The most essential Founding Father? It’s not who you think

Here we are at the very outset of the year in which America celebrates its 250th birthday on July Fourth. There’s a man who played a pivotal role in that birthday, but most Americans seem unaware of his immense contributions.

Samuel Adams is perhaps the most overlooked of our Founding Fathers. Yet he played a vital role in getting the whole ball rolling for American independence. Thomas Jefferson called him the “patriarch of our liberty.”

Many today only know him as some sort of beer guy. Even the image used to promote this adult beverage is not a picture of the real Samuel Adams.

Boston, the city founded by the Puritans as “a city upon a hill,” in 1630, became the epicenter of resistance to what they saw as unlawful British tyranny in the 1760s and 1770s. Samuel Adams had a lot to do with that.

Author Stacy Schiff, who wrote a wonderful biography on Samuel Adams in 2022, entitled, “The Revolutionary,” called Adams “The Most Essential Founding Father.” I agree. Born in Boston in 1722, Adams died in Boston in 1803. He graduated twice from Harvard, having written a master’s thesis basically asking the question: Must submission to the government always be absolute? “No” was his basic answer.

Prior to age 41, Samuel Adams seemed to fail at every business he put his hand to – including as a maltzer, a profession involved in one part of the creation of beer. I should note that in those days, water was unsafe to drink, and beer and wine were safe alternatives.

Samuel Adams discovered his calling in mid-life when he got involved in politics and picked up his quill pen to write about it.

Adams became a prolific writer of pro-independence essays published in influential Boston newspapers. These incendiary op-eds favored the colonists’ rights as British citizens, albeit on a different continent. But for his own safety’s sake, he used pseudonyms, such as “Candidus,” “A Puritan,” “Vindex,” and “A Son of Liberty.” He also burned many of his papers because he was a marked man.

Some Tory sympathizers thought that if the British could just arrest (and execute) Samuel Adams and John Hancock, the rebellion in the American colonies (in other words, independence) would be quelled. Adams had recruited Hancock to the patriot cause.

He also recruited his cousin John Adams, who became a major Founding Father in his own right.

Samuel Adams was a key member of the “Sons of Liberty.” They often met in secret or under the shade of a magnificent oak tree near Boston Commons. This was known as the Liberty Tree (or Tree of Liberty). The banner of the Sons of Liberty was a prototype of the American flag – nine red-and-white stripes, side by side.

In 1772, Samuel Adams drafted a document called “The Rights of the Colonists,” which articulates the reasons America should sever all political ties to Great Britain. In this document, Adams noted: “The right to freedom, being the gift of God Almighty … the rights of the Colonists as Christians … may best be understood by reading and carefully studying the institutions of The Great Law Giver and the Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament.”

Samuel Adams was very committed to Christianity. George Bancroft, perhaps America’s first great historian, described the elder Adams as the last of the Puritans. His house was a house of prayer. He was devoted to keeping the Sabbath fastidiously.

Samuel Adams saw the link between his Puritan ancestors, who sacrificed all to seek religious freedom in the New World, and his contemporary patriotic colonists – strongly contending for the maintenance of their God-given rights.

Adams helped organize the Boston Tea Party. He helped initiate the Committees of Correspondence so that patriots throughout the colonies could communicate with one another.

Samuel Adams was not only a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In many ways, he helped make it happen. As author Benjamin H. Irvin put it, “The Declaration of Independence represented in many ways the culmination of Samuel Adams’s life work.”

One could argue that Samuel Adams was not only the last of the Puritans but the first of the Founding Fathers. If George Washington is the father of America, and he is, then Samuel Adams is its grandfather.

This July Fourth, when we raise a cup (perhaps not with tea) to thank God for America, we should remember to be grateful for the work of Samuel Adams, who helped make it all happen, by the grace of the Lord.

Hat tip to Dr. Peter Lillback, with whom the writer is collaborating on a forthcoming book about Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty.