Some people stand at the great divides in human history. They serve as links between the ages. They ignite new forces, forge new realities, crystallize new perceptions. We remember Galileo, his astronomy, turning the universe inside out. We recall Luther, the 95 Theses and the Reformation; or Einstein, E = mc2 and the atomic age.
Samuel, whom Allison Corman-Vogan brought to our attention just a moment ago––Samuel provides a link between two ages. He ushers in a new era. Samuel’s anointment of Saul as King of Israel spells the end of one age and the beginning of a new one. Those twelve tribes of Israel, a loose confederation of clans, confronted the Philistines’ military juggernaut and all but collapsed. Their common religious memories, a shared culture, a loyalty to war lords claiming their own fiefdoms––these wrangling tribes could not sustain an impenetrable battle front against a voracious, imperial war machine. Israel must change or be destroyed. She must say “goodbye” to the theocratic confederation and mold a unified, national domain. So, the old theocrat Samuel anointed the new king, Saul. But before he did so, he marshaled all his prophetic vision and launched a warning into the risks of unbridled political and economic power - a broadside still standing as a classic in its field. Remember? “Do you really want a king?” he asks. “You’ll get one. But never forget what comes with royalty. Your children die in his wars. He drafts your families into his military industrial complex. He seizes your produce for his taxes. You find his magistrates selling themselves to the highest bidder; his civil servants engaged in fraud, your families conscripted to aggrandize his vanity; your life, enslaved to his survival. And when this tyranny finally exhausts you, I promise no one - no one ill be around to say, ‘I told you so.” With that valedictory, Samuel dissolves the old era and inaugurates a new one. He anoints Saul. He stands as a continental divide between the ages.
But he is not the last Samuel to straddle that divide. He is not the final Samuel to express wariness and resistance to overweening power. Another Samuel, one of our own, a third generation member and Deacon of this congregation, stands also at a monumental, historic divide. His name you know: Samuel - Samuel Adams, alias, “The Father of the Revolution,” “The Tribune of the People,” “The Last of the Puritans,” “The Genius of Liberty,” “The Grand Incendiary.” Samuel Adams, as much as anyone, cultivated the revolution in American hearts and mind, culminating in Lexington’s “shot heard round the world, ” compelling Congress, in retrospect, to inscribe on the Great Seal of the United States Virgil’s telling phrase: “Novus Ordo Seclorum” –– “A New Order of the Ages.”
How shall we speak of Samuel Adams: this link to the new order? How shall we perceive him? Well, we need recognize first, staunch and deep roots in New England Congregationalism. As William Fowler. of our own Massachusetts Historical Society writes, “Driven by his sense of covenant, (Adams) believed that the people of his community were bound to one another through a common history and reverence for virtue and simplicity.” And Oscar Handlin adds, the “central role of covenant, is of a voluntary agreement among participants who ruled themselves by consent. Just as in their relationship to God, men and women retained their liberty through accepting the divine will of their own accord, so too in politics they remained free so long as they themselves created the government that ruled them.” That mood and tone we find captured in a sentence of the Preamble of our Commonwealth’s constitution, written no less, by John and Samuel Adams: “The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen covenants with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good…” Or more briefly, as the citizens of Sudbury affirmed in 1656, transferring their local church, congregational polity to the civil realm: “We shall be judged by men of our own choosing.”
And, thus for Samuel Adams. Beyond his church ties and perspectives, in the political world Samuel Adams became primarily a propagandist for, a fighter in behalf of, a political genius organizing around human and civil rights. “I am not more convinced of anything,” he wrote to his wife in 1777 (by the way, his first wife, Elizabeth, who died in childbirth––Elizabeth was a preacher’s daughter. Her father? Samuel Checkley: The minister of the Old South Church in Boston.) In any case, Adams wrote to his second wife, Betsy Wells, “I am not more convinced of anything than that it is my duty to oppose to the utmost of my ability the designs of those who would enslave my country; and with God’s assistance I am resolved to oppose them ‘til their designs are defeated or I am called to quit the stage of life.”
We can speak of him perhaps as a democrat in an autocratic time; a republican refuting the authority of monarchy. “I firmly believe,” he wrote to Richard Henry Lee, “that the Benevolent Creator designed the republican form of Government for man.”
Samuel Adams was born in 1722, the son of a brewmaster and Deacon of this Congregation. His mother, Mary Fifield, came from an elite Bay State family. Adams graduated from Harvard in 1740––a glitch in his record indicates on one occasion too much of a nip from his father’s malt barrels––his graduate thesis he forbodingly––contentiously––entitled Is it Lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved? He argued in the affirmative.
