Stacy Schiff's Samuel Adams Bio and Pop History's Recoil from Drama

Curioser and curioser . . .

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Because this post is partly about the 18th century, it might come as welcome relief from the 2022 midterm elections—if it didn’t involve one of our founders, Samuel Adams, doing his best to overturn an election. Those who know my book Declaration (Simon & Schuster, 2010) may recall some of that story’s gory details, but I’m bringing it up here to frame a strange intellectual/artistic experience I recently had, when reading Stacy Schiff’s new biography of Samuel Adams. That experience played straight into my quandaries about current issues in popular narrative history, especially of the founding period.

For those of you who don’t know the story (and if you haven’t read the ripsnorting, page-turning Declaration, how would you know it?): In April of 1776, Samuel Adams, the ruthless, brilliant Boston organizer of opposition to the royal element in Massachusetts government, and an early visionary of American independence, was serving in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and doing everything he could to overturn the legitimately elected government of the Congress’s host state, Pennsylvania. That’s because as late as that date—a year after the shooting war broke out between British troops and militia in Massachusetts—the Congress remained officially opposed to declaring independence, and Pennsylvania, the most powerful province, was especially strong in preventing any talk of independence from getting in front of Congress, let alone an independence resolution passing.

So independence looked like it would come down to Pennsylvania’s assembly election, which was held on May 1, 1776. One ticket in that election was pro-independence, the other anti-. If the independence ticket won, the province’s great weight would shift and a path to declaring independence would open in the Congress.

The whole country was watching. This was the closest thing to a referendum on American independence we ever had.

And American independence lost.

Samuel Adams had been busy trying to influence that election’s outcome—to fix it, really. He was working secretly with a group of local political outsiders who wanted American independence because they wanted to overthrow their elitist government and create a radical democracy in Pennsylvania. Adams found that goal nauseating, but he didn’t care what happened to Pennsylvania, so in hopes of winning the May 1 election, and thereby getting a path to independence, he’d made common cause with the local radicals whose program he despised. When, on May 1, 1776, they lost that election, they failed to achieve their joint aims by legitimate electoral means.

So now they got serious. In a series of secret meetings, Adams and the locals coordinated the pro-independence forces in the Congress with the pro-democracy forces of the street. The blow-by-blow is cool, and you can read all about it in Declaration, but suffice it to say here that between the May 1 failure of independence in the Pennsylvania assembly election and the July 2 passage of a resolution for independence in the Congress, Adams and the radicals carried out a coup that overturned Pennsylvania’s duly elected government and shifted the province’s power to supporting a break with Britain.

That was the crowning achievement of Samuel Adams’s career. Overcoming Pennsylvania’s obstruction by nullifying the results of an election, in collaboration with outsiders whose radical commitment to democracy had nothing to do with him, Adams and his cohort in the Congress enabled America to declare independence, and in that process, Pennsylvania adopted a radically democratic constitution—the opposite of what Adams wanted for Massachusetts.

So now comes this new biography of Adams by the widely read pop historian Stacy Schiff. As a fellow pop historian, though much less popular, I’m always interested in how founder biographers handle, or don’t, the less edifying facts that raise more questions than they answer, so I took a quick trip through Schiff’s book and found that it doesn’t deal in any way with Adams’s Philadelphia machinations of 1776.

That’s not so surprising. Some of the best-loved founder biographies are good books to read if you want to avoid knowing anything important about their subjects.

Usually, though, authors of that kind take one of two well-worn approaches. One is to actually not know the facts that would bring unwelcome nuance into the mix (David McCullough). The other is to wave such facts away in a few tendentious sentences lacking any real argument (Ron Chernow).

But Schiff takes an original approach to leaving out the most important realities. She does seem to know them. She also seems to be sure that her readers don’t want to know them. So when I got to the 1775-’76 part of her book, the effect was nearly surreal. After walking the reader chapter by chapter through Adams’s Massachusetts career in a standard founder-bio way—though her writing is crisper and more evocative than most—Schiff gets her man into Philadelphia, facing strong opposition to American independence. Then, at the end of May 1776, this happens: “. . . the pieces began to fall into place behind the scenes, where so much of the summer was orchestrated.”

And that’s it.

That’s all that happened.

That’s the climactic action.

In a bio of Samuel Adams.

I’ve said Schiff can be a good writer. Failure in the writing here is a tell. The trite “fall into place” and “behind the scenes” roll us not toward the events of the summer but into the summer itself, which is what “was orchestrated.” This isn’t just passive voice; it’s passive narration. After all of that action in the preceding chapters, Adams abruptly disappears from the center of the action just as, in real life, he’s pulling off the biggest thing he ever pulled off. For Schiff’s readers, there’s no May 1 election, no secret meetings, no common cause with the street, no overturning Pennsylvania’s government. Two brief and breezy paragraphs after the pieces begin “to fall into place,” we find Adams, barely knowing how it all went down, yet “bathed in relief,” signing the Declaration. The prime mover just got clonked on the head one day and woke up in Oz.

You can read McCullough’s John Adams and watch John, too, fade out of the action at the climactic moment. The difference is that if you search McCullough’s bibliography, you can see he hasn’t read the scholarly work that covers what really happened. Not so with Schiff. That’s what’s so strange—for me, I mean, personally.

In her notes, Schiff cites not only my book Declaration but also, and more importantly, two key scholarly sources (my book, as I said, is pop, like hers): Garry Wills’s Inventing America, where I first encountered the real deal of 1776; and David Hawke’s In The Midst of a Revolution, which details the major events. And the note citing Wills and me begins “For these weeks: William Hogeland, Declaration . . . ,” etc. Like: “If you want to know anything about what Adams really did in these weeks, I’m not telling you, but you can look it up here.“ Even weirder, that note is to Schiff’s narrative of events that actually occurred two years earlier than those of the ’76 climax.

But misplaced or not, the note reveals that Schiff is familiar with some of the key sources for what occurred to bring about American independence, and with Samuel Adams’s all-important day-to-day role in it. That suggests to me not that she’s consciously decided not to tell her readers what she knows. Instead, she gives them a Samuel Adams who, at the peak of his own biography, finds himself swept along in a blur of events that must remain perpetually inexplicable.

Or Schiff herself just got tired, and her book was overdue?

Or she likes Boston and finds Philadelphia boring?

Who knows. The fact is the dropping her subject from his own story at the crucial moment might have been the right call. Solely from a narrative and dramatic perspective, bringing to life what Adams really did in Philadelphia is the far more interesting choice, to me. My preference is clearly not shared by many in the readership for books on the founding period. Some of the most successful authors in the field recoil not just from reality but also from drama. Their goal seems to be to guide a certain kind of reader toward a nice nap.

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Further Reading

The drama is all here: Declaration: the Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1- July 4, 1776

The short, free version: “Our Chief Danger.”

I talked about the strange nature of the pop-history readership here.