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He knew that we are governed more by our feelings than by reason; with rigorous logic, he lunged at the emotions. He made a passion of decency. He was a prudent revolutionary. Among the last of his surviving words is a warning to Thomas Paine: “Happy is he who is cautious.”
he believed virtue the soul of democracy.
Alone among America’s founders, his is a riches-to-rags story.
“Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and amidst the noise and violence of faction,”
Self-government was in his view inseparable from governing the self; it demanded a certain asceticism.
It is impossible with Adams to determine where piety ended and politics began; the watermark of Puritanism shines through everything he wrote.
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.”
Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution. It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer, or that republicanism, as envisaged in Massachusetts Bay, traced the independent-minded, egalitarian, community-based lines of Puritanism.
Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.
As his subject Samuel Adams chose: Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?
It was “the duty of every subject, for conscience’s sake, to submit to his authority, while he acts according to the law.” Should he imperil the natural right and liberties of his subjects, however, “he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience.”
He excelled at friendship, which at its best he termed “thinking aloud together.”
He proved the only downwardly mobile of the Founding Fathers.
“Luxury and extravagance,” the adult Adams would fret, “are in my opinion totally destructive of those virtues which are necessary for the preservation of the liberty and happiness of the people.”
“He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue,”
The people owed it to themselves to monitor those who governed. The dangers of complacency could not be stressed often enough. “The foundation of a people’s ruin is often at first laid in small, and almost imperceptible encroachments upon their liberties,” he warned. No people — the idea is central to modern civil resistance theory — should forget their own power.
Thomas Hutchinson did not believe it possible to be principled and poor any more than Samuel Adams seemed to believe it possible to be a patriot and rich.
