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Adams saw no reason why high-minded ideals should shy from underhanded tactics.
We cannot control events, Samuel Adams liked to say. The trick, he revealed that summer, “is to foresee as far as we are able, prepare for, and improve them.”
As Samuel Adams would later complain, those who questioned authority soon saw themselves “represented as a rude, low-lived mob.”
Sounds familiar...
Adams stressed an equation on which he could never sufficiently insist: A corrupt people would not long remain free. “He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue,” he concluded.
In mid-1766, he joined a committee to introduce a bill prohibiting the importation of enslaved people, one of several efforts over the next decades to eliminate an “odious, abhorrent practice.”
The Stamp Act had upended government, but it had also drawn colonists together. Up and down the American coast, effigies hanged and were fed to bonfires.
