them independent of the people.

Adams and the correspondence committees promoted opposition to the Tea Act. He convinced the tea consignees, two of whom were his sons, not to back down. The tea ship Dartmouth [ clarification needed ] arrived in the Boston Harbor in late November, and Adams wrote a circular letter calling for a mass meeting to be held at Faneuil Hall on November Thousands of people arrived, so many that the meeting was moved to the larger Old South Meeting House.

The mass meeting passed a resolution introduced by Adams urging the captain of the Dartmouth to send the ship back without paying the import duty. Governor Hutchinson refused to grant permission for the Dartmouth to leave without paying the duty. Two more tea ships arrived in Boston Harbor, the Eleanor and the Beaver. The fourth ship, the William , was stranded near Cape Cod and never arrived in Boston.

December 16 was the last day of the Dartmouth's deadline, and about 7, people gathered around the Old South Meeting House. However, this claim did not appear in print until nearly a century after the event, in a biography of Adams written by his great-grandson, who apparently misinterpreted the evidence. That evening, a group of 30 to men boarded the three vessels, some of them thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians , and dumped all chests of tea into the water over the course of three hours.

Whether or not he helped plan the event is unknown, but Adams immediately worked to publicize and defend it. The first of these acts was the Boston Port Act , which closed Boston's commerce until the East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea. The Massachusetts Government Act rewrote the Massachusetts Charter, making many officials royally appointed rather than elected, and severely restricting the activities of town meetings.

The Administration of Justice Act allowed colonists charged with crimes to be transported to another colony or to Great Britain for trial. A new royal governor was appointed to enforce the acts: General Thomas Gage , who was also commander of British military forces in North America. Adams worked to coordinate resistance to the Coercive Acts.

He was one of five delegates chosen to attend the First Continental Congress. In Philadelphia, Adams promoted colonial unity while using his political skills to lobby other delegates. Adams returned to Massachusetts in November , where he served in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress , an extralegal legislative body independent of British control.

The Provincial Congress created the first minutemen companies, consisting of militiamen who were to be ready for action on a moment's notice. John Hancock had been added to the delegation, and he and Adams attended the Provincial Congress in Concord, Massachusetts , before Adams's journey to the second Congress. Betsy Ross. John Adams. Andrew Jackson.

George Rogers Clark. Roger Sherman. James Monroe. George III.