[Samuel Adams: A Life] | C-SPAN.org

Ira Stahl recalls the life of Samuel Adams, who the author argues deserves greater recognition as one of America's founding fathers. Mr. Stahl says that Samuel Adams, a highly religious man, believed that God desired a free America, and as long as the people remained virtuous, it would come to fruition. Samuel Adams helped plan the Boston Tea Party, and his newspaper editor constantly argued against taxation without representation. This event, hosted by the Boston Public Library, lasts about an hour. It's a pleasure to be here tonight at the Boston Public Library. Not only are we in Boston, the town where Samuel Adams was born and where he is buried, the town where he launched his political career and where he longed to return during the seven years he was away serving in the Continental Congress, but we're at the Boston Public Library, which has a special place in the hearts of admirers of Samuel Adams. This library's preservation of colonial-era newspapers and their files helped later historians find Samuel Adams' writings, many of which were published under pen names. And as I write about in my book, at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1883 held to consider charges against Samuel Adams, when one historian spoke about how Samuel Adams had been stripped of his laurels to crown others, it was a judge in Boston who was chief of the Boston Public Library, Mellon Chamberlain, who rose to defend Samuel Adams, calling him the single greatest personal force in bringing on and maintaining the struggle for independence. I'd like to say a word or two about Samuel Adams. My book is a work of history, but one of the questions I'm often asked is why we should remember Samuel Adams or care about him today. So let me attempt some answers beyond the fact that he played a significant, even a central role in founding our country. At a time when we're about to have our first black president, Adams was the founder who, unlike Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, never owned a slave, refused one when he was offered one as a gift, and called the slave trade odious and abhorrent. At a time when most of us are a lot poorer than we were two years ago, Adams was among the least wealthy of the founding fathers, one whose wife wrote to him that she was short of cash, and one who knew that there were other things like freedom, family, and faith that are more important than money. At a time when tax increases are on the horizon, Adams was a professional tax collector who nonetheless led the most successful and most important tax rebellion in the history of the world. At a time when newspapers are endangered, Adams was a newspaper columnist who used the press to spread the ideas of the revolution. At a time when religion is under attack from outspoken atheists, Adams was both one of our most religious founding fathers and one of the most significant ones, an example of how religion can be a force for good in politics. At a time when there's a debate over whether the rest of the world is ready for freedom and democracy, and over how hard America should fight for it, Adams was one of the most stalwart and articulate believers in the idea that freedom can be universal, and that it is worth fighting for. And at a time when we're getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving, it's Adams who can be credited with introducing Thanksgiving as an American national holiday. Let me try to expand briefly on a few of these points, one at a time. I had an op-ed piece in the New York Daily News the week of the presidential election commenting on Barack Obama's statement on election night. Quote, If there is anyone out there who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, tonight is your answer, Obama said. What founders could Obama have been talking about? Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, was a slaveholder. George Washington, our first president, was a slaveholder, although his will dictated that his slaves would be freed upon his death. James Madison, the drafter of the Constitution, was a third slaveholding founder. He believed that freed slaves should be sent back to Africa. The Constitution with which these founders created America counted slaves as three-fifths of a person and included a 20-year prohibition on Congress banning the slave trade. There's no record of Samuel Adams' dreaming of a black president. But of all our founding fathers, he is the one perhaps most likely to have done so. There's a family story that Samuel Adams refused to accept a slave he'd been offered as a gift. He never himself held a slave. When the slaves in Massachusetts petitioned for liberation, they directed their appeal to Adams, using some of the same arguments Adams himself was using against the British. The Massachusetts House of Representatives that Adams helped lead approved an act banning the slave trade, but the British-appointed governor refused to sign it into law. Later, Adams helped draft and win passage of the Massachusetts State Constitution that led judges to outlaw slavery in the state in 1781. The federal Constitution included a provision that prevented Congress from banning the importation of slaves for a 20-year period. Adams reacted by rejoicing, quote, that a door was now to be opened for the annihilation of this odious, abhorrent practice in a certain time. