Inevitably, American history in the second half of the 18th century has become a major theatre in the culture wars, and not only for the right. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, which attempts to update and defamiliarise the founders for a multicultural, multiracial America, derived from Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton. In recent decades many academic historians have turned away from the old civil religion, depicting instead the lives of women, the enslaved and the poor in the era of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, there remains a seemingly unquenchable demand for books on the founders. The results are, on the whole, nuanced and balanced, surprisingly so at times; in 2014, Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, published a respectable biography of James Madison. Still, there’s a lurking suspicion that the public interest in the lives of dead white patriarchs is predominantly hagiographical.
Stacy Schiff’s life of the revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams is an unobtrusively subversive contribution to the genre. Schiff’s Adams is, if not quite a purveyor of fake news, a master craftsman in the arts of distortion and exaggeration, whose spin and sensation-mongering transformed loyal colonial Britons into revolutionary Americans over the course of little more than a decade. The origins of the American Revolution remain a conundrum. Why did the colonies that had supported Britain in its North American struggle against France between 1754 and 1763 turn so quickly against Britain’s relatively benign parliamentary government? Understandably enough, British attempts after 1763 to make the colonists contribute to the costs of imperial defence provoked protest. But the escalation from loud discontent about taxes to outright independence wasn’t predictable or straightforward. The most persuasive explanation, advanced by Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), is that the reading habits of the 18th-century colonists tilted heavily towards the fretful opposition Whiggery of the mother country. By contrast with mainstream Whiggish celebration of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, opposition Whigs – indebted to mid-17th-century commonwealth ideals, suspicious of government power in general, and nervous of conspiracies against liberty – stressed the frailty of English freedoms, not least from the poisons they identified in the body politic. Transatlantic distance aggravated such concerns. Eventually, colonials came to fear that England’s liberties were on the point of expiry, and British America’s might be next.
Schiff adds a twist to this story. The colonies’ instinctive British loyalties counterbalanced suspicion and mistrust; it took sustained, deliberate effort from Adams between the mid-1760s and mid-1770s to transform protest into outrage, then militancy, and finally a willingness to shed blood for an as yet unimagined American nation. Abetted by London’s misunderstandings of Boston, and Boston’s exaggerated misreadings of London’s intent, Adams’s persistent scheming, Schiff suggests, contrived America into existence.