![]() ![]() ![]() Although his rhetoric sparked riots and placed colonial officials in mortal danger, his prodigious powers of obfuscation repeatedly protected him from prosecution. He imagined an underground patriot espionage network and, under the innocuous-sounding name “the committees of correspondence,” made it a reality. ![]() He was the first to refer to the deaths of five people at the hands of British soldiers in a 1770 Boston riot as a “horrid massacre” and then spent a year embellishing the incident in print, relitigating it and turning it into a memorial event, complete with annual addresses. ![]() One of the earliest champions of American liberty, he was honored at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia as the hero of independence. In the mid-1770s, the worst thing a British official could say of a man was that he was “brought up at the feet of Samuel Adams.” The prime mover in the transformation of colonists from loyal to rebellious in little more than a decade, the Boston-born Adams calculated what would be required to overturn an empire and made it happen by radicalizing the public with boycotts, a news service, street theater and character assassination. If the man is Samuel Adams, you call him a founder. What do you call an anti-tax ideologue who spreads false accounts of rape and child murder via the mass media with the explicit goal of bringing down legitimately constituted government? THE REVOLUTIONARY: Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff. ![]()
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