When Adams realized this, he reformulated his goals: instead of preaching independence and the ideas of John Locke, he set to work to sever the colonists’ ties with England. He made the children distrust the parent, whom they came to see not as a protector but as a domineering overlord exploiting them for its profit. The bond with England loosened, Adams’s arguments for independence began to resonate. Now the colonists began to look for their sense of identity not to Mother England but to themselves.
