After receiving his Master's degree, Samuel Adams began
the search for a job. He halfheartedly began studying law but found
that his mother's strong opposition prevented any serious study.
He joined the counting house of Thomas Cushing, hoping to succeed
in business. He quickly proved that he severely lacked business
abilities. After a few months, Cushing broke the news to Adams and
his parents that Adams would never be a merchant. Cushing remarked
that he trained men to be merchants, not politicians. Adams's father thought
that there might be hope for the young man to become a financier
and thus loaned him a thousand pounds with which to begin business.
Adams lost almost every penny in a single transaction. Samuel Adams
then joined his father in the family brewery.
Although he proved himself more successful at brewing
than at financing, Adams's first love remained politics. In 1748,
he joined with some radical friends to begin a newspaper called
the Independent Advertiser, and he made his first
foray into political writing. Adams's writings came as the situation
in the colony began to heat up again–a truce between the governor
and his opponents had been called during the prosecution of King
George's War from 1741–1748. While Adams failed in his attempt
to jump-start the revolution, these early political writings gave
insight into the man he would become. He used his Harvard schooling
to show that if Boston did not reform to more Puritan ways, it
might fall just as Rome once did. He held the governor responsible
for the lack of morals in the society and argued that the politician
had chosen the materialistic ways of the merchants rather than
the noble virtues upon which the colony had been founded a century
before. He argued for the Country Party, the opposition party that
his father helped start, and condemned the governor's political
machine. Most stunning, though, was Adams's demands that the General
Court be given the same status as Parliament and that it be the
final word on matters in the colony–not the crown or Parliament.
The Independent Advertiser folded after a year
of publication, and Adams failed to make a name for himself in
the colony since the paper's writers were anonymous. However, it
left one lasting impression: since much of Adams's thoughts and
arguments were based on the theory of John Locke, Adams's writings
exposed New Englanders to John Locke's ideas
of liberty.
Adams's father died in 1748, and Adams began some of most impoverished
years of his life. And although he had been elected to his first
public office in 1746, that of thr clerk of the Boston Market, he
found himself shut out of office until 1753 when he was elected town
scavenger–not quite the high-profile jumping-off point for which
the aspiring politician had hoped. Finally, in 1756, he rose to the
post of Boston tax collector, a post he would hold for almost a
decade. During this period, the colony was engaged in all-but constant
war. As the French
and Indian War raged on, Adams and other radical politicians
found themselves unpopular. Adams and his friends waited quietly
as the colony massed troops for an attack on French Canada and
while border settlements were burned by Indian attacks. Adams found
a ready opponent, though, in the Land Bank commissioners trying
to foreclose on his father's estate. He turned his vitriolic writings
toward them and summed up his approach toward battles of the pen
as such: "Put your adversary in the wrong, and keep him there."
When in 1758, the commissioners put what remained of the Adams
estate up for a fourth auction–the first three being unsuccessful–Adams
set out to defend it with his chosen sword: editorials and broadsides.
He threatened to sue the sheriff and anyone who bid on the place,
reminding potential buyers that no one had had the nerve to buy
the place in the three previous auctions. The sale eventually fell
through, and Adams held on to the neglected brewery and the now
dilapidated house.
Adams badly wanted to help lead Massachusetts, but, being
in the opposition, he found his way blocked by the "Shirlean Faction" of
Massachusetts politics, so- called after the governor of the same name
who led the colony for sixteen years. Thus, Shirley's Court Party,
composed of merchants, political appointees, and "High Church"
men, faced Adams's Country Party–the mantle of which he had received
from the party's founder, Elisha Cooke. Thomas Hutchinson was a
strong opponent for Adams. The stunning Hutchinson had "captivated
half the pretty ladies in the colony," the Country Party complained.
In 1750, Hutchinson outlawed paper money, thus killing the pet
project of the Country Party. In response, crowd of radicals attacked
his house and burned it to the ground. Nonetheless, he stood proudly
against everything Adams wanted. He would be Adams's great opponent
for much of the rest of their lives.
