Serene, sunny, tender, he seemed instinctively to grasp what righteous anger could accomplish. John also believed Samuel an original Samuel mystified even his peers. John Adams swore that his cousin Samuel was born to sever the cord between Great Britain and America. As a grandson acknowledged: “Shallow men called this cunning, and wise men wisdom.” The patron saint of late bloomers, Adams proved a political genius. Adams steered New Englanders where he was certain they meant, or should mean, to head, occasionally even revealing the destination along the way. It was a sideways, looping, secretive business. He muscled words into deeds, effecting, with various partners, a revolution that culminated, in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. On a wet night in 1774, when a group of Massachusetts farmers settled in a tavern before the fire and, pipes in hand, discussed what had driven Bostonians mad-reasoning that Parliament might soon begin to tax horses, cows and sheep wondering what additional affronts could come their way and concluding that it was better to rebel sooner rather than later-it was because the long arm of Adams had reached them. He found his footing at 41, when, over a dozen years, he proceeded to answer to Thomas Jefferson’s description of him as “truly the man of the Revolution.” With singular lucidity Adams plucked ideas from the air and pinned them to the page, layering in the moral dimensions, whipping up emotions, seizing and shaping the popular imagination. It was all the more confounding after the first: He was a perfect failure until middle age. Samuel Adams delivered what may count as the most remarkable second act in American life.
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