Samuel Adams Radical Puritan

A detailed Summary of Samuel Adams Radical Puritan

A Book Review of Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan

Historians such as Drew McCoy and Joseph Ellis have produced noteworthy studies of the Founders and their impact on the time period of the American Revolution. Fowler's supplement to this blossoming literature is in many ways a traditional biography. It investigates Samuel Adams's life as it unfolded and pays less attention to the larger conceptual issues that commanded the age. No reader can escape this brief biography without a sense of the personal loss that Samuel Adams felt when he witnessed the death of many of his children and his wife. "Delivering five children, three deaths among them took a heavy toll on Elizabeth...Elizabeth died on 25 July." (37) Nor will an attentive reader assume that political events unfolded according to some foreseen path. Fowler's achievement here is to bring the reader into the loll of Boston politics, the arena of much of Adams's life. His representation of Adams's Harvard, his outline of the careers and reputations of other notable figures - such as John Hancock and John Adams - and his depiction of Adams's disenchantment with the rise of the Federalists in the 1790s - which included the election in 1796 of his cousin, John, to the Presi

Biographies should always be a little unconventional and a little untraditional in approach. What makes a biography interesting to read is that little extra that the author has tried to explore. But when a biography presents only the facts known already, the book loses its appeal and in turn becomes only a reference book. Fowler, with his knowledge and expertise, should have tried to explore the man a little deeper and should have tried to bring forth some aspect of his personality, which is not known, to the general public.

But leaving this aspect of the book apart, we can say with certainty that the biography is a great source if one wants to know more Boston politics in Adams's days. The political scenes, and all the conflicts and rifts that arose have been carefully written with a depth that can not be ignored.

The difficulty here is that historians remain divided on what the term "Puritan" meant in the eighteenth century. Although Fowler briefly traces the objectives of early seventeenth-century Puritan leaders, he spends inadequate space on the complex evolution in Puritan ideology. Instead of a careful evaluation of Congregational religion in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts, the reader comes across a "Puritan" Adams whose religious beliefs seem closer to those of John Winthrop or William Bradford than his contemporaries. But was this the case? A good way to make his argument would have been to deal directly with the boundless historical literature on the evolution of Puritanism, none of which is cited in the bibliography, an un

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Approximate Word count = 1053
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History