Samuel Adams

Biography

Samuel Adams was born in Boston in 1722 and graduated from Harvard College in 1740, adding a master's degree in 1743. He failed in business, worked in his family's malthouse and from 1756 served as a Boston tax collector, a post in which he fell into arrears. Through the Boston Town Meeting and the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he was clerk from 1766 to 1774, he became a leader of opposition to Parliament's attempts to tax the colonies.

In 1768 Adams wrote the Massachusetts Circular Letter urging the colonies to resist the Townshend Acts, which led London to station troops in Boston. After the Boston Massacre of 1770 he joined the town leaders who demanded the soldiers' removal. He helped set up the committees of correspondence in 1772 and organised the meetings that preceded the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

Adams represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1781, helping to bring about the Continental Association and the Declaration of Independence, which he signed, and working on the Articles of Confederation. He helped draft the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, presided over the state senate, served as lieutenant governor from 1789, became acting governor in October 1793 and was then elected in his own right, serving until 1797. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1803.