Samuel Adams The Last Puritan Fights the American

Revolution Twice
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9/5/2017

Samuel Adams, the troublemaking firebrand who stirred the common rabble into supporting the American
Revolution, became known as the last Puritan late in his life as he shook his head in dismay at how the country
made use of its new freedom following the American Revolution.

Adams is widely credited by his contemporaries for bringing a passionate zeal to his support for the American
Revolution. His critics on the English side accused him of being underhanded and a master of smear tactics to incite
the public to support his position.

But Adams zeal for a virtuous America was real, founded in a deeply religious upbringing in the Congregational
Church. He was sadly disappointed by what he saw as moral decay following the Revolution, including the push to
bring theatre to Boston, attacks on the citys cherished public town meeting and the start of a libertine society that
elevated flash over substance.

Sans Souci Club

Samuel Adams by John Singleton Copley

An early irritant to Adams emerged in 1784 when a group of young people decided Boston needed more
entertainment. It needed to be more like New York and Philadelphia. They created the Sans Souci (Without Care)
Club to bring merriment and mirth to the city.

The organization irked the more conservative members of society. Sam Adams hated the club and some of its more
radical ideas, such as allowing women into gambling parlors. It was an invitation to bring European court society,
with its lack of virtue and questionable values, into America just at the moment when the country was successfully
expelling them on the battlefield.

A play critical of the club was circulated: Sans Souci, Alias Free and Easy: or an Evening's Peep into a Polite Circle.
The character Little Pert speaks for the supporters of the club:

Damn the old musty rules of decency and decorum - national characters - Spartan virtues - Republican principles -

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they are all calculated for rigid manners, and Cromwellian days; - they are as disgusting as old orthodoxy:

Fashion and etiquette are more agreeable to my idea of life - this is the independence I aim at - the free and easy
air which so distinguishes the man of fashion, from the self-formal republican - the court style - the je ne sai quoi -
give me but this and way with all your buckram of Presbyterianism.

For all the anger the club caused, it had few outward impacts on the city. It was merely a private forum for club
members to indulge themselves.

More public was the fight to bring theatre to Boston an equally abhorrent idea to Adams.

Board Alley Sprouts a Theater

In 1792, a group of theatre advocates put up the money to launch the Board Alley Theatre, in defiance of the laws
that forbid theatre in Boston.

As a venue for entertainment, the theatre, which could hold 500 people, was not much of a success. But as a
statement of a mini cultural revolution at hand, it worked wonders. John Hancock, the pomp-loving peacock of a
governor, was angered by the cheek of the theater supporters in openly defying the law.

He ordered his attorney general to break up the theater and arrest its managers in the midst of one performance.
The stoppage of the play was cause for a mini riot. The case against the theater was thrown out of court on a
technicality. But working class Bostonians would not let the matter drop. Why was their entertainment being banned
when the wealthy and privileged could idle away their hours in private clubs and card games?

The message to the states legislature was loud and clear and the prohibition of theater was stricken from the books,
clearing the way for Charles Bullfinchs Federal Street Theatre to be constructed on the corner of Franklin and
Federal Streets a year later, opening Boston to theater of all sorts.

Puritans in Decline

The arrival of theater in Boston highlighted the ways in which a new order was asserting itself, sweeping away the
aging leadership that brought about the American Revolution. John Quincy Adams wrote to his father John and
defended the theater.

For Sam Adams the theater was just another symptom of a society growing sick. His great worry was that the elites
who ran the country, having summoned the rabble to do the dirty work of the Revolution, now wanted to put the
farmers and working class on the back bench and elevate themselves as a new breed of royalty.

This fight between those who favored the old vs. those who wanted change manifested itself in the town vs. city fight
that continuously enveloped Boston. As early as 1708 some had been agitating for Boston to do away with its town
meeting and establish a city form of government.

While other cities moved ahead with killing off direct democracies, Boston hung firm. In 1785 a proposal was put
forward to do away with town meeting. Samuel Adams derided it at a public meeting at Faneuil Hall. Some of his
countrymen, he noted, seemed to be developing a hankering for the leeks and onions of Great Britain.

And in a town meeting called to consider the issue, Adams warned against creating a political class: A love of
novelty and a desire for change has been an avenue through which aristocracy has entered.

Overwhelmingly the town meeting voted down the change.

In 1792 a better organized attempt was made to change the government. By now the young bloods were growing in
strength, but again the idea failed. John Quincy Adams could barely contain his disdain for the town meeting

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supporters in writing about the defeat: Seven hundred men, who looked as if they had been collected from all the
jails on the continent, outvoted by their numbers all the combined weight and influence of wealth and abilities and
integrity of the whole town.

The town meeting would beat back proposals to change the charter in 1785, 1792, 1804 and 1815. Finally, in 1822,
a city government was established. By then Samuel Adams was long dead. He had been elected governor for one
term when John Hancock died, but his brand of politics was dying out and he failed in a bid to become a senator.

Adams died in 1803 after several years in political obscurity. Palsy had made it impossible for him to write and he
slipped into retirement. Historian Edward Everett would note that with Adams death, the last of the Puritans was
gone.

Thanks to: The Magic of the Many: Josiah Quincy and the Rise of Mass Politics in Boston by Matthew H. Crocker
The Gardiners of Massachusetts by T.A. Milford

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