48 Fun Facts About Sam Adams

Which school, America's oldest public school, taught both Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin?

Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, sent Adams on to college; Franklin lasted under a year there before his father, daunted by what a college education would cost, pulled him out.

Samuel, the Boston patriot, was a second cousin of which future US president?

John Adams, Samuel's second cousin, was the future president; when John reached France in 1778 he had to explain that he was not Samuel, 'the famous Adams'.

Which college did Samuel Adams enter in 1736 at the age of 14?

Harvard admitted Samuel Adams in 1736, when he was 14; his devout parents hoped it would make a minister of him, but he came away drawn to public life instead.

Samuel Adams's 1743 master's thesis asked whether it was lawful to do what to save the Commonwealth?

Resist the Supreme Magistrate: Adams argued that it was lawful, at a commencement that the royal governor and other Crown officials customarily attended.

Samuel Adams is often called a brewer, but the family business he inherited made him what by trade?

A maltster: the Adams malthouse supplied malted barley to Boston's brewers, and he may have brewed a little himself; he had no head for business, and it eventually failed.

Samuel Adams's father was nearly ruined when Parliament shut down which Massachusetts scheme he had helped create?

The Land Bank, which issued paper currency backed by land, was dissolved by Parliament in 1741; its directors became personally liable, and lawsuits dogged the Adams family for years.

Boston elected Samuel Adams to which town office in 1756, a job he went on to do notoriously badly?

Tax collector: Adams rarely pressed his neighbours for payment, a laxity that boosted his popularity but eventually left his accounts roughly 8,000 pounds in arrears.

Which philosopher's ideas ran through Samuel Adams's political essays?

John Locke: Adams met his writings as a student, and three decades on his 1772 Rights of the Colonists was still citing 'Mr. Locke' by name.

Under which of these pen names did Samuel Adams write essays in the Boston Gazette?

Vindex was the name Adams signed to Boston Gazette essays attacking the Boston Massacre verdicts, since he thought the soldiers should have been convicted of murder. Candidus was another of his many bylines.

In 1764, Samuel Adams's instructions led Boston's Town Meeting to declare what about Parliament?

It could not tax the colonists: answering the Sugar Act, Adams asked whether taxes laid without representation would not reduce them from free subjects 'to the miserable State of tributary Slaves'.

The Loyal Nine, who organised Boston's 1765 Stamp Act protests, grew into which group often linked to Samuel Adams?

The Sons of Liberty grew out of the Loyal Nine, nine Boston tradesmen who hung effigies of Stamp Act officials from an elm in August 1765 while working in such secrecy that they left almost no paper trail.

Which colonial painter made the stern portrait of Samuel Adams, from around 1772, that hangs in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts?

John Singleton Copley painted Boston's patriots, but his father-in-law was one of the merchants the East India tea was consigned to; in June 1774 he sailed for London and never came back.

Which wealthy young merchant joined Samuel Adams in the Massachusetts House in 1766 as his protege?

John Hancock later fell out with Adams, who disapproved of his vanity and extravagance, before the pair reconciled in time to back the Constitution together in 1788.

After the Massachusetts House refused 92 to 17 to rescind Adams's Circular Letter, what did the royal governor do?

Dissolved the assembly: London had told Governor Francis Bernard to do so if it refused, and the 92 who held firm were honoured on a silver bowl by Paul Revere.

Which sloop's seizure by customs officials in Boston in June 1768 sparked a riot?

The Liberty, a merchant sloop accused of landing Madeira wine without paying duty, was seized on 10 June 1768; a crowd then attacked the customs officers and burned one of their boats.

Which Boston lawyer defended the Boston Massacre soldiers while his brother helped prosecute them?

Josiah Quincy took the defence, and six soldiers walked free while two were branded for manslaughter; Samuel Adams then attacked the verdicts in print.

In November 1772 Samuel Adams created which network so Massachusetts towns could share political news?

Committees of correspondence: the Boston committee Adams formed in November 1772, after the Crown took over paying the governor and judges, circulated a statement of colonial rights and invited every town to reply.

Whose private letters, saying there must be 'an abridgment of what are called English liberties', did Samuel Adams expose in 1773?

Thomas Hutchinson denied meaning what his critics read into it, but the House petitioned the king to recall him; months later his refusal to let the tea ships leave set up the Tea Party.

The mass gathering Adams called for 29 November 1773 outgrew Faneuil Hall and moved to which building?

The Old South Meeting House took the overflow crowd; on 16 December thousands were packed there when word came that the governor would not let the tea ships leave.

Where was the William, a fourth tea ship bound for Boston in December 1773, wrecked before it could arrive?

Cape Cod: the William ran aground there that December, which is why only the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver were lying at the wharf for the Tea Party.

Legend has Samuel Adams signalling the Tea Party, but eyewitnesses say he did what when the war-whoops began?

Asked people to stay: one witness heard Adams call the whoops a trick of their enemies to disturb the meeting, but the crowd poured out after the disguised men anyway.

What set Samuel Adams's 1774 journey to the First Continental Congress apart?

He had never before left Massachusetts: Adams set out for Philadelphia in August 1774 in new clothes his friends had bought him, his expenses paid, on his first trip beyond his home province.

Who sent Paul Revere riding out of Boston on 18 April 1775 to warn Samuel Adams?

Joseph Warren, a Boston physician, dispatched Revere; the British column's written orders never mentioned arresting the patriot leaders, though London papers had reported that Adams would hang if caught.

In which town was Samuel Adams staying at the minister's parsonage when Paul Revere rode in to warn him?

Lexington: Adams and a fellow patriot leader were guests of the town's minister, Jonas Clarke, and slipped away across the fields as the British column came into view at dawn.

Samuel Adams left the Continental Congress for good in the year of which American victory?

Yorktown: Adams went home to Boston in 1781 after seven years in Congress and won a seat in the Massachusetts Senate; Cornwallis surrendered that October.

Jefferson called Samuel Adams the Revolution's Palinurus, a figure who was what in Virgil's Aeneid?

Aeneas's helmsman: Palinurus steered Aeneas's fleet from Troy until he fell overboard off Italy, so the compliment credits Adams with steering Congress toward independence; Jefferson also called him 'truly the Man of the Revolution'.

In 1876 Massachusetts sent statues of Samuel Adams and which Puritan governor to the US Capitol?

John Winthrop went to the Capitol in marble alongside Adams, whom sculptor Anne Whitney showed with arms folded at the moment he demanded that British troops leave Boston after the Massacre.

Samuel Adams never signed the Constitution, so which founding document carries his name beside the Declaration of Independence?

The Articles of Confederation: Adams sat on the committee that drafted them and signed in 1778, then stayed away from the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, wary of a stronger central government.

About which uprising did Samuel Adams say a man who rebels against a republic's laws 'ought to suffer death'?

Shays' Rebellion, the 1786-87 rising of indebted Massachusetts farmers, reportedly drew the remark; to Adams, rebelling against an unrepresentative king was one thing, taking up arms against a republic of fellow citizens quite another.

Samuel Adams dropped his doubts and backed the US Constitution in 1788 on the promise of what?

Later amendments: Adams sat through two weeks of debate in silence, then backed ratification once nine 'conciliatory' amendments were proposed, and Massachusetts approved the Constitution narrowly.

Samuel Adams, later called 'the last of the Puritans', fought in the 1790s to keep what banned in Boston?

Theatres: Adams thought playhouses undermined civic virtue and spoke against them in town meeting, but he lost, and Boston voted to seek repeal of its old law against stage plays.

Which Massachusetts office did Samuel Adams hold from 1789 until October 1793?

Lieutenant governor: Adams won the post in 1789 and held it until the sitting governor died in October 1793, when he became acting governor; he was then elected governor in his own right in 1794.

Far from his Massachusetts home, which state's Republican electors gave Samuel Adams all 15 of his electoral votes in 1796?

