In his book Samuel Adams, Radical Puritan, William Fowler Jr. utilizes Samuel Adams as a foil for Colonial-America. Having fled England for the new world a century before, the Puritans of Massachusetts imbued their ancestors with a deep distrust for tyranny. Few could dispute that the American Revolution began in Boston, and Samuel Adams played a prominent role in it from the very beginning. His fiery rhetoric and indomitable will to forge a free nation fanned the nascent revolutionary spark into the bonfire that took down the vanity of the Crown. A Puritan by descent, a Radical by trade, Fowler paints a picture of a man who was uniquely in tune with the prevailing sentiment of the day.
In the early years of his manhood, having just graduated from Harvard, Adams wrote glowingly of the English Constitution and its role in American life: "no form of civil government appears to me so well calculated to preserve this blessing, or to secure to its subjects all the most valuable advantages of civil society, as the English" (Fowler 26). However, Fowler is also quick to point out that Adams, like many Americans of the time, understood "that liberty was a delicate flower" (Fowler 27). This delicate flower needed sustenance to survive, and for Adams that sustenance was embedded in the virtue of the men who composed the government. Indeed, in many ways virtue in a nation's leaders was to be the constant thread in Adams belief.
The Massachusetts assault on Parliamentary power began in 1761 when James Otis presented prominent Boston merchants in a trial, which challenged the Governor's right to issue writs of assistance. In the hearings, James Otis presented a brilliant oratory that advanced the notion of natural rights. Fowler notes that Adams and his townsmen "nodded in agreement" as Otis announced that "it mattered not if Parliament had enacted the writs, for they ran 'against the fundamental principles of law" (Fowler, 45)...