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sons of liberty

How the Daughters of Liberty Fought for Independence

On August 14, 1768, the Daughters of Liberty cheered from windows as the Sons of Liberty paraded through Boston to commemorate their riots against colonial officials three years earlier.

They were far more than cheerleaders, though they did rally the men in Newport, R.I., to steer clear of taverns selling English whiskey. The women organized boycotts of British goods, especially tea, and they manufactured replacement products, especially cloth. They pressured men to embrace the patriot cause, refusing to date anyone unwilling to risk life and property for freedom. Some even took on dangerous military missions.

The Daughters of Liberty, though not as celebrated as the Sons, were crucial to the cause of liberty in the run-up to the American Revolution.

“With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble,” Samuel Adams said.

Daughters of Liberty

The Daughters of Liberty didn’t always organize and people didn’t always call them the Daughters of Liberty. Some newspapers called them ‘Daughters of Industry’ or ‘noble-hearted nymphs.’

Abigail Adams, 1766 (Benjamin Blythe)

Abigail Adams is often linked with the Daughters of Liberty, though she wasn’t a card-carrying member. So are Deborah Sampson and Prudence Cummings Wright. Sampson dressed as a man and joined the Continental Army, while Wright led a group of women in capturing two British spies. Sarah Bradlee Fulton, a card-carrying Daughter of Liberty, was the ‘mother of the Boston Tea Party’ and spied for George Washington.

Well before the Revolution, though, the ladies formed chapters throughout New England to free themselves from British economic tyranny. The ladies equated political independence with economic independence.

A Daughters of Liberty chapter branched off from the Sons of Liberty in Providence in 1766, followed in Rhode Island in East Greenwich and Newport.

Parliament unintentionally provoked more resistance among the colonial women when it passed the Townshend Acts in 1767, taxing imports of British glass, lead, paints, paper and tea.

In Massachusetts, there were 300 daughters of Liberty in Boston by February 1770; they were also in Beverly, Byfield, Ipswich, Newbury, Rowley and Salisbury.

Spinning for Freedom

From early in 1766 to about 1771, spinning bees were all the rage in New England. Women wanted independence from British textile manufacturers, and started making their own cloth. Homespun became the politically correct fashion item.

On April 7, 1766, the Boston Gazette reported 18 daughters of liberty gathered at the house of Dr. Ephraim Brown. “There they exhibited a fine example of industry, by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country, rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience,” reported the newspaper.

Spinning for freedom

Newspapers continued to report on the smallest cloth-making development.

Spinning schools were revived and awards were offered for the person who wove the most cloth. A woman raised 6,000 silk balls from a single mulberry tree in Windham, Conn. A 70-year-old woman in Newport, R.I., learned to spin for the first time. In February 1769, two Connecticut women held an all-day spinning contest in which the winner spun seven skeins and two knots of fine linen yarn, just a little more than her competitor.

Women began gathering in large groups, often at ministers’ homes, along the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. For 32 months starting in March 1768, more than 60 spinning meetings were held from Harpswell, Maine, to Huntington, Long Island.

“I presume there never was a Time when, or a Place where, the Spinning wheel could more influence the Affairs of men, than at present, in this and the neighbouring colonies,” wrote one contemporary writer in the newspaper series, A Journal of the Time.

The boycott worked: The value of imported goods from Great Britain fell by half in 1769 over the previous year, from 420,000 to 208,000 pounds.

Sarah Bradlee Fulton

In 1770, Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea. The Daughters of Liberty had already pledged not to drink the stuff. They made ‘liberty tea’ from currant and raspberry, basil, mint, even birch bark.

Then the Tea Act of 1773 gave a virtual monopoly on tea to the floundering Dutch East India Company. It also inspired the Boston Tea Party.

The Boston Tea Party

Sarah Bradlee Fulton was a Medford, Mass., housewife and leader of the Daughters of Liberty.

She is credited with the idea of disguising the men who dumped the tea into Boston Harbor as Mohawk Indians. She painted their faces and found Native American clothing for them. After the Tea Party, the men returned to her home to clean off the paint and get rid of their disguises.

When war broke out, the Daughters of Liberty melted metal for bullets and sewed soldiers’ uniforms. Fulton organized women to nurse soldiers wounded in the Battle of Bunker Hill. She also served as one of George Washington’s spies.

During the siege of Boston, Maj. John Brooks had important dispatches to send from Medford to Washington. Fulton volunteered, thinking the British wouldn’t suspect a woman of spying. She walked across enemy lines at night, rowed to Charleston and delivered the message.

Sarah Bradlee Fulton died in 1835, and 65 years later a memorial stone was placed at the Salem Street Burying Ground in Medford.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Boston’s John Allen: The Uncool Revolutionary

John Allen was one of the first American churchmen to declare that King George III was so badly managing colonial affairs that he had abdicated his right to govern the American colonies. Not only that, he hinted that if George wasn’t careful, he might wind up like King Charles I – beheaded for treason.

King George III

Allen’s ideas would eventually turn into conventional thought, and propagandists such as Thomas Paine would expound on them. But in 1772, Allen had crawled out on a limb with his ideas, and as it turned out the limb couldn’t hold him.

An obscure minister in a non-mainstream religion, he had financial trouble in England and few friends among Boston’s elite. He made John Adams uneasy. But for one shining moment — the aftermath of the Gaspee Affair — he found his audience.

A passionate and controversial Baptist, Allen delivered his fieriest speech at a Thanksgiving celebration in December of 1772. He turned the speech into a pamphlet: Oration Upon the Beauties of Liberty, or the Essential Rights of Americans. It became one of the best-selling political pamphlets in America before publication of the Declaration of Independence. It passed through seven printings in four cities.

John Allen, Baptist Minister

The Baptist pulpit was an odd place for such radical thinking to spring up. Baptist leaders of the day focused on obtaining parity and equal treatment with other religions in New England. They rarely ventured into the squabbles between the colonies and the mother country. But Allen’ had a much bigger vision. He railed against taxation, parliamentary shenanigans and even took shots directly at the king. He even criticized Britain for allowing slavery in its colonies, though his publisher couldn’t include that issue in the first editions of the Oration. It made it only into later printings.

Allen was born in England and had been driven from the pulpit there because of his radical thinking. Among other issues, he refused to condemn the Sandemanians, a religious sect that preached the Bible gave no basis for granting authority to a central church.

By the time he left England, Allen had also been tarred with allegations that he tried to pass a bogus check. He cleared his name, but the incident called into question his fitness as a minister.

John Davis, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Boston, learned that Allen had departed England and arrived in Boston. In 1772, Davis was dying. He requested that the congregation invite Allen to preach at the church and potentially take over the pulpit.

An Oration, Upon the Beauties of Liberty, Or the Essential Rights of the Americans by John Allen

Bad Reports

The congregation disagreed about letting Allen should speak. Churchman Isaac Backus noted in his journal: “Met with Mr. John Allen a noted writer from England, who has been preaching in Boston lately, but we have some very bad reports about him; how they’ll turn out I know not.”

Meanwhile, Allen had friends among the Sons of Liberty and among American sympathizers in England. With a little back room pressure, he got his chance in the pulpit.

Sons of Liberty pouring hot tea down the throat of the customs commissioner after tarring and feathering him.

Allen chose the 1772 Thanksgiving address – guaranteed to be widely attended and noted – to deliver his Oration. The colonies were in an uproar over the king’s appointment of a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the burning of the British ship Gaspee in Rhode Island. The commission planned to send the Rhode Islanders who burned the ship to England for trial, and Allen used that as the springboard for his rant against the English government.

Allen, like all speakers of the day, never declared his disloyalty to the monarchy. But he made his opinion clear. “An arbitrary despotic power in a prince, is the ruin of a nation, of the King, of the crown, and of the subjects; therefore it is to be feared, abhorred, detested and destroyed. . . The King of England has no power to enact, or put in force any law that may oppress (the Americans); his very attempting to do it, at once destroys is right to reign over them.”

Too Radical?

He went on to call for a sort of American parliament to make rules to govern the colonies. He also declared that if the king persisted “in being influenced and dictated by his Ministry,” he might well risk the same fate of his predecessor Charles I, overthrown by revolutionaries.

James Otis by Henry Blackburn

Many people read Allen’s pamphlet, though not everyone found his hostility to their liking. John Adams, in his diary, noted James Otis “reads to large Circles of the common People, Allen’s Oration on the Beauties of Liberty and recommends it as an excellent Production.”

Adams felt such radical ideas as giving voting rights to un-landed citizens took democracy too far. Still, he noted, Otis’ devotion to the rights of Americans was unquestioned.

Allen published his pamphlets under the nom de guerre British Bostonian. He proposed one last pamphlet in 1774, The Patriotic Whisper in the Ears of the King; or the Grand Request of the People of America Made Manifest. Intended as a Chariot of Liberty for the Sons of America. But if it was ever published, it was lost. Allen slipped into obscurity – his position as radical pamphleteer filled by thinkers such as Thomas Paine.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Eat Like A President, Part II

In honor of President’s Day, the New England Historical Society brings you another guide to how to eat like a president.

John F. Kennedy. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

We focus on New England presidents beginning with John Adams and including one or two diversions such as Abraham Lincoln. (Though it’s worth pointing out that Legal Seafood’s clam chowder has been served at every presidential inauguration since Ronald Reagan.)

Eat Like a President

Green Dragon

John Adams drank a tankard of hard cider when he got up in the morning, and when in Boston he stopped off later at the Green Dragon Tavern.

Paul Revere talks in his memoirs about meeting John and the other Sons of Liberty, like Samuel Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren, to start a revolution. The tavern isn’t exactly where it was back in the day, but absent the karaoke bar and table tents it’s quite evocative of the Revolutionary era.

When at home, John and Abigail ate typical New England foods such as codfish cakes, New England clam chowder, Johnny cake, apple butter, succotash, Indian pudding and gingerbread.

John Quincy Adams

Their son, John Quincy Adams, was notoriously indifferent to food despite his exposure to many fine international cuisines. He liked fruit, and was known to say, “Five or six small crackers and a glass of water give me a sumptuous dinner.”

Pie at the White House

Franklin Pierce was another president who liked solid, traditional fare. It was a preference he would have picked up at his father’s tavern in Hillsborough, N.H., where a Christmas dinner was once held for Revolutionary War veterans. Pierce and his family were fond of maple syrup and New Hampshire fried pies, made with dried apples.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Abraham Lincoln, though not a New Englander, had relatives in Massachusetts. His distant cousin Levi Lincoln supported his political career. You can visit Sturbridge Village and see his former mansion where Abraham Lincoln dined in September 1848.

Levi Lincoln, former governor and then the mayor of Worcester, held a meal that Cousin Abraham remembered long afterward. Thirteen years later, he told Massachusetts Gov. Henry Gardner:

I had been chosen to Congress then from the wild West, and with hayseed in my hair I went to Massachusetts, the most cultured State in the Union, to take a few lessons in deportment.

Lincoln, Gardner said, added

That the dinner at Governor Lincoln’s by reason of its elaborate hospitality and social brilliancy was different in kind from any function he had ever attended before. He remarked upon the beauty of the china, the fineness of the silverware and the richness of all the table appointments, and spoke of the company of distinguished and thoroughly educated whom he met there in the animated, free and intimate conversation inspired by such an accomplished host as Governor Lincoln.

Picky Presidential Eater

Where Calvin Coolidge developed his eating habits

Calvin Coolidge, as a state lawmaker and governor, enjoyed dining at the private Algonquin Club on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. He was a fastidious eater who believed chicken should be raised close to where they were eaten and kept chickens at the White House. They had an unusual flavor because the chicken yard was built on top of Theodore Roosevelt’s mint bed.

Coolidge liked roast beef, Vermont pickles and corn muffins. According to the Food Timeline, his fastidiousness created a problem for the White House chef, who couldn’t get the recipe for corn muffins right. First Lady Grace Coolidge finally sent off to a Northampton inn to get the recipe.

Coolidge’s discriminating dining habits are illustrated by several versions of a story told about him while he attended Amherst College. Here’s one version:

Dwight Morrow was a classmate of Coolidge’s at Amherst and the father of Anne Morrow, the wife of Charles A. Lindbergh. (Coolidge later appointed Morrow as Ambassador to Mexico.) Morrow used to like to tell the story of when he and Coolidge went to the same boarding house to take their meals. Hash was served frequently. When it was served, Morrow said Coolidge turned very grave. The landlady had a dog and a cat. As the hash was being served, Coolidge would ask “Where’s the dog?” and the dog would be brought in. Then he’d ask “Where’s the cat?” — and the cat would be called in. Only then would he help himself to the hash.