Virginia: its Republican electors hoped to make Adams vice president under Jefferson, and their 15 votes put him fifth nationally; he was pleased when Jefferson finally won the presidency in 1800.

Which movement disorder do historians believe left Samuel Adams unable to write in his final decade?

Essential tremor is the modern diagnosis: the shaking in his hands, head and voice began in his forties and ran in his family, and by 71 it forced Adams to dictate all his letters.

Where did Jim Koch brew the first batches of Samuel Adams Boston Lager in 1984?

On his kitchen stove: Koch quit his consulting job with $100,000 of savings and the sales help of co-founder Rhonda Kallman, then hired a Pittsburgh brewery to make the beer at scale.

Where did Jim Koch find the 19th-century family recipe that became Samuel Adams Boston Lager?

In his father's attic: the lager was his great-great-grandfather Louis Koch's, yet Jim's father, a brewer squeezed out by the big beer companies, warned him that reviving it was a bad career move.

Within weeks of its 1985 launch, Samuel Adams Boston Lager was voted the country's best at which event?

The Great American Beer Festival in Denver named it the best beer in America only weeks after Koch began carrying samples from bar to bar, betting that bartenders who liked it would sell it for him.

Which Samuel Adams beer, a 30% brew as of 2025, cannot legally be sold in 15 states?

Utopias breaks those states' caps on beer strength; it is aged in cognac, port and Scotch whisky casks and meant to be sipped an ounce or two at a time, like a fine spirit.

Which hard iced tea brand did the Boston Beer Company introduce in the early 2000s?

Twisted Tea first went on sale in 2000 as BoDean's Twisted Tea, brewed in the same tanks as the company's beer, and dropped the first half of its name a year later.

In May 2019 the Boston Beer Company bought which Delaware craft brewery for about $300 million?

Dogfish Head, opened in Rehoboth Beach in 1995, joined Boston Beer in a deal worth about $300 million; founders Sam and Mariah Calagione took mostly stock, becoming its biggest shareholders after Jim Koch.

In which Ohio city, founder Jim Koch's hometown, did Boston Beer buy the Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewery in 1997?

Cincinnati: Koch's father had once worked at the Schoenling brewery there, and buying it in 1997 let the company make more of its own beer after years of renting other brewers' tanks.

Samuel Adams's first wife, Elizabeth Checkley, whom he married in 1749, was the daughter of whom?

His pastor: Elizabeth was the daughter of the Reverend Samuel Checkley, whose church Adams attended; only two of their six children reached adulthood, and after her death in 1757 he married Elizabeth Wells in 1764.

Which learned society did Samuel Adams help found as a charter member in 1780?

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was chartered by Massachusetts in May 1780 with Adams a charter member, to cultivate every art and science that might advance the happiness of 'a free, independent, and virtuous people'.

Which society did Samuel Adams, like Jefferson, denounce as a stride 'towards an hereditary Military Nobility'?

The Society of the Cincinnati was founded by Continental Army officers in 1783, with membership passing to eldest sons; Adams called Washington's place in it 'a very great Misfortune', since his fame would lend the order weight.

In what role did Samuel Adams's only son serve in the Revolutionary War, at lasting cost to his health?

Surgeon: Samuel Adams Jr. never recovered his health and died at 37 in early 1788; the army pay claims he left his father were what kept the hard-up old revolutionary solvent in his last years.

Which British general offered a pardon in June 1775 to every rebel except Samuel Adams and one other?

Thomas Gage's proclamation pardoned all who laid down their arms except two, whose offences were 'of too flagitious a nature' for anything but punishment; days later came Bunker Hill.

Why did Adams lose his job at Thomas Cushing's counting house after only a few months?

He was too preoccupied with politics for the counting house, so Cushing let him go; his father then lent him 1,000 pounds to go into business, half of which Adams promptly lent to a friend and never saw again.

In which Boston burying ground was Samuel Adams interred after his death in 1803?

Granary Burying Ground took its name from a grain store that stood next door; Adams lies there with Paul Revere and, near the gate, the five victims of the Boston Massacre.