The origin of Adams’s ferocious quarrel with the British is somewhat obscure. The radicalizing affront, essential to the movie image of a rebellious patriot—the moment when the Russell Crowe or Mel Gibson character finds his family killed or his farm despoiled, down to the last dog—never happened to him. It’s true that his father had, rather in George Bailey style, helped oversee a “land bank,” a kind of early savings-and-loan company, which had been squashed, Potter style, by rivals who persuaded the royal governor in Massachusetts to get it shut down. But this setback, though it damaged the family’s finances, hardly seemed permanently traumatic, and, anyway, Schiff tells us, it proved politically fruitful for Sam’s father, who got elected a Boston selectman in 1744 and, soon thereafter, to the Massachusetts legislature. So Sam Adams was scarcely oppressed by the Crown’s governors. He just didn’t like being told what to do without first being asked if he wanted to do it. When the British, desperate for money for the imperial budget, began to tax America in the mid-seventeen-sixties, he didn’t ask, Is this tax fair? He asked, Who are people like that to tax me? He began by making this emotion regional, throughout New England, and then invented a nation in the image of the insult.
He was perhaps the first in the modern pattern in which revolutionary leaders rise from the well-off cohorts of a subject population, who turn on the colonial power more from principle than from immediate oppression. In the cases of Nehru and Che and Castro and so on, their sympathies were also lit by a sense of the groaning oppression of their poorer peasant countrymen. For Adams, who lived in a more prosperous society, the sympathies spread not so much downward as outward, to other members of the Colonial élite who might share his abstract but compelling sense of injustice.
This helps explain why it has always been so hard for American schoolchildren to understand the spiral of offenses and responses that led to 1776. What was so outrageous about the Stamp Act, and how could taxing tea lead you to throw it into Boston Harbor in the dead of night? Schiff reminds us that the colonists themselves had a hard time answering these questions. The Stamp Act of 1765—the scheme was to make colonists pay for an embossed stamp on their official documents—essentially never went into effect, and the tea tax lowered the price of tea, inconveniencing mostly the Colonial middlemen. The Stamp Act simply became a synonym for horror; Schiff tells of a New England servant who refused to enter a barn at night, for fear that the Stamp Act might be there.