The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Stacy Schiff
Little, Brown and Company (October 2022)

A “wildly entertaining exploration” of the thirteen colonies’ “Machiavelli of liberty”

This is among the most entertaining and most informative works of non-fiction that I have read in recent years. Stacy Schiff examines Samuel Adams’ life as both a window and a mirror during one of the most dynamic periods in western civilization.

In his review of this book for The New Yorker, Adam Gopnick describes Schiff’s depiction of Sam Adams as “a wildly entertaining exploration of the roots of American political theatre. Unreliable rumormongering, slanted news writing, misleading symbolism, even viral meme-sharing—it was all right there at the start. In John Singleton Copley’s great portrait of Sam Adams, from the early seventeen-seventies, the best portrait ever produced by that early American master, this self-knowing conspiratorial figure emerges. We see Sam in a suit of bright-red clothes, a kind of wry parody of British military wear, his head turned mischievously into clandestine half-light while his left hand makes, with elegant crablike tension, what has been, since Raphael’s depiction of Aristotle, the classic pictorial gesture of empiricism: hand facing downward, toward the facticity of earth. It says not, like Copley’s portrait of a seated Hancock, quill in hand, “I am a man of mind” but, rather, “I am here, dealing with real things only, a maker of minds.” It is the perfect image of a mastermind at work, Sam Adams as a Machiavelli of liberty.”

Gopnick’s review encouraged me to obtain a copy of Schiff’s book and as I began to read it, I already had several questions about Samuel Adams and hoped that she would answer them. She does so with eloquence and impact. My questions included these:

o What were the nature and extent of his relationship with his second cousin, John Adams?
o How was he viewed by other Founding Fathers, notably Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hancock?
o What was his attitude toward Thomas Paine and his classic work, Common Sense?
o How to explain his numerous failures in the business world prior to his highly effective involvement in public service?
o What is the unique significance of the Journal of Occurences?
o What were his major contributions to the ultimate success of the War for Independence?
o Why has Samuel Adams’ historical significance been under-appreciated??

Here is another brief excerpt that also indicates the thrust and flavor of Schiff’s superb writing style: “A glimmer, a gleam, the hurry of hoofs: a sturdy, square-jawed man speeds through the night, with an urgent message, on a borrowed horse. His topcoat flaps behind him. A bright moon hangs overhead. Within days he will know he has participated in some kind of history, though he will hesitate to attach his name to it for decades and is never to know that his own account will be obliterated—the adrenaline alone enduring—by verse, leaving him trapped in tetrameter, a mythic figure, eternally jouncing his way toward Lexington.”

According to Schiff, Adams “operated by stealth, melting into committees and crowd actions, pseudonyms and smoky back rooms.” His cunning and guile help to explain how and why the British were so eager by unable to eliminate him. Without a doubt, at least in my mind, he was the driving force behind New England’s — especially Boston’s — involvement…and that was his single greatest contribution to ultimate victory.

I have added The Revolutionary to a short list of books I am eager to re-read before next July. Others include Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1) and Patrick K. O’Donnell’s The Indispensables: The Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware.