Sam Adams, Liberty & Freedom, and What Sam Knew

From Americans for Constitutional Government Reform (ACGR).

(This is a lengthy report, but yet succinnct. [sic] It contains an outline of how Samuel Adams stood against the Crown of England and what lessons are useful for us now. Please enjoy and let us know what YOU THINK. I am happy to add YOUR comments and ideas.)

William R Collier Jr. The American Freedomist http://blog.freedomist.info (The Ugly Blog That Tells the WHOLE Story!)


As early as 1748 Samuel Adams, who should be considered the Father of the American revolution, started to write in a newspaper he jointly owned with a group of like-minded young men, about what was then an alarming tendency by the British Crown to ignore and violate the “charters” of the 13 colonies. Sam may have been a sickly man and an abject business failure, but he was the first to see and to publicly say that things would come to a head and that the only way to restore the charter rights was to become independent of the Crown.

These charters gave the colonies a great amount of local self-control and over time the Crown started to simply ignore the charters or it made arbitrary changes that did not favor the colonies at all. For the Crown, the colonies were a business investment in which the only thing that mattered was profit: the “Lords of Trade” wanted the colonies to produce only certain items, none manufactured, and to act as a “market” for their manufactured goods.

Sam saw right off the bat the logic of the situation. The Crown was pursuing policies that were not beneficial to the colonists, in service of the Lords of Trade, and would have to use more and more coercive powers to enforce such policies. This meant that either people would have to be made ignorant or made impotent, or both.

Sam believed, and started to say so, that there were only two paths: either the colonies would be turned into dominions of the Crown in which all former rights to self government and, of course, the right to be armed and the right of a free press, would be eliminated OR the colonies would have to separate from the Crown’s jurisdiction and replace the Crown’s rulership with a system in which the colonies each kept their charter rights, and enhanced them, and formed their own Union to make them safe from European powers.

Quite simply, Sam described a possibility of abject bondage or of “independency” and for the most part, Sam was ignored or even shunned for his beliefs. In everything he did, Sam was a failure and it has been said that while Sam was a fearless and dedicated worker in his cause, the cause of independence, he did not seek his own advantage or raise his station in life. He lost the money his father gave him, 1,000 pounds sterling, and the newspaper he and his friends owned was funded by them with only some support from advertisers and subscribers.

Sam was a tax collector, but because he refused to pursue people who could not pay their taxes with any vigor, he was notoriously in “arrears”, which means that, under the rules of the day, he was personally liable for the uncollected taxes (taxes were assigned, they were not based on income or wealth, on a per capita basis). Eventually the good people of Boston simply voted to forgive him of what he owed (2,000 pounds sterling), but this was after what had to have been many years of carrying a huge burden while focusing almost his every waking hour on arousing the people to a realization that there were only two possible paths to follow: bondage or independence.

Somehow, Sam was able to survive and lived, even in his last days, in a ramshackle house, which was all he could afford. Quite simply, Sam never gained materially from his work in sparking and laying the groundwork for the revolution and he suffered greatly in the years before it became more obvious that his seemingly “radical” ideas were, in fact, quite reasonable.

After the revolution Sam lived mostly in obscurity, he served in the Continental Congress and as Governor of Massachusetts, but his days of glory were from 1765 to around 1777: he had spent almost 20 years trying to arouse the people, from 1748 to 1756, he worked with James Otis, an unsung hero of only slightly less importance than Sam, from around 1765 to 1769 galvanizing the people around high ideals. From 1769 to 1775 he consolidated his position and single handedly organized the vital institutions that would lead the revolution, namely the Committees of Correspondence which led to the Continental Congress, from 1775 to 1777 he energized the revolution and worked tirelessly on countless issues within the Congress, and from 1777 to his death again receded into relative unimportance with a 4 years stint as governor dying in 1803 at the age of 82.

While James Otis has done so much to lay the legal and theoretical groundwork for the Revolution he was always an uncertain, hesitant revolutionary, he really believed that a new form of “Empire” was possible in which the Colonies would become equal partners and even, at one time, predicted that the real power on the Empire would shift across the Atlantic (which is what happened in general).

Otis was a defender of the rights of the people, what was called “the popular party,” that was a coalition of very conservative farmers in the countryside and of more or less radical merchants, mechanics, and laborers in the city of Boston. The basis of this coalition (they did not have formal “parties” but mostly they met as what was called “The Caucus Club” or “The Sons of Liberty”), was a common faith in the principles of freedom and liberty, almost exclusively based on the writings of John Locke, the ideological founder of the United States, a desire to restore all lost rights and privileges under the charter of the colony, and expansion of those rights, and a liberalization of trade that would allow the colony to manufacture its own goods and eliminate all, or most, tariffs and duties on all trade goods.

