![]() ![]() The students at Harvard in the eighteenth century argued that the reptiles of America were those preserved by Noah maintained that the Pope was the Antichrist and regularly held “that it was unlawful to sell Africans.” Harvard was, well, as woke then as it is now. She lists, for instance, the surprisingly diverse topics of theses submitted at Harvard more or less around Adams’s time there, as an X-ray of the New England mind in formation. She has a fine eye for the significant detail, and knows how to compose that lovely thing the comic-comprehensive catalogue. Lacking a good documentary record, Schiff constructs her book from a pleasing tapestry of incident and inference. Yet how he did it, or with what confederates, or even with what purpose-did he believe in American independence from the start, or was that forced on him by the wave of events, as it was on others?-is muddied by an absence of diaries or letters or even many firsthand accounts. He shaped every significant episode in the New England run-up to war. He was also the opposite of his friend and eventual rival John Hancock, whose signature is all that’s left of him Sam’s signature on the revolutionary events is invisible, but his fingerprints are everywhere. Sam-thirteen years older than his second cousin John, and twenty-one years older than Jefferson-was among the more senior of the Founders. He is now best known as the trademark of a Boston brewery, which does carry on its Web site the invitation “Revolutionaries Wanted,” though the revolution in play seems more to do with whether one calls a beverage a craft ale or a lager or a beer.Īdams himself, disappointingly, probably wasn’t a brewer, though he was for a while in the family’s malt business, working as a “maltster.” It was an appropriate task, in its way, since the maltster is to the brewer what Sam Adams was to the Revolution: the person who preps the ingredients that eventually ferment and cause mass intoxication. How to do it well? Sam Adams is a fine case study, since he is one of those appealing figures who were for a time a very big deal, and then, suddenly, not so much. We revise and revere and then revise again. So we live within an oddly divided consciousness: on the one hand, we need to hear of enslaved and subjugated populations on the other, we expect a defiant celebration of the revolutionaries as radicals. ![]() As the musical “Hamilton” reminds us, we don’t want our heroes perfect we want them human. ![]() The stories that Henry Adams (a relation of Sam’s) told about the Jefferson era were mostly sardonic, and William Henry Herndon’s Lincoln was as melancholic as our own. The saving candor came after the wicked impulse. It is quite false to say that earlier generations liked only tales of flawless Founders: the point of Parson Weems’s tale about the young George Washington is not only that young Washington could not tell a lie but that he could first cheerfully chop down his father’s cherry tree. The bigger the obstacles and the more grooved-in the personal flaws, the better the story. All writers must woo and win readers, and readers are wooed and won, today as yesterday, by stories of flawed, sympathetic people who do big and significant things despite many obstacles put in their way. ![]() The note of irony in that “jouncing” is modern, but the thrill of Revere’s ride is permanent. ![]()
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