Revolutionary Leadership

Essential Lessons from the Men and Women of the American Revolution

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• Publisher: Revell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493430529
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Times of crisis call for revolutionary leadership. What better model could we have for courage and creativity under fire than those who found themselves in positions of leadership during the American Revolutionary War? Men and women, famous and obscure, of European and African descent--the leaders of the revolution faced outrageous odds and dire consequences should they fail. Yet they stuck to their principles, winning the most unlikely of victories and not only shaping a new country but reshaping the world. Now Pat Williams helps you apply their genius to your sphere of influence. Through the remarkable stories of more than 25 leaders of the American Revolution, you'll discover fresh insight into how great leaders are formed, refined, tested, and strengthened. As Thomas Paine wrote, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." Let Pat Williams show you how to lead in our day with revolutionary courage, confidence, and a serving heart.

1

Samuel Adams

The Father of the Revolution

Most Americans know Samuel Adams as a name on a beer label.

But Sam Adams—a cousin of the second president of the United States, John Adams—was one of the earliest and most important figures in the drive toward American independence. During his lifetime, he became known as the Father of the Revolution.1 Yet Sam Adams showed very little leadership ability in his youth. In fact, his father, Samuel Adams Sr., was convinced that his young son was destined for failure.

Samuel Adams was born in Boston in September 1722. He was one of twelve children born to Samuel Sr. and Mary Fifield Adams. In those days of high infant mortality, only three of the twelve Adams children survived past age three. Samuel and Mary Adams raised their children in their devout Puritan faith.

A wealthy Boston merchant and landowner, Samuel Adams Sr. sent young Samuel to the best schools—Boston Latin School and Harvard College. Academically, Samuel was second in his graduating class at Harvard, but the college president, Benjamin Wadsworth, arbitrarily demoted him to sixth in a class of twenty-three because Samuel’s father lacked a “gentleman’s education.”2 The aristocratic snobbery Samuel encountered at Harvard reinforced his opposition to the rigid class prejudice and elitism of British society.

Samuel’s parents sent him to Harvard to study for the ministry, but he chose to study philosophy and politics instead. He graduated in 1740 and earned his master’s degree in 1743. His master’s thesis statement demonstrated an early desire for revolution against the British Crown. Translated from the Latin, Samuel’s thesis question read: “Is it lawful to resist the government if the welfare of the republic is involved? Responding in the affirmative, Samuel Adams.”3

At that time, three decades before the Declaration of Independence was written, Adams’s bold advocacy of resistance to the Crown must have sounded more like treason than patriotism to his fellow colonists. Most colonists considered themselves British subjects, not American Patriots. Though Adams was only twenty years old when he wrote his master’s thesis, he was well ahead of his countrymen in pondering resistance and revolution.

The Successful Failure

Samuel worked briefly in a counting house—a bookkeeping and bill-collecting business. He hated the job and wanted to become a lawyer, but his mother talked him out of it. For a while, his parents tried to persuade him to become a clergyman, but their efforts were to no avail.

When Samuel Sr. realized his son would never enter the ministry, he lent him one thousand British pounds—the equivalent of about two hundred thousand dollars today. Samuel was supposed to use the money to launch a business. Instead, he lent half of the money to a friend (the loan was never repaid). He lost the rest on bad business deals.

Samuel Sr. concluded that young Samuel had no enthusiasm for business and was probably unemployable. He gave his son a job in the family malt house business where, he hoped, his bright but financially inept son would do no harm. A malt house is a building where cereal grain (such as barley) is soaked in water, allowed to sprout, then dried as malt. The Adams malt house probably sold malt for brewing beer and distilling whiskey. (It’s unlikely that Samuel Adams ever brewed beer, despite his name being a popular beer brand today.)