The Modern Era

George H.W. Bush in his broccoli-eating days.

As a member of Congress, John F. Kennedy stayed at a hotel near the Statehouse in Boston. He notoriously showed up at the nearby 21^st Amendment for a beer he never paid for.

Kennedy also liked to read his Sunday paper at the Union Oyster House, where another presidential wannabe, Daniel Webster, used to consume six plates of oysters and a tumbler of brandy for lunch.

Like Coolidge, Kennedy liked corn muffins. He also dearly loved Boston clam chowder. White House chef Rene Verdon remembered,

He asked me to prepare it for him on many occasions…I did everything I could to satisfy Mr. Kennedy’s New England liking for good fish cookery. Quite naturally, as a Catholic, he had it every Friday.

When vacationing on Cape Cod, the Kennedys liked the homemade ice cream from the Four Seas ice cream parlor in Centerville, near the family compound in Hyannisport. Jackie Kennedy’s favorite flavor: peach.

George H.W. Bush was as fastidious about vegetables as Calvin Coolidge was about everything else. He hated broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and cabbage. Barbara Bush said,

The day he was 60, he said to me: `I am never going to eat broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower or cabbage again.’ And he hasn’t!

Bush and his family liked lobster and ice cream, though. When vacationing in Kennebunkport, they enjoyed Mabel’s Lobster Claw, a seafood restaurant that’s been serving tourists since the 1950s. The Bushes allegedly liked the peppermint stick ice cream.

And on the walls of Frank Pepe’s Pizza Napoletana in New Haven hangs a framed photo of Bill Clinton. Though now a vegan, he liked a good white clam apizza in his day.

This story about eating like a president was updated in 2022.

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Before Old Glory, There Was the Taunton Flag

The people of Taunton, Mass., celebrate the Taunton Flag with a friendly festival on their green every October. But when first raised on Oct. 21, 1774, the flag inspired an angry controversy.

The Taunton Flag

Taunton, Mass., was a hotbed of rebellious fervor. By the time the town raised the Taunton Flag, it had sent lawyer Robert Treat Paine to the First Continental Congress representing Massachusetts.

Six years earlier, Paine defended a 16-year-old slave named Bristol accused of murdering the sister of Dr. William McKinstry to gain his freedom. Paine lost the case and Bristol died on the gallows.

In 1774, Taunton’s Sons of Liberty ran Loyalists out of town. One of the last to go was McKinstry, though the Sons allowed his wife to stay behind.

The Taunton Flag

On Friday, October 21, 1774, patriotic Tauntonians erected an enormous liberty pole. On Monday, October 24, the Boston Evening Post reported the story:

We have just received the following intelligence from Taunton… A liberty pole 112 feet long was raised. Attached to it was a Union flag with the words Liberty and Union sewed on. The following lines were fixed to the pole:

Bird’s-eye view of the Taunton Green in 1875

CRESCIT AMOR PATRIAE QUE CUPIDO (The love of country and the desire for freedom)

Be it known to the present,
And to all future generations,
That the Sons of Liberty in Taunton
Fired with a zeal for the preservation of
Their rights as men, and as
American Englishmen,
And prompted by a just resentment of
The wrongs and injuries offered to the
English colonies in general, and to
This Province in particular,
Through the unjust claims of
A British Parliament and the
Machiavellian policy of a British ministry,
Have erected this monument or Liberty standard,
As a testimony of their fixed resolution
To preserve sacred and inviolate
Their birthrights and charter rights,
And to resist even unto blood
All attempts for their subversion or abridgement.
Born to be free, we spurn the knaves who dare
For us the chains of slavery to prepare;
Steadfast in freedom’s cause, we’ll live and die,
Unawed by statement; foes to tyranny,
But if oppression brings us to our graves,
And marks us dead, she ne’er shall mark us slaves.

Liberty and Union

The flag, also known as the Liberty and Union Flag, symbolized revolt against British oppression. The Evening Post story inspired flags with similar mottoes throughout the colonies.

