As early as July 1765, Samuel Adams, known mainly for brewing beer in Boston, was identified as a leader in the revolutionary movement which would eventually demand - and get - independence from England.
It was Adams - before Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine - who decided that the colonies could establish their own nation. He was the first American of any real prominence to dispute Parliament's right to tax the colonies.
Samuel Adams was a pious churchgoer who fashioned his arguments with scrupulous devotion to legal precedent, who urged his fellow citizens to refrain from violence except in self-defense, and whose aims, while ambitious, were also finite.
Unlike the French revolutionaries, Adams was no ideologue. In the beginning, his goal, it seems, was simply to ensure that Massachusetts merchants could operate without interference from Parliament or the Crown and without taxes to which they had not consented. As a producer and seller of ale, he had a direct interest in free trade. Such freedom of commerce, it turned out, required political independence, which Adams promoted. He sought no overthrow of established values, however. He wished Boston to become a "Christian Sparta."
Adams was well versed in history, literature, philosophy and legal theory, in addition to being recognized as one of the very best beer-brewers.
To his political opponents, Adams once wrote, "Do you think that your pen, or the pen of any man, can un-Christianize the mass of our citizens, or have you hopes of converting a few of them to assist you in so bad a cause?"
