Founding Myths
“J. Langguth’s popular book Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution, one patriot stands out from the rest. Samuel Adams is the instigator of every revolutionary event in Boston, while all the other patriots are merely his “recruits,” his “legions,” his “roster,” his “band.”1 Liberty!—the companion volume to a PBS series on the American Revolution—proudly proclaims, “Without Boston’s Sam Adams, there might never have been an American Revolution.”2 Children’s book author Dennis Fradi...n makes this point even more emphatically: “During the decade before the war began, Samuel Adams was basically a one-man revolution.”3 Samuel Adams was not always the hero we make him out to be today. “If the American Revolution was a blessing, and not a curse,” wrote John Adams, Samuel’s cousin, in 1819, “the name and character of Samuel Adams ought to be preserved. A systematic course has been pursued for thirty years to run him down.”4 From Revolutionary times to the middle of the nineteenth century, Boston’s most celebrated idol was not Samuel Adams but his close friend and colleague Dr.MoreLess
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