Samuel Adams

   Welcome to Friday with Chairman Joe.

   Today in 1722 Samuel Adams was born in Boston. He was involved in the movement that to the American Revolution and is considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. In his day he was much more famous than his second cousin John who went on to become president. He was not a brewer, but a maltster. Also, if you knew what was good for you, you never called him "Sam," always Samuel. Boston Brewery gets that much right, mostly.
   Samuel was born into a pious Puritan family. His father, also named Samuel, was active in politics, always on the look out to protect the Massachusetts Bay Colony against infringements of their rights by the mother country. Samuel's family hoped he would become a preacher, but after graduating from Harvard, he said he wanted to become a merchant. His father loaned him enough money to get started.
   Samuel proved to be a poor businessman. He loaned half his stake to a friend who didn't repay him, and frittered away  the rest. A biographer wrote that "he was a man utterly uninterested in either making or possessing money. When his father's loan ran out, he was taken into the family malting business. Malt is the key ingredient used by brewers to make beer. His father died when Samuel was 26, and Samuel got married the next year. He wasn't really interested in making malt and got involved in local politics. He was elected tax collector, but was so bad at it that the city of Boston almost went bankrupt.
   After the Seven Years War removed the French threat from North America, the British Parliament tried to tax the colonies to help pay its war debt. The colonies had never been taxed before and Adams saw the tax as unconstitutional. By this time he was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives where he was a leader in the fight against these taxes. When a mob destroyed the house of the lieutenant-governor to protest the tax, Adams spoke out against violence. He preferred peaceful means such as boycotts or petitions to the king.
   When the colonists refused to pay taxes, the governor, a royal appointee, called for troops to be quartered in the city. Friction arose between the soldiers and the locals which led to the Boston Massacre in 1770 in which five citizens were killed. Samuel convinced his cousin John to defend the soldiers in court to show Britain the colonists were law abiding. Samuel was not happy though when John got the soldiers off. He thought they should have been convicted of murder.
   All this came to a head with the Boston Tea Party in December of 1773,  when a group of patriots threw three shiploads worth of tea into the harbor rather than pay the tax on it. Adams was not behind the Tea Party, but did approve of it as a means to protest Parliament's actions. Things really escalated from there. Britain closed the Port of Boston and sent more troops.
   Adams and like-minded colonists organized a shadow government and began stockpiling arms and gunpowder. Adams along with John Hancock was ordered arrested and troops were sent to Lexington and Concord to destroy the arms. This triggered the war that led to American independence. During the war, Adams was a member of the Continental Congress.
   After the war he served as governor of Massachusetts for four annual terms. He fostered free public education even for girls which was truly revolutionary in those days. He was not chosen to the Constitutional Convention, but he did support the new Constitution. He had to retire from politics due to a tremor that made writing impossible. He died on 1803 at the age of 81 and is buried in the Old Granary Burying Ground in downtown Boston.

Bud and George III now share the Hall of Shame.