Review: 'The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,' by Stacy Schiff

Biographers of America's Founding Fathers generally have mountains of material to choose from — public documents, colonial newspapers, private diaries and letters that reveal the private man behind the public face. But for her new book "The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams," Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer with a taste for elusive subjects (Cleopatra, Salem's witches), has chosen a Founding Father who took care not to leave a paper trail.

Samuel Adams, whose battle with the British began years before most colonists even thought of independence, was a hunted man. He burned his correspondence. He wrote under pseudonyms. He plotted in private. The track of his life is "a flicker and a dash, a vapor trail. Even in his letters he seems to have one foot out the door," she writes. One historian dubbed Samuel Adams America's first covert agent. The British might have had another word for it — terrorist.

Adams was an unlikely rebel, in many ways a typical Massachusetts citizen of the prerevolutionary years: son of a wealthy businessman, educated at Harvard, "at ease with everyone he met." If there was something special about him, it was his focus: untouched by art, bored by business dealings, he loved politics and words, "which he buffed, buffed again, and afterward refined." He might have vanished into Boston history were it not for the British, who spectacularly and catastrophically failed to understand what made Massachusetts citizens, forged by an independent version of Puritanism, tick.

The roots of Adams' opposition to British rule were personal, fed by the British Parliament's punitive dismissal of a land banking scheme that his father co-founded, an action that ruined his father and transferred his debts to his son. Adams became a magnet for the aggrieved and the chief stage manager of the emerging rebellion. The first two-thirds of "The Revolutionary" make for riveting, suspenseful and even laugh-out-loud reading, as Adams outflanks the British at every turn. Adams "seemed to exert an uncanny influence on men's minds: he knew when to alarm, when to sooth, flatter, intimidate."

He controlled every element of the narrative, coordinating protests over unfair taxes, the onerous Stamp Act and the hated forced importation of tea, then publicizing the uproar for an ever-widening audience. Schiff deftly uses as Adams' foil British official Thomas Hutchinson, who hated Adams and chronicled his political tactics and alleged personal failings, writing that "I doubt whether there is a greater incendiary in the King's dominions or a man of greater malignity of heart."

A vivid and evocative writer, Schiff excels in her portrayal of Boston in its agony and anger. Warring gangs, secret clubs, riots, mobs destroying British officials' homes, then the officials hung in effigy. Then a punitive port blockade and military occupation and, finally, shots fired at Lexington and Concord. By then Adams, leagues ahead of the British, had expanded his network to all 13 colonies. They were primed and ready to respond.

The political Adams is dazzling. The personal Adams is more elusive. We see the man of ideas and action, but not his internal struggles. Samuel's famous cousin John shared his thoughts with his wife, Abigail, in their correspondence, and their letters memorialize their doubts, fears and hopes, but Samuel Adams' wife and family remain largely offstage. The historical record details what his enemies thought, and what his allies thought, but little of what Samuel Adams thought of himself.

As a biography, "The Revolutionary" is incomplete, but as a portrait of an activist, it's superb. With his way with words, his skill at bending the truth and his unrelenting focus, Samuel Adams resembles nothing more than a 21^st century operative, working the networks, masterminding the narrative, plotting mayhem. Samuel Adams made a revolution. We are still living with the outcome.

Mary Ann Gwinn is a book critic in Seattle.

The Revolutionary

By: Stacy Schiff.

Publisher: Little, Brown, 432 pages, $35.

Event: Talk of the Stacks, a virtual conversation with Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel, 7 p.m. Dec. 8, supporthclib.org/stacy-schiff.