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed a certificate of freedom for a black man, William Newton, who he described as being of good character. Adams has falsely been accused of racism for supposedly discounting the testimony of a Boston massacre witness because the witness was black. But he was citing the testimony of another witness who was also black, but who he thought was more reliable. That is some of what we know about Adams and race. What about Adams and money? Other founding fathers, such as John Hancock and George Washington, were wealthy men. Samuel Adams was hardly lower class. He went to Harvard, and his father owned a house and land in Boston. But he was poor enough that when he went off to Congress, the people of Boston had to take up a collection to buy him a new suit. I glory in being what the world calls a poor man, he wrote to his wife. She wrote back that she was short of cash. She was not the last wife of either a politician or a newspaper man to make that complaint. The relationship between Hancock and Adams was made more awkward by the financial gap between the two men. When Hancock was elected governor of Massachusetts, Adams seemed a bit jealous. His reaction was to write, So fascinating are riches in the eyes of mankind. The two men's reconciliation coincided with a decline in Hancock's fortune. What about Adams and religion? Samuel Adams was a devout Congregationalist Christian whose faith motivated him and strengthened him in the revolutionary cause. He often argued that God was on the side of the revolutionaries. He was the son of a deacon and married the daughter of a minister. His relationship with his father-in-law was so close that the minister, Samuel Checkley, probably stayed in Samuel Adams' house in the final months of his life. Two of Samuel Adams' cousins, Amos and Zabdiel Adams, were also ministers, as was his brother-in-law. Samuel Adams wrote of the rights of the colonists as men, as British subjects, and also as Christians, referring directly to that liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. I wish we were a more religious people, he wrote to his wife. The Massachusetts Constitution he drafted and held past provided for freedom of conscience, but it also allowed for taxes to be imposed to support public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality. Certain elected officials were required to declare that I believe the Christian religion and have a firm persuasion of its truth. John Adams called his cousin Samuel a man of real as well as professed piety. After retiring as governor of Massachusetts, Samuel Adams sat with the choir at Old South Church, often selecting the tune and leading in that part of public worship. If Christians can relate to Samuel Adams, then so too perhaps can Jews. Adams studied Hebrew at Harvard, and again and again, both subtly and directly, Adams placed the American colonists in the role of the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt. He likened the British to the oppressive Egyptians. Writing in the Boston Gazette on August 8, 1768, Adams referred to the British as taskmasters, a term the Bible uses to describe the Egyptians. Earlier, he referred to the Stamp Act as a very grievous and we apprehend unconstitutional tax, echoing the language Exodus uses to describe the very grievous hail, cattle disease, and locust plagues. From Philadelphia, Adams wrote home to Massachusetts that the heart of the British king, George III, is more obdurate and his disposition towards the people of America is more unrelenting and malignant than was that of Pharaoh towards the Israelites in Egypt. In a speech to his fellow members of the Continental Congress, Adams is said to have credited God with providing the Americans a cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, which had, according to the Bible, also guided the Israelites in the wilderness after Egypt. One Massachusetts preacher even compared Samuel Adams to Moses. Samuel Adams' religious beliefs may have contributed to his views about the potential for the universal spread of freedom. One of the reviews of this book says that by the time I'm done, I've convinced myself that Samuel Adams would have supported the Iraq War. Of course, the words Iraq or President Bush do not appear in this book, but I do think that in the debate, such as it is, over whether Middle Easterners or Muslims are capable of democracy or worthy of freedom, Samuel Adams would have sided with those who thought they are. Even savages, he wrote, are capable of freedom, debating his cousin John Adams, who is a bit more elitist. Samuel Adams couldn't have imagined American troops invading a country across the world, but he did welcome French assistance in the American Revolution, and it's possible he would have seen some parallels between the French action in America and American action in Iraq. And what about Thanksgiving? I don't want to insult anyone from Plymouth who may be in the audience here tonight, but I don't think it is too much of a stretch to claim that the first national Thanksgiving holiday in America was not in 1621 in Plymouth, but in 1777 in York, Pennsylvania. The American colonists had declared independence from Britain back in July of 1776. That year, their plight was so bleak that there was not much to give thanks for. The journals of the Continental Congress record no thanksgiving at all in 1776, only two days of solemn fasting and prayer. For much of 1777, the situation was similarly desperate. British troops controlled New York City. The Americans had lost the strategic stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York to the British in July. In Delaware on September 11th, troops led by General George Washington had lost the Battle of Brandywine in which 200 Americans were killed, 500 wounded, and 400 captured. In Pennsylvania early in the morning of September 21st, another 300 American soldiers were killed or wounded and 100 captured in a British surprise attack that became known as the Paoli Massacre. The British captured America's largest city, Philadelphia, on September 26th. Congress, which had been meeting there, fled briefly to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then to York, 100 miles west of Philadelphia. One delegate to Congress, John Adams, wrote in his diary, gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting. John Adams' cousin, Samuel, gave the other delegates, their number had dwindled to a mere 20 from the 56 who had signed the Declaration of Independence, a talk of encouragement. He predicted, We shall never be abandoned by heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection. He turned out to have been correct, at least about the good tidings. On October 31st, a messenger arrived with news of the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga. The American general, Horatio Gates, had accepted the surrender of 5,800 British soldiers and with them 27 pieces of artillery and thousands of pieces of small arms and ammunition. The victory at Saratoga turned the tide of the war. News of it was decisive in bringing France into a full alliance with America against the British. Congress responded to the event by appointing a committee of three that included Samuel Adams and his close collaborator, a Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, to draft a support and resolution. The report, adopted November 1st, 1777, declared Thursday, December 18th, as a, quote, day of thanksgiving to God so that with one heart and one voice, the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor. It was the first of what were to be many thanksgivings ordered up by Samuel Adams. In 1778, a thanksgiving resolution drafted by Adams was approved by Congress on November 3rd, setting aside Wednesday, December 30th, as a day of public thanksgiving and praise. It having pleased Almighty God through the course of the present year to bestow great and manifold mercies on the people of these United States. After the revolution, Adams, who was eventually elected governor of Massachusetts, maintained the practice of declaring these holidays. In October of 1795, the 73-year-old governor proclaimed Thursday, November 19th, as a day of public thanksgiving to God, recommending the prayer be offered that God would graciously be pleased to put an end to all tyranny and usurpation, that the people who are under the yoke of oppression may be made free and that the nations who are contending for freedom may still be secured by His almighty aid, and further, that the peaceful and glorious reign of our divine Redeemer may be known and enjoyed throughout the whole family of mankind. A year later, Governor Adams offered a similar thanksgiving proclamation, declaring Thursday, December 15th, 1796, as a day of public thanksgiving and praise to our divine benefactor. He recommended earnest supplication to God that every nation and society of men be inspired with the knowledge and feeling of their natural and just rights and that tyranny and usurpation may everywhere come to an end. These statements were greeted with cynicism and derision by some of Adams' younger political opponents, who saw them as archaic. One of them, Christopher Gore, wrote a friend that it would be an occasion for a real day of thanksgiving when Adams finally retired. It turned out, though, that the ideas of thanking God for America's blessings and of praying for the spread of freedom everywhere would long outlast Adams' career. You know, I'm often asked why, if Samuel Adams was so significant, he isn't more well-known. And I give some answers to that towards the end of my book. One reason is that he didn't leave much of a paper trail. A lot of his letters ended with the words, burn this. And he was very concerned with it being wartime. He was concerned with secrecy. So while George Washington left correspondence that's been bound into about 30 volumes, the collected writings of Samuel Adams fill only four. Another reason, I think, is that there's been a trend towards secularism in America and separation of church and state, and that Samuel Adams is seen as a bit of a relic, something that's no longer relevant to our time. But I think as we look out at the political landscape in America and as we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving and inaugurate a new president, that there are lots of elements, as I've tried to explain today, in Samuel Adams' character that are still worth remembering today. These remarks just sort of scratch the surface. To learn more and to hear the story of Samuel Adams' revolutionary adventure from start to finish, much of it in his own words, I'd encourage you to read the book and to help me make this book a success and help rehabilitate Samuel Adams' reputation by spreading the word to friends who you think might like the book. Thank you all for coming tonight, and I'm really looking forward to answering any questions that you have. Yes, Seth. Mr. Stoll, can you talk about what position Sam Adams took in the great foreign policy debates after the Revolutionary War? For example, did he favor Britain, did he favor France, and why? That's an excellent question. Unlike a lot of the other founders, Samuel Adams never became a diplomat. Benjamin Franklin spent all this time in Paris and John Adams was ambassador to the court of St. James or to London. So he wasn't really first-hand engaged in foreign policy. To the extent that he was, he maintained the hostility towards Britain that he showed before the Revolution and he maintained a sympathy to France. The sympathy to France is actually sort of interesting because Samuel Adams had strong anti-Catholic tendencies. I'd go so far even to call him an anti-Catholic bigot. And the King of France was a Catholic. But Samuel Adams managed to reconcile himself to the alliance between America and France. And he even participated in welcoming the French ambassador to America, going so far as to ride in the coach with the ambassador in Philadelphia, accompanying him to his first appearance before the Continental Congress. And after the American Revolution and also after the French Revolution, there was also this religious difference between Samuel Adams and the French revolutionaries who were so anti-religious that they changed the names of the months and came up with a new calendar because they didn't want to count days from the birth of Jesus. And there we see when Samuel Adams was a state official in Massachusetts, the French wanted to throw some big party on Sunday, which to Samuel Adams was the Lord's Day. And Samuel Adams intervened to get it rescheduled to another day. So, you know, it's not as if he didn't want to celebrate with the French. He just didn't want to do it on his Sabbath, at least in Boston. Yeah, David. Talk about Adams as a family man. Well, John Adams sort of faulted. John Adams was a big admirer of Samuel Adams, although there were some political differences later in their life. And there's a sort of summation that John Adams gives of Samuel Adams' character in which he talks about how he's a zealous and pious and ardent and has a deep understanding of liberty. But the one thing he faults Samuel Adams for is being insufficiently attentive, perhaps, to his family. It was an unusual family, at least in a modern sense, in the sense that it had undergone a lot of trauma. Samuel Adams was one of twelve children that his mother had, and he was one of only three of the twelve who survived to adulthood. His first wife was in exactly the same circumstance, one of only three of twelve children in her family to survive to adulthood. And of the six children that that first wife had, only two of them survived to adulthood. So Samuel Adams saw the loss, I mean, some of this was before he was alive, but nine siblings died, four of his children died, and then his wife died soon after the birth of the sixth child. He remarried, actually, his father-in-law from the first marriage was a minister and officiated his second marriage. And then he was off serving in Congress for seven years, while his wife was in Boston or outside Boston while the British were occupying Boston. And there are letters back and forth that signal certainly a warm, loving relationship. And he did get back to visit now and then. And he kept up with the family of his first wife. There's correspondence between Samuel Adams and William Checkley, the son of Samuel Checkley and the brother of Elizabeth Checkley. This was a family who was a minister and prominent in Boston. The minister father moved in with Samuel Adams after his wife died. And he had Samuel Adams, the two children, one of them was a doctor in the Revolutionary War who died before Samuel Adams did. He actually died during the Massachusetts Convention over whether to ratify the federal constitution. And it's sort of a dramatic moment where half the states have ratified the federal constitution and half haven't. And Massachusetts is sort of a pivotal vote. The delegates are sort of split half and half. Samuel Adams is thought to be skeptical, as is John Hancock. But neither one of them have publicly announced how they were going to vote. It was all kind of hanging in the balance. And at that point, the delegates all to this constitutional convention all take a break. And they all march off to the funeral of Samuel Adams' son, the Revolutionary War doctor. The child who survived, Hannah, was close to Samuel Adams. And one of the interesting things is that Samuel Adams opened up public education in Boston to women. And I wonder if one of the reasons for that is the fact that his only child who was surviving at that time was a daughter. And he understood that women could play significant, important roles. Other questions? Yeah. If you read a lot of books about the Revolutionary period these days, Samuel Adams comes across as almost a Trotskyite, as somebody who's in garrets, writing incendiary things, sending the mob around, even committing crimes. And I have a sense that you see a very different methodology in him. I wanted to know how you saw him as a political organizer, what tactics he used, and what were his main goals. That's a terrific question. And I think it's come to the fore even more, not even the recent books about Samuel Adams, but there was this HBO miniseries about John Adams that I actually reviewed for the New York Sun, where there's a scene in one of the first two episodes, it's really a gory scene where this person is tarred and feathered. And John Hancock and Samuel Adams and John Adams are all kind of looking on. And John Adams turns to his cousin Samuel kind of accusingly and says, you know, Is this what freedom and liberty is all about? How can you stand for this? I really, in the book, I try to defend Samuel Adams against this charge of violence. I mean, it's true that he wanted people to have weapons, to be prepared for war, and that once the war broke out, he didn't flinch from violence. But my research indicates that there were only three tar and feathering incidents in Boston during the entire Revolutionary period. And there's no evidence that either Samuel Adams, John Adams, or John Hancock was present at any of them. In terms of, if they had been, the Tories would have made a big deal out of it. In terms of violence against property, the question becomes a little more complicated. There are two incidents that I write about in the book where the Boston mob basically ransacked the houses of officials, colonial officials of the British government, a stamp tax collector, a lieutenant governor. The first of those Samuel Adams defended. The second, which was a more aggressive ransacking, Samuel Adams publicly disavowed. There's a debate among historians over whether that disavowal was sincere or whether it was just pro forma. It's very hard to say. He did make a point of defending property rights. He was quite proud of the fact that in the Boston Tea Party, it was just the tea that was dumped into the harbor. It's not as if the ships were burned. It's not as if the sailors or captains of the ships were thrown into the harbor. It was just the tea that was dumped into the harbor. As far as how he affected his revolutionary leadership, I would say it wasn't by secretly manipulating a mob. He had multiple methods. One of them was newspaper writing. He was a professional newspaper columnist. It wasn't how he earned his living, but it was how he spent a lot of his time. He used to go to the newspaper office and help the editors put together the newspaper. He edited other people's writings for the newspaper. He personally wrote thousands and thousands of words. He was almost a legal correspondent, a court reporter. This Boston Massacre trial, he covered it for the Boston Gazette as if it was the O.J. Simpson trial. Thousands of words every week with trial strategy. He also did work behind the scenes. The Boston Massacre trial is another great example. He and several other leaders in the cause went to visit the judge before the trial to urge a speedy trial. As the members of the bar here know, that would be highly irregular in the current context. He also sent a memo to the prosecutor on trial strategy. So he was visiting the judge, advising the prosecutor, writing about it for the newspapers. And he was also writing personal letters to his network of friends in London and Virginia to tell them privately about what was happening. He organized a structure of committees of correspondents, sort of like an email listserv of his time, to formally communicate between the different towns what was happening in Boston. Provide, once the British started blocking off supplies from Boston, to provide food aid to Boston. Once he was in the Continental Congress, he was working in committees. He would occasionally give speeches. There was a lot of caucusing in coffee houses that went on. So he had this whole array of different techniques of motivating people. And I would emphasize also that he was not simply as a propagandist either. I think Samuel Adams was an articulator of ideas and a thinker. And he managed to combine thinking and doing in a way that's unusual. Yeah. I see you acknowledge Judge Hiller Zobel's terrific book on the Boston Massacre in your book. He says, and I wondered if you were able to come up with more information on how Sam Adams really orchestrated even more the trial. John Adams gets a lot of credit for defending the soldiers with Josiah Quincy. But Samuel Quincy, Josiah's brother, prosecuted them. And my understanding is that this was all orchestrated to show that the colonists, the Americans, would give a fair trial to the British. Was Adams the ringleader behind that? Well, that's a very good question. The reference to Judge Hiller Zobel is a judge here in Massachusetts and the author of what is probably the authoritative book on the Boston Massacre and also the co-editor of John Adams' legal papers, which one of the volumes is heavily devoted to the Boston Massacre, which I rely on for the sections here on the Boston Massacre. But those works, both of them were done, you know, I think 20 or 30 years ago. And there's been some skepticism of some of that since then. I, you know, my instinct is that if you accept the interpretation that Samuel Adams wanted the British officers to be acquitted, it's a little bit too neat. To accept that explanation, you have to take the 30,000 words of newspaper writing by Samuel Adams that says, oh, these guys are guilty, guilty, guilty, and it was a massacre. You have to really think that it's all sort of disingenuous in calculating. My view of Samuel Adams is more sympathetic to him than that. And I guess it's just, I don't think, I don't think, I haven't seen any real proof of that, of the idea that Samuel Adams wanted these guys to get off. It's a lot of conjecture based on, you know, well, his cousin John was defending the guys. But if you look at the advice to the prosecutor, this memo that's in the pain papers, you know, or the idea that he visited the judge to ask for a speedy trial, it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't really mesh to me with the idea that he wanted those guys to get off. Because you can make the opposing argument as well. I mean, if the British were convicted of having, you know, murdered in cold blood, these citizens of Boston, well, that would be a big propaganda victory for the colonial side as well. So, you know, one of the fun things about writing this book is realizing that even though people have been debating this stuff for, you know, 225 years, a lot of these questions are still unanswered. And, you know, we're not even, you know, we're further along than we were, but we're not even close to a conclusive answer on this stuff. So, you know, it's just work for some future historian to, you know, try to do another book on the Boston Massacre and, you know, really take another hard look at this stuff. Did he have any interest at all in pursuing national office? Well, he served in Congress for seven years. I mean, that was an office that was, he was elected by Massachusetts, but it was a national office and he played a leading role there on a lot of committees and in helping to orchestrate what happened in the Congress. He was older than a lot of the other founders. And by the time that the revolution was over, he'd been away from his hometown of Boston, which he loved for seven years. He'd been away from his wife and daughter for seven years. And, you know, even if he wanted national office, it wasn't clear that he was wanted because his ideas of a strong state and local government and a weaker national government and an important role for religion in public life, those ideas were receding a bit in favor of, you know, instead people like Washington and John Adams who believed in a stronger central government and Hamilton who believed in industry. So it's not really clear. The closest he came was Thomas Jefferson, who was our third president. Some of the electors in Virginia cast their second votes for Samuel Adams so that in a way that he would have been vice president under Jefferson if things worked out the way they wanted. It was a little bit of a different system than we have now. There weren't vice presidential candidates. It was just sort of the runner-up got to be vice president. And Jefferson and Samuel Adams felt in some way that Jefferson's accession as president was a victory at the national level for Samuel Adams' cause. And Jefferson wrote to Samuel Adams after his inaugural address saying that, you know, I got my words from that address from you. So I think even though Samuel Adams wasn't serving in the national government, at least once Jefferson was elected, he felt that his ideas of individual liberty and freedom were holding sway at the national level. So it was a victory for him in that sense. The Republican Party designation doesn't really, you know, as a political party, it doesn't really come into play until later. You know, he would have thought of himself as a Whig. He was characterized at some level as an anti-federalist even though he ended up voting to ratify the Constitution. The Federalists were the kind of dominant party at the time and they were kind of Democratic hyphen Republicans was the Jefferson Party. You know, the political, the advent of real strong political parties was something that came into being in American history, you know, really at the tail end of Samuel Adams' presence on the scene. Although when I talked about that critic, Gore, who said it would be an occasion for Thanksgiving when Samuel Adams finally got out of office, there you see the beginning of, and Samuel Adams actually lost some elections in Massachusetts after the Revolution and it was to that faction, the faction that was sort of allied with John Adams in believing that we needed a stronger federal government that was going to be more closely allied with Britain and supportive of industry and public projects and banks. Samuel Adams was a little bit skeptical of that, although really he wasn't focused so much on fighting those fights at the national level. He was focused on his work in Massachusetts. The controversy at the time between strong central government and states' rights that he was involved in clearly was on one side. Was that related in any way to the issues around pro or around slavery? Well, certainly the states' rights language later in American history, you know, was used that way. I think for Samuel Adams, he wrote, actually, that America was a big country and that people in the South and in the North or in New York even and Massachusetts saw things differently and he traveled enough within America to appreciate that. I mean, when he rode with John Adams and John Hancock from Massachusetts to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, you know, they were struck by the fact that, geez, in New York, there's towns with no ministers at all and the people talk really fast and, you know, the houses are really, you know, big and fancy here in New York. So I just think he thought that it would be difficult to have one rule of law for a country that is that diverse and he also felt that in some ways it was redundant and that it risked becoming like the government in London. You know, he had just been through this whole experience where there was a Massachusetts House of Representatives that was elected by the people and instead of ruling, it was Parliament and the King all the way off in London that was ruling and he certainly didn't want that to be replaced by a Massachusetts House of Representatives and then a Congress that was off in Washington that was ruling and remember, it was different then. I mean, to get a message, you had to send a messenger on a horseback and it took days. You couldn't just, you know, pick up the phone and call Washington or watch what was going on in the Senate or the House of Representatives on C-SPAN. You know, so I think there was a fear that the government in Washington would be so distant that it would get out of control and be unresponsive to the people the same way that Parliament was. Yeah. Two questions, although maybe the answer would be my first and what you just said. I'm wondering whether you can, in effect, depict his struggle against the English, against the British as a struggle against a monopoly of power, particularly far away and he saw, in effect, a strong federal government in the same terms and the second question I have is, not infrequently one finds that people are very good in idea-wise, in provoking things, in getting things started in effect, in revolutionary zeal in a variety of contexts but not very good after the fact in administering what's left. What confuses this picture to me is the fact that he was the governor of Massachusetts. Was he an efficient governor or was that, what was his record as governor in terms of efficiency as opposed to his stature as a revolutionary leader? Two good questions and then I'll, maybe we'll call it a night. Yeah, I mean, he never used that phrase, monopoly of power. He was more concerned in the American context about a redundancy with the federal government and the state government. And with Britain, the situation was such that there were all different powers. I mean, there was the royal appointed governor of Massachusetts and then there was the king and then there was parliament, which at this point, remember, parliament is this quasi-democratic institution in itself. I mean, it wasn't elected by people in Massachusetts, but it was elected, you know, the House of Commons was elected in London and there were actually, you know, lively debates in London in parliament over how to handle this question of the rebellious colonies. And, you know, there were people who were openly criticizing the administration there. You know, as far as Samuel Adams' record as governor of Massachusetts or he was also president of the Senate in Massachusetts after the war. You know, he was at the, he was at the end of his life and actually there's a moving scene in the book where he actually collapses at the podium as, you know, while giving a speech as governor of Massachusetts and somebody has to catch him as he's falling. So, it's hard to tell if his record in that post is, whether you can attribute it to the fact that he's no longer a revolutionary or to just his natural, you know, decline at the end of his life. It is true that during Shays' rebellion, where there was the Western Massachusetts people were rebelling against the taxes that had been imposed democratically by the new government, the governor of Massachusetts turned to Samuel Adams for advice and appointed him to actually go out to Western Massachusetts and try to, you know, settle things down a little bit. And at that, you know, he appears to have done a pretty capable, capable job. And, you know, I think it would be a misinterpretation to see Samuel Adams as just an agitator who had no governing skills because even though history is focused on his role leading up to the Declaration of Independence, he actually served in Congress for a while and Congress, there was no strong executive at that point. Congress had lots of, you know, logistical tasks and there was organizing committee work, paying the war bills and, you know, getting all that stuff done. He was a pretty efficient manager, I would say. I mean, he was no, he wasn't, you know, a Harvard Business School type, but he was, he got stuff done pretty well. So thanks a lot. Ira Stahl is vice president and managing editor of the New York Sun. He was editor of the Jerusalem Post, managing editor and Washington correspondent of the Forward, consultant to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. For more information about Ira Stahl, visit nysun.com and search his name.