This coalition was not limited to any racial group (although, blacks were, as a rule, not members if they were slaves, there were black members, such as Crispus Attacks), and it included men of all economic classes. The Town Meeting form of government was not, as some think today, limited to property owners: all men above 21 years of age were welcomed and came and many elections occurred right there in the Town Meeting while ALL could, and most did, participate and speak, even when meetings of 4,000 people occurred (although usually around 500 showed up).

This coalition did not seek to fix anything, beyond public works or public safety, but only sought to open up opportunities and give greater freedom of action to the people. The “mobs” did not range the streets demanding bread, they ranged the streets demanding “no taxation without representation” or a return to some right under the original charter.

There were wealthy people and “servants” in this coalition. Almost every man in the society of those days was at some time a servant, even the richest families sent their sons to become servants, “apprentices”, as a means of training them, teaching them a trade, teaching them to read and write, and securing them a start in life. A “graduated” apprentice could serve for 7 years and would often receive a new suit of cloths and tools to conduct their trade.

The path from servant to being wealthy was open to any white man, or any freed negro, and it was a belief that this pathway was being closed that caused rich and poor alike to form this coalition.

Of course “poor” is a relative term and as every contemporary observer attested in those days, the differences between rich and poor were simply not near as great as in Europe and the poor were not starving and unclothed. Servants were guaranteed food, shelter, education, what forms of health care existed, and protections against abuse that were enforced rigorously

Courts were even known to have fined masters for heaping profanities on servants and the general rule was that in a dispute between a master and servant the court had to favor the servant because they had less power. In some cases, the courts forced masters to pay large sums of money when it was found by the court that the master’s servants were not well fed and well clothed or had inadequate quarters.

This was no paradise, the technology of the day could produce little better than an average existence in which 12-16 hours work days with only Sundays off were simply necessary: any task was labor intensive. Doing the laundry was, until the 20th century, one of the most labor intensive jobs that existed and a “stay at home mom”, which was the rule for all homes with very few exceptions, was a very busy job requiring massive amounts of labor just to cook meals, clean the home, do the laundry, mend or sew clothes, and the like.

In general, older men tended to be capable of having some servants to handle these functions but the average lower middle class, or even “poor”, American has, thanks to microwaves, washers and driers, and other modern appliances, the equivalent of a staff of 4-5 servants.

Younger men were expected to become servants, apprentices, and the society of the day frowned in general on people who amassed a lot of wealth without sharing it generously with the poor, the church, and the community and could even be hauled onto court for greed and excess. The young men of the wealthy were expected to be “apprenticed”, which meant that almost everyone, with very few exceptions, experienced the same life of servitude as a “rite of passage”, generally beginning at around age 12 and lasting for around 7 years.

The people who were for the Crown almost ALL tended to be individuals who thought that an “American Nobility” should be created: these people would have brought feudalism in some form to America. Their opponents, the Whigs, saw any such move as dangerous to the freedom of all and they viewed the Tories as elitists and traitors to the charters of their colonies. Interestingly enough, the Tories were less socially conservative than the Whigs of the popular party: Tories gravitated towards the humanism of Voltaire and his kind, clinging to an idea of “order” that was alien to the colonies and that the first migrants had fled from.

The Tories, who tended to be “socially liberal”, were willing to offer “help to the poor” in exchange for votes, but who were really all about protecting their position in society by effectively freezing out potential new competitors from the “lower classes” which they pitied but did not respect. When, for instance, James Otis gave a rousing oration to a “mob” of mechanics and laborers, who, incidentally, knew their Locke as well as any man, then Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson scorned him in the press, essentially attacking Otis for having such low class people as a base of support.

The popular party, Whigs, tended to have all kinds of people from all groups and classes and was socially conservative. They wanted limited government and what we would call a free market (they used the term free trade, but they simply meant a free market, not free trade as we know it today).

The Tories had managed to decrease the freedom of the people, weakening the original charters by controlling the press, trying to control the universities, controlling the bureaucracy, and controlling the higher courts, particularly the Superior Court and the Admiralty Courts (which regulated trade). The Whigs created their own press, anyone with a printing press could print “penny papers” by hand and more and more did, and at times, when the courts and the governor in particular closed off legal redress, they did not hesitate to use the mob to force the issue.

The Whigs countered the Tory dominance with their own newspapers, countless pamphlets and broadsides, Town Meetings, massive protests and even mob violence that targeted merchants that imported boycotted goods, officials who tried to enforce what they saw as illegal and unjust rules and regulations, and even officials whom they saw as enemies of Liberty.

This situation may not have been universal in all 13 colonies, and tragically, it did not apply to slaves or to women to the same degree as it did to white men. What is certain is that the beliefs and the values of these people in Boston and Massachusetts were the driving force of the revolution: the writings of James Otis and Samuel Adams created an atmosphere for freedom that many in other colonies, men such as John Dickinson in Pennsylvania and Patrick Henry in Virginia, started to pick up and emulate in writings and speeches.

The ideas born in the crucible of life in Massachusetts, ideas born and supported by men of all groups, ideas based on a yearning for opportunity and freedom of action by individuals and small communities, particularly those governed by a Town Meeting that included ALL the men, permeated the colonies and were taken up by them vigorously. The logical extension of this ideal of freedom as ownership and opportunity and of rights designed to assure equal and fair access to freedom for all, was not realized in the that day, and indeed has never been fully realized and today is being assaulted by new Tories who are even more clever at hiding their elitism.

Today we take all this as a given, although when I say “we”, I am talking about a shrinking percentage of the population who actually understand that ownership and opportunity for individuals and local communities is the very definition of freedom, but in that day, going back to the period that ran from 1748 to around 1765 our hero, Samuel Adams, whom we affectionately call “Sam”, was pretty much alone in his keen understanding that there were only two paths.

Many people thought the existing system could be used to return the lost freedoms and to “right” things. Otis himself was convinced that if he could only have a fair hearing for his idea the Parliament in London would be convinced that this was all wrong and they would then see the light- Sam understand as few wanted to admit that Parliament and Crown were corrupt, that politicians there were only worried about their own interests and the interests of their rich friends who kept them in their cushy offices, and that in the end that system had to be run out of the colonies and the colonies would have to separate from that system or the colonies would totally lose all freedoms and feudalism in some form would come to America.

In time a small minority of people gathered around Sam, men like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. These men, younger than Sam, determined to follow the logic he had opened their minds to, and became the “early adapters” and, eventually, the first leaders of the entire nation. The first “converts” were initially doing thankless work but eventually they did become the great leaders of a revolution and of a new nation and today we count them as our “Founding Fathers”.

By 1775 a strong, well organized, minority of men, organized into these Committees of Correspondence, were in a position of being united, even though perhaps around 3% of the population totally agreed with them, and they had developed their own “shadow” government and society that was capable of making decisions, organizing people for action, and operating AS a government when the final crisis came on April 19, 1775. It was their ability to see into what was possible and probable and to understand what was impossible, largely thanks to our hero, Sam, that placed them in the perfect spot to take advantage of the situation and to respond to the crisis.

After 1776, it should be noted, Boston was not ever again threatened by the British and were it not for Sam’s good work in creating a vast network for rapid communication and gathering of people and resources the sudden move on Lexington and Concord on the night of April 18, 1775, would have occurred without anyone being aware and prepared and there would not have been any organized means to counter it let alone to let the rest of the colonies know what was happening and how the initial foray by the British had FAILED.

Sam was not a man who either sought or shrank from violence. He understood, as almost no one seems to understand today, that you don’t change corrupt systems that are not controlled by the people by playing the game according to their rules: when the “rules” prevent you from succeeding, when they are inherently unfair and lopsided in favor of your opponents, you must either break those rules forcing them to change and become unenforceable or you must accept defeat.

Our revolution was not created and won by some committee, it was prepared for by one man who slowly gathered a core of die-hards and who was willing to use any issue and any means at his hands, legal or not, to undermine the corrupt system, to build an alternative system, and to render the enforcement of what were illegal acts by the charter of the colony impossible.

Back then, as today, everyone seemed to have their own club, group, or committee and nobody was able to see that there were only two paths and that changing the system, even to simply restore lost liberties, one had to view the “rules” in as “flexible” a manner as possible, even breaking those rules when nothing else was possible.

Sam did not care, he kept writing and working, here a little, there a little, and when people suddenly remembered that crazy guy who had been saying a crisis was coming he was suddenly surrounded by new friends, men who in the past may have called him a radical, an extremist, or whatever.

Now let me tell you, my name is not Sam, but it I sometimes think it should be. My name is Bill Collier and like Sam I published newspapers more as a way of reaching the People than anything else, and I am, financially speaking, an abject failure. I cannot resist, as much I have tried, devoting all my energy to the cause of freedom.

Just as Sam wanted to see the rights of the original charters restored I want to see the rights of our constitution restored, I want our states to regain the powers they would have had under those very original charters (it is ironic that our Federal Government gives less powers to the states than the British Crown gave to the colonies in the original charters), and I want to see local communities given the same powers they enjoyed under those original charters, including the right to have a Town Meeting form of government and the right to control MOST all of their local affairs without interference by the States and the Federal power.

What do we want to sell people on? We want to sell them on just what freedom is--ownership and opportunity and a strong protection of their rights, who the enemy is, all of the centrally controlled institutions, self reliance starting simply with groups of people agreeing to be mutually supportive and to assure one another of help in time of need, and asserting local autonomy and local economic self-reliance by promoting things like a local currency, local victory gardens, locally owned micro factories that use recycled goods, and etc.

We must sell as many people as possible, even if it is only 3% of the population, from all races, creeds, and socio-economic backgrounds, on supporting the information war, on freedom, on who the enemy is, on private self reliance, and on local autonomy.

WHAT are YOU doing to promote freedom? Let me know so that we can share with our 6.000 plus daily visitors! Email Bill Collier at upadaria@yahoo.com.