There are few families in American history that have had
quite an impact on the country's future as the Adams family. By
September 27, 1722, when Samuel Adams was born in Boston, the Adams family
already had a long and distinguished history in the new colonies.
Adams's father, also named Samuel, was a successful businessman
in the Massachusetts capital, who ran a brewery and served as deacon
of the Congregational Church. Even then, long before the revolution,
before John Adams would serve as President, and even longer before
America had ever heard of John Quincy Adams, Abigail Adams or Henry
Adams, the Adamses were already involved in politics. Samuel Adams,
Sr. was a justice of the peace, selectman, and representative to
the General Court, the colony's governing body. His mother supported
the increasingly narrow Calvinist faith movement, and the pious
woman influenced her son enough that he would later be called "the
last of the Puritans."
From his earliest days of schooling, Adams was known for
his impassioned emotions–emotions which would sometimes keep him from
seeing an issue clearly. His emotions sprang from the interplay of
theology and political science, where political theory met dogmatic
theory. Thus Adams often found himself influenced in his arguments
by theology, and he was normally known as a religious man.
Little is known of Adams's boyhood, and what little is
known comes from the comprehensive three-volume biography his great-grandson
William V. Wells later wrote. Little other information on Adams's
early years has been found. He studied at the Boston Latin School
for eight years, learning Latin and Greek. Adams, like most of
the sons from Boston's elite, entered Harvard College in 1736 at the
age of fourteen. Although his father had expected him to pursue the
ministry, it quickly became obvious that Adams had little interest
in following his father to the pulpit. Adams progressed through college
without distinguishing himself in any way. He was disciplined once
by Harvard for sleeping through morning prayers, and he was ranked
fifth in the class of twenty-two when ranked by the social standing
of his parents. He studied arithmetic, metaphysics, Latin, Greek,
rhetoric and other subjects–but he remained surprisingly weak in
literature throughout his life. During his junior year, Adams's
father lost most of the family's money in a bad business deal, and
Adams was forced to work the rest of his way through school by
serving as a waiter in the college dining hall. The city fined him
five shillings during his senior year when he was caught drinking
in public.
While Adams attended college, the Great Awakening swept
over New England. The evangelist George Whitefield arrived in Massachusetts,
and he deeply affected many of Harvard's men. He worked to convert
many of the students to the gospel, and when he left in 1740 it
was said that little but "voices of prayer and praise" could be
heard on campus. In fact, Whitefield was able to reverse the growing
trend throughout Boston of indulging in drink and fine clothes.
Colonial politics also began to heat up as Adams graduated
from Harvard in 1740. Samuel Adams, Sr. had helped to run the opposition
to the crown's demand for a fixed salary for the governor and was
quickly becoming known as one of the colony's leaders. A failed
attempt to establish a Land Bank in Massachusetts had forced the
colony into an economic depression. Massachusetts's farmers had
suffered from the lack of a stable currency, and a movement had
begun to establish a bank where the money would be backed with
land. Again, Samuel Adams had helped lead the fight, serving as
one of the bank's directors, and the effort appeared likely to
upend the political world of the state. By 1741, rebellion looked possible.
The colony's governor acted quickly, arresting the ringleaders
and vetoing the election of Adams and other Land Bankers to the
colony's governing council–the highest governmental body. Soon,
the Land Bank movement lay in tatters as Parliament outlawed such
banks.
The movement had a profound impact on the younger Samuel Adams,
and after graduating from the College in 1740, he continued on
to pursue a Master's degree. In an ominous sign of things to come,
he chose as his question of study, "Whether it be lawful to resist
the supreme magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise
preserved?" Adams decided on the affirmative, and left little question
in his response exactly where his sympathies lay.
