How much do you really know about Samuel Adams?

In ‘The Revolutionary,’ Stacy Schiff shines a light on one of America’s most important, but little-known founding fathers

BY JENNIFER HUBERDEAU

What do we know about Samuel Adams?

Popular culture would have us believe he was a successful brewer. History books tell us he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a founder of the Sons of Liberty, a hot head, a cousin of the second president and a governor of Massachusetts.

Some historical records would place him at the scene of the Boston Tea Party; other accounts would have him participating in the action. Other historians left him out of their accounts altogether.

Why did Thomas Jefferson describe Samuel Adams as “truly the man of the Revolution”?

What do you really know about Samuel Adams?

Very little? You’re not alone.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff, a native of Adams and author of the newly released “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” once found herself in the same situation.

“Honestly, there was just a great deal of embarrassment, on my part, that I had grown up in Adams [which is named after Samuel] and really not known anything about [Samuel] Adams,” Schiff said during a recent interview over Zoom. “He makes a cameo in my Ben Franklin book, but even there I had never really looked into much of his background. So those things, you know, began to sort of simmer. The

ore I looked into it, the more I just became completely obsessed.” However, “The Revolutionary,” which debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times’ hard-cover nonfiction list, was not the biography Schiff set out to write in 2016. At the time, Schiff had just come off a promotional tour for “The Witches: Salem, 1692,” a non-fiction account of the Salem Witch Trials based on firsthand accounts and source material. “After Salem, I really was, I think, deliberately looking for someone admirable, someone who had taken a very courageous moral stand, someone who has sort of spoken truth to power, and someone who could be said to have rerouted history,” she said. The more she read, the more Samuel Adams checked off all of those boxes for Schiff. “I thought I was writing about someone else,” she said. “The person I was researching, their books were to the right, and Samuel Adams’ [books] were to the left, and I kept kind of walking onto the floor of the library and going left.

Three hours later, I would. be sitting on the floor, reading the papers of Samuel Adams. At a certain point, my agent finally said, ‘Obviously, you want to write a book about Adams.’” In writing his biography, Schiff tells the story of a Samuel Adams we are not familiar with. Historians have either forgotten about him or reduced him to a caricature, a firebrand of sorts. Instead, Schiff delivers a Samuel Adams (never Sam) as his colleagues, friends, enemies and rivals saw him — as one of the most influential men working behind the scenes of the American Revolution.

Schiff describes Adams as a man who lived “what may count as the most remarkable second act in American life” and as being “a perfect failure until middle age.” A graduate of Boston Latin, he attended Harvard at the age of 14. He earned a bachelor’s degree and later a master’s. He studied theology and law, but pursued neither. He failed at almost every job he took before the age of 41, including as a brewer — one of several occupations held by his father.

When British rule bankrupted his family (his father invested in a land bank to help out fellow Bostonians when money was scarce), Adams found his footing, founded a newspaper and began writing editorials and articles — under the guise of pseudonyms — critical of the crown officers, of new tariffs and taxes burdensome to the colonists.

Adams would recruit John Hancock and his cousin, John Adams, to the cause that became a revolution, ending with a declaration of independence and a newborn country. He would be the voice that connected the common man with the political elite. And, eventually, he would fall out of the picture.

The following excerpt, from a conversation with Schiff about “The Revolutionary,” is edited for clarity and length.

When it comes to the Revolutionary War, why do we know more about John Adams than Samuel Adams?

STACY SCHIFF: I think one of the many reasons why Samuel Adams falls off the radar is that John occupies so much of center stage … When I was looking at the accounts of Paul Revere’s ride and thinking it’s crazy that we all know Paul Revere gets on his horse on April 18, 1775, but we never stopped to think where he actually going. The idea that [Samuel] Adams and [John] Hancock were at the end, were actually his destination, kind of threw me back. I thought, you know, this so much explains so many parts of those years and so many hidden recesses of those years. I mean, just the question of, ‘How does the resistance movement take off as fast as it does after the Boston Port Act?’ [is answered when you add him into the equation]. The answer is the Committees of Correspondence and Samuel Adams. So, it was piecing those questions together and realizing how little I knew.

You write at one point that Samuel Adams burns his letters; at another point, he took scissors to them, and, unlike his contemporaries, he does not write a memoir. How hard was it to research someone who didn’t want to be in front of the curtain?

STACY SCHIFF: I think the problem is you end up with a lot of questions that are unanswered. I have so many questions. For starters, how much does he mastermind the Boston Tea Party? When does resistance begin to mutate into independence? You know, just the questions that we can’t answer.

The biggest cache of his remaining papers is in New York at the New York Public Library, as are the papers of the Boston Committee of Correspondence. So those were really, really rich resources. Although they, of course, don’t answer some of those central questions. But because you have the other side of his correspondence there, which had not been published, you can begin to really flesh out the man because the published letters are just as letters, not what he’s responding to.

And then there’s just a great wealth of material in the British archives because you can read what the crown officers are writing about him. Obviously, it’s very damning material, as it’s often very colorful material and sometimes it’s also erroneous. But it gives you a sense of what a thorn he is in the British side and how effective he is … There’s so much personal stuff we don’t have. We don’t have some of his letters to his wife. We have very little correspondence with his children. I should say, there is mention in his great-grandson’s book about him, of this memoir that was left by

Samuel Adams’ daughter about her father. Stacy Schiff I think it’s like a 50-page document. I just assumed it would turn up in the archive and it never did. So that was one of those things where you count on something, thinking ‘that will give me the personal dimension of the man’ and no one can find it. There are heartbreaks like that. But I felt as always as if that was the Holy Grail because when I had that, I would be able to get a more rounded sense of his personal life or his emotional life, and that never turned up.

It seems like so much about him was lost. Was it done purposefully?

STACY SCHIFF: That ritual destruction of the letters, of which John Adams writes, I suspect that happened at many addresses, that many people were destroying documents. I’m sure that Dr. [Joseph] Warren [who was killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill] had a great cache of documents that went missing. A lot of this was meant to be ‘no fingerprints’ and came down to us without fingerprints.

Most people don’t realize what a big role Samuel Adams played in the founding of the country. Why do you think that is?

STACY SCHIFF: I think the whole binding the Colonies together, he’s the person who really is most eager to unite everybody and he is trying to do something from a really early date. I think that gets lost because it’s just there’s no event attached to it, but it is a thing that explains, as I say, how the Boston Port Act misfires as loudly as it does because he’s knit everybody together at that point. It’s hard when someone’s behind the scenes to know what to attribute to him. But that one we know, when people say Samuel Adams’ Committees of Correspondence, we know that one is his creation. ■