After Harvard, Samuel Adams failed at virtually everything. His brewery went bankrupt. As the town tax collector he smoozed with miscreants rather dunning them. His newspapers ran aground.
In business? A flop. In Politics? A smash. Over the years he served as leader of the Boston Town Meeting, the clerk of the Massachusetts Assembly. He organized the Massachusetts Committees of Correspondence–– “a band of brother , which no force can break, no enemy destroy.” He helped to manage the transition from monarchy to revolutionary government, served as a delegate to the Continental Congresses, signed the Declaration of Independence. As Pauline Maier writes, “During these years, both in guiding Massachusetts through the decade before independence, and in forging a durable inter-colonial union, his importance was of the first rank.” Thomas Jefferson called him, “…truly, the man of the revolution.” John Adams exclaimed, “He was born a tempered wedge of steel to split the knot of lignum vitae that tied North America to Great Britain.”
He was not always an incendiary. The resolutions he composed for Massachusetts Assemblies in the 1760s demonstrate time and again an eagerness to extend civil liberties, yet remain loyal. But his skepticism of arbitrary power courses through everything he writes, “All men are fond of power,” he concludes. “It is not difficult for us to be prevailed upon to believe we possess more than belongs to us. Even public bodies…legally constituted, are too prone to covet more power than the public hath judged it safe to entrust them with.” This resistance to power made him the ultimate propagandist against it, the shrewdest organizer to control or subvert it. He reveled in writing articles, composing editorials, publishing broadsides, brandishing rumor, embellishing innuendoes.
In such men as Samuel Adams one historian wrote, “perfect embodiments of the ‘fierce and sober type of seventeenth century covenanter…poor, simple, ostentatiously austere and indomitably courageous…, hating with a fierce hatred monarchy and the English Church, and all privileged classes who were invested with dignity and rank…”––in such men as these “ permeated and indurated” with “the blended influence of Calvinistic theology and republican principles . . .” as Bernard Bailyn writes, . . “the government’s impositions could only stir the most explosive reactions.”
William Tudor claims: “ He would have suffered excommunication rather than bow to Papal infallibility; he would have gone to the stake rather than submit to the prelatic ordinances of Laud; he would have mounted the scaffold sooner than paying a shilling of illegal ship money.” Is it any wonder that as gunboats opened the war on the Delaware and Adams interrupted Congress crying, “Thank God! The game’s begun. No one can stop it now”––Is it any wonder a more loyalist member muttered, “I wish that man were in heaven,” while a colleague upbraided him, “No, no, not in heaven, for I hope to go there some day myself.”
Naturally, Samuel Adams imagination and pen, his clandestine and subversive organizing, his sense of political timing, his shrewd manipulation and jaundiced interpretation of events triggered resistance, contempt, disdain, indeed, fear and hatred. “This is the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of sedition.” He serves as leader of “a set of atheists and Deists, men of profligate manner and profane tongues.” To some loyalists he seemed “an unrelenting tyrant,” who with his “gang” would “monopolize every town office, suck its vital blood, and churn its gore to satiate their unblunted ambition.” The Tories labeled him “the master of puppets,” and yearned to see his head “gracing the spikes of Tyburn Gate.” His highly inflammatory newspaper, the Gazette, was filled with resistance to the Crown, labeled by Governor Thomas Hutchinson “an infamous paper, The Weekly Dunge Barge.” Hutchinson complained to London, “I doubt whether there is a greater Incendiary in the King’s dominions or a man of greater malignity of heart or who less scruples any measure ever so criminal to accomplish his purposes; and I think I do him no injustice when I suppose he wishes the destruction of every friend to Government in America.” In 1775 a British officer wrote, “Would you believe it, that this immense continent, from New England to Georgia is moved and directed by one man, a man of ordinary birth and desperate fortune, who by his abilities and talent for factious intrigue, has made himself of some consequence…This is the case of that great patriot leader Sam. Adams...” George III wanted only to capture him, try him and execute him for treason.
Adams’ pursuit of liberty placed him, of course, at the heart of what Henry Steele Commager sees as “The point of no return” in December, 1773, the Boston Tea Party. It began right here in this building and our Samuel served as its steaming catalyst. He viscerally resisted the monopoly given the East India Tea Company, freezing out all competition––including smugglers––but even more so, he loathed the tax imposed without colonial consent on the tea itself. Should the tea be landed and the tax paid? In New York and Philadelphia they simply sent the tea-ships back. In Boston? No way! Samuel Adams schemed to use the tea and its tax as proof of Parliamentary perfidy. Abigail Adams, John’s spouse, saw the lurid clouds gather: “The tea,” she wrote, “that bainful weed is arrived. Great I hope and effectual opposition has been made to the landing of it. The proceedings of our citizens have been united, spirited and firm. The flame is kindled and like lightening it catches from soul to soul. I tremble when I think what must be the direful consequences.”
