College of Political Knowledge

Subject: Early American History

This is the week that we stop and celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and as usual I post some American history that I feel has been overshadowed by the doings of the DoI issue….we spend all our energy patting people like Jefferson on the back (my readers know that I am not enamored with Jefferson at all)…….I feel we spend too much time on the action and not enough on what lead up to the situation that the Founders felt that they needed to declare our independence from mother England………

We all know the story of Concord and Bunker Hill and Valley Forge…..we are, for the most part, acquainted with the Stamp Act, the Taxes on tea and eventually Bunker Hill….first let me say, the action was not fought on Bunker Hill but rather the smaller hill next to it, Breed’s Hill, I believe…..one of the many revisionists views of what happened…….

Our Founding Fathers were rebel, in the loosest sense of the word and not radicals…..most were hoping for an eventual reconciliation with England…..in the beginning many were not even thinking about independence……so where did the idea of an independent America come from, is a question that is seldom asked.

It was Samuel Adams who took the first step toward its construction, though the idea had been first suggested in 1705 by the great preacher Jonathan Mayhew. In order to provoke the colonies to assemble in a continental congress, it was only necessary that the British government should take the aggressive upon some issue in which all the colonies were equally interested. The sending of the tea-ships in 1773 was such an act of aggression, and forced the issue upon the colonists. The management of this delicate and difficult affair, down to the day when Massachusetts virtually declared war by throwing the tea into the harbor, was entirely in the hands of the committees of correspondence of Boston and five neighboring towns, with the expressed consent of the other Massachusetts committees and the general approval of the country. In this bold act of defiance Samuel Adams was from first to last the leading spirit.

He had been the first of American statesmen to come to the conclusion that independence was the only remedy for the troubles of the time; and since 1768 he had acted upon this conviction without publicly avowing it. The “Boston tea party” made war inevitable. In April, 1774, parliament retorted with the acts for closing the port of Boston and annulling the charter of Massachusetts. This alarmed all the colonies, and led to the first meeting of the continental congress. In this matter the other colonies invited Massachusetts to take the lead, and the work was managed by Mr. Adams with his accustomed shrewdness and daring. When the legislature met at Salem, 17 June, 1774, in conformity to the new acts of parliament, he locked the door, put the key into his pocket, and carried through the measures for assembling a congress at Philadelphia in September. A Tory member, feigning sudden illness, was allowed to go out, and ran straight to the governor with the news. The governor lost no time in drawing up the writ dissolving the legislature, but when his clerk reached the hall he found the door locked and could not serve the writ. When the business was accomplished the legislature adjourned sine die. It was the last Massachusetts legislature assembled in obedience to the sovereign authority of Great Britain. The acts of April were henceforth entirely disregarded in Massachusetts.
Adams served Continental Congress until his return to Boston in 1781. He initially opposed the new Constitution of the United States, but finally supported its ratification in Massachusetts. Adams served as Governor of Massachusetts from 1793 to 1797.

In my mind Samuel Adams holds a special place as a radical who always wanted a separate and independent America……he along with Thomas Paine made the independence we so cherish more than just a pipe dream….they made it a possibility.