One person unimpressed with the Taunton Flag was the wife of Dr. William McKinstry. According to Two Men of Taunton: In the Course of Human Events, 1731-1829, Mrs. McKinstry,

…took no pains to conceal her contempt for the Patriots. Her neighbors endured her scorn for a while; then, one morning, these women of the New England Taunton, jealous because Mistress McKinstry was still enjoying her afternoon tea, proceeded to her house on High Street (as the women marched in Old English Taunton during Monmouth’s Rebellion), dragged her from her fireside, marched her down to the Green, and around the Liberty Pole in humiliating token of allegiance.

Every year, Taunton holds a Liberty and Union Festival in October to commemorate the raising of the Taunton Flag. In 2022, the festival was scheduled for October 15-16. It did not include humiliating forced marches in front of the Taunton Flag.

Dr. William McKinstry appears in an earlier post on Oct. 19, 2015. Find out why by clicking here. This story last updated in 2022.

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Mather Byles, the Witty Loyalist Even the Patriots Liked

Boston’s Rev. Mather Byles was a Loyalist through and through. His loyalty to England never wavered throughout the American Revolution. What set him apart from others, however, and what may explain his ability to remain in Boston unmolested until his death in 1788, was his wit.

Mather Byles portrait by John Singleton Copley

Mather Byles , a Harvard-educated clergyman born in 1706, became pastor of the Hollis Street Congregational Church in Boston in 1733. Though he did not use his pulpit to push his politics, everyone knew his views. Yet the colonial leaders viewed him highly. Because of his charm and wit, he often spoke at funerals of high officials.

Mather Byles

Mather Byles viewed the coming Revolution as probably inevitable, given the festering relations between the colonies and the crown. However, he viewed the undisciplined violence of the revolutionary leaders as particularly odious.

He is perhaps most famously remembered for his retort when questioned why he didn’t support the uprising of the Sons of Liberty. The quote attributed to him:

“Which is better — to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?”

During the siege of Boston, Mather Byles remained in his home and reportedly had good relations with the British who occupied the city. His influence did not extend so far as to protect his church, however, as the occupying forces converted it to a barracks.

The Evacuation Of Boston by W.J. Aylward (New York Public Library).

Upon the departure of the British, Byles did not flee. His congregation, however, soon removed him from his post (a decision fellow ministers were not comfortable with). Massachusetts officials charged and convicted him of aiding the British and speaking against the Revolutionary cause.

Though ordered to leave Boston in 1778, the aging minister simply refused. Eventually the colonists learned to tolerate him, partly because they considered him more a buffoon than an enemy. Mather Byles could never resist a pun or a witticism, even in the direst circumstances.

The Mather Byles Wit

Some examples of his humor:

When he witnessed the parade of celebrating revolutionaries returning to Boston, he observed the rotund form of Henry Knox. He knew Knox as a bookstore operator before the outbreak of the war.

Henry Knox by Gilbert Stuart 1806

“I never saw an ox fatter in my life,” Byles reportedly said as Knox passed by. Knox’s assessment of the remark? He called Byles a ‘damned fool.’

When Byles came before the judges who were to hear charges against him, he was ushered into their chambers and offered a seat by the hearth, as it was a cold day. His retort:

“Gentlemen, when I came among you I expected persecution, but I could not think you would have offered me the fire so suddenly.”

After they convicted him, Byles refused to leave Boston. The town leaders now had the quandary of what to do with the obstinate old minister.

Observatory

For a time they placed him under house arrest, and posted a sentry in front of his home. That scenario generated several farcical scenes attributed to Byles. Asked once by a visitor what the guard was doing outside, he replied: “Oh, that is my observe-a-Tory!”

On another occasion, he supposedly asked his guard to bring him water from a nearby well. When the guard refused to leave his post, Byles offered to stand in for him while he fetched the water, and the guard agreed.

While the sentinel went for a bucket of water, Byles shouldered his musket and marched to and fro while waiting for him to return.

Eventually, the town fathers got sick of guarding Byles. They temporarily removed his guard, reinstated him, and then permanently abandoned the operation. That gave him the opportunity to explain that, “I have been guarded, re-guarded, and disregarded.”

Thanks to: The Famous Mather Byles by Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton. This story about Mather Byles was updated in 2022.

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Sam Adams Walked Into a Tavern and Started a Revolution

Sam Adams was a devout Puritan who brought his religious convictions to the fight for American liberty. That did not mean he stayed out of taverns or shunned his family’s malt business.

