Rick Riordan's Reviews > The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

As with her biography on Cleopatra, I continue to be impressed by Schiff's ability to bring to life a historical figure who left behind so little documentation. Samuel Adams was careful to burn most of his correspondence to avoid having it used against him by the British. He also preferred to work behind the scenes and let others take the main stage. Despite this, Schiff offers us a reasonably full picture of this shadowy operative from the American Revolution.

Was he a rebel or a patriot? A terrorist or an activist? A guardian of liberty or a spreader of lies? Or maybe a mixture of all the above? We see Adams from many points of view, British and American, and much of the conversation around his actions and motives will feel familiar to anyone following politics today. It hits especially hard for me, living in Boston some 250 years after the Revolution, where the majority of the action took place.

Many have pointed out Adams' rhetoric against the British use of military forces to suppress sedition in American cities, and used it to apply to current events in the U.S. re. the use of the National Guard to "restore order" in urban areas.

For instance, Adams writes of the absurdity of stationing troops in Boston, "on pretense of preserving order in a town that was as orderly before their arrival as any one large town in the whole extent of His Majesty’s dominions.” He points out that the stated purpose of these troops is directly opposite to the effect they achieve, which is to actually increase the potential for violence: "No man can pretend to say that peace and good order of the community is so secure with soldiers quartered in the body of a city as without them.”

Still, we must be careful to take Adams' words at face value. He was a consummate agitator, who would gleefully take the smallest bits of hearsay and inflate them into lurid tales of British atrocities in order to scandalize the American colonists. His opponents in the loyalist camp were no better, and no more beholden to objective truth. Samuel Adams just played the game better. There is a strong argument to be made, as the British made in the 1770s, that Adams almost single-handedly created the American Revolution.

My biggest takeaway from this book was that the subjectivity of the news is nothing new. In colonial Boston, many newspapers thrived, and all were viciously partisan, relating only the news that served to reinforce their world view, and distorting that news as they saw fit to stir up their readers. This was "rage bait," long before that term was coined. Even after all these years reading and studying history, I am still amazed how much history is a shared illusion that people decide to believe, rather than any sort of factual account. In light of this, critical thinking skills are the most important tool we can give our students to decide for themselves which accounts are most credible, and which "facts" are most likely factual, by comparing sources and examining the biases at play. Unfortunately, we do a very poor job of this, perhaps because the purpose of education is too often to sell that shared illusory narrative, not to question it.

At any rate, if you are interested in the reasons for the American Revolution, or want a snapshot of life in colonial Boston to see how much has changed, and how much hasn't, this is a great book to try.