At the opening of the old radio and then television show “Dragnet,” we were told: “The story you are about to hear is true; only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” History Channel’s “Sons of Liberty” series, which aired this week, should have been preceded with the disclaimer: “The story you are about to see bears little resemblance to the truth; only the names are real.” I suspect that most people who watched the show on the History Channel thought they really were watching “history.” Unfortunately, it’s just too easy to completely overlook or misconstrue what the network meant when it showed its brief disclaimer that the show was a “dramatization.” Hint: That’s code for “completely made up.”
It was mere seconds into the first episode when the History Channel completely jumped the shark. Samuel Adams was neither a bachelor, nor a drunk, nor a thug, nor a ninja capable of climbing walls and jumping from rooftops; nor was he ever forced to contemplate such a thing. The real Samuel Adams was 43 years old in 1765, when the events portrayed in the series began.
Called Samuel, the publican, because of his work — such as it was — as a tax collector, he was a pious man who lived frugally and was described derisively by loyalists as a “Psalms singer.” He was respected by Bostonians because they saw in him a man who lived by values that most of them honored only on the Sabbath.
What he was mostly was a politician who had developed an understanding of and a longing for liberty at an early age. For his final paper at Harvard, he argued that when the existence of the commonwealth was at stake, it was lawful to resist even the highest civil authority.
In 1749, in an essay in The Public Advertiser, Adams wrote, “[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.”
In the early 1750s, Adams and some friends formed a secret club and printed a newspaper called the Independent Advertiser. It so consistently criticized the royal governor that it came to be called “the Whippingpost Club.”
He was almost always politicking and almost always recruiting lovers of liberty, but he did it in a way that seemed to convince his recruits that he was following their ideas — not they his. His politics were relatively simple: Goodness meant the welfare of the most people; evil was tyranny by the few. These efforts kept him elected to the Boston Town Meeting with the support of Boston’s workmen and middle class. So when it came time to spark a rebellion, Adams had many followers — not because they were a bunch of mindless and drunken thugs, but because he had spent years sowing the seeds of liberty among all manner of people: politicians, businessmen, tavern-goers, churchgoers and Harvard graduates.
I won’t go into all the inaccuracies in the series. To do so would take several columns. The Journal of the American Revolution covers some of them here.
I suppose I should be content that Samuel Adams finally, in a way, got his just due. I’ve long felt his contributions were overshadowed by the more “famous” Founders like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, who did less to spark the revolution.
Samuel Adams understood what was required for a free and just society; and he didn’t just preach it, he lived it. In a letter to James Warren in 1775, Adams wrote:
Since private and publick Vices, are in Reality, though not always apparently, so nearly connected, of how much Importance, how necessary is it, that the utmost Pains be taken by the Publick, to have the Principles of Virtue early inculcated on the Minds even of children, and the moral Sense kept alive, and that the wise institutions of our Ancestors for these great Purposes be encouraged by the Government. For no people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffusd and Virtue is preservd. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauchd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.
It is our ignorance and lack of morals that are aiding our nation’s destruction. Our children — and our ignorant friends — must be taught the true history of country and what liberty really is. But don’t go looking for it on the History Channel.
Sources:
The Journal of the American Revolution
“Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution,” by A.J. Langguth