Name: ______Date: ______

Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty Sam Adams was the son of a Boston Merchant. Adams graduated Harvard College in 1740 where he publicly defended the thesis that it is “lawful to fight the Crown, if the people cannot be otherwise preserved.” This idea became a central theme in his life. After failing as a beer maker and newspaper publisher, Adams found that politics was his true calling. He participated in Boston town affairs and rose to power in the Massachusetts colonial government when he opposed the Stamp Act in 1765. Adams organized Boston’s Sons of Liberty, a well organized secret organization that opposed the Crown. This group would tar and feather British tax collectors who tried to enforce King George’s Stamp Act. He played a key role from 1765 until the end of the War of Independence. Adams believed Britain wanted to destroy constitutional liberty.

Adams contributed to the Independence movement in many ways. During the 1760s and 1770s he frequently wrote articles for the Boston newspapers, and he recruited talented younger men–Josiah Quincy, Joseph Warren, and his second cousin John Adams, among others–into the Patriot cause.

He was among those who planned and coordinated Boston’s resistance to the Tea Act, which climaxed in the famous Boston Tea Party. This famed act of American colonial defiance served as a protest against taxation. To help the troubled East India Company, British Parliament created a monopoly on tea with passage of the Tea Act in 1773. While people in Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia rejected tea shipments from the East India Company, merchants in Boston refused to give in to the pressure of other Bostonians. On the night of December 16, 1773, Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty dressed as Native Americans and boarded three ships in the Boston harbor. They threw 342 chests of British tea overboard.

Who is Samuel Adams? ______

Who are the Sons of Liberty? Why were they formed? ______

What was the Boston Tea Party? ______

How do you think the British would react to this event? ______