#8 The Father of Democracy
IDENTITY POLITICS | Mark Boonstra: Samuel Adams said, "I firmly believe that the benevolent Creator designed the republican Form of Government for Man."
Some chose to ridicule him as “Sammy the Maltster”—a name borne of his family’s brewery business. Detractors derided him as “Sammy the Publican”—an appellation derived from his election in 1756 as a tax collector in Boston, an odd but eye-opening pursuit by one who would later find himself among the instigators of the Boston Tea Party.
But as the fledgling colonies advanced toward declaring their independence from mother England in 1776, Adams became known as the “Firebrand of the Revolution” and, ultimately, as the “Father of Democracy.” Indeed, Adams’s revolutionary zeal led his second-cousin, future-President John Adams, to describe him as having been “born a Rebel.”
Adams’s great-great-grandfather, Henry Adams, had emigrated to Massachusetts in 1638. Henry came from Barton St. David in Somersetshire, England with his wife, Edith Squire, and nine children. They were part of the great puritan migration of dissenters from the Church of England seeking to escape religious persecution.
Fast-forwarding a few generations, Adams the signer was born in 1722 to Samuel Adams Sr. and Mary Fifield Adams. Adams Sr. was a wealthy and prominent Boston citizen, active in local political affairs and a member of the Massachusetts colonial legislature. Like his forebears, he was a devout Christian, a deacon in the Old South (Congregational) Church. In 1715, he was instrumental in the formation of a new Congregational church, known as the New South (or Summer Street) Church, and in procuring, as its first pastor, the Rev. Samuel Checkley. Rev. Checkley was a long-time friend of the elder Adams’s and was related to him by marriage. It was at the New South Church, by Rev. Checkley, his future father-in-law, that young Samuel Adams was baptized.
Adams’s mother, Mary Fifield Adams, was born into the illustrious Mather family of Congregational ministers. She was a devout and pious woman, equally as religious as her husband. Together, they instilled in their children the puritan beliefs that guided Adams throughout his life. Prayers and Bible readings were a regular part of their everyday life, traditions that continued when, as a youngster, Adams was sent to the Boston Latin School. Boston Latin was a rigorous preparatory academy of great renown headed by Master John Lovell, whose sole criterion for admission was the ability to read verses from the Bible.
The long-standing fervency of the Adamses’ religious beliefs lived on though the younger Samuel Adams, whose extreme radical political views were inextricably intertwined with his Calvinistic religious sentiments.
At the age of fourteen, Adams enrolled at Harvard College.
Founded as a puritan institution, Harvard was then headed by Rev. Benjamin Wadsworth, a Congregational minister who had served for thirty years as pastor at Boston’s First Church. Adams’s father encouraged him to pursue the ministry, but his interests shifted toward politics. By the time he was awarded a master’s degree from Harvard in 1743, Adams’s revolutionary zeal was already emerging, as he presented his thesis, Whether it be Lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.
While working at the family brewery, Adams and a group of friends founded a newspaper called the Public Advertiser (or, by some accounts, the Independent Advertiser), which afforded Adams a platform from which to author, albeit anonymously, articles promoting his pro-liberty views and calling for heightened moral principles in society and government.
In 1749, Rev. Checkley brought the Adams and Checkley families together in marriage once again, proudly officiating at Adams’s wedding to his daughter, Elizabeth Checkley. Elizabeth’s brother, also dubbed Rev. Samuel Checkley, was pastor of the Second (Congregational) (or Old North) Church. Adams and Elizabeth shared much in common, not the least of which was their fervent Congregational faith, as well as the unfortunate circumstance that each was among only three of many siblings to survive to adulthood. In 1757, having baptized Adams’s children, Rev. Checkley was obliged to preside yet again; this time, it was at Elizabeth’s funeral, shortly after she gave birth to a sixth (and stillborn) child. Upon Elizabeth’s death, Adams penned a note in his family Bible:
To her husband she was as sincere a Friend as she was a faithful Wife. . . . She ran her Christian race with remarkable steadiness and finished in triumph! She left two small children. God grant they may inherit her graces!
Adams’s revolutionary activities steadily mounted, and with the passage by Great Britain of such measures as the Stamp Act in 1765, he became a key organizer of a resistance group, the Sons of Liberty. He conceived of and formed Boston’s Committee of Correspondence to facilitate communications among members of the resistance in the various colonies. He gave the signal that unleashed the dumping of tea into the Boston Harbor in 1773.
Adams’s enduring prayer was that Boston would become a “Christian Sparta.” He authored numerous writings promoting the colonists’ God-given rights and liberties. In one, which he signed as “Valerius Poplicola,” he wrote:
Liberties . . . are originally from God and nature . . . . It is our duty therefore to contend for them whenever attempts are made to violate them.
In another, he declared the inextricable linkage between religion and liberty, and he presciently warned that efforts to destroy people’s liberty begin with efforts to poison their morals:
The Religion and public Liberty of a People are intimately connected; their Interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together. For this Reason, it is always observable, that those who are combin’d to destroy the People’s Liberties, practice every Art to poison their Morals.
In 1772, he authored—and the Town of Boston adopted—The Rights of the Colonists, A List of Violations of Rights and a Letter of Correspondence, in which Adams declared:
Just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty in matters spiritual and temporal, is a thing that all Men are clearly entitled to, by the eternal and immutable laws Of God and nature.
Further linking freedom and religion, Adams declared:
The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave—
The Rights of the Colonists as Christians . . . may be best understood by reading—and carefully studying the institutes of the great Lawgiver and head of the Christian Church: which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament—
Adams was an ardent advocate of complete separation from the motherland, and a strenuous opponent of concession or compromise. He became the moral conscience of the revolution and soon—along with John Hancock—among the most wanted men in the colonies. Forewarned by Paul Revere, they escaped capture in Lexington, and made their way to Philadelphia.
