The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Before 1765, Adams labored under the belief that well-reasoned arguments would be enough to convince the colonists of the rightness of his cause. But as the years of failure piled up, he confronted the reality that the colonists retained a deep emotional attachment to England, as children do to a parent. Liberty meant less to them than did England’s provision of protection and a sense of belonging in a threatening environment. 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.