In January 1748, twenty-five-year-old Sam Adams launched his first successful business, a weekly newspaper called the Independent Advertiser. It gave him a platform from which to preach against oppressive British actions, such as “impressment,” seizing sailors from merchant ships (including American ships) and forcing the sailors to serve in the Royal Navy. Samuel’s writings were heavily influenced by the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, who promoted “natural rights,” especially the rights of life, liberty, and property.

That same year, Samuel’s father died, and Samuel took over the family estate. He discovered that one of his father’s business ventures—a failed banking enterprise—had put the entire estate in jeopardy. His father and other investors had established a bank to stabilize the local economy by issuing its own paper money. The British government and the Loyalist governor of Massachusetts had forced the bank to close.

Throughout the 1750s, Samuel Adams battled the commissioners of the Massachusetts General Court who, on behalf of the British Crown, launched scheme after scheme—many of them clearly illegal and corrupt—in a bid to seize the Adamses’ estate. That long battle only inflamed Samuel Adams’s hatred for oppressive government—and tilted him in favor of revolution.

During the long legal battle, Adams wrote essays in the Independent Advertiser denouncing British oppression. He attacked the commissioners for trying to seize his father’s estate and exposed the commissioners’ profit incentive for corruption and dishonesty. His newspaper essays generated a public outcry—and the commissioners were fired. This cause-and-effect action taught Adams the power of the press in gaining public sympathy and political leverage.

From Tax Collector to Political Leader

In 1749, the year after his father’s death, Samuel Adams married his pastor’s daughter, Elizabeth Checkley. She gave birth six times, but only two of those children survived. Elizabeth died in 1757 from complications following a stillbirth. In his eulogy for his wife, a grieving Samuel Adams said that Elizabeth had “run her Christian race with remarkable steadiness and finished in triumph.”4

A year before, the Boston Town Meeting (the citizens’ council that governed Boston) appointed Adams tax collector. Because of his strong sense of compassion and fair play, he was reluctant to collect taxes from fellow citizens who were going through financial difficulties. His lenient nature made him popular with the people, but the Town Meeting held him personally responsible for the shortage in collections. After nine years on the job, he was £8,000 behind in his collections (equivalent to $1.6 million today). Adams parlayed his popularity into political support. The people knew that his concern for their well-being was genuine, springing from his Christian and pro-liberty convictions.

Having failed as a tax collector, Adams turned to a career in politics. He served in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Boston Town Meeting during the 1760s. He organized opposition to oppressive British tax schemes such as the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, and the Townshend Acts of 1767. He also led a boycott of British goods.

As a devout Puritan, Sam Adams was a peace-loving man, and he saw armed revolution as a last resort. His hopes for a peaceful solution were dashed in May 1768 when a fifty-gun British warship, HMS Romney, sailed into Boston Harbor and began the impressment of Bostonian sailors.

Unrest in the city was already high when, on June 10, 1768, British customs officials seized the Liberty, a sloop owned by the popular Boston merchant John Hancock. When British sailors from the Romney came ashore to take the Liberty in tow, Bostonians rioted, forcing British officials and their families to flee to the Romney. The British government sent army regiments to Boston to quell the riots. Reinforcements soon arrived, and a full-scale military occupation of Boston began.

On March 5, 1770, the Massachusetts colony was stunned by the Boston Massacre. During a time of troubled relations between British soldiers and Boston citizens, a mob gathered in front of a British soldier standing guard at the Boston Custom House. As the sentry endured taunts from the mob, he was joined by eight more soldiers. The crowd threw stones and snowballs at the soldiers—and the soldiers fired into the crowd. Five Boston civilians died. The tragic incident stoked revolutionary passions throughout the thirteen colonies.

After the Boston Massacre, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other leaders met with the governor of Massachusetts and with Colonel William Dalrymple, the commander of the British troops. The Boston delegation demanded the withdrawal of troops and an end to the occupation. To reduce unrest, Dalrymple agreed to move his soldiers to Castle William on an island in Boston Harbor.