Adams also worked to create the Continental Congress, where he served as a guiding intellect and passionate advocate of independence from 1774 to 1781. Upon the opening of the Congress, and then a parishioner at the Brattle Street (Congregational) Church, Adams’s puritanism revealed a conciliatory side; he adroitly diffused a potential controversy among the various religious denominations represented, by successfully proposing that an Episcopal clergyman offer the opening prayer. In 1776, Adams achieved his lifelong dream, as he transformed from radical agitator-in-chief to signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Upon signing the Declaration, Adams delivered an address, on August 1, 1776, entitled, On American Independence. In it, he proclaimed:
Heaven hath trusted us with the management of things for eternity. . . . We have this day restored the Sovereign, to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds his subjects assuming that freedom of thought and dignity of self-direction which he bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting the sun, may his kingdom come. . . .
The hand of Heaven appears to have led us on to be, perhaps, humble instruments and means in the great providential dispensation which is completing. We have fled from the political Sodom; let us not look back, lest we perish and become a monument of infamy and derision to the world! . . . And, brethren and fellow-countrymen, if it was ever granted to mortals to trace the designs of Providence, and interpret its manifestations in favor of their cause, we may, with humility of soul, cry out, “Not unto us, not unto us, but to Thy name be the praise.” . . .
Thus, by the beneficence of Providence, we shall behold an empire arising, founded on the justice and the voluntary consent of the people, and giving full scope to the exercise of those faculties and rights which most ennoble our species. . . .
Countrymen! the men who now invite you to surrender your rights into their hands . . . are the men to whom we are exhorted to sacrifice the blessings which Providence holds out to us—the happiness, the dignity of uncontrolled freedom and independence. . . . Go on, then, in your generous enterprise, with gratitude to Heaven for past success, and confidence of it in the future.
The following year, as war with Britain raged, Adams delivered an address to the members of Congress, exhorting them to recall that:
We have appealed to Heaven for the justice of our cause, and in Heaven have we placed our trust. Numerous have been the manifestations of God’s providence in sustaining us. In the gloomy period of adversity, we have had “our cloud by day and pillar of fire by night.” [Referencing the Book of Exodus, Chapter 13]. We have been reduced to distress, and the arm of Omnipotence has raised us up. Let us still rely in humble confidence on Him who is mighty to save. Good tidings will soon arrive. We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.
Adams also helped craft (and signed) the Articles of Confederation. In 1781, he returned to Massachusetts as a member (and president) of the state Senate. He also served as a delegate to the Massachusetts state constitutional convention, where he helped frame the constitution of that state.
In 1785, Adams penned a letter to Richard Henry Lee of Virginia—who had authored the resolution of independence in 1776. It included the following:
I firmly believe that the benevolent Creator designed the republican Form of Government for Man.
Being opposed to a strong national government, Adams declined to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787; but he was instrumental in securing the ratification by the state of Massachusetts of the resulting United States Constitution. And he later helped author the Bill of Rights. In 1789, he was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, during which time he attended the Old South Church where his father had served as deacon. Upon the death of Governor Hancock in 1794, Adams succeeded to the governorship, and in addressing the Massachusetts legislature, again invoked God as the source of all authority and the giver of our freedoms:
Diffident as I am of my abilities, I have yet felt myself constrained to undertake the performance of those duties, and the exercise of those powers and authorities in consequence of a sovereign act of GOD. To him I look for that wisdom which is profitable to direct. The Constitution must be my rule, and the true interest of my constituents, whose agents I am, my invariable object. . . .
Among the objects of the Constitution of this Commonwealth, liberty and equality stand in a conspicuous light. It is the first article in the Declaration of Rights,—“all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and inalienable rights.” In the supposed state of nature, all men are equally bound by the laws of nature, or, to speak more properly, the laws of the Creator. They are imprinted by the finger of God on the heart of man.
Adams served as governor until 1797, during which time he issued numerous proclamations for a Day of Thanksgiving or a Day of Public Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, calling on all citizens to give thanks to God, to exalt his name, and to “unitedly implore the forgiveness of our Sins, through the merits of Jesus Christ, and humbly supplicate our Heavenly Father, to grant us the aids of his Grace, for the amendment of our Hearts and Lives, and vouchsafe his smiles upon our temporal concerns.”
In 1797, Governor Adams again addressed the Massachusetts legislature, imploring them that religion and morality should be at the forefront of the education of our children and youth:
As Piety, Religion and Morality have a happy influence on the minds of men, in their public as well as private transactions, you will not think it unseasonable, although I have frequently done it, to bring to your remembrance the great importance of encouraging our University, town schools, and other seminaries of education, that our children and youth while they are engaged in the pursuit of useful science, may have their minds impressed with a strong sense of the duties they owe to their God, their instructors and each other, so that when they arrive to a state of manhood, and take a part in any public transactions, their hearts having been deeply impressed in the course of their education with the moral feelings—such feelings may continue and have their due weight through the whole of their future lives.
Samuel Adams died in 1803, forever a Puritan and, as the original mixer of religion and politics, a believer in the indispensable role of virtue and religion in republican government.
Now, ask yourself, what would Samuel Adams—the Father of Democracy—think of America today?
And who do you really think is the threat to democracy in America today?
* Portions of this essay are derived from Judge Boonstra’s 3-volume work: In Their Own Words: Today’s God-less America . . . What Would Our Founding Fathers Think?
Next Up: “The Penman of the Constitution”
-Mark | Mark’s Substack | Visit Mark’s Website