Samuel Adams was a politician before there was a country to have politics in. He organized resistance to British taxation in the 1760s — years before any other prominent colonial voice was calling for independence. The documents begin with the Stamp Act and end with his opposition to the Constitution he had helped make necessary.
Samuel Adams entered Boston politics in the early 1760s as a tax collector — a job at which he famously failed, leaving the city £8,000 short and himself nearly bankrupt. What he lacked in financial discipline he made up in political clarity. When the Sugar Act passed in 1764 and the Stamp Act in 1765, Adams was already writing resolutions for the Massachusetts legislature arguing that Parliament had no authority to tax the colonies.
In November 1772, Adams drafted "The Rights of the Colonists" for the Boston Town Meeting — a document that laid out the argument for colonial rights three years before Lexington and four years before the Declaration. It was adopted by the Boston Town Meeting on November 20, 1772. The full text is at Yale Avalon.
Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
The same document also laid out the argument for the Committees of Correspondence — the inter-colonial communication network Adams organized to coordinate resistance. By 1774 every colony had a Committee of Correspondence. Adams had built the infrastructure of revolution before anyone declared one.
On March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd on King Street, killing five colonists. Adams immediately moved to use the event politically. He secured Paul Revere's engraving depicting an ordered British volley against an unarmed crowd. He organized a town meeting, demanded the removal of British troops from Boston, and published accounts of the event across the colonies. The soldiers were tried — John Adams defended them — but Samuel Adams had already shaped how the event would be remembered.
On December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty — working under Adams's direction — boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into the water. Adams had organized the action. The Journals of the Continental Congress document the colonial response and the British reaction — the Coercive Acts — that followed. The Journals are at the Library of Congress.
Samuel Adams served in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1781. He signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776. His letters to his cousin John Adams during the war document his thinking in real time — what he feared, what he believed, and what he thought the new republic required. Both letters are at Founders Online.
May God give us Wisdom, Fortitude, Perseverance and every other Virtue necessary for us to maintain that Independence which we have asserted. It would be ridiculous indeed if we were to return to a State of Slavery in a few Weeks after we had thrown off the Yoke and asserted our Independence. The Body of the people of America, I am perswaded, would resent it.
Three months later, with Washington's army retreating across New Jersey and the cause near collapse, Adams wrote again. The January 9, 1777 letter documents his assessment of what was happening and what he believed was required. The letter is at Founders Online.
Is it not a reproach to us as a free people that we should suffer the Enemy to triumph over us for the want of Virtue and publick Spirit? Can we not recruit our Armies and furnish them with every thing necessary for an honorable Campaign? If we cannot, I am afraid the people of America in general are not yet sufficiently awakened to a Sense of their Danger.
Samuel Adams signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776. He signed the Articles of Confederation in 1778. He served in the Continental Congress through 1781. Then he left national politics and returned to Massachusetts.
When the Constitution was sent to the states for ratification in 1787, Samuel Adams was skeptical. He had spent decades arguing against concentrated power — British parliamentary power, executive power, any authority not directly accountable to the people. The proposed Constitution, with its strong central government and no bill of rights, alarmed him.
His correspondence from the ratification period is in the Warren-Adams Letters collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society — letters between Adams, James Warren, and Mercy Otis Warren. Adams was concerned that the Constitution gave too much power to the federal government and not enough protection to individual liberties. He ultimately supported ratification after Massachusetts proposed amendments — amendments that became the framework for the Bill of Rights.
I stumble at the Threshold. I meet with a National Government, instead of a Federal Union of Sovereign States. I am not able to conceive why the Wisdom of the Convention led them to give the Preference to the former before the latter.
The man who had organized resistance to British power because it was insufficiently accountable to the people now opposed the new American government for the same reason. The Constitution was ratified. The Bill of Rights — which Adams had demanded — was added in 1791. Adams served as Governor of Massachusetts under the Constitution he had resisted.