Oh Abigail: your trembling presaged the crisis. Your cousin-in-law Samuel continued to galvanize national resistance. He no doubt recruited physicians to the anti-tea resistance, physicians who stated that “tea weakened the tone of the stomach, and therefore the whole system, inducing tremors and spasmodic affections.” He, unquestionably, under the circumstances, agreed with the essayist who wrote, “Do not suffer yourself to sip the accursed dutied stuff. For, if you do, the devil will immediately enter into you and you will instantly become a traitor to your country.”
Whatever his relationship to the essayist or the physicians, Samuel Adams found himself in this house on December 16, 1773, among 7,000 other people, packing the balconies and streaming onto to Washington and Milk Streets, playing for time while Governor Hutchinson faced an immanent deadline to return the tea to England or to exercise the royal prerogative to land it. Speculation ran high. Tension gripped the assembly. One observer cryptically pondered, “I wonder how the tea will mix with salt water?”
The governor dispatched his reply. “Clearance for the ships’ return to England: refused. The tea must be landed.” The 7,000 exploded in derision. The furies began to surface. Into this pulpit––no, a previous pulpit, because during the siege of Boston in ‘74 and ‘75 the Royal Troops chopped the original into firewood, warming this Meetinghouse they had contemptuously, blasphemously turned into a riding stable–into that ancient pulpit climbed Samuel Adams on that climactic night: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country,” he cried. And from the gallery: a shrill whistle. On Milk Street: a war whoop. At this door, some heavily feathered, war painted, punch fortified “Mohawks.” Shouts, screams, a wild cacophony. “Such an uproar,” wrote one witness, “you’d a thought inhabitants of the infernal regions broke loose.” “To Griffins Wharf,” they cried.” Boston Harbor, a teapot tonight.” Those Mohawks, those Narragansetts invaded the ships “and within a few moments three hundred forty two chests of the finest tea that ever tempted New Englander’s palates, pocketbooks and patriotism were at the bottom of Boston Harbor”
The next day, Samuel’s cousin John, out of town during the incident, turned as usual to his diary, reflecting on the occasion. “Last night,” he wrote, “three cargoes of Bohea tea were emptied into the sea. This is the most magnificent moment of all. There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity in this last effort of the patriots that I greatly admire. The people should never rise without doing something noble and striking. This destruction of the tea is so noble, so bold, so daring, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I can’t but consider it as an Epocha, an Epocha, in history.”
John Adams’ reflection anticipates the motto on The great Seal of the United States, indeed, John Adams helped design it: Novus Ordo Seclorum: “A New Order of the Ages.” Right here. With our brother in the faith, Samuel Adams.
In the northwest corner of our sanctuary at Copley Square, there nestles in the wall a tablet in memory of Samuel Adams. It’s pictured on the last page of your history insert. It reads in part: “Samuel Adams, a member of this church…to give his history at full length would be to give a history of the American revolution.” I’m glad it’s there. Sometime before our forebears installed that tablet, one of my predecessors, Jacob Manning, put its meaning in proper perspective: “the only fit monument to such a life is that which the friends of freedom are unconsciously building––a vast temple of republicanism, its base the broad continent, and its dome the bending heavens; equal laws inscribed all over its living walls, and its worship the multitudinous activities of a just and brave Christian people.” Indeed! And whenever we worship in such a living temple––go to the polls, petition a legislator, plunge into civic struggles for justice, equity, fairness––we stand, I think, for “a new order of the ages.” We share with our brother Samuel Adams, the hope that “The proud oppressors over the earth shall be totally broken down, and those classes of (humanity) who have hitherto been the victims of their rage and cruelty shall perpetually enjoy perfect peace and safety till time shall be no more.”
Right on, Sam Adams! Right on, Old South!
Let us pray: We come before you, Almighty God, with hearts filled with thanksgiving and gratitude. Grant we may be your faithful servants, bringing to the public realm, with vision and integrity, compassion and courage a sense. Indeed, the first fruits of your gracious realm. Amen
SCRIPTURE READING
I Samuel 8:4-20
Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, “You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.” But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to govern us.” Samuel prayed to the LORD, and the LORD said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”
So Samuel reported all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”
But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, 20 so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.”