Samuel Adams by John Singleton Copley.

Far from it. He embraced both.

By the time Sam Adams was born on Sept. 16, 1722 (Old Style) beer brewing was a well-established and protected commercial activity in Boston. Brewers and maltsters earned good wages and positions of respect. Many wealthy and prominent colonists started out as brewers or maltsters. (Maltsters make the malt that gets brewed into beer.)

If it hadn’t been for beer, Sam Adams might not have started a revolution.

Boston Beer

Puritans were anything but Puritanical about beer. Among the Pilgrims’ many vexations was the shortage of beer on the Mayflower.

Common breweries sprang up in Boston shortly after the Puritans arrived. Soon the General Court regulated the price of beer at 2-1/2 cents per quart.

In the mid-17^th century, England imposed a tariff on malt in order to encourage the domestic beer industry. In 1705, Massachusetts began to export beer. By 1731, Massachusetts was exporting malt to New York and Philadelphia.

Ethelbert Stewart, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote in his Beer Brewing in the New England Colonies, that Massachusetts discouraged noncommercial beer brewing. Anyone who wanted to make beer had to prove they had “sufficient skill in the art or mystery of a brewer.”

Sam’s Hops Receipt

Massachusetts also fined people for trying to sell improperly cleansed malt. Malt cleansing could only be properly done at the regular malt houses.

There were advantages to regulation, however, as the public gained a better quality of beer, the trade of maltsters and brewers became recognized as such, and the business became settled. … (Patriot Samuel Adams was probably the most famous maltster in history, though there remains debate about whether he ever engaged in actual brewing of beer.)

Ira Stoll, author of Samuel Adams: A Life, writes in a footnote “The founder and chairman of the Boston Beer Company, parent of today’s Samuel Adams beer, James Koch, told me in an interview that he was once offered for sale a receipt for hops signed by the patriot Samuel Adams, proving that Samuel Adams was a brewer and not just a maltster.”

Sam Adams, Maltster

Sam’s Adams’ father, Deacon Samuel Adams, was a man of wealth and reputation. He made his living selling malt to beer makers from a malt house in his backyard. Deacon Adams led the populist political party known as the Boston Caucus, whose members met in taverns.

Young Sam Adams entered Harvard in 1736 at 14, graduated in 1740 and received a master’s degree in 1743. He didn’t want to be a lawyer or a minister, so he tried working in Thomas Cushing’s counting house. Adams hated it. He ended up living at home on the income from his father’s malt house.

Green Dragon tavern, a favorite of the Sons of Liberty

He haunted the taverns of Boston, honing his political skills and making his political connections. His cousin John Adams noted taverns were where “bastards, and legislators, are frequently begotten.”

Sam Adams didn’t become a legislator, at least not at first. He won election to clerk of the market, then town scavenger and then tax collector, a position he held for nearly a decade. Later he became clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, delegate to the Continental Congress and president of the Massachusetts Senate. Finally, he won election as John Hancock’s lieutenant governor and then governor.

When Sam was 24, his father died. The next year, British naval officers kidnapped 50 men on the Boston waterfront to impress them into service. A riot ensued, the prisoners were released and Sam Adams became a journalist. He started a newspaper, The Independent Advertiser. In it, he portrayed the rioters as an assembly of people defending their natural right to life and liberty.

Caricature of a British press gang

Sentiments of Liberty

He also organized the Sons of Liberty, which flourished in Boston’s tavern-based political culture.

In 1769, Sam Adams, James Otis, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Benjamin Edes and 350 Sons of Liberty celebrated the fourth anniversary of resistance to the Stamp Act at the Liberty Tree Tavern in Dorchester. They dined in a tent set up for the occasion and drank 45 toasts. John Adams, who attended, noted that no one got drunk (beer could be pretty weak). The future president grudgingly approved of the affair.

“Otis and Adams are politick, in promoting these Festivals, for they tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty,” he wrote.

Samuel Adams Beer

In 1984, James Koch, then a management consultant, decided to start his own brewery in Boston using his great-great-grandfather’s beer recipe. He called it Samuel Adams. Koch explained he did it because “he shared a similar spirit in leading the fight for independence and the opportunity for all Americans to pursue happiness and follow their dreams.”

This story about Sam Adams was updated in 2022.

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