In April 1770, the British Parliament repealed all of the Townshend Act taxes except the tax on tea. In newspaper essays, Adams urged his fellow colonists to continue boycotting all British goods until Parliament removed the tea tax. As long as the British government continued to tax tea, it legitimized the British claim of a right to tax Americans without giving them a say in Parliament. American patriots united behind the slogan “No taxation without representation.” Despite Adams’s pleas, the boycott failed. People went back to buying British goods and paying the taxes.

The Boston Tea Party

In his continued frustration over taxes on British goods, Samuel Adams decided to take bolder action, a decision that led to the Boston Tea Party. Though Adams’s precise role in the Boston Tea Party is debated by historians, we know he was involved in planning the protest. Adams was the founder of the Sons of Liberty, a secret organization with members in all thirteen colonies who were devoted to resisting British oppression.

He was also a leading member of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, one of many committees of correspondence throughout the colonies. Committees of correspondence acted as shadow governments, organizing opposition to the British government and to colonial governors and legislatures who were loyal to Britain.

In late November 1773, the Dartmouth, a British cargo ship laden with tea, anchored in Boston Harbor. The ship’s owner, the British East India Company, was required to pay the tax for the goods and unload the cargo within twenty days or British customs officials would confiscate the cargo (the tax was passed along to the colonists in the form of higher tea prices).

Adams convened an emergency town meeting, attended by several thousand Bostonians. The meeting passed a resolution demanding that the Dartmouth raise anchor and return the tea to England without unloading or paying the tax. At the meeting, twenty-five men were selected to stand guard and prevent the tea from being unloaded.

Massachusetts royal governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to allow the Dartmouth to leave without unloading its cargo. Meanwhile, two more British tea ships, Eleanor and Beaver, dropped anchor in Boston Harbor. On December 16, the eve of the governor’s deadline for unloading the Dartmouth, Adams called another town meeting. An estimated five thousand people, nearly a third of the city’s sixteen thousand citizens, showed up at Boston’s Old South Meeting House, despite a bitterly cold rain.5 Most of the crowd filled the streets as people strained to hear the debate inside.

A number of town leaders rose to give speeches about the critical situation at the wharf. Finally, Samuel Adams stood and said he could see nothing more that the people of Boston could do to save their country. Some historians believe Adams’s words were a signal to the Sons of Liberty. A group of men left the meeting, determined to take action, about fifteen minutes after Adams spoke those words.

That night at around six, a large group of men, some dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three British ships and spent the next three hours opening more than three hundred chests of tea and dumping them into the Boston Harbor. The disguises were intended to prevent the men from being recognized and prosecuted by the government.

This was no rioting mob. The men involved in the Boston Tea Party were remarkably efficient and disciplined as they went about their business. There was to be no looting or destruction of property, other than the tea. When one of the men accidentally broke a padlock, a new padlock was brought aboard to replace it. The disciplined and nonviolent nature of this act of resistance was likely due to Samuel Adams’s strong Puritan influence.

By around 9:00 p.m., the Sons of Liberty had completed their task and the crowd on the wharf quietly dispersed. As Samuel’s cousin John Adams reflected in his diary, “This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Samuel Adams
• 2. Crispus Attucks
• 3. John Adams
• 4. Benjamin Franklin
• 5. Sarah Bradlee Fulton
• 6. Patrick Henry
• 7. Paul Revere
• 8. Parson Jonas Clarke
• 9. Jonathan Trumbull
• 10. Samuel Whittemore
• 11. Henry Knox
• 12. Esther de Berdt Reed
• 13. Thomas Paine
• 14. Thomas Jefferson
• 15. John Hancock
• 16. John Paul Jones
• 17. Sybil Ludington
• 18. Baron von Steuben
• 19. Nathanael Greene
• 20. Marquis de Lafayette
• 21. Mary Hays, Anna Marie Lane, Deborah Sampson, and Others
• 22. Alexander Hamilton
• 23. James Madison
• 24. George Washington
• Epilogue
• Notes
• About the Author
• Back Ads
• Back Cover